Chapter 38 Mona
The cramping starts low in my belly.
Mona, something’s wrong, Beep urges, rousing me from sleep. After giving up on trying to get Ghost to use our time wisely—he and I have different ideas on what that means—I got dressed and watched him pace the cell, muttering to himself.
Being able to read him through the bond is wonderful and relieving.
Before, I’d have gone through great pains trying to read him, to understand where his head was at.
But through the bond, I felt his worry about the situation, so his distraction didn’t offend me.
Especially when he paused every few minutes to look over at me, with fire in his eyes.
I’ve learned the bond isn’t like a radar, but somehow I could sense my other mates weren’t too far away. So, I laid back and watched as Ghost plotted and planned, all the while wondering what the fuck I thought I was going to do, coming here alone.
At the very least, the witches would have drained me more than once.
I must’ve dozed off though because I wake to a strange pain in my belly, like a squeezing cramp.
Mona, Beep snaps again. Then a sharp pain hits me and I cry out.
Ghost spins on his heel and rushes over, kneeling down. “What is it?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’m fine, I think.”
His eyes narrow, and he looks me over.
“Just a cramp,” I say, but Beep worries me when she corrects in a panic-stricken tone, Not a cramp.
He presses his palm to my forehead. “No fever.”
“It doesn’t feel like heat… or, it feels like the bad parts of it.”
He stares at me silently, eyes raking over me, frowning. After a minute, he curses and rocks back on his heels.
“She’s doing something to you. Mona, I think she’s—”
Pain lances through me like a white-hot poker. I collapse, a scream tearing from my throat as something writhes inside my womb. My fingernails gouge into my stomach as I curl into a fetal position.
“She’s doing something to your...”
“To my what?”
“Your… fertility.” He says it calmly, in contrast to how he gets up, stalks over to the silver bars caging us in, throws his arms up and begins chanting, curling his fingers around the silver and flexing with all his strength to pull it off. His flesh sizzles on contact, yet he only grips harder.
Paired with his magic, the cement frame begins to crumble. Ghost’s eyes have gone black, veins protruding across his temples and along his forearms, his back muscles flexing, as his voice deepens to something inhuman while he chants.
“Ghost!” I yell, trying to understand what’s happening, but I can already feel something vital draining from me, like sand through an hourglass.
Through the bond, he is crazed.
The door’s entire frame slowly pulls from the wall.
I can hear Andrea shouting from across the silo.
The stench of burned flesh and Ghost’s magic fills the air, and I open my mouth to call to him, but the words die as I see his face—eyes wide with fear, breath panting, cold sweat across his brow. He’s panicking.
Ghost never panics.
The pain inside me ebbs and flows. Three witches gather outside our cell, their fingers crackling with lime-green light as they hurl bolts at us between the bars.
Ghost’s hands drop from the frame, his face slick with sweat as he throws both palms outward.
The air shimmers where their magic hits his invisible barrier.
A bolt slips through, missing his head by inches and leaving a smoking crater in the cement wall behind us.
I lunge toward the half-loosened door, my fingernails scraping against silver.
“Mona, I don’t want you to hurt yourself!
” Ghost’s warning cuts off as he ducks, a spell whizzing past his head.
Chunks of wall explode inward, which actually helps loosen the frame even more.
I feel Beep’s familiar strength flowing up my arms as my fingers curl around the silver bars, the metal searing my skin as we pull.
My palms singe with blisters, but they will heal.
I peel back the bars just enough to let Ghost focus on magic.
His face hardens, hands weaving patterns crackling with dark energy.
The witches crumple one by one, their lime-green light sputtering out like blown candles.
When the last falls, Ghost’s attention returns to the bars, muscles straining, veins popping along his forearms as he wrenches the bars apart with a groan.
The bars screech and bend just enough, and he slides through, then reaches back for me.
Across the corridor, Sam and Andrea work together, making slow progress in pulling down the silver bars caging them in. Their faces are tight with determination, hands bloodied but still pulling, as if they can feel the approaching danger.
Ghost grabs my hand, nearly yanking my arm out of the socket, dragging me along the curved wall, past the fallen witches.
