Half of a Second Child

Prologue

EMBER

Eight Months Before

Birthday without the Happy was more apt.

Mine certainly wasn’t happy, and both times I’d heard those words today, the closest I’d come to smiling was a twitch at the corner of my mouth.

Not that it was unhappy. Today was what it was supposed to be: drizzling, uneventful, and the same as every other year.

Though I suppose, last year, on my seventeenth birthday, there hadn’t been this pit of dread in my stomach.

I stared at the cracked-open window on the other side of Gray’s room, my eyes tracking the long path of a raindrop slowly rolling down the glass.

A gust of cold air blew in and speckled his desk with freezing rain.

Shivering, I shifted closer to him in his bed.

His hand twitched on my waist, and I glanced over my shoulder to look at him.

“Gray?”

“I’m just resting my eyes,” he mumbled, the rhythm of his words so slow, he was clearly talking in his sleep.

I sighed and twisted to reach my phone on his nightstand, getting as far as checking the time before I clicked off the screen.

I slid out from under Gray’s arm and sat upright. It was 11:58 p.m., and I’d promised Dad I’d be home before midnight. Heart racing, I scanned the room for my clothes, which were everywhere. My jeans and tank were rumpled on the floor, and Gray was sleeping on my sweatshirt.

I pressed my lips together and held my breath, trying not to wake him as I attempted to tug my sweatshirt out from under him by its sleeve.

Gray rolled toward me in his sleep.

My sweatshirt now completely pinned, I let out a defeated breath and dropped the sleeve. It would be a long, cold walk to my car, but I’d rather get home than be warm. I slipped out of his bed, got dressed, and hurled myself out his first-floor window without stopping to tie my shoes.

Gray lived across the cul-de-sac from us. His house was so close I could have been home in an instant, except I was going the wrong way.

Earlier, I’d thought this was a good idea. I’d figured Dad wouldn’t want to know his eighteen-year-old daughter was sleeping with her twenty-one-year-old neighbor. I’d thought it would be better to tell him I was at a “friend’s” house, if I parked my car at the high school then walked to Gray’s.

“How’s midnight sound?” he’d asked, extending my curfew beyond the eleven p.m. time he’d given me for my birthday last year.

“Midnight’s great,” I’d answered. Then my guilt ate away at me as I stood there, waiting for him to finish the same lecture I got every Halloween.

Halloween brings out all the drunk drivers.

Gloomy weather means low visibility and slick roads.

He believed I was going to a friend’s, never mind that — aside from Gray — I didn’t have any of those. He believed me the same way everyone always did.

Lying was my gift.

It was something I was born with, like every other witch.

We all had a unique, Goddess-given gift.

Our gifts, inherent to us, couldn’t be canceled with a spell and didn’t require any effort or concentration to use.

Not even Siphoning — the Dark Witch power to remove every drop of spellcasting magic from a light witch — had any effect on a witch’s ability to use it.

Spellcasting magic — which, because I’d never been to Everden, I didn’t have — had different rules.

Witches weren’t born with spells. They had to drink spellcasting magic first. Only after the liquid magic fused with their blood could they access spells, which differed depending what kind of witch they were, like a Dark Witch, Healer, or an Elemental.

My thoughts swerved to my older sister, Ash, who wrote me a letter from Everden after she drank mental magic.

Remembering that, and how it was one of the last times I’d heard from her, my body shook with a painful shiver.

I folded my arms across my chest and tucked my hands into my underarms for warmth.

Part of me wished I’d just grabbed one of Gray’s hoodies and put that on, but five years of on-and-off history with him told me all I needed to know about how that would have gone over. He didn’t like strings attached to him. He’d think I’d taken it just to be able to give it back in-person.

Sometimes I wondered if he’d look at me differently if he knew I was a half witch. But, considering how every other human felt about witches, it was probably best that he didn’t know.

I strode on, held off from sprinting past a streetlamp with a burned-out light bulb by the dangerously slick, leaf-covered sidewalk.

Something felt different about our street tonight.

Shadows loomed where warm yellow light from streetlamps usually glowed, and instead of the comforting sounds I was used to — critters hopping from branch to branch, crickets chirping — all I heard was my quickening breath, and rain slow-dripping from the overhead canopy of browning yellow leaves.

