“Heard you flashed the councillor. Wish I’d been there to see his face, although in all honesty, that wouldn’t be where I was looking.” He winked at her as he bent to pick her up, and Melody felt herself flushing with embarrassment.
It hadn’t been her finest moment, but she was still so out of it, and so annoyed with the stranger, that it had seemed the best choice at the time.
As soon as Justin had put her down on the lounge, the councillor was in front of her.
“What is your role in Bestia?” he snapped.
So, Melody outlined what her life had been like, her memories of her mother’s death, and her understanding of what her aunt’s mad plans were.
“A beast army? And what would be the point of that? There are enough shifters on the continent to stand against her.”
“And how many dragons? I was told to get the dragons and any alpha shifters I came across. I did my best to avoid them all, but once they realised that I was strong enough to defeat them, they kind of made it their mission to find me.”
She glanced up at the shifters around her, and found them all looking ruefully back at her. Dean and Asher, however, were unrepentant. She could feel their satisfaction through the bond. She’d tried to avoid all of them, but they’d managed to catch her even as the others had failed. She would need to have a word to the pair of them about that.
“My aunt was looking at the long term. She wanted to breed a superior kind of shifter, and then she was going to come after the other beast covens. Once she had control of all the beast tamers, she was going to expand. She was going to use me to breed with the dragons, and have a whole army of dragon shifters at her beck and call.” Melody shuddered.
She’d had decades of listening to her aunt’s ravings and the mutterings that the shifters passed onto her. It had taken a long time for her to piece it all together, and if her aunt knew that Melody understood what her plans were, she would have never have let her leave the compound.
“This isn’t something she’s going to let go of, either,” Melody continued. “I may be out of the picture now, but she’ll find a way to bind these Apex shifters and then she’ll breed them until they are spent. The young will be taken away and trained to obey her, they’ll be forced to swear fealty to her alone, and they'll be used against anyone who stands in her way.”
It wasn’t just the dragons who growled at that, but all the shifters. Young were prized amongst clans and communities, especially in the packs. Any threat to a youngster was treated as an insult to their entire group.
The councillor scowled at her. “You’re a strong witch. With the power I can feel in you now, even though you’re not at your full strength, I think it would be safe to say that you’re the strongest I’ve ever met. So why didn’t you just break the geasen?”
His demeanor had calmed a bit during the questioning, but his hatred of her had not.
“Sir, these started when I was four. I’ve lost count of all the stupid commands that she’s given me over the years. Everything from washing my hands after going to the toilet, to making sure I only bound Alpha and Dragon shifters. There were hundreds of them on me, each one binding me a little tighter than the last.”
“That’s a ridiculous use of magic,” growled the councillor.
“Not if you want to keep someone weak and under your thumb,” replied Mrs Hardinger.
There was a pause for a few moments while he mulled over all the information that she had given him. Melody sat and watched as he flipped through the notes he had taken. Finally he took one of the front sheets and read it again before looking up at her.
“You said that you’ve had hundreds of familiars. If you were as controlled as you said you were, how could you bind them? How could your aunt control you if you had hundreds of shifters at your disposal,” he asked, smiling in triumph.
“I didn’t say that I had them all at once,” Melody told him. “My aunt would command me to accept a challenge from a shifter, they were usually new to our coven and didn’t know how things operated. She couldn’t make me do it, unless it was for the good of the coven, because I had given my oath of fealty to the coven and not to her.”
The councillor opened his mouth to protest, but Melody spoke over the top of him. She needed to get this out there before her courage failed her. She was a monster, as angry as she was at the way the councillor was treating her, she also knew that she deserved it. The sooner she confessed and he took her away, the better. They could break the bonds to Dean and Asher, who would eventually recover, and they would be free—safe from her.
“Unfortunately, it was for the good of the coven, because she had twisted everything to make it true. So, I would accept the challenge and defeat the shifter. Then she would break the bond and make us do it again and again. Until the shifter was weak enough that one of the other witches could claim them. Then they were penned for the night, and the next day they would be taken away. They were usually dead within a month, six at the most for the stronger ones.”
She had been determined not to cry, but it happened anyway. All those faces flashed before her, including the familiars who had been ripped apart in front of her in the
