Page 21 of Hell Hath No Fury
WICKED
THE DAUGHTERS OF LILITH MC
ANNE MALCOM
CHAPTER ONE
The flames from my mother’s funeral pyre shone brighter than the stars. It took over the night. The smell of her burning flesh mingled with that of the rowan berries, anemone, frankincense and birch that covered her body to aid her journey into the Otherworld. The fragrance of the herbs theoretically should’ve masked the stench of charred hair and flesh, but it remained omnipresent.
Women’s voices drowned out all sounds of the night as they chanted a spell to guide her soul safely to the Otherworld.
My voice was not one of them.
Itshould’vebeen. I was her last remaining daughter by blood, the rest perished, scattered across the Earth or shielded by their own power as not to be found.
We were all sisters here. Bound not by blood but by the oath we’d sworn to this coven. Our magic, elemental—earth, water, fire and air—blanketed the large area we’d claimed as our home, intertwined together by our promises, our blood, spilled freely.
We were all family.
But we were not all equal.
My mother had been the head of our coven. By every rule that we held sacred, that leadership was to be passed to me, the eldest and last remaining daughter. If my other sisters had been here, The Mother would have decided. There would’ve been rituals that lasted a whole moon cycle. Our powers would be tested, our souls would be weighed and the rightful leader would’ve taken her place on the New Moon.
But they weren’t here. There was only me. With every death, disappearance and desertion of her daughters, it became clear that I would be the last to remain. I was sure that she had known before… Before we were all born, she would have known this was the inevitable end. That I would be the last Balfour standing at her funeral pyre. I had been groomed, trained relentlessly for years for this title.
I had not been ready for my mother’s death. I would’ve happily never been given this role if it meant I would be in this world with my mother for as long as possible.
But that was not what was to be.
Though it ripped parts of me, precious, sacred parts of me to shreds, I accepted it. Because death was a part of life. Death was a precious friend. We dealt in it often enough. We respected its power. We knew that it could be influenced, sometimes even cheated … for a time, at least. We respected the temporal nature of our lives in this world. Understood that it was not the end of our soul’s journey, merely a passage onto another plane.
Although I grieved for my mother, I celebrated the new voyage her soul was embarking on. Or at least I would’ve had I not learned her dying wish was to go against years of tradition.
Thousandsof years of tradition.
Not that I was big on tradition. In fact, that was kind of my defining personality trait.
I’d always wanted to break the mold, wanted to take my place in our history, wanted to be remembered.
But not for this.
Not for being the only daughter ever denied her place at the head of the coven.
In thousands of years. Inrecorded motherfucking history.
The shame that had covered me upon learning this was cold, all encompassing. Until it was chased away by a hot blanket offury. The fury was welcome. It was more comfortable than the stifling humiliation and grief that threatened to drown me.
Ridley hadn’t even tried to hide her satisfaction at the turn of events, her eyes alight with the power that had passed on to her.
The third most powerful witch in the coven when my mother was alive. The second now that she had passed on. She possessed three out of the four elemental magicks: air, earth and fire. It was a rare ability, but not unheard of. There were numerous covens in North America and across the world with witches who could harness three magicks. Each of those witches had varying degrees of power, varying degrees of access to those elements.
The witch who could harness all of the elements was born once in a generation. We had not had one since my mother, who had been on this earth for a long time. I was the only one of her daughters to possess that ability. This power was not something that traveled within blood. It was about the soul of the witch, it was about the plans that were laid out for her before her life even sparked inside of her mother.
It was a power I had not been humble about. My mother had many times chastised me for my arrogance, for my recklessness, my lack of respect for the old ways. I’d worn those scoldings like a badge of honor, knowing that something needed to change in order for us not just to remain alive but to thrive. To come out of the shadows, to stop hiding under generations of lies, of differing clubs, cults and churches so none would suspect what we truly were. So that we would never experience the Burning Times again.
Even here, in the twenty-first century when the fascination with paranormal and all things magical had been fucking franchised, we still disguised ourselves under the name ‘Daughters of Lilith.’ Not exactly subtle, mind you, and not something we could’ve done one hundred years ago.
But it was still a lie. A motorcycle club that lay on the fringes of society where witches had been shunned, where we told ourselves we were most comfortable.
