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Chapter One

Sutton

Laughter echoed through the trees. I hung back, watching from the shadows as coven Ellis filed out of their cemetery.

A pang of pain, followed by a rush of anger filled me as my mother and father, my sister, aunts and uncles and cousins, all together, enjoyed a midnight harvest. Cemeteries were places of great power for a coven.

Everything here held magic—the dirt and grass, the gravel on the path, every herb and flower, it was all useful.

Magic never left a witch completely, not even when we died.

The bones of our ancestors continued to pump magic into the earth, which was why we grew large herb gardens in our cemeteries, so when harvest time came, we were well stocked with powerful ingredients for potions and elixirs.

The clink of the iron gate closing rang out and their chatter slowly faded as they walked away.

Running my fingers down Boo’s back, I left my hiding place behind one of the garden sheds and watched them drive away. Sensing my spiraling emotions, my tiny familiar used the hooks at the ends of his delicate bat wings to climb higher and snuggled under my hair.

“I’m okay, Booboo,” I whispered as I made my way through the headstones and over to the main herb garden.

I had a shift tonight, ambulance duty, and I needed to top off my supplies.

We had a small cemetery behind Ashborne house, but it wasn’t as old and nowhere near as powerful.

If my family knew I still had access to this place, they would’ve dragged me before the witch’s council and demanded severe punishment.

But since my mother had cut me out of their lives like a festering wound, they’d all but forgotten I ever existed.

Apparently, having demon blood tainting the coven was a big no-no.

And maybe if I hadn’t transformed into an ugly fucking monster , my cousin Bonny’s words, when I used my healing magic, then maybe they would have been able to pretend I was normal , said to me by my aunt Julia as my stuff was being tossed out of the house, I would have been here with them tonight.

My father, upon learning I wasn’t biologically his and that his wife had been unfaithful, decided it was too much work to leave her, or even really fight about it, and instead pretended I never existed.

He always had been lazy. So yes, they were cold and mean and, more often than not, just awful, but I’d been young, and they were my family.

They’d left me alone, unprotected, scared.

That rejection, and what came after, had shaped who I’d become.

So, no, I wasn’t with them, and I never would be again. Instead, I skulked around in the shadows and stole what I needed. A literal thief in the night.

I used to pray to the mother every night, begging her to make me like them, to take my demon blood away, but of course the goddess never answered. There was no changing what I was.

I twisted the heavy gold engraved ring on my thumb as I approached my grandmother Bity’s headstone. She’d given it to me before she died, when I’d broken into the house to see her on her deathbed. The spell she’d engraved in it meant I could bypass the Ellis wards and take what I wanted.

Crouching, I ran my hand over the smooth stone. “Hey, Gran.” I pressed my palm to the earth and felt her familiar power vibrating through the ground, and my heart squeezed. “I miss you.”

She’d been the only one in my family to love me as I was.

Shoving down the pain, I quickly grabbed my hand shovel and jar. I filled the container with dirt, then rushed to the herb garden, where I took what I needed, more than I’d usually risk taking, but harvest night was always the best time to come because they never noticed anything missing.

It just really freaking sucked seeing them all together, even if it was only from a distance—and even if they were all awful.

Nope. Shove that down as well.

Quickly packing everything in my bag, I slung it over my shoulder and headed off, pulling my phone out as I walked.

I typed a message to Jack, asking him to swing by and pick me up for our shift, then sent a group text to my coven, telling them to let me know if anyone heard from Luke tonight.

He hadn’t been home in almost a week, and that wasn’t like him.

I’d been living rough when I’d been introduced to coven Ashborne. Phoebe had offered me a place to stay, and the witches there had welcomed me with open arms. They were all like me, born with mixed blood, and they’d quickly become my family. They were all I needed.

I hit send and my eyes were drawn to the Nightscape message notification that popped up.

My heart did a little leap as I clicked it open.

Jagger had followed me on the app a couple months after he’d left for Hell. I’d been the only person he’d followed then, and I still was.

