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  “Oh well, can’t have everything,” she said to herself.

  Eyeing the road, she thought of the nightmares she had about school. It wasn’t really the people there that freaked her out. It was the people who weren’t there that mesmerized her. In the middle of lectures, figures as whole as the freckled kid next to her would appear like ghosts made flesh. She could sense them like she could sense the coven members in her class. Mostly warlocks. But two witches had come, as well. They never spoke. At least not in voices that she could hear. But she knew one warlock’s name.

  Richard.

  He was tall with dark hair, a dimple in his cheek, and always dressed stylishly. Like he was a model come to life from a fashion magazine. Whenever she saw him, her heart stopped. Unlike the others he only appeared for one reason—he was being tortured. Sometimes the clothes had yet to be ripped from his back, other times the invisible lash had already torn into his bare flesh. Every time he appeared, he disappeared with blood dripping down his side.

  The only reason she knew his name was because he mouthed it. A lash would descend and his mouth would move—Richard. His bruised face would flinch as another blow landed—Richard. Sharp vertical cuts would appear on his stomach—Richard.

  She supposed Richard could be someone else’s name, but she knew in her heart that it was his. His through the pain, the misery, and the desperation reflected in his eyes. She knew he never saw her. But she would never forget him.

  Nevertheless, she really didn’t need him distracting her in homeroom. It was bad enough trying to manage her powers when she was upset; when she got frustrated on someone else’s behalf, even a ghost’s, it was impossible.

  As she walked out of the parking lot she gathered her courage. She knew today wouldn’t be any worse than any other day, but that wasn’t necessarily comforting. A cold sweat broke out on her brow as she shifted the strap of her book bag so that it hung off one shoulder. When she reached the front doors of the school, a cold chill took over her body. Startled, Katherine looked up. It was as if someone had stepped on her grave. The chill dissipated, but the foreboding air around her didn’t. She knew better than to try to shake it off—as a witch it was in her blood to read the signs into the forthcoming doom. But usually she had more to go on than a cold breeze.

  The school bell rang out, disturbing her concentration.

  “Hey, you going to open that door or what?” said a cautious voice behind her.

  Turning around Katherine took in a guy with dreamy chestnut eyes, tightly curled black hair, and a killer smile. Derrick’s team captain and an honest person. Reluctantly she bit back her snarl as she realized that she was in fact standing in front of the only entrance on this side of the school with both steel handles gripped firmly in her hands. Swinging the doors open with an elaborate flourish, she said, “After you, Mark.”

  He grinned flirtatiously. “Ladies first.”

  Giving him an assessing look, Katherine turned back around and walked in front of the human. For someone who had no chance with her, he seemed like a good guy. Her homeroom class was just down the hall, close to her locker. She put the bag up and grabbed her binder and textbook for her first class of the day—math, a subject she enjoyed when she wasn’t trying to figure out what a quadratic equation was.

  Slipping into her seat in the very back row of homeroom, Katherine sighed in relief.

  So far, so good.

  The only blemish in her plans so far was the empty seat next to her. She wondered where Cecily was. It wasn’t like her cousin to be late, even to a class as stupid as homeroom. Slipping out her phone, she quickly shot off a text in case Cecily had overslept.

  Five minutes later the bell had rung, all the stragglers had straggled into their seats, and no sign of Cecily had appeared on her phone or in class. Biting her lip, Katherine decided not to worry too much.

  “She probably decided to skip this morning,” whispered Connor from the row across from her. He was leaning back in his chair with his red hair flopped over in his eyes. She had known Connor since they were toddlers. He was confident, fluent in sarcasm, a pyro, gay, and possessed one of the coolest witch’s gifts she’d ever seen: telepathy. She didn’t even mind the telepathy part so much. It was the fact that he dropped in on her thoughts like they belonged to him that irritated her. But he was also the closest thing she had to a friend that looked human for miles...aside from Cecily.

