Chapter 31 Meera
Meera
“Ditch wants you and the Riders to audit our food stores,” Meera told Rosewyn.
The young witch was still healing from her encounter with two Valkyries. Fresh bandages wrapped the stumps of a regenerating arm and leg, the air thick with the scent of witch salve.
Rose froze mid-sprawl on the velvet sofa in her cottage. “Does she know about the cattle?”
Meera only shrugged.
With a hissed breath, Rose shoved herself upright, wincing as a regenerating bone shifted under growing skin. She brushed a tangle of hair from her face with her remaining hand—no braids, no poise, just a wounded predator too proud to show weakness.
How had Meera ever been intimidated by this young witch? She shook her head. “You’ve been immortal for what, like, four years? You had to know your regeneration would be glacial at your age, but you still picked a fight with Valkyries?”
Meera wasn’t much older than Rose’s twenty-nine years, wouldn’t heal much faster. But she also wouldn’t be fighting anyone any time soon.
Won’t I? She felt a spike of nerves. Ditch kept ordering her to train, to channel her temper like venom. Yet each time Meera emerged from those sessions, she had less control over her ability.
“Have you found out what Ditch’s powers are?” Rose asked. “Other than desire reading?”
“No.” The demon-witch must get those readings wrong on occasion, because she said Meera desired to be a badass warrior and heroine of her coven.
At that absurd idea, she gnawed her thumbnail before she caught herself. Stop it. She was here in an official capacity! Ditch might call her an assistant, but in truth, she was second-in-command.
Not Rosewyn the Banehand. Not another Rider.
Me.
The thought made Meera queasy. So she imagined telling Lowell about her day, his grin waiting for her worries, his teasing remarks somehow easing them.
Night after night, he’d disarmed her with wit. By their fourth or fifth time together, he’d seduced her out of her pants for kisses.
Wry observations weren’t the only good to come from that mouth.
Am I falling for him?
Probably.
He’d written today that he’d missed her last night, when he’d had to stay in Craigdúr for work. Sigh. She’d reread those words until the parchment softened under her thumbs. And now, even here—surrounded by salve fumes and suspicion—her mind drifted to him.
Rose’s voice cracked the spell: “You’re lying about Ditch. You would have seen some indication of her powers by now.” Her good hand went aglow.
“Ditch won’t say or reveal them. Smart, really. Her enemies are everywhere, including in her own coven.” Meera rubbed her temple. Hecate’s wand, she was ready for this workday to be over.
“You’re starting to admire her!” More glowing. “Already forgot that she murdered Lazara, your mentor for decades?”
“Of course I haven’t,” Meera said. Loyalties and duties pushed and pulled at her until she thought they would tear her apart. The House of Witches. The office of the high priestess. Lowell. “But Akelarre did choose Ditch for a reason.”
Meera wondered if Rose knew how much she had in common with their new leader. Both orphans, both raised by a coven.
As was I. “Maybe instead of fighting Ditch, we should try to understand what the House of Witches ultimately wants.”
Rose scoffed. “If Akelarre sent Ditch to assassinate Lazara, we shouldn’t follow her. If they didn’t, we still shouldn’t follow her. She’s likely a rogue witch. And what’s one duty of the Riders?” She cupped her ear. “That’s right—to execute rogues.”
“How would you kill Ditch? You tried to sic the Valkyries on her because you couldn’t take her yourself.”
“Nobody hexshoots harder than me.” Rose buffed her remaining nails, smug.
“Want to bet your life on that?”
“I’m not afraid of dying.”
“No,” Meera said softly, “you’re afraid of Lykae. To a nightmare degree, it seems.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed. “You talking to the Valkyries now?”
“Everyone in the Skein’s talking.” Nymphs routinely passed through the Witchwood with tales…
Color stained Rose’s high cheekbones. “I’d rather be afraid of Lykae than fucking them.”
Oh, gods, she knows. Ditch must too. Equal footing with divulgences, indeed!
Rose smirked at her silence. “That’s right. Your fearless leader spent last night with King Thane. She’s his mate.” Rose spat the word, couldn’t show her disgust enough.
“What?” Thane the Hungry—subject of Meera’s study—had mated with Ditch? “That’s impossible.”
“It happened, Meera. This very morning, nymphs told me his roar echoed across half the realm, her screams too.”
Matehood. Meera’s rational mind reeled. No wonder Thane’s behavior during his first meeting with Ditch had been so peculiar.
He must have been thunderstruck! And then Ditch had spoken blandly of cannibalism and made crude observations about lupine behavior.
Yet somehow they’d ended up together last night?
