Chapter 26
Morning light is lazily streaming into the bedroom when I feel Memnon’s large, corded body wrapped around mine. His breath is even.
I glance down at where his arm is slung over my body, locking us together in the embrace.
Marring his skin are cuts from battles that happened over a thousand years before the printing press was invented.
I trace them now, along with the tattoos that decorate his arm, remembering our final conversation from last night.
Some intense, unnamable emotion wells up in me as the sunlight highlights the dips and rises of his muscled form.
A thin wisp of my magic coils around his upper arm as if it, too, needs to claim a piece of him.
Memnon’s hand flexes at my back, drawing me in closer, and his lips press to my shoulder.
He’s still under the hazy weight of sleep, and I allow myself to drink in this moment.
Despite the gruesome scar on his face, in sleep he looks young and unburdened.
My heart speeds as I take him in, wanting this perfect moment where it’s just me and him to last forever.
Either the sun or my own restlessness must rouse him because he drags me deeper into his embrace, brushing a kiss along my hairline, then the shell of my ear. He runs his lips down the side of my face, then my throat, only stopping at that sensitive crook where my neck meets my shoulder.
I stretch like a cat beneath his lips, and I feel him smile against me.
“Good morning, est amage,” he breathes, his voice still thick with sleep.
My heart pounds as I arch against him. This runaway happiness that seems to well up from within me; I’m terrified of it. I’m also utterly addicted to it.
Worst of all, I might do anything to feel more of it.
Memnon moves his mouth against my ear. “My queen, it is the honor of my life that you feel for me what I have ceaselessly felt for you.”
He pulls away enough to meet my eyes, and I feel more laid bare under his gaze than when I am well and truly naked.
My gaze drops to his lips. “Kiss me,” I command with all the imperiousness of the queen I once was.
I see the rakish edge of his smile before Memnon’s mouth descends on mine.
Kissing the sorcerer ends up leading to other things being kissed by the sorcerer, which then leads to getting the sense railed out of me.
And that silly, giddy feeling grows and grows until I feel like I can’t fully contain it all.
“Tell me something important to you,” he says as I lie sweaty in his arms.
“My education,” I say immediately. Because for the longest time, it was such a fight to simply achieve what many other witches took for granted—admission into a coven.
Memnon smiles at me, his eyes twinkling with true affection, and I want to melt, I want to die, I want this moment to never ever end.
“What?” I finally say when his expression lingers.
He shakes his head, his grin only growing. “You had the same drive when you were Roxilana. Always learning, always striving.”
I feel a twinge then; it’s something more hopeful than nostalgia, but it makes me feel strange.
I clear my throat. “Tell me something important to you,” I say, turning the question back on him.
“This,” he admits, his hand pressing into my soft skin. “Seeing you, feeling what you do to me.” I see his delicate swallow. “My power takes so much. I’ve become afraid it will…” He shakes his head, like voicing the thought might speak it into existence.
I frown as I search his features. “You’re afraid it will one day take your feelings for me?” I guess.
He shakes his head vehemently. “No. We—you and I, my queen—we are eternal.” He says it with the conviction of a believer, his smoky amber eyes steady on me.
And yet, I didn’t imagine his fear.
He must hear my thoughts because he says, “It is so easy to hate, est amage. So, so easy. Especially for me. My magic thrives on it. And yet looking at you, I feel like I’m alive again. You are the only thing that makes me feel something else.”
He kisses me then, but he doesn’t stop at my lips.
He moves to the skin near my ear and presses a kiss there, and maybe I hear a stray thought of his, or maybe the touch simply dredges up an old memory, but I realize he’s deliberately kissing the freckles he told me of back when I didn’t remember who he was.
His lips move down the column of my neck, and then he’s kissing my collarbone, my breasts, my arms, my sternum.
All of it painfully intimate. The sort of intimacy that would have had me running even weeks ago. I’m free-falling into it now.
His mouth is still moving over my flesh when I hear a dull noise coming from the bathroom.
I pause, tilting my head, the sound somewhat familiar. A few seconds later, I hear it again. And again.
My phone.
The previous night rushes back like a bad dream, shattering the idyllic morning.
“Seven fucking hells,” I swear, sliding out of the bed and dashing into the bathroom. In there, tucked away in my discarded pants pocket is my cell phone. There’s notification upon notification on my phone—from Kane, my parents, Sybil, even Olga and two other coven sisters.
But perhaps worst of all is the email that I catch a snippet of.
I clutch my phone and return to our bedroom.
Memnon is already out of bed, a pair of low-slung pants pulled on.
“I have to get back to Henbane,” I tell him dazedly.
Memnon’s gaze flicks over my face. “Did something else happen?”
I exhale a shuddering breath. “I think my school might be closing.”
Henbane is in an uproar when Nero and I arrive.
