Chapter Thirteen
The girl’s rosy pink aura washed over us like a tidal wave of good fortune, leaving a feeling of ease and a sweet taste in its wake. As she cantered away, I leaned out of the woods, desperate to follow. Even Winnie seemed affected by the teenager’s charming essence. She smiled and sighed as the girl rode out of sight, staring blissfully after her.
Morgan emerged from the forest, gazing at the vanishing girl. “That was her, wasn’t it?”
It was a rhetorical question. No other witch could have that kind of effect. The girl’s presence alone was enough to support a second wind for Morgan and Laurel’s flagging energy.
“She’s so young,” Laurel said. “I wouldn’t have expected it for—”
“For someone so powerful,” I finished, still reeling from the girl’s effect. “She’s dripping with energy, isn’t she? Have the two of you ever felt anything like that before?”
Morgan shook her head. The girl’s aura seemed to have affected her most. Her eyes were brighter than they had been a moment ago, and though she looked more alert, she also appeared to be subduing her emotions under a mask of nonchalance. “Let’s go,” she ordered.
We followed the trail of the girl’s pink aura, keeping to the edge of the forest. I hurried to catch up to Morgan’s long strides. “I was right, wasn’t I? She really is as powerful as I thought.”
“You were right.”
Her rough tone worried me. “So what’s the problem them?”
Morgan tripped over a tree root. I caught her by the elbow before she could fall. She brushed herself off. “The problem is that we have to kidnap a teenager from her home.”
I stopped short. Winnie, not anticipating my sudden halt, walked right through me. For once, her freezing presence had no effect on me because Morgan’s words had already made my blood run cold. “Who said anything about kidnapping?”
Morgan trekked on, climbing over a viney bush. “It’s the only way.”
I looked at Laurel to see what she thought of this development, but she was too deeply immersed in the surrounding nature to reply. I hurtled the bush to catch up with Morgan. “I’m lost. At what point did we decide that abducting a child was the best way to cure the coven?”
“What did you think we were going to do?”
“Ask nicely?”
Morgan huffed, glancing behind her to make sure that Laurel was keeping up. “Gwenlyn, I love you, but this is not a game of chess. There are lives at stake here—our lives—and we cannot afford to make a mistake this late in the game. We need that girl.”
“So why not just talk to her coven?” I insisted.
“What did I say on the way here? The covens here aren’t a part of our alliance.” She slid down a small embankment, nearly falling into a small pond at the bottom. “I don’t have any pull with them. I can’t negotiate a deal for this girl.”
I plucked Morgan away from the dingy pond water. “Why not? Maybe they’re amiable.”
“Or maybe one of these witches is the woman that cursed us in the first place,” Morgan replied. “Did you consider that possibility?”
“Why would some random witch in Windsor Falls curse us?” I asked. “We’ve kept to ourselves. No one had a reason to attack us.”
“And yet here we are.”
“May I interject?” Laurel had finally pulled her focus out of the trees in order to join the conversation.
Morgan gestured for her to continue. “By all means.”
Morgan’s grumpy mood was offset by Laurel’s soft calm. The younger Summers sister looped her arm around my shoulders and drew me close. She allowed Morgan to forge ahead, leaving us to follow along in our coven leader’s agitated wake.
“Do you remember what Morgan was like ten years ago?” Laurel murmured. She spoke to me in the same dulcet tones she used to speak to the trees. I felt like a furry woodland creature, manipulated by Laurel’s earthy vibes. “She’s changed so much since then. She learned to control her emotions so well that half the time I don’t know what she’s thinking anymore. I forget how wild she used to be. Untamable. The epitome of a lone wolf. And then I remember the reason why she changed.”
I thought back to when I first met Morgan. She was disagreeable, cynical, and spoke in a series of sarcastic comebacks. Over time, her temper cooled, and she dealt with trivial coven matters with an air of nonchalance, even if an argument between witches was more heated than usual. I looked ahead to make sure Morgan wasn’t listening in. “What was the reason?”
“She wasn’t a lone wolf anymore,” Laurel replied. She swooped down to rescue a toad from where it was stuck in a boggy puddle. “She came back to us. She remembered who she was. It’s only when something truly threatens this coven—her family—that the old Morgan resurfaces, and she is a force to be reckoned with.”