The air around us shimmers with his hastily drawn protection ward, but it flickers whenever he throws out his free hand to deflect an incoming spell.
I wrench my arm free. He whips around, pupils dilated, jaw clenched.
“I’m right behind you,” I assure him. “You need both your hands.”
He nods, and we run across the catwalk to the other side of the underground silo, and when we reach the opposite side, we follow the curved wall until we hit one of the rectangular openings cut into the cement, the one that opens into a larger room toward the back.
I can smell her from here. Deidre, her sister Tracy, and a handful of other witches. The scent of sulfur is strong, the magic sizzling out of their pores.
There’s a small hearth behind them, smoke dissipating into the dank air. The fire burns low, and beside it, the stone vat filled with my blood.
“You can’t do this,” Ghost pleads when we reach them.
Deidre smiles. Dips her already bloodied finger into the bowl and repeats the spell.
na?chno? mde??a? hers mde??a? t?ach mine
na?chno? mde??a? hers mde??a? t?ach mine
The cramp rips through me again, twisting like a knife. I cry out, collapsing to my knees. Ghost’s roar shakes the walls. “You can’t do this! You can’t take this from her!”
My vision blurs, dark spots swimming in my eyes. Blood pounds in my ears, drowning out everything but the white-hot agony gutting me from within and the raw terror in my mate’s voice as he fights for what they’re stealing from us.
Deidre’s face contorts with rage, spittle flying from her lips. “I care nothing for her future!” She slams her fist against the altar, the crack echoing. “What about my future? Ours!”
She whirls, gesturing violently toward the circle of witches, their eyes burning with hunger as they lean forward, all rocking and chanting in unison. “Her fertility is a sacrifice we will honor. But it is ours!”
“What will you do, hmm?” Ghost taunts in a low, deadly whisper. “A transference spell won’t work, there’s too many of you.”
Deidre’s eyes gleam in the firelight. “Consumption.” Her finger extends toward the cauldron. Ghost’s face drains of color. “Her reproductive organs steeped in her blood. The spell I’ve waited decades for, and all that’s required is we drink.”
My heart drops into my stomach.
“That’s what this is all about?” Ghost steps wide, blocking me from her view. As if that could somehow protect me from her magic. He tilts his head as he takes her in.
“You’re infertile,” he states. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
And then the pieces click. Her obsession with pregnancy. Shifter hormones from heat, our blood.
“With the prisoners we just let escape, and with your blood, Mona, the magic is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Holy shit,” I wheeze.
The witches behind her continue their chanting.
na?chno? mde??a? hers mde??a? t?ach mine
na?chno? mde??a? hers mde??a? t?ach mine
na?chno? mde??a? hers mde??a? t?ach mine
A loud crash comes from behind us, but the pain stabs deeper, sharper.
“Please don’t do this. You can’t take this from her,” Ghost pleads on my behalf. On behalf of our pack, our future.
“She’s a wolf, she’ll regenerate.”
“We don’t regenerate limbs or organs, you fucking psycho!” he shouts. “We heal at the site like a cauterized wound.”
Ghost turns to me. It’s like I can see his heart breaking in real time. “Mona, if she succeeds…”
I’m not ready for children. I don’t even want to think about that. But to lose the choice? To take that away from me, before I’ve even had a chance to live my life?
After everything?
“I don’t understand,” I say, as she watches me. “All of this is about you getting pregnant?”
Everything she said to Silas about having more power over the other covens, it was all just vague nonsense—megalomania, he called it—but no one thought to look closer.
I laugh bitterly through the pain. “You’re barren.”
Her face contorts with rage. “You mock me, but you’re the one on your knees,” she hisses, circling closer.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to have so little power, you’re a joke among your kind?
I was withering away like some common hedge witch.
I couldn’t control it, I couldn’t slow it.
Then an elder witch offered us a bargain—we sacrificed our bloodlines, our fertility, for power that would make us the most powerful witches of our time. ”
“So you gave up your fertility?”
“I sacrificed!”
“But I thought witches believed having children diluted their magic? Why bother wanting children now? Why take this from me, from all of us? All this pain and suffering you’ve caused!” I scream.