Chapter 1
Layla
“I know what you did,” Darren said.
I swallowed hard and crossed my arms.
“Yeah, so?” I replied, calling his bluff. He didn’t know anything about me. Not really.
“Layla,” he said, “I saw you do that spell in the middle of Photography Club. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”
I uncrossed my arms and sighed. How the Hell did he even see that? I thought all Blackmore boys kept to themselves at school.
“You don’t understand, Darren. You don’t know who my family is.”
“Meet me in the cemetery,” he said, quickly grabbing his books from the desk. “Or I’ll tell your Mum what I saw. I bet your coven won’t be happy.”
Great.That was all I needed. For my mum to find out how much of an embarrassment her daughter was at a mortal school. How careless I was.I stared at him as he walked off with his books under his lanky arm. Darren Blackmore acted like he wasn’t threatening to completely ruin my life in under thirty seconds.
The bell rang for lunch. I grabbed my bag and arrived at the cemetery like he’d asked. It was cold, I could see my breath fogging in the air, but I didn’t need a jacket. I run hot sometimes. Teenage witches run a little hot sometimes.
I’d just managed to ditch Mrs Burton’s English class before the end of the lunch bell rang. I should’ve gotten out of that class ages ago, but when there are three cute mortal boys locked in one classroom for a certain amount of time each day you think you better make sure you’re in that same class.
I’ve always hated cemeteries. Not because of ghosts or anything like that. I mean, ghosts absolutely existed, but I never saw one up close, (except for the time my aunt Hilda’s ex-husband appeared in the backyard when I was five, asking about where she’d hidden his watch). I hated cemeteries because they remind me that my father and brother are both currently buried in one. It was just me, my mother, my uncle, my six aunts, and the rest of the coven now.
While I waited for him to show up, I walked past the old crypts, feeling the damp, wet leaves soak through my shoes. The scraggly grass hid so many gravestones it made me slow down without meaning to, like I might trip over someone who I used to know or something. My dead cousin Maeve was buried in our family’s crypt on the other side of the grass, but my father, who wasn’t magical was buried somewhere around here.
I was getting tired of waiting so I came through the gate and Darren was waiting over by the trees. The crypt door in front of him was being pushed by the wind back and forth. I wasn’t worried if someone caught us out here. Darren was a Blackmore warlock. His family owned the cemetery like they owned everything else in this town, meaning that he should’ve had no trouble getting here on time.
“Over here!” he called.
“Are you serious?” I called back. “Why are we even here?”
“Come on,” he said, gesturing towards the darkness behind him.
I looked past him, into the darkness of the crypt. It smelled really wretched. In this part of the cemetery, there was a greyness about the world. Like where all the really weird people were buried, evil or not. It creeped me out on so many levels.
I didn’t move and he just stared at me.
“Tell me what we’re doing first,” I said, sternly.
He sighed. “I need you to do a spell for me.”
“What kind of spell?” I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. I mean, I loved magic, but that didn’t mean I was particularly good at it. I hoped he knew that. Besides, Blackmore warlocks are supposed to be the best. They’re an all-male coven. So, what did he really want from me?
He pulled his hands out of his pocket, holding something small.
“Is that a pebble?” I asked, staring at the white stone in his hand.
“Yep. You need to do a retrieval spell with it.”
“Me?” I stepped back. “Absolutely not. That’s way too much magic for someone like me.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t be so overdramatic about it.”
“Darren, I know you know that retrieval spells are off-limits for under eighteens.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be like that.”
“Like what, cautious?”
“Stupid.”
“What did you call me?”
“I didn’t call you stupid.”
“You didn’t?”
“I implied that you were acting stupid. Idiotic.”
“How is it stupid,” I said, “if I know the rules and don’t want to break them? Not for you.”
“Oh, so you’d break them for someone else?”
I thought about it for a second or two. There were a few guys I knew, mostly mortals, who I’d break the rules for. Darren Blackmore wasn’t one of them.
I didn’t want to get into anymore trouble with my coven for doing off-limit spells. The last one almost got me kicked out. Didn’t he know I was on probation? Why doesn’t news fly around so fast in the witch world?
“Okay, I didn’t want to play this card,” he said. “But you owe me, Layla.”
Squinting my eyes at him, I thought about what he was saying. What did I owe him? What did I, Layla Huntington of an all-female witch coven, owe a Blackmore warlock?
“Or,” he went on, “do you actually want me to tell your family about the last spell you did? I bet your coven won’t be very happy to learn that Layla Huntington, daughter of Elisabeth Huntington, performed a Materialization spell unsupervised. Who knows, you might even get banned for life. They might even throw you to the mortals.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “What, like they’ll drag me into the town square and light a match? That hasn’t happened since the 1800s. Idiot.”
I was so angry I could’ve slapped his face. Striking Darren Blackmore would be a kind of justice. Especially if I broke his nose in the process.
But deep down, I was scared. I was afraid of what my mother would say. We weren’t supposed to perform any kind of spells unsupervised. Especially, since I was only just sixteen this year.
“Alright,” I said, forcing myself to calm down. “But you should know that I’ve never done what you’re asking before.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know the risk.”
Retrieval spells weren’t spells you could do alone, or something that actually worked very well. You needed both a Blackmore and a Huntington. But here’s the thing: if it doesn’t work properly, both of you die.
“If you’re here with me, a female witch,” he said, “it might just—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I cut him off, rolling my eyes. “The magic is stronger when it’s performed by a witch and a warlock. I’ve heard this all before, but I still don’t believe it.”
“Nothing bad’s gonna happen, Layla,” he said, walking down the stone steps of his family’s crypt.
I followed him down.
There were lots of Blackmores in here over the years, all dead and buried, their magic gone. The crypt smelled like kerosene and damp leaves. It was even more pungent as we entered the lower level.
“What do you need to find anyway?” I asked, standing in the half-light.
He snapped his fingers and the candles glowed one by one, all around us. Darren was already on his knees and was just starting to chant.
He forced his eyes open, his dark blue eyes seeing right into me. “Just something my family lost ages ago. I just need it back. Now, shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.”
I dropped to my knees. He held out his arms. I grabbed them. His skin was so soft it was like touching satin.
This wasn’t like the spell I had done earlier in class. I could make something appear in an instant, without putting much thought into it. I could materialize an apple, a painting, a book, an assignment, a photograph out of thin air, but retrieval spells, on the other hand, were like the ones you read about in a witch’s spellbook and then don’t try because they never work. My mother said that that kind of magic is like rage or violence because whatever object you wanted to find, you had to want it bad enough. You also had to use your own blood. And blood magic as she put it was more of a “passion spell.” It had consequences.
“My dad put a block on me,” Darren suddenly blurted between humming and keeping his eyes closed. “So that’s why you’re really here.”
“But you’re almost eighteen.”
“He doesn’t want me doing blood magic.”
“Blood magic,” I said. “I’m not allowed to do it, either. But I thought that was your guys’ speciality?”
“It is,” he whispered, “but I’m the only one who’s not allowed to practice it.”
I stared at him. “You’ve already tried to do this spell, haven’t you?”
It was so obvious now.
“I guess that makes you like me,” I told him, but he didn’t say anything else. He was trying to concentrate.
In a way, he was like me. We’d both committed something illicit. And we were both breaking the rules of our own covens again, this time together.
