Page 30 of Destiny of the Witch

My eyebrows rose. ‘So much for magical purity, then.’ The evil Coven was one of those organisations that propounded the virtues of magical purity, or so the bedtime stories said.

Bastion shrugged. ‘We all make different choices when we’re in love.’

I wanted to ask Bastion if he had ever been in love; it seemed unlikely that he hadn’t during two centuries of living. I’d had him and Jake – and I was only in my forties. I didn’t ask, though; I wasn’t brave enough and this wasn’t the right moment.

‘Hard to imagine my father and “love” in the same sentence,’ I said instead.

‘He lovesyou,’ Bastion disagreed. ‘He wanted you safe at the auction house.’

I snorted. ‘Because of the harkan! He wants me to unlock its full potential, and I couldn’t do that from a Connection jail cell – or if they’d killed me by mistake.’

‘Maybe,’ he conceded. ‘But things are rarely black or white.’

‘Bastion, I do believe you are an optimist.’

He clapped a hand to his heart. ‘You wound me!’ he joked, making me smile. His smile faded. ‘What do you want to do now, Bambi?’

I huffed a breath. ‘I want to go and shout at Oscar, and kick the ass of that duplicitous grimoire, but as he is currently residing in my dear friend Benji I’ll give him a firm telling off instead. And Oscar can have a ticking off, too.’

‘Oscar has already been through a lot,’ Bastion pointed out gently.

‘Maybe so, but the damned grimoire hasn’t.’

I jumped off Bastion’s lap and marched out of my office to confront my grimoire, who had helped persuade my mum that giving a piece of her mind and soul to a cursed crystal was agoodidea.

Chapter 23

I strode into the living room, full of righteous fury. ‘Am Bam? Are you okay?’ Benji asked apprehensively as I stood in front of him, glowering with my hands on my hips.

‘I am very angry, but not at you. I am angry with Benjamin. Come out, you bastard, and talk to me.’

‘Why Miss Amber, I declare that is not the nicest way to address me,’ Benjamin said. ‘Though technically, as I have no mother or father, I suppose they cannot have borne me in wedlock and thus the description may be technically correct.’

‘You told my mum to give a piece of herself to the bloody harkan crystal!’

‘Ah,’ he said urbanely. ‘That. Yes, well. It was the only solution to her particularproblem.’

‘Sheaddedto the harkan,’ I spat in horror. Her confession made me sick to my stomach; she had killed someone and used their life force to add to the damned crystal.

‘She did, but not in the way in which you are imagining,’ Benjamin said. ‘She found a terminally ill patient called Diane on a crossover ward and explained what she needed to do and why. The elderly lady agreed to help her. She checked herself out of hospital and came to our Coven. She wanted her death tomatter.And truly, it did.’

‘No matter which way you dress it up, Mum killed someone. And she used their death in her magic.’ I felt sick.

‘Yes, she did,’ Oscar said softly. ‘And it ate her up inside to the point that she went back in time to try and undo it. She used the portal to go back to persuade Diane not to go with her. She went back to a time a few hours before she’d met with her, explained what would happen, begged Diane not to do it. Diane smiled and nodded, and when the then-present Luna came and told her of her plan, Dianestillwent with her anyway.’

The wind went out of my sails. ‘Thatwas why she used the Third realm?’

Oscar nodded. ‘She went back to try and stop what she’d already put in motion. But you can’t change what has alreadyhappened.’

‘The fixity of time,’ I muttered.

‘Indeed.’

Mum had made some poor decisions. Wiping my memory, killing Diane and adding to the crystal… I should have been furious with her but, truthfully, she had already been punished enough. Giving a piece of herself to the crystal was foolhardy – surely she could have found another way? But it was done and could not be undone. Mum’s jaunt through time was evidence of that.

I had thought that the first verse of the prophecy was so clear, but those thrice-damned seers – with them nothing was ever quite how you thought it was.

Through the veils of time, a mother’s plight; Her mind is the cost to set things right. She weaves the threads of fate so tight. Her sacrifice made in love’s pure light.I had thought the reference to time had meant Mum’s use of the Third realm, that her mind had been the price for using that, but the two sentences were unconnected.

---