Teaching the King (Witchling Academy Book 1) Read online

  “Let’s say for the sake of argument that I want what your coven wants—for you to fulfill the contract your family signed.” She leaned forward. “The way I’ve heard the story, the Fae have stayed out of the human realm because the coven of the White Mountains gave them what they needed. Now those same Fae walk our streets, sense our magic. There are those who think they will come and they will take, just like they did at the breaking of the world.”

  I shrugged. “So let them come. Witches are a lot savvier now than we were all those years ago. And it’s a free country.”

  “It won’t be free for witches if the lightbringers have their way,” Deanna retorted, continuing to assess me with her bright green eyes. “It’s a dangerous time we’re facing. And no one is as smart as a Fae.”

  “Look, if you’re so worried, find someone else to teach them,” I said, trying another tack. “There are doubtless hundreds of witches that would gladly fill the position. Unearth one of them to trick into Fae service.”

  She frowned. “If it were that easy—”

  I lifted a hand to silence her. “It is that easy. The Hogans have done our time, Deanna. And now, I think it’s your time to go.”

  I flexed a finger, and the Crane’s front door edged open, the lights of the tavern flickering just enough that a few heads popped up, their faces grim. It was a tiny bit of place magic, more bound up in the bar than in any ability I possessed, and I suspected Deanna knew it.

  She stood anyway, a small, condescending smile playing about her mouth. “You can’t break the contract, Belle. Your coven has that much right. The Fae will come for you. Sooner or later, they’ll come.”

  “Then let them come,” I said again, with a confidence I didn’t feel.

  As soon as I spoke the words, I realized my mistake. Because the door to the tavern was open.

  The call of the Hogan witch slipped away, chasing into the night.

  2

  Aiden

  “Report,” I snarled, the words lost in the screaming wind, though they traveled far enough to reach the ears that needed to hear them. Niall, my second-in-command, turned toward me, his one sighted eye squinting with grim humor beneath his unruly mop of dark russet hair.

  “You can see that twice as well as I can,” he yelled back. “The wraiths have this place locked down. We’re not going to take it back tonight.”

  “Oh, yes, we will.” I pulled the witch pendant out of my pocket, gripping it in my fist as if that would help urge things along. Nothing happened, of course, and Niall shook his head.

  “The magic fades at last,” he sighed in my mind. “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, not even that one. You haven’t been taught the ancient ways.”

  I curled my lip in disgust at the truth of his words. I was the third generation of High Kings to not have been taught the ancient ways. Our magic had been diminishing all those years, puffed up by spelled articles the last Hogan witch had left behind, thinking they’d be all we needed to sustain our power. The book of magic that she’d left should have been enough as well.

  It hadn’t been.

  According to the paltry few records left from a hundred human years prior, Reagan Hogan had supposedly gifted my grandfather with enough power embedded into several precious artifacts to magically protect the high Fae for a thousand years. It hadn’t lasted a generation. My father, a stone-cold bastard from all accounts, had allowed the magic to go fallow as soon as he’d become king, and he’d let the trail of the witch die as well. His queen had only the strength to bear one child, and that had damaged the line further.

  My mother had been frail, cowed by her husband’s brutality, and she’d faded off into the Western seas well before her time. Then my father had launched us into war. He was dead now, killed by one of the wraiths he could no longer defend his people against, and my role was clear: deliver the Fae realm from the seemingly endless assault of our enemies, rebuild our strength, and reinstate the magic within the family of the High King.

  Only one problem. I needed a Hogan witch to get that done.

  We burst through another door and into the midst of a score of screaming wraiths.

  “We’re close,” I insisted, and that gave Niall and the others all the motivation they needed. With a roar, we pushed on, swinging our golden blades, slicing through the shadows. In my left hand, the witch’s blood red stone glowed with renewed fury, finally reacting to the innate magic of my line even if it was now a distant echo.

