Page 70 of Twisting Twilight (Homesteader Hearth Witch #9)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

“Such a child,” the Stag Man scoffed. “After everything I’ve put you and this town and all your pathetic little friends through, you still come back to this. To him .”

We both glanced at the grizzly bear on the other side of the shimmering barrier.

The hulking giant was slumped on his side, his ribs rising and falling with slow, labored breathing.

Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

Though my friends clustered around him, calling his name and treating his wounds as best they could, he would not rouse.

He had fought the Stag Man and all his magic hunters, mallaithe, and faelight beasts for three days. The grizzly was done.

Ossian laughed derisively, drawing my furious gaze. He touched the big blue gem with two fingers. “Took you long enough to figure it out.”

“But I still learned,” I said through gritted teeth.

“That’s the difference between you and me, Ossian.

I can learn and grow, but you’re still stuck in the past. A petulant prince still pining for a throne he no longer has any right to.

Elfame has moved on without you, Ossian. There is no going back .”

“I will have what is mine,” he raged. “Including you , wife. Violet thought she could get away, deny the inevitable, but some fates are written in the stars, woven into the fabric of the Tuatha’s Loom.”

He clamped a fist down over the cloch. Copper magic poured into the blue gem, and a golden aura unlike any other I’d ever felt before flooded into me.

“You weren’t the only one who powered up while you were away,” the Stag Man gloated. The gemstones twinkled madly as a sultry masculine voice, luscious as dark chocolate, invaded my mind. “You will fear the grizzly. You will love only me.”

My foot took an involuntary step forward. My ivy-green eyes widened in panic.

“ Meadow! ” Sawyer cried down our bond. His magic suddenly became claws, hooking into my spirit and yanking me back.

“You belong to me, my love. Come to me.”

Another step, another gentle rasp of a bare sole over leaf-strewn earth.

“It’s okay,” I murmured to Sawyer. My voice had a dreamlike quality that set off every alarm bell in my head.

“How is this okay? I thought you were impervious to this crap!”

I was. I am. I?—

The stolen fated mate bond had never been used like this before. Never so deliberately. It was like he was rewriting the existing bond, or at least layering his own desire along its framework. Smothering it. Erasing it so I would at last be subservient to his will. Erasing Arthur.

No . I seized that ragged blue thread and claimed it with every breath in my body, every spark of life in my cells. It was mine. My choice.

My choice was the witch I’d become outside the manor’s walls. My choice was the friends who’d chosen me, not my last name. My choice was the hazel-eyed gentle giant who’d shown me kindness and patience and enduring love when I didn’t deserve them.

Beneath the copper overlay, the ragged blue tatters shone brighter.

This bond would never be Ossian’s. No matter how hard he tried, my heart would always connect to Arthur’s and no other. He could tamper with the bond, but its true power would always elude him.

I smiled softly at that assurance, and the Stag Man gave me a triumphant flash of his sharp white teeth. He hadn’t felt the change in the blue thread, only the influence of his own magic.

“Meadow,” Sawyer tried again, whining pitifully.

“It’s alright,” I assured him firmly. “Play along.”

I moved with agonizing slowness across the ten-foot enclosure.

Ossian wanted me to take every step as testimony to his dominion over me, but I was going to make him work for it.

The magic he needed to keep flooding the cloch was incredible.

It spoke to the power of that bond—an ancient magic the Tuatha had left behind for their descendants to draw upon in times of great danger.

One by one, the gemstones at his neck winked and died out as their reserves were drained. He didn’t even care, secure in the knowledge that when I submitted to him, my power would replenish them and then some.

Arrogant fae.

The Stag Man looked down from his superior height as I halted in front of him, our bare toes almost touching. A cruel sneer twisted his beautiful mouth.

“Seal your love with a kiss, Meadow,” he ordered.

Obedient, I raised up on tiptoe, reaching for him as I once had to seal our first bargain.

My hand found the base of his sternum and slid upwards until it pressed in the cleft of his chest. Ossian hummed at my touch, but not in pleasure.

It was satisfaction, meant to humiliate.

With my other hand on his arm for balance, I lifted my chin to receive his kiss.

And looked him straight in the eye.

He reared back, but my grip on his arm was iron and my hand against his chest was fused as if soldered there. “What the?—”

Drain , I commanded the oak tree.

A strangled cry ripped from his throat as I tapped the magic infused in his flesh. This time, it wasn’t the desperate attempt of a witch pinned to a stone floor with a furious high fae poised above her with Caer powder in his fist. This was calculated, controlled, and swift.

The Stag Man screamed and tried to shake me off.