He didn’t always reply to my messages—okay, I messaged him every day, and he replied like once every couple of weeks, and it wasn’t really a reply, more a request for another picture because he wanted to see for himself that I was okay .

That was a lie, though. He’d followed me on Nightscape and had sent me that first message, for one reason only, something that I’d tried to tell myself to forget, that it couldn’t be true, even when everything in me screamed that it was.

The truth was, that after he’d left, I started to think that Jagger and I were mates.

There’d been no other explanation for the way I felt.

Why else would his scent calm me the way it did?

Why else couldn’t I stop thinking about him?

What other reason could there be for the way my body reacted when we’d kissed.

This wasn’t just some infatuation, I felt it on a level that hadn’t existed before I’d met him.

Instincts, demonic ones, had roared to life, screaming that he was mine.

I’d known who he was the moment our lips touched. I’d felt it with every part of me. If I were honest, I felt something the day he snatched me off the street and took me to treat Fern when she’d been injured several months ago.

But despite how sure I’d been, I’d still asked Agatheena what she thought when she’d come to check on my injuries the last time.

The powerful, dark witch had looked at me with that piercing gaze, and said, “Of course he is, you nitwit!” Along with a few other things, but she’d definitely confirmed it.

Jagger had to feel it too. Why else had he come to say goodbye that night?

Because he felt this insane connection between us as well, and the only reason he hadn’t admitted it was because there was nothing he could have done about it.

I’d still been recovering, and he’d been forced by Lucifer to go back to Hell to do his lord’s dark bidding, or whatever the heck it was they did down there.

We’d both been playing it cool because neither of us wanted to make it harder on the other.

Okay, maybe I hadn’t been as cool, blubbering all over the place.

But I knew that’s why he always grouched and acted indifferent with me, because starting anything up before he left was impossible. I got it, and it sucked.

But I knew from Fern that it was really hard on males to stay away once they found their females, so I’d said nothing. I sent him the pictures he asked for, and I’d resigned myself to wait until he came back, when we could finally be together.

I clicked open my Nightscape messages and my heart sank.

Not Jagger. Some invite to a retro house music, dance party.

I tapped Jagger’s name anyway. The last message was from me, yesterday, telling him about the new healing oil I’d been working on.

Above that was a picture of me in shorts and a tank top, standing in front of the bathroom mirror.

My hair was crazy, and I was pulling a silly face.

There was also dirt on my arms and a smudge on my cheek after working in our little cemetery’s herb garden all day.

He’d looked at it but hadn’t commented, which was standard Jagger. In a week or so, he’d ask for another picture, then vanish again. I had no idea what he was doing in Hell, something that obviously kept him very busy, and I mean, it was Hell , maybe the Wi-Fi was patchy?

I smiled. Everything would work out in the end. It was fated after all.

Shoving my phone in my bag, I got in my car and headed for home.

I’d been through some not so great things in my life, but I was still here. I’d survived. I chose to be happy every day, to push through, to soldier on. Staying positive, seeing the good in people, that was how I’d found my new coven.

Sure, there’d been another bump in the road with the attack, but now the fates were finally on my side.

I’d been through the worst.

Now it was time for the reward.

“Roll him to his side,” Jack said as he pulled the tube from the young shifter’s throat.

“What on earth is going on?” I said as I hovered my hand over his abdomen, firing up my magic.

Jack shook his head. “This is the third one tonight.”

The younger male coughed and groaned. At least he’d make it.

We’d lost the overdose patient we’d treated earlier.

My powers let me see anything relating to a person’s well-being, physical or mental.

No, I didn’t see pictures as such, but for a moment in time, I was in a patient’s head.

I could feel what they were feeling, but in an abstract way, a way that conveyed the full scope of their condition and the circumstances surrounding it without actually crippling me from the pain they were experiencing.

Unfortunately, the mental sides of things—what someone suffered and how it affected them—managed to reach me, especially if it was particularly bad.

“He took the same drug as the others. He thought it was safe. He just wanted a good night out.”

“Idiot,” Jack muttered.

Yep. Poor pup.