“That doesn’t mean she should abandon her morals,” I said.
Laurel released the toad with a long face. “There are no morals in war.”
There was no further discussion. It was decided that, at the first opportunity, the girl would accompany us back to Yew Hollow. Her family would not be notified. We would make her as comfortable as possible, but there was no denying that what we planned on doing went against humanity’s laws of decency. Time was running short. The situation worsened the longer we were away from the coven. We needed to return with the girl as quickly as possible, but Morgan wanted one more thing before we did.
“We need to test her,” she declared.
As the sun fell, we set up camp in the bordering woods. I did most of the work, constructing tents, summoning sleeping bags and other gear, and starting a fire to keep us warm. Winnie acted as an LED lamp, illuminating the clearing so that I could see what I was doing. Laurel did her best to collect food and water, but her energy was waning, as was Morgan’s. I finished up for her, making a salad out of the various greens she had managed to find in the surrounding area. As we ate, I kept a mental journal of Morgan and Laurel’s flagging health. As Morgan’s breath came in short gasps and she struggled to get through an entire sentence without coughing, I realized that the curse wasn’t central to Yew Hollow. Evacuating would’ve done the witches no good.
I offered Morgan a canteen of fresh water from a nearby spring. “What do you mean? What kind of test?”
“There’s no point in bringing her in if she doesn’t have the capacity to heal us,” Morgan replied in a hoarse voice. She cleared her throat and sipped the water, but it did little to alleviate the issue. “We don’t know anything about these super-powered witches.”
“They’re rumored to be ten times more powerful—” Winnie began, quoting our research.
“Rumored to be,” Morgan said. “As in, it’s not necessarily fact. She’s still a witch. She still has to hone her skill over time.”
I picked greens out of my teeth, wishing for a toothbrush. “How are we supposed to figure out if she’s as powerful as we need her to be?”
“We force her to use the full extent of her power,” Morgan answered.
I gestured for her to continue. “And to do that, we…”
Morgan remained stoically quiet, and Laurel answered for her. “A healer’s greatest gift lies in being able to mend herself first.”
Morgan’s intention dawned on me slowly. I dropped my canteen to the ground, where it rolled over and collected a layer of dirt. “You want to hurt her, don’t you?”
“No,” Morgan said. “Of course I don’t want to.”
“That wasn’t the point of the question,” I argued. “Is this what it’s come to, Morgan? We’re going to harm an innocent teenager, force her to heal herself, and then abduct her for our own selfish needs?”
“I don’t like the idea any more than you do, Gwen—”
“Then find a different way!”
I pushed myself up from my seat around the fire and stormed off. I didn’t know what had gotten into Morgan. We were pressed for time and we needed the girl, but why was it necessary to tes
t her beforehand? There was no solid reason for harming the girl other than to serve us peace of mind. The woods grew darker as I wandered away from the fire, but Winnie’s luminescent glow soon caught up with me.
“I can’t do this,” I admitted to her, plopping down to sit in the fork of a tree. “I can’t force a kid to save the coven.”
Winnie floated upward, hovering in the overhead branches and glowing like a second moon. “Look at it from Morgan’s point of view. She can’t afford for this not to work. She doesn’t have a backup plan.”
I shivered in the damp, cold night. “It’s not right.”
Winnie settled next to me, keeping a few inches between us to save me from her chill. For the hundredth time, I wished she was alive, if only so she could give me a warm hug.
“Listen,” she murmured gently. “Toward the end of my life, my mother almost went insane. She panicked because she knew she couldn’t save me, but that didn’t stop her from trying. If things had progressed—if my aunt had found this girl in time—I don’t doubt that my mother would have gone to the same lengths as Morgan. It wouldn’t have mattered to her that she was putting another woman’s child at risk. I was the only thing on her mind. That’s how Morgan’s thinking now. Her only responsibility is to save the coven, and this is how she’s decided to do it.”
“So you think there’s no stopping her,” I said defeatedly.
“I think that the world needs balance.” An owl hooted overhead and Winnie looked up to see if she could spot it. “You and Morgan are on opposite sides of this argument right now. Come to the middle. Find common ground. How can you test the girl without hurting her and appease Morgan’s demands at the same time?”
