Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I thought that perhaps his loyalty toward his family would encourage him to do the right thing,” Samuel said, looking straight at me. “But I should have known that dealing with children can prove difficult at times. Getting my own niece to make up that story about Bridget all those years ago was nearly impossible. I had to use an encouragement spell just to pull it off. Still, I would have thought it easier to make this boy deceive you. After all, there was no allegiance to your coven when I sent him to you.”
Samuel gestured at Asher, who was still lying in a heap on the ground. I wanted to run over to him to make sure he was all right, but I knew the moment I stepped off that porch and away from the safety of the house, all hell was going to break loose. So I had to stay where I was. It was obvious by now that what Asher had said was true. He’d been forced into my life and had been pulled in two different directions. Either betray me or lose what was left of his family. I didn’t envy his choices.
“It is true—the boy was a disappointment, but this one proved worthy.” He pointed off to the side. Suddenly Emory was walking out of the shadows toward Samuel. She had a big grin on her face and strutted around like she’d just been announced the next Miss America. “She ended up surprising even me. Once given the proper encouragement, Emory went forth and made me proud. Oh, and to hear about her talks with you regarding your dearly departed . . . it was inspired. Come here, dear, and take a bow.”
I gritted my teeth and ignored the fact that my head was telling me to destroy the double-crosser. What Samuel was saying was true. Her deception was far worse than anything Asher had done, simply because she and her family had been members of the Cleri for as long as I could remember. We’d grown up together, trained together, even had family dinners together. The fact that she’d willingly set her sights on destroying us? Well, that was disloyalty that couldn’t be forgiven.
“Thank you, Reverend,” Emory said, taking her place at his side. There was no sign of the innocent girl she’d been with the coven while she was under our roof. The smile on her face now was devilish, which matched her all-black ensemble. Guess the flowery Emory was gone for good. “It’s an honor to serve you.”
“Why?” I startled myself as the question escaped my lips before I could stop it. I didn’t want to show that I even cared to hear the answer, but I knew it was what everyone else was wondering as well. And after all we’d been through, I felt we deserved a response. So I let the question linger in the cool night air.
Emory looked up at Samuel as if waiting for his approval. When he nodded, she turned back to me with a sneer. “Why?” she asked. “You seriously have to ask? Okay, how about this: The Cleri was a dead end, Hadley—emphasis on dead. There was all this power but no one was using it. We were encouraged by our elders to keep our magic hidden from the world, stifled. That’s no way for a witch to live.”
“They weren’t telling us not to use our magic. They were trying to teach us the right ways to use it. We can’t just use our powers for our own selfish reasons. It leads to chaos and disrupts the order of things. It’s not our purpose, not our way of living,” I said.
“And I think it’s time to do things differently,” Emory said. “I was sick of being weak. So when Reverend Parris came to our family and offered us more, I knew I had to do it. It was my destiny.”
“It was your destiny to be a traitor? Because that’s what you are. You betrayed your own coven, the ones who loved you. . . .”
“Loved me? Are you kidding me with this? Hadley, the only person you care about is yourself. I mean, why else would you come back here when you know that the only person we’re after is you? Do you even care that you’re going to get all of them killed?” Emory asked, narrowing her eyes at me. “Because that’s what’s going to happen. We will win and they will die. And it will be all your fault.”
I looked around at the rest of my coven, feeling momentarily guilty over the fact that she was right. There was no guarantee that any of us would live through the night. And this wasn’t a secret to the rest of my coven. In fact, I’d told them they could leave before the Parrishables caught up to us, and there would be no hard feelings. Yet, here they were. My eyes reached Fallon’s and then Jasmine’s and moved on to Sascha’s and Peter’s. I could see a resolution there that made me stand up straight again. Letting them make their own choices to stay, instead of running away and taking that decision away from them, was the difference between how I ran my coven and how Samuel ran his. With the Parrishables, no one had a choice. Samuel told them what to do and they did it. No questions, no free will.
In the Cleri, we all had freedom. And freedom is power.
“The Cleri are the bravest group of people I know. And they have more heart and determination than you ever could. Go ahead and do your worst,” I answered, placing my hands on my hips. “I’m going to have so much fun destroying you.”
The sound of applause rang through the backyard. My eyes flew back to Samuel, who was clapping enthusiastically. “Bravo! Good show! But might I point out that you chastise us for our desire for power, yet you have existed on these same principles yourself for so long? You have no qualms about doing whatever you can to get ahead, and you would roll over anyone to get what you want. My dear girl, you are no different than I. You thrive on the power you have over others. You get drunk on it. Nothing feels better than knowing you hold dominance over those around you. Just talking about it makes me shiver with excitement.”
His body trembled slightly as he said it. The sight of this made me want to gag, but I swallowed back the bile and then took a step toward him, almost stepping off the deck as I did so. The motion made Samuel’s eyebrows rise.
