“And what do you intend to do with that knowledge? Kill me?” I asked, staring my potential death in the face. I looped a finger in a circle, rousing the plants beside me. They pulled back, preparing to strike if they needed to defend me.
“You are the last of my bloodline. Surely you must know that I would do anything to preserve that,” Susannah said, hanging her head forward. She pinched her brow between two finger bones. “Leave. Leave this place and never return. Ward yourself so that even the Covenant and Alaric cannot find you. I will allow you to live out of loyalty to the blood we share, but you cannot remain here.”
A few weeks prior, the offer would have been everything I wanted. I’d attempted to fulfill my duty and failed, but I’d done what I could. She’d given me permission to leave, to go to Ash and live out our lives free of the Coven.
And yet…
“Where are the bones, Susannah?” I asked, staring her in the face. It was the closest thing she would get to a confession from me, the acknowledgement that I was searching for something only a Hecate would care about.
Susannah laughed, the sound vibrating against her rib bones awkwardly. A chill ran up my spine. I didn’t want to consider what it was that she found entertaining in all of this. I glanced at the rosebush at my side, swallowing as she took a step toward me.
“Foolish girl, your lover has had them all this time. Surely you know that and that’s why you allowed him to touch you. Why you’ve let him take such liberties.”
My heart jolted at the certainty in her voice. In the way she was so confident in her assertion. I couldn’t be positive if she was lying to trick me, but I felt like I couldn’t breathe past the sudden pressure in my chest.
“You’re wrong,” I said, forcing myself to laugh off the pain. “Gray knows what I am. He said he would help me find the bones. He would have given them to me if he had them.”
Susannah stilled, her skull going slack as the traces of amusement faded from her bones. “He knows?” The closest thing I’d ever heard to fear filled the tremor in that voice as she closed the distance between us, clutching my hands in her grip. “Hell’s sake, Willow. Listen to me. If you only ever listen to one thing I tell you, let it be this. Run. Run and do not ever come back,” she ordered, wincing as the thorny vines of the roses wrapped around her bones and pulled her arm back away from me.
“Why would I run? The Vessels loved Charlotte for what she was to them,” I said, laughing in the face of her terror. I couldn’t shake that sinking feeling in my gut, no matter how hard I tried, not even when the roses wrapped around Susannah’s waist and she didn’t fight.
“All that I have done, the choice male witches are forced to make, has been to keep him from getting his hands on you,” she said as the rosebush dragged her toward the ground.
I didn’t command them to stop; I couldn’t. Not when I didn’t believe she’d allow me to live.
Not when she knew who I was.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said, shaking my head in denial.
“Those bones are not worth what you will unleash if you stay here. You don’t know him, Willow. The bargain swore those of us who do to secrecy,” she said, something that resembled a strangled sob leaving her as the rose bush dragged her to the fresh dirt in the garden bed. It pulled her to the surface, snapping her bones as I winced. She lay in a heap of bones as the flowers and thorns wrapped around her, pulling her into the earth.
She disappeared bit by bit, the plants dragging her below.
“I won’t unleash anything. I just want to do what’s right.”
“Your destiny is not to do what is right. Your destiny is to destroy us all.” Susannah gave me one last horrified look before her skull started to fade into the dirt.
The rosebush shifted to cover the grave where it had buried the Covenant alive, leaving me blinking at it in shock. My bottom lip trembled as I stood, looking back toward the doors to the school.
I took a step, determined to ask Gray what she’d meant.
I stopped.
She hadn’t fought. She was the Covenant, and plants or not, she could have easily escaped. She hadn’t wanted to, not if…
Run.
I looked away from the school, turning my body toward the woods surrounding Hollow’s Grove.
Casting one last glance over my shoulder and heaving a deep breath to calm my panic, I ran.
34
WILLOW
Fuck. I hated running.
I wheezed as I bent forward, placing my hands on my knees and trying to get a deep breath in. I couldn’t function on so little oxygen.
Couldn’t think.
What could Gray have hoped to achieve by lying to me about the bones? By keeping them from me? If Susannah was telling me to run, there had to be more to it than just the simple reality of him wanting to prevent me from finding them. That fear in her voice had sunk inside my skin, slithering beneath the surface like an insidious menace.
But instead of doubting what she’d said, I was left with the growing, dawning realization that something was wrong. That I’d missed something that had been staring me in the face.
A howl cut through the woods, raising the hair on my arms. Susannah had been willing to let me flee, to let me attempt to escape the fate waiting for me in Crystal Hollow.
Because she’d known the odds of me surviving were minimal. Creatures far worse than witches call these woods home.
I swallowed, heaving a sigh and spreading my feet shoulder width apart. Letting my magic loose was always like releasing a breath, like releasing a tiny sigh of that power into the world and molding it to my will.
I grasped my knife from the sheath, slashing it across each of my palms quickly before returning the blade slowly. My blood dripped onto the forest floor, the sound of it echoing in the silence around me. There were no noises as the beasts hidden here stalked me, keeping quiet as I listened for them.
I inhaled, filling my lungs with air and the feeling of the woods around me. I exhaled, blowing a long, steady breath into the trees. They answered, the forest itself seeming to shift as trees swayed to the side, showing me a path through to the border where it met the outskirts of Salem.
The beasts were to my right, their footsteps thudding against the ground and vibrating against my soul where I’d connected to the trees. I took off at a run even as my calves burned, taking the path the forest had revealed and refusing to look over my shoulder to see if they would catch me.
The ground helped, rising and falling to give me momentum beneath my feet as I kept breathing. Each sigh let loose a little more of that power that I kept trapped within my skin, until the air around me seemed charged with it.
Never had I surrounded myself so thoroughly, had I released so much of it into the earth and the air. A creek bed came up before me, and there wasn’t enough time to stop—to slow myself before I would stumble into it. A tree in front of me shifted, swinging a branch toward me just in time for me to grab it.