I wracked my mind for alternate ideas. “A false hex maybe? It would give the girl the illusion that she’s hurt, convince her to use her powers to heal herself, and reveal the extent of her craft.”
Winnie nodded, satisfied. “There you go. See? Wasn’t that easy?”
“Sure, if Morgan will go for it.”
“I’m sure you can persuade her.”
I wasn’t in any hurry to return to Morgan and Laurel. The night was cold but beautiful. I tipped my head back to stare up at the stars. It had been so long since I’d seen them properly. The owl hooted again, this time closer, and I spotted its yellow eyes in a neighboring tree. The longer we sat, the more we blended in with nature. Animals emerged from their hiding places to inspect Winnie’s inexplicable presence. Unlike mortals and most witches, animals could sense when a ghost was present. A family of raccoons, a skunk, and even a curious coyote passed by us. The moon drifted overhead, indicating the passing time.
“Hey, Winnie,” I whispered after a while. “Do you think your mom is okay?”
Winnie looked down at her hands, tracing the lines in her palms. “I hope so, or I hope she will be. I imagine she’ll need time to grieve. My father too. Do you think parents can ever recover from the death of a child?”
“I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask,” I replied. “I didn’t grow up with a standard version of parents.”
“Sometimes I think this would’ve been easier if I didn’t have a good relationship with them,” Winnie said wistfully.
“Hey.” I moved as close to her as possible without sinking into her incorporeal form. “Don’t ever wish for that. You lived a beautiful life surrounded by beautiful people. A premature death doesn’t change that. Your family will look back on their time with you and remember love and happiness rather than regret.”
Winnie rested her head on my shoulder, and I suppressed a shiver. All I felt was her cold absence against my own skin. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t supposed be like this. We should’ve found each other sooner. Unlike the rest of her family, I wouldn’t remember Winnie alive. She would always be a ghost to me.
“Something’s wrong,” she murmured, lifting her head. “The trees are talking.”
Sure enough, a soft whisper rode on the breeze, urgent and worried. The trunk beneath us shuddered. I leapt to the ground. Though I couldn’t understand the conversation, the trees’ urgency was adamant.
“Gwenlyn!”
Morgan’s voice sounded far off. I’d wandered farther from the camp than I’d thought. At her panicked call, I broke into a run. What could have gone wrong now? Winnie and I rushed through the forest until I skidded into the clearing. Morgan and Laurel no longer relaxed along the ground. Morgan paced alongside the fire while Laurel flitted from tree to tree, flower to flower, listening to messages that the rest of couldn’t understand.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the coven,” Morgan replied, her tone colored with worry. “Malia and Karma can’t hold the curse off on their own. Two more witches passed out.”
I combed through my windswept hair with my fingers. “Like Alana? They’re in a coma?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Morgan took Laurel’s hand as the younger witch rushed by her to reach another tree. Without missing a beat, Laurel spun Morgan into a cocoon of a hug, all while maintaining contact with some leaf or stem. “They’re weak though. Dauntingly so. We need to return to Yew Hollow immediately.”
“We can’t go!” I protested. “We need this girl.”
“Let me rephrase,” Morgan said. “Laurel and I are returning to Yew Hollow. You will stay here and fetch the girl.”
“But—”
Morgan withdrew from Laurel’s embrace to grasp me by the shoulders. “You wanted to do this on your own, remember? Test the girl and bring her back to us as quickly as possible.”
“Morgan—”
Morgan took my chin between her fingers, forcing me to look at her. Her green eyes met mine, but where mine were wild and panicked, hers were calm and steady. “I believe in you, Gwen. You can do this.” She looked to Winnie. “Take care of her, won’t you?”
Winnie nodded. “Of course.”
Morgan shouldered her backpack, coughing, and tapped Laurel on the shoulder. “It’s time. Let’s move out.”
Laurel planted a kiss on my cheek. “See you soon.”
They snaked away through the shadows of the woods, and just like that, the sisters were gone. I sat cross-legged near the dying fire, watching the embers glow with a blank expression. This was what I wanted—to help the coven on my own and prove myself worthy of their bloodline—so why did I feel so alone?