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“No, I won’t,” Gillian said, her voice full of pain. “For I am Mother, whether I wish it or no, and not in some future time that will never be, but now. I am the last of the Great Mothers, and I will die tonight along with the rest.

“And so will you.”

* * *

Morgan didn’t believe her. It was in her smile, which was friendly enough and yet condescending at the corners. It was in the gleam in her eyes, which had abated not one whit. It was in the confidence of her pose, which was not that of someone who’d just learned that she had lost.

She didn’t look like she thought Gillian was bluffing, she looked as if she knew.

And she had cause.

Gillian saw herself again, bending over her dying husband, too shocked to sob, too dead inside to think. And felt him grasp her hand. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” she’d asked, her lips numb. “We have to—we have to—” she hadn’t been able to think; didn’t know.

“Don’t . . . hate.”

“What?” she’d stared down at him, uncomprehending.

“Don’t—” he had grasped her arm, surprisingly tightly for one so close to death. “Don’t hate them. It will consume you. I’ve seen what it does to others.

“It fills your arms, so you can’t grasp anyone else . . . it fills your heart, so there’s no room if you could. It fills your life . . . until there is nothing left.

“They stole enough from me . . . they don’t get you, too. Promise me . . . Promise—”

It was the last thing he had said to her, the last request he ever made, and she had tried. She had tried so hard not to let her hatred of the Circle overwhelm everything else. Sometimes it had worked; sometimes it hadn’t. But she had tried, for him. She wondered if that was all that had kept her from becoming another Morgan, from having vengeance eat at the love in her heart until there was nothing left.

She thought it likely.

Even now, there was a part of her that wanted so badly to join her; to wreak bloody havoc on the Circle as they had done to her and her kind. Wanted to see them fall; wanted to see them bleed. And she could do it. She felt the wild power in the skies tonight, felt it call to her, felt its energy thrumming through the staff she clutched, the one she’d found in the prison storehouse and had had no idea what it was.

They’d stripped the witches they caught of their weapons and piled them up like worthless trash, not knowing how to fight with them and deeming them inferior to anything the Circle had wrought. But they hadn’t been worthless, and something in this one had called to her. Now she knew why.

It vibrated under her hand, ready to leash the power above, ready to throw it at her enemies. And she wanted that so much she could taste it. That was what Morgan knew, why she was trying so hard to convince her.

Not because she feared a fight, but because she knew.

“We’re not so different, you and I,” Morgan said, as if she’d heard her thoughts. “I’ve simply had more time to think on things.

“You teeter on the edge, have done so ever since this night. I felt the same. Even in the happy times, it was always there, in the back of my mind. A darkness that never retreated, a stain that never washed out. What I could have done; what I could have prevented, and yet, even then, I knew it was a lie.

“I could have done nothing. I was the leader of a coven already decimated by war. I was barely holding us together; I had no power to stop this, not then, not even now. But you do. You hold it all, and a single command could change everything.

“Oh, I know,” she said, coming closer, her eyes sad but her face compassionate. “I know. They taught us differently. To be better, to not give in to the fear, the hate. But it’s harder in practice, isn’t it?

“Harder to forgive, when the ones to be forgiven are still killing us!”

Gillian stared at her, trying to shut out her voice, but it cut through her defenses like a knife. She knew what she had to do, what her husband would want her to do, were he here instead of somewhere in this forest being hexed to death by the Circle! But she was not the kind and loving type that he had always been. Her temper matched her hair and her sense of compassion was tempered considerably by her sense of justice.

She wondered if part of her didn’t want Morgan to win.

And the other witch felt that.

Her hand closed over Gillian’s where she clenched the staff, but didn’t try to take it. “I’ve seen the future,” she said, her voice barely higher than a whisper. “The Circle will rule over us, over these lands, for hundreds of years to come. And if there’s an end to it, I haven’t seen it.

“We stop this now, here, or we never do.”

Gillian looked at Kit, suspended a dozen feet in the air, his body crushed as if held in a giant’s fist. At the ring of witches who probably didn’t even understand fully why they were here, but who would die all the same, more sacrifices on an alter already running with blood. And at the sky up above, the center of the vortex looking like a great eye, staring down at her.