Page 138 of The Unbound Witch

Endora turned the floor to ice, causing Eden to slide forward, right into her mother’s arms. Endora sank her claws into the wound in Eden’s head, distracted by her own blood lust. Eden took the opportunity to reveal the blade she’d been hiding just before she planted it into her mother’s stomach. She wiped her hand through Endora’s blood and slammed her palm into the barrier that held me, shattering it.

One second I was dashing forward, while Eden yanked the blade from her mother’s abdomen, the next, Endora cast a powerful spell, decimating every object in its path, sending Eden and me flying away as blinding white light filled the magical barrier.

I could hear again before I could see. The scrambling, the grunting, a gasp beyond the ringing in my ears. The world stopped. Another single sharp blast of magic silenced everything. Even the mountain seemed to bow to curiosity. Without a doubt, one witch had fallen and one remained standing.

The barrier shattered like glass, splinters of magic exploding into the cavernous room around us. I blinked once, and then twice. Eden Mossbrook stood, the victor in the center of the bloodied circle, holding her mother’s entrails up in triumph like a goddamn warrior. Freed. No longer beholden to her mother’s malevolence.

60

RAVEN

“You stop, you die,” Atlas roared, racing for the opening of the collapsing cave.

“No shit,” Nym yelled, shoving past him to get to the felines waiting in the tremoring hall below Endora’s mountainside cottage.

Bastian hadn’t let go of my hand, though he was furious with me for not leaving him behind in the belly of the mountain the second the daggers began to fall from the ceiling. I couldn’t, though. My heart wouldn’t let me leave a single one of them, knowing they would need each other one day.

Eventually, Eden limped past us, covered in small gashes and a knot on her forehead the size of a fist. She crawled up the stairs, stopping only a second to take in a home that was once hers before walking out of this cottage. A lifetime. An entire lifetime dictated by her mother’s wickedness and her own personal conviction to fight it. She’d lost so much, but stepping into the sunlight, I didn’t miss the way her shoulders rose, no longer holding the weight of the world.

Part of me thought the fight would come down to me and Endora. A face off she’d been cultivating for years. Since the moment she put that target on my back before I was even born. But that was not reality. I was just another witch scorned. Eden, though? Every night she’d laid her head down in the human lands, every time she’d thought to use her magic and could not, every day the sun had risen and she’d looked upon the faces of rotating shifter guards, protecting that book… She’d thought of her mother. Another tiny slice into her heart. Until years and years of slices cultivated a wound so great and scarred, even the death of her mother wouldn’t heal it over.

I hoped she’d find a way through. Sadly, it wouldn’t be lost in the arms of a captain. It might not even be in the heart of the Moss Coven. But she’d earned the right to settle wherever she wanted, to live the life she’d dreamed of for years.

I moved beside her, taking her hand as I pressed our shoulders together, gently.

She turned, looking down on me as a mother might her child. “We’re free now.”

“Almost,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Almost.”

She lay her head on mine, a tear soaking into my scalp. Warmth moved through my body, racing over my veins and into the core of my bones, wrapping itself around my heart. She’d meant to heal me, but I was not the one that was sick. Not really.

I gasped, looking back at Bastian, who stood with Atlas and Nym surveying the mountainside village. “The book.”

“Forget the book, Raven. It doesn’t matter anymore. The Harrowing is over, Endora is gone. It’s time to put the world back together.”

“We have to put it back together. We need the final book.”

He closed the space between us, pulling me from Eden’s grasp. The anger and anxiety disappeared from his face as he gripped my cheeks, this thumb moving down to my neck as he so loved to do. “That is not a task for today, Little Witch. Today, we simply go home.”

“Go on without me, then,” I whispered, brushing my lips across his. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He closed his eyes, savoring another kiss. And another. “Fine. I concede. But only if you promise that when we get back to the castle, we spend a month together, locked in a bedroom. No clothing allowed.”

My heart broke at the words he used. The plans of a future he’d already begun to make. I pushed away the small lump in my throat. The sorrow that crept up on me.

Forcing a smile, I nodded. “As soon as I finish the final task your mother has given me.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “My mother?”

“Your mother had a vision. She used the power of the books to hide my markings, that’s why, even in her death, they have not appeared. She also saw something, though it took me ages to figure out. She gave me a portion of her own power, knowing I would need it to put the books back together. Split by a curse, they’ve damned this world. Everyone is distant and fighting, even among the witches. The books are… dying.”

The word ‘dying’ hung in the air between us, lingering as the mountain stopped rumbling below. His beautiful silver eyes shifted between mine as he tried once and then again to take a breath. I moved my fingers into his hair as he bowed his head.

“Are you also dying, Little Witch?”

I couldn’t hear those words from his lips, couldn’t imagine the look on his face. The world blurred as my throat burned. The moment delivered every ounce of pain I thought it might as I nodded, knowing he would not see it. Ears ringing, I swallowed. But that lump only grew as I trembled, the tightness in my chest, the weight on my limbs trumping every other feeling I had but guilt.

He shook his head, fighting the truth as he fell to his knees. “Don’t say it,” he whispered. “Even if it’s true, don’t speak it into existence.”