“How sick,” Rose hissed. “Being with a Lykae beast would be like bedding an animal.”
“Not really.” The words slipped out before Meera could stop them. “You can still see flashes of the man, and the beast is sentient to a point.” She would give anything to behold Lowell’s beast, especially on the night of a full moon. Its appearance would mean they were mated.
Rose recoiled. “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. Ditch betrayed this coven.”
“She’s playing with him,” Meera said firmly. “There is no way she’d ever surrender to him.”
Wait… Lowell’s face flickered in her mind. He had to know about Thane and Ditch. He’d known all along! He’d courted Meera for information—made her believe he desired her.
With her sensible shoes and muffin-top waist.
Heat spread under her skin, betrayal made palpable. Her palms burned; light bled through her clenched fists, casting wild patterns on the walls.
“Great H?xa,” Rose breathed. “More of that anger, witch! I have plenty of it on tap, but your magic’s pure fuel.” Her own power sparked in reaction. Had her healing arm given a spurt of growth, stretching the bandage?
Meera blinked, chest heaving. “Why are you so angry all the time?” she demanded. “You’re young, untouched by war, yet you’re bitter. Why?”
Still riding Meera’s anger wave, she snapped back, “I don’t know! I was born angry. Like a cauldron that never empties.” Her good hand trembled. She looked startled at her own admission, her guard cracked by pain and regeneration. “I’ve never known peace. Don’t even want to!”
A born firebrand. A weapon that knows it’s loaded. “Some of us do want peace.” Meera’s heart beat too fast. She drew in a slow breath, forcing her magic down, feeling like she drowned in Rose’s anger. I’ve got enough fury of my own. Because of Lowell.
Yet that wasn’t entirely true. When she’d been young, she’d melted into pools of it, affecting everyone around her. Her mother’s last words to her: Control your power, or it will control you.
Mother was the reason she’d fought against it all her life.
Rose tilted her head. “You always wonder, don’t you—if people want you or that rush they get when you flare?”
“I don’t usually release my magic outside training.” But Lowell had seen it, had drawn it out of her again and again. Was the easygoing wolf attracted to the violent shimmer of magic in her blood?
Either he used her for that…or for information. Or both. But he didn’t want Meera alone.
Darkness settled over her. Sinking realizations.
Her encounters with warlocks had likely been so lackluster because a witch like her—buttoned-up magically and figuratively—had underwhelmed them. Those males had no ulterior motives to feign passion; Lowell did.
When she caught Rose studying her, Meera forced herself to calm. “Aren’t we a pair? You burn rage. I produce it. Dangerous.”
“Powerful. We’d make a killer team, Meera.”
She smoothed her cardigan and said easily, “I believe that anger without sense is never welcome.” Such a combination can kill a good witch.
“You’ll get there one day. Once someone gives you a real reason.” Rose’s lips curled. “Ditch has. She’s got to go. Help me take her down.”
“Asking me to spy is one thing.” Meera turned toward the door. “You’re talking outright sedition. I won’t be a part of it.”
“Because you’re weak!”
At the door, Meera looked back, voice low and cutting. “And you’re foolish. You’re stumbling right off the block.”
“At least I’m on the block. You hide your gift until it’s shriveled”—she raised one stump—“like this arm. One day we’ll need your fire, and you’ll have nothing left to give.”
Meera’s pulse pounded. “That so, huh?” Rose didn’t realize how much she’d just sounded like Ditch.
***
Rose
When Meera left, the air cooled in her wake, and regeneration slowed once more.
As bone eked inches beneath her taffy skin, Rose started to doubt her earlier schemes.
She hadn’t expected Eyrun to take an arm and a leg.
Bitch.
And that Valkyrie’s beast form continued to haunt her sleep. She’d never seen a Lykae fully risen before. Now that monstrous vision stalked her dreams. Massive. Shadowed. Its roar threaded every nightmare like memory.
Yet despite suffering from her last scheme, Rose actively worked on her next, mainly to distract herself from sinister visions of Lykae.
Ditch had to go.
Maybe Meera too.
That meek little mouse was hiding claws—Rose could sense them under all that cardigans-and-cutesy nonsense. Let the others underestimate her. Rose wouldn’t. When the time came, she’d move against both of them.
Akelarre was distant; power here was ripe for the taking, and all the Skein’s thrones trembled.
She could sense it thrumming beneath her skin—the promise of rule, of vengeance, of something she’d always known she was meant for.
High priestesshood.
Rose felt as if she’d been born for that job, as if she’d been training for it all her life.
No one would expect how far she’d go to avenge Lazara the Worthy and rid the coven of a demon-witch who lay down with dogs.