  Once we were through to the keep’s main banquet hall, we found the treasure we’d come for, or what was left of it: the grisly remains of a noble ocean Fae family, shriveled and sucked dry. This was a relatively new tactic of the wraiths, to try to claim the trace amounts of magic every Fae possessed, though why wraiths would want that magic, I couldn’t fathom. Fae magic only helped the Fae. Maybe it was simply a new and creative way for them to violate my people, because here they’d done their work too thoroughly. They hadn’t kept their hosts alive.

  I held my hands out, the pendant dangling from its chain, and spoke the words of honorable death. It was one of the few bits of magic that the High King could still wield effectively, even when all else faded away. Reagan Hogan clearly hadn’t been without a sense of humor.

  “Aiden,” Niall shouted, making me turn. He stood with his shoulder against a doorway at the far end of the chamber, shoving it open. “By the Light, there’s more in here—”

  His words were cut off with a startled huff, and he disappeared through the narrow opening, a tide of horror-struck voices rising up from the room beyond.

  “There’s always more of them.” One of the warriors beside me cursed, but we pushed forward, blades drawn, and plunged into a new fight. This chamber was some sort of ballroom, or had been in happier times, and beneath the roiling wraiths lay mounds of bodies. Did some still move?

  We set to work, slashing and thrashing with renewed vigor. Once the first wave of wraiths were cleared, we could see the hostages beneath the screaming tide. These were Fae females and children, skinny and pale, huddled together in terror.

  Shame twisted inside me. How could I have let this attack happen? Why hadn’t I gotten here sooner?

  Suddenly, a cold wind blew through the room, blasting through the wraiths with a shocking brutality, disintegrating a good third of the horde. Taking the unexpected advantage, we surged deeper into battle. The blood red stone flashed with fire in my fist, shooting a curious thrill through me that tightened my chest and made my blood race. I stared around the room, surprised. The crown’s advisor, Cyril, had always insisted that the witch’s pendant carried unique properties. Magic, yes. Healing. But also a path to the future, where high Fae magic would once more be fanned to its full glory. Had that path somehow been triggered?

  I couldn’t focus on far-off futures right now, only the monsters of the present. Monsters who were clearly prepared for our assault, the bastards.

  “What in the light—” Niall roared, as the number of wraiths in the room doubled, then doubled again. The victims on the floor shrank back in terror, as well they should. Because these new wraiths weren’t attacking us, they were attacking them. Beneath the battle we waged, a new, insidious layer descended upon the huddled forms. The noble Fae’s shrieks rose up as their essence was stripped away, their lives essentially sucked out while we could do nothing more than battle atop the pile, desperate to reach them.

  “We need reinforcements,” Niall gasped, though he knew as well as I did that there were no reinforcements coming. There was no one else.

  “More wraiths coming in.” One of my other warriors standing near the window reared back at whatever he saw approaching the castle, his face the resolute mask of a Fae ready to die.

  “Then let them come.”

  The female voice shot across the room with the force of a battle-ax, clear, high, and resonant. The fire that had lit along my blood sharpened to a pinpoint of magnificent pain, then burst inside me, flooding my body with stren
gth, tightening my stomach, hardening every inch of my body beneath my battle gear.

  The jewel in my hand pulsed with heat, and its fire spread through the chamber, catching the wraiths in crimson bursts of light and sending their screams surging up to the rafters. The warriors around me tore through the second layer of wraiths, then the third. The ruby’s blazing red fire jumped from sword to sword, filling the blades with enough power to drive back the vicious life-sucking creatures.

  In another few moments, the fighting was done. The wailing continued, of course, and as I lifted shaking hands to mutter the Hogan witch’s words of healing over the injured, my warriors rushed to aid the females and children, assessing wounds, separating bodies.

  A moment later, a renewing blue glow leapt from my hands to flow through the room. As quickly as that, the screaming stopped, the wraiths’ victims gentled down into boneless slumber.

  I turned to see Niall staring at me with his one good eye, mouth agape. “What in the Light was that? What happened?”

