Bewitched

BEWITCHED LAURA THALASSA LAVABROOK PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC Copyright © 2023 by Laura Thalassa All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. Published by Lavabrook Publishing Group, LLC CONTENTS The Law of Three Prologue 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 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Coming Soon Acknowledgments Author’s Note Books by Laura Thalassa About the Author For Astrid, who brews potions, dances with skeletons, and howls at the moon. You have magic in your blood, love. THE LAW OF THREE The magic you cast, In use be wise and true. Do good unto others, For threefold it shall return to you, If ill will moves your hand, And woe strikes in your wake, Threefold it shall return its might. Threefold the curse will take. PROLOGUE Memnon I am trapped. I have been for a very, very long time. My body and mind are bound by spells both suffocating and comforting. I cannot escape them, no matter how hard I try. And how I have tried. This is not as it should be. I know that. I remember that. Someone did this to me. Someone…but who? The answer evades me. My thoughts are…fragmented. Broken apart and scattered by the very wards that shroud me. There was a life before this shadow of an existence. Sometimes I catch glimpses of it. The memory of the sun, the heavy weight of a sword in my hand, the feel of a woman—my woman—beneath me. Even when I cannot recall much of what I look like, I can see the slope of her shoulder and the curve of her smile and the mischief shining in her sharp blue eyes. Her image…it cuts deeper than a wound. Need her. My queen. My wife. Roxilana. Need to leave this place. Need to find her. Unless… What if…what if she is truly gone? Lost to me forever? Terror eclipses my longing and clears some of the haze from my mind. I release what magic I can, funneling it through the few holes I’ve found in these spells. Roxilana cannot be dead. So long as I exist, she must too. I have…taken pains to make this so. I relax. She will find me. One day. One day. So I call to her, as I always have. And I wait. CHAPTER 1 Selene Today will be the day Henbane Coven accepts me. I exhale as I stare up at the sprawling Gothic buildings that make up the coven’s campus. The property sits on the coastal hills north of San Francisco, bordered on all sides by the Everwoods, a thick coastal forest composed of evergreen trees. There’s no placard that announces I’m now standing on witch-owned land, but this place doesn’t really need one. If a person lingers for long enough, they’ll see something out of the ordinary—like, for instance, the circle of witches sitting on the lawn ahead of me. Their hair and clothes float every which way, as though no longer bound by gravity, and plumes of their magic thicken the air around them. The color of their individual magic varies—from bright green, to bubblegum pink, to turquoise, and more—but as I watch, it all blends, creating an odd sort of rainbow in the air around them. A wave of longing moves through me, and I have to tamp down the panicky, desperate feeling that follows in its wake. I glance down at the open notebook in my hand. Tuesday, August 29 10:00 a.m. meeting with Henbane Coven’s admissions office in Morgana Hall. *Leave an extra twenty minutes early. You have a bad habit of arriving late. I frown at the note, then glance at my phone: 9:57 a.m. Well, shit. I begin walking again, heading toward the weathered stone buildings, even as my eyes flick back to my notebook. Beneath my scrawled instructions is a drawing of a crest with flowers rising from a cauldron atop two crisscrossing brooms. Next to the drawing, I taped a Polaroid picture of one of the stone structures in front of me, and I’ve scrawled the words Morgana Hall beneath it. At the bottom I’ve written in red: Meeting will be held in the Receiving Room—second door on the right. I head up the stone steps of Morgana Hall, growing breathless with my churning emotions. For the past century and a half, any witch worth her weight in magic has been an active member of an accredited coven. And today I’m determined to join that list. It didn’t happen last year or when you reapplied at the beginning of this one. Perhaps they simply don’t want you. I take a deep breath and force the insidious thought away. This time is different. I’m on the official wait list, and they arranged for this interview only last week. They must be taking my application seriously, and that’s all I need: a foot in the door. I open one of the massive doors into the building and head inside. The first thing I see in the main hallway is a grand statue of the triple goddess. Her three forms stand back-to-back—the maiden, flowers woven into her