  She grimaced. “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

  “You worry too much, Katherine,” he teased. “You’re the second in line for the throne—”

  “Which means squat,” she hurried to protest. She hated when her friends brought it up. She wanted to distance herself as much as possible from Rose, which was hard enough when you went to the same school, lived in the same town, and there were less than two dozen witches and warlocks her own age for miles.

  “Exactly,” Connor said, eyes lighting up. “Don’t you know that means party, party, party? Haven’t you learned anything from the British royals?”

  Katherine narrowed her eyes as a smirk appeared on his face and she threw a pencil at him. “Hush up, you.”

  A voice in front of the room, Mrs. Peabody, an English teacher and her homeroom advisor, said, “Is there something you wish to share with the rest of the class, Ms. Thompson and Mr. Lanchen?”

  Katherine shrank back into her chair. “Umm, no Mrs. Peabody.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said the white-haired woman with a sniff and a subtle push on her glasses.

  “Now that I have you all for the next twenty minutes, why don’t we discuss some literature?” Mrs. Peabody said eagerly.

  A chorus of groans from the students in the class, human and coven alike, met her suggestion.

  “Now, now,” she said hurriedly, “I have something fun for you today. Who’s heard of Macbeth?”

  The room was silent.

  “From Shakespeare,” the old woman prodded, clearly not giving up.

  Tentatively, a girl with long black hair pulled back in a butterfly clip raised her hand.

  “Yes! Thu Kim?” Mrs. Peabody said, peering hopefully at the girl in the second row.

  “He was a general who believed a prophecy made by witches in Scotland. It meant his downfall,” said the girl, dropping her hand.

  “The prophecy wasn’t the cause of his fall,” murmured Katherine disdainfully.

  “Yes, and?”

  Thu Kim shrugged. As she did so the clip in her hair fluttered and released. Her silken hair fell down around her face as the live butterfly fluttered above her head with spread wings trailing shimmering dust. Katherine wasn’t sure if it was actual fairy dust or just glitter. Either way, it was cute. Holding up a finger for it to land on, Thu Kim transformed it back into a stiff hairclip with a hint of magic. Katherine smiled sadly, watching. She wished her witch’s gift did simple things like that when it got out of hand.

  “Miss Thompson?” said Mrs. Peabody.

  Katherine flicked a startled gaze back to the front of the room. “Yes, Mrs. Peabody?”

  “Shakespeare is a favorite of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Not especially,” muttered Katherine.

  “Oh?” said Mrs. Peabody. “I had hoped you would enlighten the class on the morals of a human general scheming with a pair of coven sisters based on the illuminating paper you wrote.”

  Katherine stared at Mrs. Peabody from the back of the room. So she was one of those people. Humans that did everything in their power to prove that witches and the people that served them were the spawn of Satan. A fable if she’d ever heard one. Not the demonic part, those were real, but everything else had been modified from true lore, shall we say.

  She knew she shouldn’t have written that diatribe against Shakespeare, obviously a favorite of Peabody’s, for English class. But she hadn’t thought the woman would call her on it in the middle of class.

  Smiling sharply, Katherine spat out, “Well then, I would say Shakespeare was a coward who
deceived his patron queen, the great Elizabeth I, and betrayed the trust of the three witch sisters who entrusted him with their journals. He was never supposed to divulge the true histories of the coven council, and he paid for that.”

  “Much like a more modern author and the Sistine Chapel accords?”

  Katherine replied simply, “Much like, Mrs. Peabody.”

  And then it happened. A ghost appeared. It wasn’t Richard, thank the gods. It was one of the witches, the one Katherine had dubbed Anastasia after a local cat she knew with the same wavy chestnut hair. Anastasia looked upset, like she was shouting...no...arguing, with someone. She was raising her fist and shaking it while her mouth ran a mile a minute. Even though she was acting belligerent, Katherine saw fear in the ghostly woman’s eyes. And then she startled as Anastasia fell to floor under a person’s fists. A person she couldn’t see. A fist she didn’t know was there. But the bruises on Anastasia’s face told her they were.