  “My witch happened.” I growled, tightening my fist around the still-warm ruby. I knew it without a doubt. “She’s revealed herself.”

  “Truly? She’s here, in the realm?” Marta, a tall, lanky warrior who served as my third-in-command, pushed her spiky white-blonde hair back from her face and peered around as if we’d find the woman tucked into a corner. But I knew better.

  “Not yet,” I corrected grimly. “But soon enough. She’s just made the worst mistake of her life.”

  3

  Belle

  I wouldn’t leave the White Crane tonight.

  This wasn’t an unusual situation for me. I had a room in back set up for precisely this purpose. But normally, I welcomed the cool quiet Boston air just before sunrise, with the sun slowly lightening the sky, the breeze fresh and full of promise, especially in early summer. I needed that freedom more than anything after Deanna Mackleway’s unexpected and unwanted visit—but I couldn’t risk it. I didn’t seriously think anyone had been listening at the door of my tavern, but I couldn’t discount it as a possibility.

  So here I sat alone at my kitchen table, the last patron gone for the night and the doorway spelled tight.

  Before me sat the meager inheritance that was all the Hogan witches had left. An empty velvet-lined box inlaid with precious stones, but clearly missing some kind of heavy necklace. My grandma said it had once carried an amulet of great power, one that her mother had left in the Fae realm to impart the needed magic once she was gone. There was an athame as well, and a small cup I’d used as a drinking vessel since I was a kid, the magic in it having long since fled.

  And then there was the book of magic, the most treasured possession of the Hogans, wherein once upon a time, every ancient rite and ritual of our family had been spelled out in perfect detail. To hear my ma tell the tale, it’d only been during the last few years of my grandmother’s life that they’d noticed the damage. First, there’d been a light fading of the ink. Then, well before we’d tried to copy out the spells to save them, whole pages disappeared when we weren’t looking, until now, only a few of the ancient prescriptions lined its pages. And when a spell vanished from the book, it vanished from our notes and our memories as well.

  This was a good thing, my mother had decided firmly. If we had no more magic to teach, it would break our contract once and for all. But I couldn’t deny the staggering sense of loss at our magic slipping into the shadows. I had pored over the broken sections of spells as a child, trying to piece together the strange half words and symbols until my eyes practically bled, but I couldn’t figure out a damned thing. Then one by one, those words and symbols disappeared.

  Now I opened the book again, my heart swelling at the beautiful inscription of the first page. That had remained, no matter what else had fallen away. The Hogan Book of Magic. It was a family joke, one that resonated down through the generations, because of course magic didn’t belong to any one family. It was inherent in every stone and flower, every handful of dirt or stream of running water. Magic was all around us. All it needed was someone to bend it, shape it, and guide it in a particular direction, for a purpose that transcended its original form.

  Or at least, that’s what I’d been told. My magic was mostly bound up in the items of the women who’d come before me, the things they’d carried and built. Their magic had been strong, and my ability to tap it was decent enough. I also could see a few steps into the future of anyone I met, unless they actively tried to block me from doing so, and that was good and useful magic, to be sure. But any instinctive ability beyond that, I simply didn’t have, though my mother had remained unconcerned to the end. She’d wanted us totally freed from the curse of our Fae contract before the bright light of Hogan magic was once more coaxed into flame. She’d remained ever vigilant to hide our supposed strength, not even using her magic when she could have to save her own life.

  And now, there was only me. Whether I wanted it or not, the weight of the Hogan witches’ curse was mine to carry. I could die without a child and break that curse completely. Or I could choose to bring a baby girl into the rusty chains of a centuries-old contract and hope enough time had passed. Not an awesome set of choices.

  I breathed out slowly, evenly, willing the pain that always attended such thoughts to flow away from me. We each walk our own paths, I reminded myself. None of us could be forced into a journey that wasn’t of our own choosing. The Hogans were done with that.

  We were done.

