Susannah paced back and forth at the front of the room. In the days since I’d begun attending Hollow’s Grove, I’d learned to tune out

the tipping and tapping of her bones on the floor. She’d taken to pretending I didn’t exist, and I suspected it was out of the knowledge that she didn’t know what might come out of my mouth at any given moment.

That might have had something to do with calling her an overconfident lesson in bone density when she’d insinuated that I wasn’t paying attention.

Sometimes the truth hurt.

“Where does magic come from?” she asked as she paced, her gaze scanning over the faces in our group.

I’d learned that the legacies attended classes together, dependent on age. That the small group of students who surrounded me in every one of my classes came from one of the original bloodlines. Most of them had survived the centuries without issue.

It wasn’t lost on me that I seemed to be descended from the only two bloodlines who didn’t procreate fast enough to outlast the murders within families. That was just fine with me.

It meant my uncle wouldn’t be putting a knife in my back, simply for the fact that I didn’t have one.

“The source,” Della answered proudly.

“And what is the source, Miss Tethys?” Susannah asked, stopping her pacing to level the Blue with a studious glare.

“It’s… it’s where magic comes from,” she said, shrugging her shoulders as if the why didn’t matter.

“It comes from the world around us. It exists in everything. That’s why there are so many different manifestations of that magic,” I said, kicking back in my chair. I relaxed where the others were too occupied taking notes or staring at the member of the Covenant as if she might grind her bones down on their flesh and make them into her dinner.

“Then how do you explain the Reds?” one of the male witches asked. His blond hair was long, swaying in a single straight layer as he whipped it over his shoulder. His brown eyes were hard on mine as his posture went rigid.

“If you think that sex is unnatural, that’s a circumstance of your own self-loathing that I cannot help you with,” I said, smiling at him as his jaw clenched.

“Enough, Willow,” Susannah snapped.

I didn’t say another word, not because she’d told me to be quiet, but because I’d already made my point. I let my lips tip into a smug smile, waiting for the confirmation I knew she would give.

“Desire, lust, and sex are all part of nature, Mr. Peabody.”

The Red didn’t look my way, his hand gripping his pen a little tighter.

I wasn’t certain what the legacies had spent their childhood doing in the town of Crystal Hollow, but it certainly didn’t seem like being even remotely educated was on the list.

“The exact number of houses among the original families was determined by the elements, not us. There were other families that we were forced to leave behind in Salem, even though we understood that it would likely mean they’d suffer the injustice of the witch hunters. Balance is of the utmost importance, and there was only the opportunity for two of each color to come with us. The crystal witches and cosmic witches, the water and fire witches, the air and earth witches, and the life and death witches. We’ve commonly come to know of them as the sex witches and the necromancers, but they were created to establish balance to Hecate’s line,” Susannah explained, tossing the apple she held in her fingers into the air. She caught it, and I could just imagine the flesh bruising beneath her hard grip.

Just as she’d done to what the Coven had been meant to be.

“Why was the Hecate line only one family?” I asked, seeking the answer my mother had never been able to provide. Each of the other

manifestations of the source had been given two bloodlines, except the original.

“Charlotte Hecate was too strong for her own good. Her ability to channel death and give a twisted sort of life could not be replicated. That kind of power multiplied could have been catastrophic. So we gave her two points of balance to her one, hoping that she would be managed that way,” she said, and the words felt like a lie as she spoke them. I didn’t doubt there was some truth in them, but something else lingered at the back of my mind.

Something I couldn’t seem to grasp fully. The Hecate line had already been at a disadvantage with the way she seemed unable to pass her magic onto her family members, even in her life. There was strength in numbers among the other houses, but the Hecate line had only ever had one witch.

When she died, the magic passed on.

Until my aunt. The only possible source for the magic had been my father, and he should have felt it even with the bones out of reach. But it wasn’t until I came of age that those bones started calling to me.

My father had suspected. He’d sadly been right.

“As dangerous as Charlotte Hecate was in life, the death of her final descendant was a tragedy for the Coven. Her death enabled the Vessels to gain power, making it impossible for us to be rid of them permanently. How do you punish something that does not die? How do you keep it in line when they’re too strong to fight and there is no threat to be had that wouldn’t take the witch’s magic along with it?” Susannah asked, glancing around the room.

“You could burn them,” one of the Yellows said, snapping his fingers and forming a tiny flame.

“The Vessel will repair itself, even from the ashes,” Susannah said. “What if you trapped it in a rock?” a White witch asked, toying with the

crystals she held in her palm. Her dark lashes fluttered nervously, as if she already knew the answer.

“It can work for a time, but there is very little that can entrap a Vessel for long. They’re strong enough to break rock,” Susannah answered, and I found my mind wandering to what Gray would think of this conversation.

Of her educating his students on how to harm him.

“I think maybe you’re the best one to answer this question, Covenant. After all, you cannot kill that which is already dead,” I said, raising a brow

as she spun to glare at me from those creepy, empty sockets. I thought I might have seen her bones tip into a smile, if such a thing was possible?

Could you smile when you didn’t have a mouth?

I shuddered when Susannah spoke. “The only way to weaken a Vessel is to deprive it of its food source. Only then can you entrap it in the earth long enough for it to slowly fade into nothing. Without witch’s blood to maintain the Vessel, it simply ceases to be, eventually.”

“And how do you convince a Vessel not to simply take the blood it needs?” Della asked.

“You can’t,” I said, turning my gaze to her. There was nothing on this earth that would convince a Vessel not to feed.

I smiled when Susannah kept quiet, but we shared a knowing look. For once, she understood that I knew something that her vows to the sanctity of the Coven had kept her from revealing. She could not incite violence between the witches and Vessels outright.

The only way a witch could keep a Vessel from feeding was to invoke the price of a broken bargain. The price was servitude—the inability to reject the other’s demands.

If Gray failed to protect me from harm as promised, his life would belong to me.

Whether I found the bones or not.