Happy hunting.
It was signed with the High Councillor’s name.
Tamsin had gone a bit light-headed. Return Within, the letter read, but she couldn’t, could she? Not after what she’d done. She was banished, after all. Yet the note had arrived on her doorstep. Someone wanted her to return. It made sense, really. Tamsin was the only witch alive who had dabbled in dark magic.
The rest had been put to death.
She alone knew what it felt like to hold that raw, electric power in her hands. She alone knew how desperate a person had to be to use it. She alone knew what it was like to suffer the consequences.
Perhaps that gave her valuable insight. She understood. She could connect. And if Tamsin found the dark witch, all of Within would be indebted to her. She could stop the spell before anyone lost their life. She could redeem herself in the Coven’s eyes.
If the Coven forgave her, maybe one day Tamsin could forgive herself, too.
“Are you going?”
Tamsin shrieked, dropping the letter as she leaped away from the voice in her ear. She had completely forgotten about Wren.
“Why were you reading over my shoulder?” Tamsin brushed away a stray hair from her face, trying to regain her composure.
“Your face got all pinched.” Wren tried to mimic the witch’s expression. “I was curious.” She shrugged lightly, like she wasn’t nosy in the slightest. “So, are you?”
“No.” Tamsin pressed her lips together into a thin line. All the possibility of the moment had vanished. She didn’t deserve to be forgiven. She had been banished for a reason. Whoever had sent the call simply hadn’t been paying attention. It was a blanket spell, nothing more.
“But it’s dark magic.” Wren had picked the letter up from the floor and was jabbing it violently with her finger. “It says right there.”
“I know what dark magic is,” Tamsin snapped. She had to get this girl out of her house.
“Well, then, why don’t you want to stop it?” The girl leveled her gaze at Tamsin, almost as though she were staring into the heart of her.
“I do.” The words escaped Tamsin’s lips before she could stop them.
“Brilliant.” Wren’s eyes were bright. “We’ll go together, then.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I already told you,” she said, her brow furrowed with confusion. She took a long, deep breath. “I’m a source.”
Tamsin was starting to worry about the girl’s sanity. “No,” she said, taking a careful step backward, “you’re not.”
Wren crossed the room with surprising speed. She reached for Tamsin’s hand and interlaced their fingers. Tamsin began to struggle, tried to get the strange girl off her, but even as she flailed, something unfamiliar and warm spread through her, moving up her arm, nestling in her chest, fluttering in her stomach. For a moment, it felt like feeling.
At first Tamsin thought it was the sheer unfamiliarity of touching another person, that the sensation came from holding the hand of a girl who was probably pretty. Before the curse, pretty girls had always given Tamsin fluttering feelings. But then understanding clicked into place. It was the way she’d felt with Leya when they’d worked together in lessons as witch and source. Tamsin was like a bucket lowered into a well. The source was the water, spilling over Tamsin’s every surface, filling her to the very brim with magic.
Wren had been telling the truth.
She was not only a source, but a strong one, albeit chaotically untrained. She housed the kind of magic that would allow Tamsin to walk through walls by simply nodding at solid stone. Tamsin might one day be able to manipulate the hearts and minds of ordinary folk with the barest flick of her wrist. With Wren’s aid, someday Tamsin might be strong enough to cross from one corner of the world to another with a single step.
Currently, that sort of magic was merely aspirational due to the havoc it would wreak upon a witch’s body, not to mention the danger it posed to an untrained source. Sources were made of magic, and releasing too much of it too quickly had the potential to throw their beings into chaos. They could overcompensate and overheat their organs. They might accidentally drain all their body heat and freeze to death. But with the right training and cooperation between witch and source, the possibilities became endless.
Icy shame flooded her like a bucket of water. Tamsin had no right to imagine the possibility of further power. In fact, she deserved to have much less.
She dropped Wren’s hand, and the sensation stopped. Tamsin studied the girl’s face, the symmetrical nature of it. A pink flush had spread across her freckled cheeks. Tamsin tried to imagine marching into the academy to ask for a hunting license with this strange, unknown girl in tow. The Coven would throw a fit.
In the early days of her rise to power, the dark witch Evangeline had targeted the sources first. Back then, sources did not live Within; they were not raised nor educated alongside witches. In fact, most witches feared sources, for they knew the whispers of the ancients—that sources held the potential to reach the heart of a witch’s power and cut off her access to magic altogether.
But there were pages missing from the ancients’ writings. Pages whose absence implied a secret that sources did not want witches to discover. Evangeline, who had never been afraid of anyone, set out to uncover what that secret might be.
She devoted years to scouring the world for the truth, seeking out those who were made of the magic she so desperately craved. Evangeline used her charms to gain a source’s trust, muffling her power until the source believed she was one of the ordinary folk, until the witch had flattered the source enough to learn that spells cast from a source’s magic left not a single consequence to a witch’s being. A source could
