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  Series Links

  Courtlight: Smarturl.it/Courtlightseries

  Crown Service: Smarturl.it/CrownServiceseries

  Sarath Web: Smarturl.it/SarathWebseries

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 1

  Half-blinded by the stinging wind as she lugged a paintball gun at her side and ducked for cover behind a rather large oak tree, Katherine Thompson promised herself this was the last time she would agree to go on a double-date with her sister Rose. She didn’t care if the entire football team showed up and promised her everlasting love, either. Her feet hurt from the too-tight boots Rose had forced on her from her mammoth closet, her face stung from what she thought was poison ivy, and the linebacker who was her date was taking vicious glee in aiming agonizing balls of bright yellow paint at her butt.

  “Katherine!” she heard her sister shout from a distance.

  Katherine grimaced. She was hunkered down by the tree and didn’t want to give up her position. Besides, where had Rose been for the last half-hour while she was being chased down like a deer in hunting season?

  “Probably off with her tongue down Derrick’s throat for the umpteenth time,” she grumbled as a sharp wind hit her in the face.

  It was the middle of winter and cold—cold for Georgia, that is. Probably no less than fifty degrees with the wind chill. But still her face felt like she was getting frostbite and her hands were so stiff that she wasn’t sure that she could put down the paintball gun even if she wanted to. Katherine knew she had two options to end this game. Come out, let the idiot date whose name she had forgotten mow her down, and surrender. Or find Rose and Derrick, because of course the two lovers on opposite teams were hunkered down together, and end this once and for all. One was easy. The other harder.

  Palming her loaded gun, she snuck off with a smirk. No one ever accused Katherine Thompson of taking the easy route. Besides, Rose deserved a little unpleasantness once in a while. She was beautiful, she was smart, and she would be the Queen of Sandersville one day. For once Katherine wanted to win something. And pelting her sister’s boyfriend with painful green balls of splat seemed just the thing to cure her misery. He was a jerk anyway. She really couldn’t see what Rose saw in him.

  She knew what she saw—a broad-shouldered idiot with scraggly, wheat-colored hair and eyes that reminded her of a Labrador retriever’s. Too stupid to know he was stupid. Unfortunately, Derrick came from one of the most powerful families in Lancashire County, was a warlock in his own right, and happened to be smitten with Rose. All of which shown like “warning, collision ahead” signs on a highway, that Katherine would eventually be calling the idiot her brother-in-law.

  As she sprinted around large boulders, keeping low to the ground, she heard the snap of a branch off to her left. She paused. And then a second branch snapped, followed by a giggle shortly after. She smiled. She had them. The sound was coming from the weeping willow just to the west. It was a tree that Katherine knew well from childhood. She and Rose had played around the old grandmother tree and in the hidden nook inside the branches all the time. As she sprinted forward in cautious bounds, she almost cackled. There was only one way in and one way out of Rose’s new lover’s nook. As Katherine got to the willow’s roots that sprawled above ground in gigantic arcs, she slowed down, wary of spooking them. But she heard no noise. Made no sounds as she crept forward.

  And then it was confirmed. Voices echoed from the nook—she’d found her sister alongside her rat of a boyfriend.

  “She must be halfway across the course. Or she would have come when I called,” whispered Rose.

  “Why did you bring her?” Derrick complained in response.

  “She’s my little sister and she needed to get out of the house. Always cooped up in her room with those old spell books.”

  “She’s so weird. If she's not off communing with trees in the dead of night, she's studying with that crazy friend of hers,” snorted Derrick.

  Katherine heard Rose shift around as she waited for her to say something. Anything.

  “She’s all right,” Rose said defensively.

  “I just meant the girl couldn’t get a date on her own. I had to beg Mark to take her on.”

  “Well, you got him here. That’s all that matters,” said Rose. “Now let’s get back to why we’re here.”

  Shuffles in the branches made Katherine certain they were back to kissing. She felt her resentment grow. She hadn’t wanted to come. Rose had begged her to go with them because their mother wouldn’t let Rose go out alone without a chaperone. Katherine, although younger than Rose by two years, qualified. Katherine knew that her mother hated Derrick just as much as she did. It took a lot of convincing to let her daughter and heir go off with the imbecile, as Mother scathingly referred to him in private, and the only reason Derrick was still around was because the alliance between their families had been written into the concord long before Rose and Derrick had been born.

  The prophecy also happened to be the only reason Rose had her given name. Mockingly, Katherine quoted the lines in her head, Star-crossed lovers and all that shall be born, from Lancashire County the Rose and the Thorn shall rule, blah blah blah. Even her mother wasn’t so disgusted with Derrick that she would tempt fate like that. The three wise sisters didn’t take kindly to lowly witches, or even queens, who thought that they were above their premonitions.

  With a battle cry, Katherine surged out of her hiding spot, khakis covered in yellow paint and firing at random. The shrieks of Rose met her as she and her boyfriend jumped apart from their lip-lock. Derrick shouted and threw up a shield with his hands. And then the tables turned.

