Page 45 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

BEFORE

I was jolted awake by the sounds of pain.

Not screams, not yet. But whimpers and groans, the sounds of someone who’d been injured badly enough that every movement was agony, but they could still move. They were the least terrifying of the sounds I’d heard in the ancient structure where my coven made their home.

After nearly a century, I ought to have been able to sleep through it.

But after a hundred years, I still struggled to parse the never-ending input that my heightened senses delivered in a ceaseless barrage.

The warmth from the fire that Maura always kept burning pushed against my power.

I could counter it with the ice in my veins, but it required conscious effort.

The sounds of my sisters moving about their daily routines echoed off the slanted stone walls, assaulting my ears.

Although we could have crafted anything using our combined power, we lived in a communal structure.

A constant reminder that the coven was a whole, not a collection of individuals.

I slept lightly, my too-sensitive ears hearing every sound.

The tread of footsteps. The scrape of a body dragged over stone.

I roused myself from a restless sleep, dressed only in my linen shift.

My sisters rose around me. Most of them had been sleeping, as well.

Only Elodie was fully dressed, her red and black velvet gown trailing across the ground as she walked.

A thick fur mantle fell from her shoulders.

Of all my sisters, Elodie was the only one who dressed this way—like a high-ranking noble, rather than the servant she had been in life.

The soft lines and shimmering velvet accentuated her sharp features and the razor-straight cut of her black hair.

My sister could take on any face she pleased, but I’d always found her own the most terrifying.

The complete lack of emotion—be it anger or excitement or sadness—was more eerie than any mask.

Like the lady she played, she did not drag the man herself. I recognized the spell that she used to haul him along, one in her repertoire as an earth-bound witch.

Our active powers were determined by the manner of our death. But unless we had our sisters’ chanting along with us, the spells we cast must belong to our sacred bind. I’d frozen to death and been gifted with frost I could mold into ice and snow. I was a water-bound witch.

When she reached the center of the cave, she released her prisoner.

The man’s face was covered in scratches that still oozed. One of his legs stuck out at an unnatural angle. A fragment of bone was visible through one of his battered fingers.

Without speaking, the rest of us fell into place.

There was no need for discussion. One of our sisters had brought this man to us for judgment.

His crime would be heard, and the coven would punish him.

We each took our spots on one of the points of the pentagram etched into the stone in lines of solid gold.

Aurienna had woken from slumber as well.

She caught my eye as we took our positions on opposite sides of the pentacle.

Her red hair hung in loose curls past her shoulders, nearly to her waist. She, too, wore a loose linen shift and bare feet.

She was even close to my age, dead in her early twenties, resurrected only a decade before me.

But the chasm between us was immense.

Aurienna had mastered her power quickly. She controlled the vines and the pines with equal ease. Could whisper a few words and turn an otherwise innocuous tea deadly. She did not hesitate to use her power for the good of the coven.

She controlled the gifts the Dark God had given her.

She was not controlled by them.

Maura appeared last. She wore black, as always, accented with bits of gold.

A black linen shift embroidered with gold thread.

A black brocade overdress trimmed in decadent black leather and fastened with gold and mother-of-pearl clasps.

Every piece was carefully chosen to accentuate her harsh natural beauty.

The black she wore matched the lustrous cloud of tight black curls that just brushed her shoulders.

The warm gold contrasted the cool undertones of her porcelain-white skin.

A beautiful nightmare.

Elodie waited only for Maura to step into place before speaking. “I found this man filching berries from coven lands. When I confronted him, he attacked.” I searched Elodie’s face and body for any indication of injury and found none. “And then he tried to run.”

With those few words, she’d laid three crimes at the man’s feet. The punishment for each was the same. My stomach clenched. I hated being woken from sleep, but in that moment, I was grateful I had not yet eaten breakfast.

In a hundred years, I had seen this scenario play out dozens of times. But still it had not become routine.

Elodie threw back her fur mantle, freeing her hands to accept the dagger that Maura had ready. Elodie had caught him, so his life was hers to take. We all must stand witness, but she would do the task. And she preferred it bloody.

Her expression remained blank as she approached. I felt the ice begin to form in my veins. I tried to soothe it back to sleep, forcing deep breaths in and out of my chest.

But when Elodie brought the point to the man’s chest, just below the clavicle, something inside of me snapped free.

“Maybe he is willing to pay your price.”

It was the only escape. The same one I’d offered to Rowellyn in the glade all those years ago. The price was Elodie’s to set. But if the man was willing to pay it, he could walk away. Few humans knew the covenants of witches. They did not know to ask for this stay.

Every one of my sisters looked at me. I’d felt the weight of their gazes so many times before. Their disappointment.

Maura’s mouth twitched into a frown. The others spanned a mix of confusion and disbelief. But Elodie, as always, was unruffled. She stared at me for several seconds, the point of her knife still pressed against the trembling man’s chest.

“Maybe he is.” With a single quick movement, she took the man’s hand and pressed the dagger into it. She did not step away. Despite the earlier attack , she did not distance herself from the man she’d now armed with a knife. She gestured downward. “Cut it off.”