  “Mrs. Thompson, am I boring you?” said Mrs. Peabody.

  Katherine’s vision snapped back into focus. But it was like being in two places at once. She couldn’t help the girl who was falling to blows in the vision next to her or escape the diatribe of the irate teacher in front of her. Katherine stiffened. She wanted to do something, anything. But she knew it was no use. No one else saw the ghosts in her visions except her. When she tried to convince other coven members of what she saw, including her mother, they laughed her off. So she said nothing anymore. Not to anyone.

  Silence descended over the classroom fraught with tension. Everyone waited to see what would happen next. Katherine knew what would happen. She would sit here quietly ignoring them both until this first period hell was over.

  “No, ma’am,” she said quietly as she deliberately avoided looking at the girl being beaten beside her by staring off into the distance. She couldn’t help them, anyway. She never could.

  Chapter 5

  As Mrs. Peabody narrowed her eyes, sniffed, and then turned to pick on another student, Katherine drifted off. In a daydream, a memory, a premonition, or something that was all of those things in one. She watched through the frosty window as a maelstrom of black clouds, heavy lightning, and rain appeared in the morning sky.

  For a moment she felt a sharp pain, the same kind she felt when her mother had fractured her knee surveying corn last week. She’d known the moment the Queen of Sandersville had fallen and had felt her mother’s pain from miles away. She had asked Rose about it later. After chiding her about releasing a powerful flare of magic in response and setting an acre of forest on fire in the process, as if Katherine had had a choice, Rose had explained that she’d also started to sense the pain of others late in her fifteenth year.

  But this ache was different. It was worse, and she had no idea what was causing it. Then she felt her gifts rise. The dark gifts. The dangerous part of her that was her witch’s gift. The part of every witch and warlock’s magic that was innate to them, unique to them. That one special gift that made every coven member different from the rest. That couldn’t be duplicated with spells or trapped with magic. Rose’s was her affinity to plants. Their mother’s was her command over earth. But Katherine’s was unlike either of those. It wasn’t weird and unique, like Thu Kim’s ability to awaken awareness in inanimate objects, or cool, like Connor’s telepathy. No, hers was a call. A call that brought destruction in its wake.

  With a shock, Katherine snapped out of her vision. She could feel her power building in a swirl of darkness in the pit of her stomach. Like a twister, it was ready to emerge. Standing up in a hurry, she ran between the desks in an effort to get out the door. To get somewhere quiet. Somewhere safe where she wouldn’t hurt anybody.

  She was holding on by a thread.

  A thread that broke when Mrs. Peabody snapped, “Katherine Thompson, sit down!”

  The magic surged up through her like a geyser erupting. She fell to the floor, trying to contain it, and was barely aware when Connor came up behind her hunched-over form on the cold floor.

  “Easy, Katherine, take it easy,” said Connor as he put a hand on her back.

  His touch was a comfort. People might gossip about his prying ways, but he had her back when she needed it. But it wasn’t enough. Fortunately, there were other witches in the room who knew what was coming. She might have been a social pariah, but they recognized a building of magic when they felt it.

  Standing up, Thu Kim whirled around and shouted, “Everybody down!”

  The humans didn’t hesitate. Jocks, nerds, and band geeks hit the floor like a bomb was going off.

  With moments left, Thu Kim used her decorative butterfly to cast a protective spell over all the humans. It grew to inhuman proportions and spread its glowing wings over the cowering humans like a benevolent god.

  Mrs. Peabody, who was stupid enough to still be standing, chose that moment to squawk, “What is going on?”

  Thu Kim turned a laser-like glare at her. Without hesitating, she pulled off the rope of jade beads around her neck and tossed them at Mrs. Peabody. The necklace elongated until it was more than three feet long and then it wrapped around the shocked human teacher like a boa constrictor. The teacher collapsed to the floor bound, gagging, and screaming through the beads in her mouth.