The earth swallowed his feet, imprisoning him where he stood.

He swung a punch at my head with his free hand, but a concave shield of air blocked it away.

When he lurched forward to head-butt me with his antlers, a pillar of water sent his chin snapping back in a vicious uppercut.

“Try that again,” Flora jeered. “I’d love to see what she sets on fire!”

He never got a chance. The magic of the gemstones was all gone now, his own magic not far behind. My oak tree had been the dynamite to break open his floodgates, and there was no repairing the damage.

I could keep his magic now, a fully realized primal witch bonded to her core. He was no different than the rambler roses. And wasn’t I owed it, after all the horrible things he’d put me through?

Time slowed as a voice whispered, “Take it.”

Violet’s voice wasn’t a phantom of my subconscious anymore.

The fae ancestor I’d seen only in my hallucinations flowed out of the oak tree’s trunk.

Elfame had changed me alright, in more ways than one.

The spark that made me Violet’s Heir was manifest now.

Her black hair swept across her shoulders, magic glowed in her green eyes, and the same dark thorny brambles I summoned whenever I drew upon my battle magic wreathed up her arms.

At her back, the magic oak tree began to transform, its light dimming as its roots wove together into a point. Death’s Sword, Violet’s vengeance that sang in my veins. At my wrists, the runes on my iron cuffs began to glow.

“Hasn’t he stolen enough from us?” she whispered. “He would take our magic, your life. Has taken it. My heir is not weak. She will not let an enemy act against her.”

This was my final test. The last decision that would set me on my path for life. The inheritor of Violet’s magic and vengeance, a commander of Life and Death, or… the cider witch, the Meadow I had become in Redbud.

That witch hadn’t wanted the battle magic to rule her life, to force others to submit simply because she was a powerful Hawthorne. She was a shield. She would not let an enemy act against her, but she would not have to destroy him, either.

“ I will choose my own way with my magic,” I told her. “You may have gifted me this, but it is wholly mine.”

Violet cocked her head to the side, eyeing me. Examining my resolve.

There was no chink in the armor of the resolution empowering my voice. The decision was made.

Greatest-Aunt Briony had been right. I had become more than Violet had ever dreamed.

“As you wish,” Violet answered, and vanished.

The runes snuffed out and the iron cuffs fell from my wrists.

Time rushed forward.

“That’s my witch!” Sawyer cheered.

The magic oak tree brightened. Its roots continued to weave, but its canopy stretched further and further.

There was a flash of light, punctuated with golden sparks like those of a firecracker, and white opalescence remained.

My magic was no longer two sides of the same coin, the two halves of Nature.

It was seamlessly one: a glorious canopy of vibrant branches, a sturdy trunk emblazoned with a cat silhouette at its heart, and a woven taproot resembling a formidable sword so broad it could double as a shield.

It was a life-giving weapon that protected and did not take for itself.

I was Meadow Ní Dara . Not Violet, not Hawthorne. Daughter of the Oak. Strong, resilient, and true.

Ossian’s magic wasn’t mine to keep. It belonged to the women he’d stolen it from.

Since they were long gone, I returned it to the land he had terrorized for centuries. Copper magic boiled under my hand as I extracted it from his chest and guided it down my arm and the rest of my body into the dirt.

I could only imagine how demoralizing that had to be—to have your magic drained away and poured out upon the ground as if it meant nothing.

But the act came at a cost. This high fae’s magic was wild, feral, and abundant, and conduits could break over time if bludgeoned with enough force.

My oak tree was working triple time—to drain Ossian, to bolster me as a conduit, and to fight off his attacks.

It would cost me almost everything to steal his magic, but I had made my choice.

The cat silhouette on the oak tree’s trunk twinkled as a trickle of magic poured into me, bolstering my last efforts.

The high fae’s jewel-green eyes rounded like patina pennies. Frozen in place, canines bared, he tried one last time to beguile me with his aura.

“I could give you everything,” that velvety voice promised. “I’m supposed to give you everything, Meadow. Authority, magic, love, the entire world ? —"

He wasn’t worth a response. I plunged the strength of the Dara Shield right into his hideous heart.

His mouth opened to release a terrified scream.

Copper hair sprouted from the Stag Man’s pores. Bones and muscles shifted under my hands, reforming. His fingers and toes fused into cloven hooves, and his roars of rage became bugling cries.

“Mead—” Whatever profanity he was going to curse me with died out in a throat that no longer could form words.

The Dara Shield was careful to take only his magic and leave him his life. A life cursed by his brother.

Breathless, I reached up and tore the necklace from his throat and lurched back.

The curse finally complete, only a stag remained where the fae king had once stood.