He shook his head, not understanding. His entire body shook, even as he clung to the knife like the lifeline it was. “What? I…”

Elodie gestured again. This time, there was no confusion. “Cut it off.”

Horror stole the man’s features, distorting them until they were unrecognizable. “No,” he cried, tears pouring down his cheeks.

Elodie had died for the love of a man. Betrayed by one.

I should have known better. I should have known this would be her price.

Elodie curled her fingers around the man’s hand, pressing the blade downward. “Cut it off.”

The man’s cries devolved into shaking sobs. The knife hit the ground. Elodie bent to retrieve it, to begin her bloody flaying. She’d remove his manhood anyway and make sure he was still conscious to see it.

“No.” Maura’s voice echoed through the stone chasm. “Our sister has not yet had the pleasure.”

If I’d still possessed a heart, it was by then a shriveled, useless thing. It had not pumped my blood for nearly a century. But the pain in my chest convinced me for half a second that there was still something alive in that cavity of darkness.

“Koryn,” Maura said. “What is the punishment for entering the coven lands uninvited?”

“Death.” Cold spread through my veins, pumped by the ancient power of the Dark God.

“For stealing the Dark Lord’s bounty?”

“Death.” It coalesced in my fingertips, frost beginning to coat my skin in silvery whorls.

“And for trying to flee our justice?”

“Death.” My pointed fingernails grew, tipped with shards of ice.

“Elodie, Koryn will take your place.”

The desperate man at the center of the pentacle was not the only one being punished. Maura knew it, I knew it, and so did every single one of my coven sisters.

Killing was as natural for a witch as breathing. More, if the faerietales the humans told their children were believed. I’d chanted spells with my sisters that had resulted in death. But I had never done it myself.

In the beginning, Maura did not allow me the honor because of my lack of control over my power. That is what it was, to my kind—an honor. A perfect execution of the Dark God’s gifts. He presided over hell, did he not? We were his vessels, were we not?

I thought I’d been careful, sneaking away over the years to gift spells to Rowellyn and then her daughter. But when Maura fixed her gold-flecked eyes at me, the pupils rimmed by a brown so dark it was nearly black, I saw the warning she did not try to hide.

Disappoint her again at my peril.

Disappoint my coven again and I might find myself an outcast. Alone in death, just as I had been in life. A disappointment in death, just as I had been in life.

Elodie obeyed Maura’s order without question. If she felt anything about it, she did not allow it to show on the perfectly honed blades of her face. I took her place at the center of the pentacle, my shift brushing against my hips, the hem against my calves.

Aurienna began to chant. In temple, it might have been considered a hymn. But here in the cave where the Midnight Coven dwelled, it was an invocation of the Dark God, spoken in his ancient tongue.

I did not have Aurienna’s effortless control over her power, nor Elodie’s perfect composure.

But I had learned much since that disastrous night outside the guild hall.

I breathed in and out slowly, letting the icy power in my veins have its way.

The silvery whorls on my skin brightened, my forearms gilded with shimmering rivulets of ice.

The man’s eyes widened as he watched, as he felt the cold that overtook the warmth of the ever-burning fire and the frost that spread across the stone floor.

I had to kill him. He had broken the covenants. He had attacked my sister.

I would do anything to protect my sister. To protect my coven. To protect my place here.

I will make it quick , I promised him silently, willing him to see the words in my eyes. But I knew all he saw was the glowing coven mark on my forehead.

I lifted my hands. My frost climbed up his body.

The chanting around me grew louder. A blast of heat from my left—Maura had broken away from the group to throw another log onto the fire.

I tried to breathe, to slow the thrum of power in my veins. I had to strike quickly. A dagger of ice would do the job. I faced my palm upward, trying to focus all of my power.

It spiraled out of me, an icy fury that grew with every passing second. I could not disappoint my sisters.

Sweat slid down my temple. The heat was overpowering my frost. I needed more power. But the chanting was so distracting. The hem of my shift had come loose, the threads dragging across my calves. The damn chanting.

Ice began to form in my palm.

Just a little more power, another surge to form the dagger. Aurienna pitched her voice higher, louder, and all of my sisters joined in?—

My power accelerated in a torrent I could not control. Instead of forming a dagger in my hand, frost shot from my fingertips, coating the man’s body, piercing into him through his nose and mouth. I could feel the blood in his veins freezing, the organs going cold.

He screamed in pain, fell down, and writhed on the ground. I had to stop it, had to pull it back, but I couldn’t. I’d gone too far already. He would die from the damage my frost and ice had wrought.

I had to kill him.

I had to harden that ice.

I channeled every fear, every agony I’d felt in the past hundred years into the ice that fanned out through his weak, mortal body.

He rolled to his back, one final scream echoing back and forth against the walls of the cave. Then he was silent.

I felt the life force leave his body. All of my sisters must have as well. They stopped chanting.

I fell to my knees. The layer of ice I’d formed on the ground cracked under my weight.

My breath came in painful gasps. One by one, my sisters returned to their activities.

I did not let myself look up to see Maura.

Whatever I saw there, disappointment or pride or something else, it might very well break me.

Ruby velvet swished along the ground.

Elodie hummed pensively. “Who knew you would enjoy drawing it out as much as I do, Koryn.”