Hexin’ up a Storm (Haven Shores #4)

Prologue

CASSIA

The storm woke her at three in the morning.

Cassia’s eyes snapped open to the crack of thunder directly overhead, close enough to rattle the windows in their frames.

Rain slashed against the cottage walls with the fury of a living thing.

Wind howled through the eaves, setting her grandmother’s sea glass chimes into a frenzy of discordant music that cut through the darkness.

Not again.

She threw off the quilts—her grandmother’s quilts, hand-stitched and worn soft with decades of use—and stumbled to the window, bare feet hitting cold floorboards. The skylight above her bed flickered with lightning. Jagged. Too close. Answering to something in her chest, she hadn’t meant to call.

The scorch marks on her ceiling caught the flash of light. Three new ones this month. One particularly dark patch where she’d nearly set the curtains on fire last Tuesday, her dreams bleeding into weather she couldn’t control.

Outside, Haven Shores’ harbor churned beneath angry clouds that shouldn’t exist. The forecast had called for clear skies. She’d checked it herself before bed, desperate for one night of peace.

But her magic didn’t care about forecasts. Her magic cared about emotions. And apparently, even in sleep, she had plenty of those.

Cassia pressed her palms flat against the cold glass, her breath fogging the surface. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. The way her mother had taught her before—

Don’t. Not now.

She shoved the memory down and focused on the storm instead.

It pulsed in time with her heartbeat, feeding off the anxiety that had woken her from dreams she couldn’t remember but that left her skin crawling and her throat tight.

The mating surge had made everything worse these past weeks.

Her power, already too big for her body, already too much for anyone to handle, had become something wild.

Something she couldn’t contain, no matter how hard she tried.

Yes, I know I’m causing this. You don’t have to rub it in.

“I know.” She didn’t bother arguing. What was the point? He’d felt every spike of her magic, every surge of uncontrolled power. He probably knew she was losing control before she did. “I’m working on it.”

Another pulse. Skeptical this time. Heavily skeptical.

“I am.” She grabbed the quilt from her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders, the fabric worn soft against her skin.

The pattern was faded now—blues and grays her grandmother had chosen to match the sea—but it still smelled faintly of salt and lavender.

“Come on. Widow’s walk. I need to burn this off before I wake up the whole damn town. ”

The narrow staircase to the roof was treacherous in the dark, but Cassia had climbed it so many times, she could navigate by memory alone.

She’d been coming up here since she was a girl, watching her grandmother work weather magic that seemed effortless.

Controlled. Every storm bent to Grandmother Gale’s will like a dog responding to its master.

Cassia had inherited the power but not the control. Story of her life.

You have more power than she ever did, her mother had told her once, long ago. They’d been standing right here on this widow’s walk, watching a summer storm roll in from the sea. But power without control is just destruction waiting to happen.

Thanks, Mom. Real helpful advice from beyond the grave.

Salt spray stung her cheeks. Lightning arced across the sky, illuminating the churning harbor below in flashes of blue-white brilliance.

Beautiful. Terrible. Hers.

Whether she wanted it or not.

Cassia raised her arms and let her magic loose.

She couldn’t stop the squall entirely, not without exhausting herself completely, but she could redirect it. Push the worst of the lightning out to sea where it couldn’t hurt anyone. Gentle the wind from destructive to merely unpleasant. Convince the rain to ease from torrential to steady.

It was delicate work. Precise. The kind of thing that required focus and calm, neither of which she currently possessed in any quantity.

Gust circled overhead, riding the currents with an ease she envied. He made it look natural. For him, it was.

Third time this week. The fishermen were definitely going to blame her for the bad catches now. They already looked at her sideways when she walked the docks. This would just confirm what they already suspected.

Too much. That was what they thought. What everyone thought. Too loud, too intense, too dangerous. Cassia Gale, the storm witch who couldn’t keep her magic in check.

By the time she wrestled the storm down to a sullen drizzle, the sky was beginning to lighten in the east. Pink and gold bleeding through the gray. Her arms ached with the effort of so much sustained magic. Her head throbbed with the beginning of a hangover that had nothing to do with alcohol.

And Gust had settled on the widow’s walk railing, still radiating that particular brand of avian disapproval that made her feel like a scolded child.

“I didn’t mean to,” she told him. “It just happened.”

He turned his back to her. The bird equivalent of sure, Jan.

Time to make coffee. And if her coffee tasted like it had been brewed in a saltwater aquarium—well, her friends didn’t come to her cottage for the beverages anyway.