Swarms of Politia vehicles are parked along the paved road into the school, along with EMT vehicles that bear the logo of the House of Keys, the supernatural world’s governing body.
Reporters from Lunar Times, The Grimm Guardian, and a couple other supernatural news outlets are scattered along the school’s front lawn, and a makeshift podium has been set up where, at this very moment, someone speaks, a crowd gathered around them.
Witches on broomsticks dart about overhead, and there’s a haze of colored magic congesting the skies.
I haven’t dared to pull out my phone again or clicked on any of the notifications. Somehow they make the situation more real than even what I’m seeing right now.
Several officers stand in front of Ravensmeade, notepads in hand. Across from them are coven sisters, their arms folded tightly against their bodies, like they might be able to physically hold themselves together.
I swallow as I take it all in. I glance down at Nero. “Maybe we’ll enter our house later.” When it looks a little less like a crime scene.
My familiar’s tail flicks as he stares back at me, but he follows when I begin to cross the main lawn toward the gathered crowd.
The woman who’d been speaking just moments ago now exits the makeshift stage, but the audience doesn’t disperse.
I move to the edge of the crowd, my eyes drifting every so often to the Politia officers who walk to and from the Everwoods, some of them carting spelled boxes and others coated in thick layers of wards.
“They say they were taking bodies out of the field for hours,” I overhear a nearby witch say to her friend.
The other witch leans into her. “I heard it was…” The coven sister’s voice drops low, and I have to strain to hear, “demons.”
Just then, Henbane’s high priestess steps onto the makeshift stage. In a coven like ours, her role is, in many ways, equivalent to that of a university’s chancellor—if a chancellor had enormous amounts of magic at their disposal.
The high priestess wears her power like a cloak; even as far away as I am I can sense it. At her shoulder her white raven perches, its dark eyes blinking at the crowd.
Once she reaches the podium, the audience falls silent.
“Good tidings, students, parents, and the supernatural community at large,” she says, dipping her head.
“It is not often that I get to speak so publicly on behalf of our beloved coven, and normally, I consider it a great privilege to do so. Today, however, if I’m honest with you, I wish I was anywhere but right here before you all.
“This school year has been marred by a string of horrific tragedies. Dark magic is forbidden for a reason, and yet many of our students here have been victim to it.
“Worse still, creatures from the deepest, cruelest depths of the Underworld have preyed on us, using our sacred land as their hunting grounds.”
Absolute silence has fallen over the crowd as they hang onto the high priestess’s every word.
“What happened last night is unprecedented. Demons, creatures of misery and violence, came to us on a sacred night, and they murdered our sisters and feasted on their flesh.”
The hairs along my arms rise.
Run, little witch, you smell like a feast. This is no place to be food for a beast.
“This will not go unpunished,” the high priestess vows. “I will make sure that every last demon is hunted down and sent back to the bowels of hell. I vow to you that true justice will be served.” Her eyes fall on mine and hold for several moments.
I can feel the magic beneath my skin stirring, rising in me as though she summoned it.
The high priestess’s eyes move away then, and the connection is broken.
“In the meantime, however, certain measures must be taken to ensure the welfare of all our students. A witch’s coven is her family, her lifeline.
Henbane should always be a place of the greatest protection.
My heart is more broken than words can convey that our school has lost that most coveted safety, and that for too many in the last weeks, it has become a place of the deepest horror.
“And so, with the heaviest of hearts, I announce that Henbane will be closing its doors for the foreseeable future.”
The world seems to tilt as my worst fears are confirmed.
Henbane truly is closing.
The noise of the crowd rises as dozens voice their concerns, their questions, and their fears.
The high priestess lifts a hand, quelling the noise once more.
“Witches will have until Friday evening of this week to move out. Extensions will be made available for those who are unable to do so within the given timeframe. Alumni, faculty, and staff who live on Henbane grounds will be allowed to remain at their own discretion…”
The rest of her words are drowned out by the screaming in my own mind. Despite bracing myself for this, I find it hard to accept.
I spent years trying to get into this coven. Then, once I did get in, I literally fought to remain here at the school. It can’t be shutting down. It can’t.
The high priestess’s voice drifts in. “…In times of trouble we come together—that is our way. And though we will close our halls in an official capacity, I urge every attending witch to keep meeting with your sisters—”
A tug on my arm has me turning around dazedly. At my back is Olga, her bloody ledger under her arm.
“They’re looking for you,” Olga states.
“What?” I say numbly, my eyes drifting down to where she still grips me. Her fingers are ink stained.
Because of all the new entries in her ledger…
A wave of nausea rolls through me.
“The Politia. They want to speak with you.”
I frown. “Why are they looking for me?”
“I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d say it might have something to do with the fact that our coven sisters are calling you and your mate heroes.”