Savage Beauty by Casey L. Bond
DEDICATION
To my witches.
CHAPTER ONE
Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, and in the time of faeries, there lived a beautiful Queen named Briar Rose. Her husband, the King, was desperate for the Queen to provide an heir. For years they tried to conceive, but the Queen was barren. She, too, became desperate. The Queen loved her husband and did not want him to seek out another to bear his child, so she snuck away from the palace in the middle of the night in search of one who might help in her time of need.
In the heart of the dark forest, she found an equally dark faery who ruled the land. When the Queen explained her predicament, the faery offered to help her, but he warned that such magic always came with a price. Briar Rose did not care what the cost was, and readily agreed to any price he might require in exchange for his magic.
The faery promised she would conceive on the next full moon, and the Queen ran back through the wood and snuck back into the castle, no one the wiser. When the moon was full and round, she waited for her husband to arrive home from his visit to a nearby village.
But her husband would never return.
However, the Queen did conceive that night. The dark faery found Briar Rose in her room and forced himself upon her. His magic overwhelmed her body, placing the Queen into a deep sleep.
She woke with a swollen belly and with great pains radiating through her abdomen. She cried out for help, but every soul in the palace had been placed under a similar sleeping spell. The Queen, disoriented and frightened, somehow made her way to the nearby village where a widow agreed to help her birth the child.
The labor was intense and complicated as there was not one, but two babes in her belly. Twin girls, born in the moments when the full moon passed in front of the earth’s shadow, soaking its surface in blood, to match the sheets the Queen lay upon.
Just before she died, Briar Rose named her twin daughters. The firstborn, whose head was dusted with hair as fair as the sun, would be named Aura. Her sister, whose downy hair was as dark as the midnight sky, would be known as Luna.
The widow sought help for the Queen, but it was too late for her. It was not, however, too late for the twin princesses. With the Queen’s death, the spell over the inhabitants of the palace was broken, and in two days’ time, at dusk, knights came searching for the Queen. The widow handed the girls over to them, both swaddled tightly against the spring winds.
And so began their strange lives that revolved around one another, the heavens, and the changing seasons.
The girls were brought up together in the palace by a caring nursemaid who tried her best to teach them right and wrong, but as they grew and matured, it became terribly clear that the girls were not like other princesses...
LUNA
Sisters can be such witches.
Especially mine.
Aura was a vindictive nuisance, hell-bent on making my life miserable. Not that I could say I didn’t have a similar goal. But while she wanted to irritate and weaken me, I wanted her dead.
She claimed she hated me as much as I hated her, but she wouldn’t leave me alone. All summer while I slept, she entered my mind and insisted on sleepwalking with me. Today was no different.
“Take a sleep walk with me, sister,” she said, her voice tinkling like a tiny silver bell. Her sickly-sweet voice was the last thing I wanted to hear. She was like a gnat buzzing round, landing, only to buzz again once waved away. I was the hand to swat her, the fingers to flick her battered body off my pale skin.
It was late summer, if I was thinking clearly. My body was physically asleep and lying safe in my cottage, but Aura had cracked into my mind and forced this dream and herself into it.
Paybacks would be a real bitch come winter.
Unless I could finally end this cycle – end her – before she took her winter slumber. Inwardly, I smiled.
“Come on, Luna,” she sang. “Wake up.”
I was seething, thinking of all the ways I could send her running away, back to her shining, opulent palace and out of my mind.
“Sister, we must talk,” she cooed.
Our chats were my least favorite thing in the world. Her voice was like a summer day, bright and chipper and beautiful, just like her; like the roses she grew all around her castle, their long thorns protecting the blood-colored blooms.
That had been the most difficult lesson for many in Virosa to learn: the idea that some of the most beautiful things in the world were deadly.
That was my sister, Aura.
Lovely.
Enchanting.
So achingly beautiful was she, that no one could resist her. She barely had to use magic to lure them in, but once they came near, they quickly learned how intricate, sticky, and inescapable her web truly was.
They were fools, taken in by a beautiful face. But their regret in trusting her was as short-lived as their lives.
She hadn’t always been this way. Aura and I were raised by people who had the best of intentions for the princesses left behind when the King and Queen of Virosa died. Humans who did their best to understand the powers we had inherited and slowly learned to wield, who looked beyond the pointed tips of our ears and the elongated canines in our mouths. People who loved us despite the inner darkness we both tried to fight for so long.
While Aura was groomed to take the throne when she came of age, I was made to watch and learn along with her, just in case something terrible happened. Because that was our reality. In the Kingdom of Virosa, terrible things always happened.
They happened again and again and again...
One by one, people began disappearing from the palace and from our lives. It wasn’t until I watched her kill the woman who had raised us without a flicker of hesitation, that I realized it had been Aura making them disappear. It was always her. She’d been killing for years, slaughtering anyone who got in her way.
The mattress dipped under her weight. My blood began to boil. It took everything in me not to backhand her off the bed.
“Do you miss him?”
My eyes snapped open, fixating on her radiant smile, her sunshine hair. She spoke of him as casually as she would the weather. Aura laughed as if she knew what I’d been thinking.
“Sleep walk with me.” Rising from the bed, she took a few steps and glanced over her shoulder, waiting for me to join her. “I think I’ll let him join us today,” she offered.
He was my weakness, and she knew how to wield him like a sword. I tried to be cold and indifferent, but seeing him was something I needed. Not because I yearned to relive the heartache, or feel the guilt and sting of not preventing his death. No, I needed to see him to remind myself of what I must do when I woke on the first day of autumn.