  I pulled the sacred cup closer to me and tipped the bottle of wine into it, watching the ruby-red liquid splash down. I’d drunk out of this golden cup for over two decades. First water, then juice, then tea, and now the cheap wine that always seemed better to me than my top-shelf options. I smiled a little as I took a sip, relishing the heavy taste, the rich scent.

  The wine would turn to vinegar in a few days if I didn’t drink it all, but I had plenty of regulars willing to share a drink with me if I ever needed them. Lately, it hadn’t been a problem.

  I riffled through the book’s opening pages, pausing only when there was still a scrap of a potion here, the bottom half of another recipe there. Actual arcane spell making came in fits and starts as well, usually the rolling incantations of healing, easy to remember, and meant to be repeated over and over again, with hands upon the victim’s body or in the air above whoever needed the benediction.

  Repetition or force, as my grandma liked to say. Either got the job done. One was simply a little classier than the other.

  A few of the spells still glowed sharply, and they caught my eye as I drifted through the pages. Spells of protection and healing so vibrant, they seemed to leap off the page. As always, I wondered what the book had been like in its prime.

  I blew out a long sigh. The Hogan witches had been losing our magic for a long time now, and despite my grandma’s and then my mother’s discreet inquiries, there seemed to be no way to recover it…at least no way that didn’t lead directly back through the Fae realm. None of us had been willing to go that far, especially since we still retained our ability to heal and protect those who needed it. And we had the tavern, after all.

  Bolstered by Fae magic that my great-grandma Reagan Hogan had carried with her out of the realm when she’d escaped, the White Crane had served as our main source of income for decades. It’d also served as a gateway for those witches who, like us, had sought to flee the oppression of their covens—and a place of sanctuary for monsters who’d fled their own realm, but who didn’t really have a foothold in the human realm. We did good work, keeping all these lost souls safe, and we led full lives. My grandma had actually married the man she’d given her heart to, though my own mother hadn’t seen fit to continue a relationship with my father. Still, we’d been happy. I was happy. Even if I chose to remain alone for now.

  Living as close as I did to the first families of magic in Boston—let alone how close we were to the academies of magic that littered the city’s elite Back Ba
y neighborhood—I had plenty of options when it came to choosing a non-witch mate who could understand who and what I was. But I’d gotten used to running the tavern by myself since my mother had died, and I was only twenty-five years old. I had plenty of time to meet someone if I wanted a child. Hell, with modern science, I didn’t even need to deal with a man at all if I didn’t want to. Truth be told, I found myself strangely ambivalent about the idea of becoming a mother. How could you bring a child into a curse?

  As if I’d asked the question aloud, the words of the women before me murmured in the back of my mind, slipping along the rafters of the White Crane as they always did. Because one day, the curse will be broken, and the Hogan magic will be a gift once more. I smiled a little, hearing the oft-repeated phrase. I missed my ma. My grandmother too.

  A sharp knock at the door startled me, echoing as it did all the way back to my little cubby. The wards would hold, of course, should I want them to, but I suddenly found I didn’t mind the idea of company…depending on who it was, of course.

  My quick and furtive inquiries into the identity of Deanna Mackleway tonight had served up no connection to the coven of the White Mountains. She’d been tied to witches in Europe for the past several years—a long way from New England. I didn’t think she’d be back anytime soon.

  I called up the images on the video surveillance of the tavern’s front door, then narrowed my eyes. It was a young man I’d never seen before, slender and fair. He was human, but I could almost smell the stink of the Fae on him, now that I was focusing. It leached into my bar with a sickly sweet aroma of honey mead and death.

  The Fae didn’t come to the White Crane. Much like my old coven, they couldn’t even see the place. So what was this fool doing here?

  Then again…I frowned and peered more closely at the image on the screen. There was something wrong with the boy’s eyes—no, I decided, with his hair. It was matted down with something dark. Blood, had to be. He also listed heavily to the side. Had he been injured by a Fae? Was that what I was sensing?