All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A Lying Witch
Book Three
Copyright © 2016 Odette C Bell
Cover art stock photos licensed from Depositphotos.
www.odettecbell.com
A Lying Witch
Book Three
Chi may have defeated Fagen, but the battle for Bane City’s hearts has only just begun.
The questions keep mounting, but Chi has no time to find their answers.
The Lonely King strikes again, and this time there may be no stopping him. He’s intent on using Chi’s heart to open a door to the past. Chi is the only witch who can stop him. But there’s a problem - a big one. Chi has finally figured out her magic comes at a cost. Now she’ll have to decide between everyone else’s future and her own….
Chapter 1
I sat at the kitchen table, head rested on my palm, gaze locked on my magical bodyguard’s back.
Max was back to normal. Technically. He’d lost most of his memory after his fight with Dimitri.
But me? Oh, my memory was fine. I could remember every single detail of what had happened to me in the past.
The only problem was, I still had no clue what had actually happened. What was worse? Oh, what was worse is I couldn’t even begin to ask Max. Because every time I did, this would happen—
“Max, I know you keep dodging the question, but I’m still curious about your past—” I didn’t even get the chance to finish my question. As soon as my words were out, Max stiffened.
His whole back became a washboard. I could practically see each muscle seize one-by-one.
What’s more, I saw it – the shadow.
It may have only been a couple of weeks since the incident with Fagan, but that didn’t mean I’d been idle. I’d been questioning Max at every opportunity I got, and every time I did, that shadow would always loom larger and darker than before.
I was way beyond thinking it was a mere trick of the light. Hell no. It was the way it sat over objects, not accommodating to their shape but smothering them like a dark swathe of fire.
Oh, and its effect on me was always unmistakable. Though I always hid it, my heart would race, my mouth would dry, and my skin would prickle with fear. Fear, and something else.
“Chi, how many times do I have to tell you,” Max began.
I plastered a friendly smile over my mouth as I continued to watch Max’s shadow. “You don’t have any memories of your past. And what you do remember, you can rarely trust. Yeah, sorry. I just forgot,” I lied, never shifting my gaze, let alone blinking.
Max still had his back to me as he did the washing up, and finally, his stiff shoulders dropped.
The shadow? It seemed to stick around for a while, looming large and dark over the kitchen bench and a chunk of the white-and-black linoleum.
… It couldn’t be him, right? The Max I’d seen from the past? Because that had just been a vision, yeah? Some random throwback to Mary McLane – some crazy nightmare induced by my near-death experience.
Max suddenly turned. I blinked and immediately hooked my fringe behind my ears, resting my hand there as I kind of hid behind my fingers to distract him.
It didn’t work. He frowned at me as he hooked a chair leg with his boot, tugged the chair around, and sat roughly.
Weirdly, he didn’t cross his arms, just reached a hand forward, rested his broad, marked palm on the edge of the bench, and began drumming his strong fingers against the wood. “Chi, what is it?”
I pressed my bottom lip high into my top lip and shrugged. “Nothing. Just enjoying the bright sunny day,” I said without thinking.
Max pointedly gestured towards the French doors to our left. They were currently drenched in sheets of rain as a hell of a storm drove down over the town. It drummed against the drains, rattled against the roof, and sent leaves and small branches scattering across the lawn. “Yeah, beautiful sunny day,” he agreed with a deadpan tone. “Now, you wanna tell me what’s really wrong?” He turned to me and looked directly into my eyes.
It stilled me. Well, half of me. The other half of me shuddered into a sprint as my heart skipped a beat and a tight pressure pushed through my chest.
There was something so soft about Max. Yeah, you had to scratch the surface to find it – way, way under the surface. But it was there. The soft droop to his eyes, the subtle curl to his lips, the way he always tilted his head to the left when he was watching me.
“Chi?” he pushed. “Why are you just sitting there and staring at me? You’re not your usual self,” he pointed out with a hint of worry crumpling his forehead and pushing his thick dark brows together.
I laughed. It was kind of exasperated. “You barely know me,” I said, more for my own benefit than his. Because it was true. A fact I kept trying to remind myself. I barely knew this guy. So what if he was my perfect type. So what if it had felt like my destiny had knocked on the door when I’d first met him. So what if my heart kept overriding my brain and begging me to trust him. The fact remained that I’d only known Max for a little over a month. Sure, it had been a seriously wild month, but that didn’t negate the fact I didn’t really know this guy.
Max leaned back, plucking his hand from the table as he rested it on his broad knee. He tilted his head even further to the left. Reaching a hand up and running
