Page 30 of Claimed By Her Monsters
“He is already yours, little witch.” Alister chuckles. “You have spellbound him, just as you did the rest of us.” He grows sober. “Our fourth mate is young still, weak.”
“We will protect him.” An unyielding need to shield my mates rises in me. My life is theirs and theirs is mine. “I vow it.”
“So fierce, my love.” Alister traces my jaw with a single finger, and I lean into his touch with a sigh. “Now, in this time, it’s not safe for you. Witches are hunted. The Tall Hat Man hunts us too. You must go to sleep so you can come to where I am now and awaken in the girl we call Madison.”
“Madison?”
His smile brims with tenderness. “She is lovely. You are lovely. We love her, you.”
“I will sleep until it’s time,” I tell him, laying down in my bed of satin. “You must slumber, too, at least the parts of you that know of the Tall Hat Man. He can follow fresh memory across time. You must hide.” I lay my palm against my mate’s brow. “I will take the memories.”
He puts his hand on me in the same way. “I will take the memories and the memories of our mates too. Until the day of the storm in the house that’s alive, where we may all awaken together and once again be reunited.”
Before we set loose our magic, we share a single kiss, made sweeter by the knowledge that we leave each other for now, but since we are fate-bound, we never truly part.
The magic flows from one finger to the next until it’s a ring, connecting our hands, connecting our minds. Together, Alister and I speak a single word.
“Sleep.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Complete
“Awaken.”
Alister’s voice threads through time and space. It plucks me from the darkness and sends me hurtling back into my body. I open my eyes to see I’m in the bed with curtains of velvet. Alister, Mick, and Caspian crouch around me, concern radiating in the tense set of their shoulders. We all startle when the clock rings out, chiming like a death toll, twelve times.
Tears flood my eyes. I throw an arm over my face to hide them. “We failed. I’m still me.”
Alister pries my arm away, laughing, bright and unguarded. “You are exactly who you’re supposed to be. You’re Madison, the Clover Witch. Queen of the Witches.”
I blink at him. “I am?”
He laughs again and the sound makes my heart soar. I’ve never seen him look so happy.
Outside, the storm clouds clear. The fire burns low in the hearth, finally content.
“Look inside yourself, little witch. It’s all there.”
I do as he says. Close my eyes and focus inward. There it is. A million lives, a thousand spells. Power rises, crackling through my fingertips. I direct it to the lights overhead and they turn on, flooding the room with brightness.
The four of us hiss and squint, especially Alister.
“Look, I did that,” I exclaim and point at the lights. Pride illuminates my chest even brighter, but the power still flows from me and the bulbs burst in a shower of sparks and shattering glass. “Oops.” My arm drops back to the bed, defeated. “Sorry.”
“Hmm.” Alister glances to the slivers of broken glass on the floor and back to me. “It’s been a while. You might be a little rusty.”
I sit up and press a hand to my forehead, which throbs with a migraine. I guess that’s not surprising, considering that thousands of years of memories and magic just got crammed in there. “I don’t understand. How do I remember everything, but I’m still me?”
“You can’t be all the lives you’ve lived at once,” Alister explains. “You’d go insane.” He takes my hand and brings it to his lips to kiss, reminding me of the stake, the fire, the graveyard where I saw him last.
“You came to me, but then we went to sleep?” I remember everything, but it’s hazy, blurred at the corners.
“Youwent to sleep,” he corrects. “A dangerous magician hunts us. To protect ourselves, Mick and I lost some of our memories. We forgot loving you.” Sorrow fills his eyes, as if the thought of forgetting our bond, even deliberately, pains him to the core.
Mick places his hand on my knee and squeezes. To Alister, he says, “But we must have remembered in some small way because it explains the draw we had to each other, to Caspian.”
“Caspian.” I find him on my right. My hands rise to his pale cheeks, which flush pink with my touch. “My mate. The fourth leaf.”