I cleared my throat. “I am nothing like you,” I said to him, my voice strong and steady. “You are right about one thing, though. I am powerful. Possibly even more powerful than you. But I would never seek out that power at the expense of those around me. You see, Sammy, there’s a reason you’ve never been able to vanquish our line completely. It’s because our focus is always on the greater good. No one witch among us is more important than another, and it’s in our working together that we’ve become stronger than any army you could summon. So I suggest you leave my house now or you’ll learn exactly what it means to go to war.”
As I finished, the air around me grew silent with tension. The Parrishables were giving each other sideways glances, and a few even dared to look back at Samuel for his command. The Cleri stood behind me and by my side; Peter had stepped up on the other side of Jasmine, creating a powerful lineup. Part of me hoped the Parrishables would back down and I wouldn’t have to put any more of my coven at risk, but I knew this was just wishful thinking.
Finally, when the silence was starting to get uncomfortable, Samuel took one step toward me and said, “Then we fight.”
As if he’d given a Braveheart-style battle cry, the whole crowd of Parrishables came running at us at once. Seeing that right in front of me was much more terrifying than anything I’d ever experienced before. They might not have been brandishing weapons, waving them overhead and threatening to cut our limbs, but the scene was actually much worse. Because instead of holding weapons, they were the weapons. And when your imagination was all that stood between you and your enemy, that left for a lot of possibilities.
Luckily, we’d prepared for this exact moment.
“Now!” I yelled out.
In perfect unison, all the Cleri who were still left joined hands, creating a band of twitches all linked together, and we said the spell we’d rehearsed earlier that day.
“Sluggashim deliberum!”
The moment it was out, everyone who’d been rushing toward us seconds before stopped in their places, as if frozen. I couldn’t help but smile as I saw that the spell had worked, and we’d managed to buy ourselves a little more time to take care of the next phase in our plan.
“Okay, guys, we don’t have long before this wears off. Do you have this?” I asked, turning my head to the left and then the right to look each of them in the eyes. I didn’t want to leave them, but I knew I was the only one who could do this next part and I needed them to hold the Parrishables back until I could get in place to do the next spell.
“We’re fine. Just go do what you have to do,” Fallon said, a smile playing across his lips. “We’ve got this.”
“You sure?”
“Piece of cake,” he answered.
Torn between wanting to stick around to help and knowing that I needed to go if we were going to have any chance of winning this thing, I gave my coven one last reassuring look and then ran back into the house, leaving them outside without me.
It wouldn’t be for long, though. I sprinted through the kitchen, narrowly missing the table as I passed, and then around the corner and up the stairs. Busting through the door to my parents’ room, I stopped in front of the window and threw it open. Climbing out onto the roof, I looked down at the crowd gathered on my lawn, hoping to see that they were still where I’d left them. Sighing with relief because they were still in place, I carefully made my way across the shingles and came to a stop at the edge of the roof, directly behind my coven.
Now standing ten feet above everyone else, I had a better view of what we were up against. And it wasn’t pretty. The Parrishables outnumbered us two to one and they mostly consisted of adult witches. Though age didn’t matter much in terms of how powerful a witch was, it did mean they had more experience under their belts. My only hope was that after what I was about to do, the odds would no longer be against us. In fact, I was pretty much banking on it working because it was all we had.
As I prepared myself for what I was about to do, I saw that the freeze-frame spell the others were casting was beginning to weaken. Their hands were shaking now and some of the Parrishables were starting to move as if they were in slow motion and not just frozen anymore. I had to move quickly if I was going to get this done.
Closing my eyes, I put all my concentration into the spell I was about to do. Finding a calm within myself I hadn’t tapped in to in a while, I began to say the words:
Blood is thick and it runs through our veins.
Let the ties it binds give way to our brains.
The power passed on from lineage down line
Will now come through us; what is yours is now mine.
Let life bring back what death took away.
We call upon family to make evil pay.
I could feel the power building up, beginning to burn inside me as I said the words. This spell had been the last one written in the family book—it was the one I’d witnessed Christian scribbling down in my dream. I hadn’t thought much of it until after my dream with Bridget, when she’d mentioned that the whole family was there for me and that all I needed to do was ask for help.
The burning feeling inside me was growing, and I looked down at my hands, half expecting them to be on fire. Instead, Christian’s ring—which I assumed had at one time been Bridget’s—was glowing like when Christian had worn it in my dream. The power radiated through my body even more intensely than the last time I’d performed one of my ancestor’s spells, and I wondered if I might actually explode. Luckily, the universe had different ideas.
Suddenly I felt the energy leaving my body in spurts. It came from my hands, my sides, my head; it was spilling out of me every which way. It didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good, as if I were letting go of a pressure that had been building up inside me for a long time. As I watched, the bursts of energy started turning into outlines of light, and the concentrations of light were taking on shape. Before my eyes, they began to look more and more human, clearly taking on hands and legs and heads. It was hard to make out their features at first, but as I continued to stare, even those became more prominent.