  Then the mists came like wraiths on the wind. Darkness claimed the sun and the screams started. Outside the classroom and within. Katherine’s power wasn’t a gift that called on nature, like Rose’s gift. It wasn’t the green forest that responded to her call. No, she called death. And death responded to her like a hound heeling to his huntsman.

  Katherine turned her horrified gaze to the windows, expecting Death to come forward as a man riding on the stormy front to exact his price. But even she could not have foretold what appeared.

  At the moment death was not one entity, but many. Death came as hunters riding on a maelstrom of lightning and thunder like the fabled Seelie hunt of olden times. Standing on shaky legs, Katherine looked into the dark clouds rolling through the sky with ominous potency. She could see five ghostly riders. Five harbingers of death.

  She knew they were her riders. Instinct told her that they were hers to command. But on the three separate occasions when they had appeared in the past fifteen years, only once had they heeded her words. Their will was their own.

  She turned to Connor with dread in her eyes as the gale-force winds from the maelstrom shattered the windows along the wall.

  “When one was called last week, an acre of forest burned in penance. Plants, animals, and fey died,” she said haltingly. “With five called, more must die.”

  Connor looked at her, his face blanched of any color. He had never seen her witch’s gift in practice. Many whispered about it, but until they saw it in action even they didn’t believe it was possible to call beings from the Other world.

  “How do they choose?”

  She swallowed. “They don’t deliberate, if that’s what you’re asking. But they’ve always struck down the source of my ire swiftly.”

  “And today that is?” he said his voice dipping into hysterics.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t a clue. I didn’t call them. They responded to something else.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She shrugged. “I saw the ghosts today. But they’re not here. I felt pain but don’t know the source. I don’t know why they’re here.” Her voice was starting to slide into the deep end of the panic scale.

  “Then why can’t you just call them off? Tell them it was a mistake. You need a murder-for-hire rain check. Whatever.”

  “Because they never listen to my pleas,” she said harshly. “I reach out to them accidently and they respond. They wreak their vengeance. They leave. That’s the existent of our relationship.”

  “Fuck me. Seriously, what kind of witch are you?” said Thu Kim while looking over at them. Her voice was half-horrified, half-derisive.

  Connor turned to Katherine and put both hands on her
shoulders. “Listen, sweetie. That might have been the extent of your relationship before, but now, more than ever, you need to get to first base. No ands, no ifs, no buts about it. Now get out there and talk to them.”

  He let go and gave her a push toward the window.

  Katherine didn’t turn back. He was right. She couldn’t keep ignoring them like the ghosts that kept appearing around her. These beings affected her whenever they appeared, and it was high time that she got a handle on why.

  She walked forward, past the desks strewn haphazardly, past the huddled mass of students on the floor, past Thu Kim, who stood defiantly next them. She gave her a nod. The girl she’d never spoken to gave a nod back and said, “Kick their asses.”

  Nothing else needed to be said.

  Katherine stepped over broken glass on the window ledge out into the yard beyond. Distantly she heard the sirens of the school go off in warning. Better late than never.

  Now all of the classrooms would be locked down. No one would come after her.

  The fierce winds outside whipped her dark hair back and forth as she walked forward in determination to face down her nightmares.

  The five riders came down on horseback from the clouds like avenging gods returning to Earth. As they met the ground the mists and lightning around them dissipated. It was just her and them. Oddly quiet. Oddly serene. They said nothing. They were all different, shifting in and out of her vision with changing appearances so that she couldn’t quite grasp which was which.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  They didn’t answer. Just stared down at her from horseback.

  “What do you want?” she tried again. Still no response.

  Frustrated, tired, and afraid, she decided there was nothing else that her magic could throw at her, so she poured her gift out and into the harbingers of death before her.