Expect a lot of drunk drivers to be out, Dad had warned. As if I hadn’t driven this road a thousand times, in a derecho, in heavy snow. I was the one who went everywhere for us. I had to because he rarely left home.

Nowhere was safer than the quiet part of Pennsylvania we lived in. Minivans parked on curbs, kids parked their bikes in driveways, towering chestnut oaks watched over us like grandparents, and streetlamps always came on at sundown.

Though they were eerily dimmer tonight.

I checked my phone, and my stomach dropped. I was already three minutes past my curfew. I contemplated turning around, but since I was already halfway to the school, I blew out a short breath and kept going.

A twig snapped behind me.

“Ember Blackburn?” a vicious-sounding male voice called out.

My heart rate spiked, and a sudden tightness caught me in the throat.

Dad was always telling me to watch out for Witch Hunters, a special division of the police, authorized to keep magic out of the human realm by any means.

I should have sprinted like my life depended on it, but then I registered what he’d called me . . . and I slowed.

No one had ever called me Ember Blackburn. No one knew about Ember Blackburn because I’d always gone by Ember Rose.

Rose was my dad’s name — from my human side — and it was the last name I’d been given, in accordance with human tradition.

Only, because I’d once found the witch realm of Everden interesting enough to study it, I knew their tradition was different.

Witches were matriarchal. And though I rarely thought about it, I knew where the name Blackburn had come from.

It was the name I should’ve gotten from my mother.

Helen Blackburn, Echelon to the School of Mental Magic, the foremost Mentalist in Everden. A low-level, human Witch Hunter wouldn’t know about her, though.

Like sentient smoke, a rope of shadows I recognized as a Shadowcurrent dove between my legs. As dexterous as a human hand, the Shadowcurrent tied my shoelaces together and tightened them.

On my next stride, I fell, my hands shooting out to catch me.

My left wrist took most of the impact, my right hand recoiling just in time to stop my phone from smashing into the sidewalk.

I coughed out a white puff of breath, pulled my legs around in front of me, then swiped my hand down my arm to wipe off the bit of blood from where the skin had been torn from my palm.

A brief glance behind me confirmed I was still being followed.

The shadows that curled around him, obscuring my view, parted just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of his pale white skin and dark features.

He was around Dad’s age, muscular, and tall.

And he was a Dark Witch, judging by the Shadowcurrent he’d just cast to trip me with.

At the realization that he was a witch, not a Witch Hunter, I set my phone in my lap and hurried to finish untying the knot between my shoes.

Witches were almost always forbidden from visiting the human realm. Humans had only permitted Ash and I to live here because we were half witches, and even then, they only allowed us to live here until we turned eighteen.

We could have grown up in Everden, except that world wanted us even less than our own mother, who abandoned us to be an Echelon not long after I was born. The one time Helen visited was on Ash’s eighteenth birthday, but I was sleeping when she came to take Ash away.

I blinked to clear my head, and stood. “Who . . .” My tongue caught in my throat as the shadows hovering around him wafted away from his form. His overgrown nails speared out from his fingertips like sharpened surgical instruments. “Who are you?”

“Don’t speak,” he said.

I tried to protest, but I couldn’t move my tongue.

“We wouldn’t want to wake the humans, would we?” He turned, crooking his finger as he did, motioning for me to follow him. “Come. Follow me this way.”

At the new command, my tongue released from whatever hold he’d had on it, and I blurted, “What? No.” I was not —

I stepped toward him, not of my own volition. I tried twisting to run the other way, but something beyond my control prevented me from doing anything other than keep pace with his footsteps.

He steered us back toward my house, striding right over the tire marks streaking the center of the road.

“I imagine your mother never told you about the portal? That it was in your yard? No matter. I’ll show you the way now.” Shadows rose from the ground and swirled around his black-clad figure.

“The portal?” I asked. “The portal to Everden?” I gazed in the direction of my house, but it was still too far away to see. “You’re not . . .”

It might have been obvious, given the date, but after eighteen years of witches ignoring my existence, I never thought they wanted me in Everden. And Everden was the last place I wanted to be.