The last of the tendrils of light burst from my body, and the force was intense enough to throw me off balance, but just as I was teetering precariously toward the edge of the roof, something pulled me back and steadied me.
Looking behind me for the answer, I nearly yelped out in shock. There, standing close enough to touch, was my mom.
“Mommy?” I asked in a tiny voice, unable to believe what I was seeing.
It was her, that much I could tell, but she was sort of hazy around the edges, and staring at her kind of hurt my eyes, almost like I was staring at the sun.
“Hello, Hadley,” she answered back, making me nearly choke with happiness. The sound of her voice awakened feelings that I’d been trying to get a handle on ever since she was taken from me. I wanted to cry, but knew there wasn’t time for that. I could feel the magic below me wavering and I knew the Parrishables were about to be freed from our spell and pick up their pace.
“I miss you.” Stupid, I know. Of all the things I could possibly say to her, I miss you was what came out.
“I miss you, too, baby,” she said, leaning her head to the side sadly. “And I’m so proud of you.”
I smiled as a tear slipped down my cheek. “I’ve been trying really hard to do what you asked me to,” I said.
Now it was her turn to smile. “And you have. Now you must finish it.”
“I don’t know if we’re strong enough,” I answered, biting my lip.
“You’re not,” she said, “if you’re alone. But with all of you together and with our help, we will send Samuel to the place where he belongs.”
“Your help?” And then it was as if a lightbulb had gone off in my head. I looked down at the Cleri below and saw that now, standing beside each of them, were their parents. Not quite as they’d been before, but shining brighter and just a little bit blurry so their features weren’t entirely clear. By this point, Fallon, Jasmine, Sascha, Peter, and the others were barely holding on to the freezing spell and had turned most of their focus to the ones they’d thought were gone forever. They seemed as surprised to see their parents as I was, but no one moved from their spots.
Out of everything in the book, we’d chosen this particular spell as our last defense against the Parrishables because it was meant to invoke the power of our ancestors. Allow them to work their magic through us, so we could be a force much bigger than we actually were. There was nothing in the spell book that had said we’d actually be visited by our family members. That they would appear to us in person. This was a surprise.
Since we were all focusing on the spell to invoke our ancestors and their power, the magic we’d been doing to keep the Parrishables at bay began to dissipate, and as a group, the Parrishables began to gain use of their limbs again. But as soon as they saw the glowing outlines of the Cleri on the porch, they slowed to a stop on their own, confusion on their faces. Then their eyes moved up to the roof, where I was perched. They began to point in surprise and talk in hushed whispers as their gazes fell just behind me. I hesitantly looked back and saw that my mom and I had been joined by dozens of other figures. Each was radiating light and there was a wide range of time periods of dress. And then I recognized two faces.
Bridget and Christian.
“We’re all here for you, honey,” my mom said, as if reading my mind. Maybe she had. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that every one of my relatives was standing behind me, ready to take down the enemy that had plagued us for centuries.
My mom reached out her hand and I took it, and then I let Bridget take my other hand. The current of electricity that flowed through our bodies was severe, but this time I knew what to do with it.
The Cleri members below me were all doing the same thing, and the gesture seemed to be intimidating the Parrishables. As I watched, they began to take steps backward, their interest in attacking us waning. Samuel’s face had gone from smug to angry as soon as he’d seen who’d joined our fight.
“No!” he screamed, losing his composure for the first time since I’d met him. “I killed you! I killed all of you!”
“Haven’t you ever heard of things coming back to bite you in the—” I began to ask. Only, I’d barely gotten the sentence out of my mouth before Samuel was hurling a spell my way.
“Hadley!”
Just as I was bracing myself for the blast of Samuel’s spell, a figure threw itself out in front of me, taking the hit instead.
“Do it now.” Bridget’s words found their way to my ear and I knew I had to listen to her.
“Exterminus departo!” I screamed as loudly as I could, feeling the power rush through me and head straight for Samuel.
The spell hit him square in the chest and there was an explosion that looked like a pile of fireworks going off. Sparks rained down on us and left the air filled with smoke. Wait, not smoke. I reached my hand out to see what it was.
Ash.
I shuddered to think what that meant, but forced myself to look through the haze to see if it was possible. Could it really be over? Struggling to see through the dirty air, I realized it was true. Samuel was gone and there was a blackened spot on the ground where he’d been standing.
As the Parrishables began to come to the same realization, they started to back out of the yard, rushing to get as far away from us as possible. I thought about sending a few stunning spells their way but decided it would be wrong to hit them when they were retreating. Instead, I turned to my mom to exclaim over what had just happened.
But she was gone.
Looking around frantically, I saw that they were all gone. Vanishing at the same moment that Samuel had, it seemed. I was alone again, with no one left to watch after me.
Except that I wasn’t. Because there was someone still lying at my feet. Someone who had jumped in front of me in order to save me from being hit with Samuel’s spell.
And that someone was Asher.