Page 22 of Hell Hath No Fury
The age of the witch was now. I knew that in my very soul. And although I was frustrated with the decisions my mother made for our coven, I wasn’t impatient for that change. Rebel I may be, I still trusted in the plan.
In our Mother.
Until this morning.
Until I saw the sharpened canines Ridley exposed with her grin.
Until my tears of sorrow had burned on my cheeks in the way of resentment, hatred and fury.
I swallowed down those feelings. I would not give Ridley the satisfaction of seeing my true emotions.
We had been rivals since childhood. No one ever pitted us against each other except ourselves. Something primal inside of us identified the other as a threat.
Ridley had been coveting my position since before I could remember. She’d sucked up to my mother in ways that made my blood boil.
For whatever reason, Ridley tried to pretend she was my friend, never openly insulting me but slyly undermining me, understanding that my explosive temper would make me look like the villain.
What she didn’t understand was that I was more than happy to be the villain. Anything but the devout daughter, the good little witch toeing the line.
I had been sure that that would be my edge. That I’d win in the end.
Although, of course, death was not the end.
But it really fucking felt like it.
Nyx’s hand curled into mine as the chant came to a close, as the ashes from my mother’s pyre turned into something else entirely. Liquid starlight, like it had fallen from the heavens, ascended from the flames.
“Blessed be,” I said aloud, my voice joining those of my sisters for the first time tonight. “May your journey be fruitful; may the stars guide you, and may the Mother greet you.”
As bright as the fire had burned, it died abruptly, terminating on the last letter of our chant.
Everyone was momentarily blinded by the thick night that came after a soul had left this world. It covered everything entirely, drowning out even the sound of our own breaths.
A taste of the void. Of death.
Nyx squeezed my hand tighter. I knew it was in support and not because she feared Death. Quite the opposite, in fact. His nearness was palpable.
Despite the situation, I found myself smirking into the abyss. You could hide from Death … for a time. But you could not escape him. Especially if he had the hots for you.
The fire returned, giving us back our sense and illuminating the circle of women surrounding it.
Everyone was clad in a deep, captivating green. The shade of decay and rebirth, a dichotomy of what the natural world has to offer. We reserved it only for funerals as, with everything, colors had power. Beware of a witch with a shade of green on her body or with eyes of pastoral fire … your death may be near.
“The circle is now closed,” Ridley uttered in a voice that made me snort out loud. It was not her natural, nasally, grating tone. There was a lilt to it that hadn’t been there before. I suspected she had been standing in front of a mirror for quite some time, practicing it as a child might experiment with lipstick. And like the child who has no idea where to put it, she sounded ridiculous.
Her gray eyes narrowed on me, her conventionally beautiful features marred with distaste.
I held her stare in challenge, daring her to do something.
Nyx’s hand squeezed mine once more, this time in warning. She didn’t need her gift to know what I was planning on doing next. She was my best friend.
The air turned bitter and acrid with the prospect of a confrontation in this sacred space.
“I fucking dare you, bitch,”I hissed in my mind.
Sure, she had her little cronies at her sides, Cordelia and Juniper, who had been her sidekicks since we were children. They hated me, not because of their own minds—I was pretty sure neither of them had had an original thought—but because Ridley did. So I knew they would join her side.
A handful of other sisters might side with Ridley purely because she was now the coven leader. Also, because a handful of my sisters hated me for various reasons. I was a polarizing figure.