  As powerful as Katherine was stubborn, Rose commanded the vines on the ground around them to lock onto Katherine’s boots. With a vicious twist of her hand, her younger sister was strung up in the tree by her feet. To Katherine’s credit, she didn’t drop the paintball gun or stop firing. But it didn’t matter, because the vines around her feet had her body facing out of the alcove. She heard the humiliating, gut-wrenching laughter of Derrick behind her as he watched her swing by her heels.

  “Put me down!”

  “You little brat!” shrieked Rose at the same time.

  “Rose, this is so not fair! We said powers are off limits!”

  Rose came rushing around so that Katherine could see her from where she hung upside down. Ignoring her sister’s complaint, she poked Katherine in her vested stomach with a furious finger. “Did you really think you could surprise your queen?”

  “Future queen,” spat out Katherine in irritation.

  Rose sniffed. “Whatever, I’ve always been more powerful than you. There was no way you could have landed a finger on me.”

  “No, you’re just able to use your powers,” growled Katherine.

  “Semantics,” said Rose in a huff.

  “I don’t even think you know what that means,” retorted Katherine.

  “Babe,” whined her boyfriend at the same time, “this little brat needs a lesson.”

  “If you could teach me anything, it would be on how to be an idiot,�
� muttered Katherine disdainfully.

  “What did you say, you little brat?” demanded an outraged Derrick.

  “I said someone who’s only two years older than me has gotten too big for his britches.”

  Then Katherine paused. “Oh wait, that’s not it.”

  “That’s right,” grunted the boy-Labrador retriever from somewhere behind her. He thought he had won. That she was recanting her statement. Oh no. Not Katherine.

  A wicked smile crossed Katherine’s face. Even though she still hung upside down by her ankles and blood was rushing to her head.

  “Yes,” Katherine said smugly. “You’re too much an idiot to think you’re more powerful than me. You just assume that because you’re going to be banging the queen-to-be, you’ll outrank me. Fool. Never in a million years. You’ll always be a Labrador.”

  That was Katherine for you. She never knew when to leave well enough alone. And, when in a hole, how not to dig herself deeper.

  Fortunately, she couldn’t say much more to make the situation worse. She looked up at her sister Rose who had turned an interesting shade of red.

  Although Katherine wasn’t sure if Rose was beet-red because of embarrassment or anger. But Katherine was guessing anger; Rose wasn’t a blushing bride to be shocked by a little hint of sex. Instead, she was usually an uptight bitch who wouldn’t let an insult slide. From anyone. Not even family.

  Katherine knew that and she had deliberately played with Rose’s emotions. Hoping to invoke a response that would make Rose so angry that her powers wouldn’t work. After all, it required focus to call on the elements, and if there was one thing that Katherine could count on, it was that her airheaded sister wouldn’t be able to focus on the manipulation of the land and trees around them for more than five minutes.

  Heaven help her when she took the throne and needed to command the forest for the defense of the town.

  Of course, that’ll probably never happen, Katherine thought wryly. She couldn’t remember the last time the Queen of Sandersville had been called on to do more than trap a rabid wolf in a thicket grove, much less take on invaders.

  Snapping back to focusing on her sister, Katherine realized with dismay that Rose’s anger wasn’t loosening her concentration. Instead, it focused it. Katherine could feel the vines only growing tighter around her ankles. She knew she was going to have livid bruises tomorrow.

  Rats, thought Katherine. Time for Plan B.

  Although she hated to do it, she tried to be nice. If you couldn’t kill your flies with vinegar and a fly-swatter, honey and luring them into a trap was the next-best step.

  “Look, I’m sorry. Really. Can we let it go?,” Katherine said in a sugary-sweet tone that didn’t quite disguise the disgust in her voice.

  She didn’t hate Rose. Really, she didn’t. She also didn’t hate the Labrador. At some point in the last year, she had reconciled herself to the notion that those two idiots were the future rulers of her hometown. But that didn’t mean Katherine was crazy about the idea. Democracy be damned. She just didn’t want to have to bow and scrape to two idiots who weren’t fit to run a brothel, much less a small town of over a thousand families.

  But it didn’t really matter what she wanted. Not right now. Besides, if her sister didn’t inherit the throne, then she would. And she certainly didn’t want the throne for herself.

  She wanted out. She wanted out of this small town. She wanted out of this restrictive old-world covenant of a land ruled by witches, warlocks, and queens. She didn’t know where she would go, but she certainly knew when. Like all teens, she lived under her mother’s roof and under the rule of the local queen (also her mother) until she was eighteen and chose to leave. Eighteen was a long and hard two years down the road. And she had to live with the would-be queen-from-hell until that time. If she couldn’t speak her mind about it now, then when could she?

  So Katherine put in her hits and angered Rose when she could. Because when Rose became her queen, her word really would be law.

  Still, Katherine knew she was beat now. Slumping her shoulders as she tried to ease up the weight of her body while pushing up from the ground with her hands, Katherine tried another tactic. Firm resolution.

  With a hint of a whine in her furious tone, Katherine said, “Put me down.”

  There was only a hint of weakness in her tone. She refused to cry in front of her domineering older sister. Rose might be the future Queen of Sandersville, Georgia, literally and figuratively, with all the responsibilities that came with that—including protecting her people. But she was just as much as a bitch as the rest of the coven heirs—the female and male young elite who would one day inherit their parents’ seats on the coven council as well as their tiny stretch of domain in the southern plantation-dotted land they called home.

  Rose leaned forward and said with great pleasure, “I don’t think so. I rather like you up there.”

  Katherine watched a smirk cross Rose’s face one more time. And then she dropped her gun and clocked her sister hard in the nose.

  Rose hadn’t expected that. Fighting like a human was so gauche. She fell screaming to the dirt with blood streaming from her pretty, freckle-free nose.

  Katherine didn’t have long to savor her win.

  They made her pay.

  Chapter 2

  Derrick walked around until he stood just behind Rose’s right shoulder and glared menacingly. Or at least he gave what Katherine was convinced he thought was a menacing look. Katherine thought he looked like a constipated golden retriever, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. Uninspiring façade or not, Derrick was a perfectly adept warlock, according to the standards of their small town. His powers were even considered dangerous. You know, for a small town, that is.

  On a scale of one to ten, Katherine thought of him as a level two, right above the ferocious might of a shih-tzu and below a cockapoo. She didn’t think of herself in dog terms, but all humor aside, she knew that she herself was closer to a twelve. But she couldn’t tell them that or use her own gifts to prove that.

  You know the old saying ‘If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you?’ Katherine thought wryly while she waited for her sister and Derrick to do their worst. Well, I have the opposite problem. If I show you my gifts, you’ll be dead. There’s no explaining, no second guessing. Which was why even though she was furious with her older sister, she couldn’t defend herself. Not as a witch. Katherine might not like her sister, but she loved her. Loved her in the way that siblings that fought like cats and dogs, but still hung together against a common enemy did. Since they were rarely on the same side of anything recently, Rose and Katherine had yet to face anything worse than the schoolyard bully they had taken down together when Katherine was in kindergarten and Rose was in second grade. That incident had proved that blood trumped friends, at least in the all-out war over the marbles container, that is.

  But now? Now, Rose and I never really see eye-to-eye at all, Katherine thought with a shiver. She must have been desperate to invite me on this stupid escapade. I know I was pretty stupid to accept the invitation. And now I’m going to pay for that. That hope that for once Rose wanted me along for me, as her sister...as a friend.

  Then Derrick called in his powers as a warlock gifted with domain over the wind and the weather, and she had no more time to think about what could have been. Only what was to come. They wouldn’t kill her. Rose wasn’t evil. But she wasn’t above scaring her sister mentally and leaving a few scars physically. She wouldn’t be a future queen if she wasn’t a little bit callous. Small town or no. Katherine gulped. This far up in the air, she couldn’t call on the small amount of talent she was willing to use, let alone best her sister and her sister’s boyfriend at their own game. But only because she didn't want to kill her only sister...yet.

  Derrick began to twirl his finger in the air just in front of Katherine’s nose. Slowly at first. But faster and faster as time went on. As his finger moved so did her body, until she was twirling around
like a spinning top on a fishing line.

  Before Katherine’s mind started to get disoriented she thought, He might only be a level two, but even a two can be dangerous if they use their gifts correctly.

  It was a lesson she would remember for the rest of her life. But in that moment, all she wanted to do was hurl.

  Derrick kept up on twirling her around and around in the air for five minutes. It felt like a lifetime.

  With a callous laugh, Rose left with Derrick some time later. Katherine didn’t know when, because the spinning continued long after they left. She wasn’t ashamed to say that she threw up in her mouth. Once the spinning finally stopped, she tried to wipe away the bitter taste of the bile unsuccessfully while struggling to hold back her fury.

  She had to. She knew what would happen if she didn't: a maelstrom a lot worse than Derrick's wind trick would tear through the woods and she wouldn't be able to stop it.

  "Deep breaths," she told herself as she fought to calm down.

  Five minutes later, she gingerly reached out to the spirit of the forest. Asking for its help in freeing herself from her bondage would mean she didn't have to call on her own gifts.

  She soon gave up. It was clear from the emptiness around her that the spirit either wasn’t listening or didn’t care to hear the pleas of a witch who had set fire to an acre of its land just last week. So she did it the old-fashioned way.

  She began to swing her body back and forth. Rocking faster and faster as she lunged each time higher and higher. She was trying to grab hold of her legs. It felt like she was doing crunches from hell. Two tries later, a triumphant, “Got it!” rang out.

  Slowly climbing up her own body while upside down she managed to fish out the knife she’d hidden in the pinching boots, her only saving grace. Then she hacked away at the vines with a whispered, “Sorry,” to the spirit of the old willow they belonged to. The vines binding her finally snapped and she fell to the ground.

  “So much for sisterly bonding,” she said as she stood up with an aching butt and dusting dirt off her bum.