Gods & Monsters (Serpent & Dove #3) by Shelby Mahurin

His expression turned solemn. “I’m still a Chasseur, Célie. I still eradicate the occult. What I’m doing now—I’d lose my Balisarda if my brethren caught me here. I’d burn at the stake myself.” He gestured between us. “We all would.”

“Unless we bring them La Dame des Sorcières’s head.” Reid looked pointedly at Coco and me. “And those of her sisters.”

Beau jutted a finger at him. “You don’t get to talk anymore—”

“Just be sure this is what you want.” Jean Luc clutched Célie’s hands, ignoring them both. “We can still walk away. You have a choice. You don’t have to do this.”

Célie’s knuckles whitened around the injection. “Yes, I do.”

“Célie—”

“And you are not called to eradicate the occult, Jean. You are called to eradicate evil.” She pulled away from him, stepping backward to stand beside me. “There is evil in this chateau. Truthfully, we have no choice at all.”

They stared at each other for several seconds—neither willing to blink—before Jean Luc finally sighed. “If we must enter from the bridge, we need some sort of cover.” Reluctantly, he unbuckled his scabbard, retreating briefly to his horse to hide it within his pack. The sapphire of his Balisarda’s hilt winked as he withdrew a set of knives instead.

Reid’s eyes widened incredulously. “What are you doing?”

“Think, Reid.” He tucked one knife into each boot. “The only viable cover available to us is magic.” He waved a hand in my direction, refusing to look at me. “Magic will not work if I carry my Balisarda.”

Together, they all turned to stare at me. As if I knew the answers. As if I held each of their fates in the palm of my hand. Stomach rolling, I forced myself to return their gaze—because in a way, they were right. This was my ancestral home. These were my kin. If I couldn’t protect them here, if I couldn’t hide them from my sisters, they would indeed die.

“Perhaps I should . . .” I cleared my throat. “Perhaps I should go in alone.”

The thought met instantaneous and decisive objection, each of them speaking over the other. Coco and Beau refused to leave me. Célie demanded a chance to prove herself, and Jean Luc insisted I would need his expertise. Even Reid shook his head in stoic silence, his eyes communicating what his mouth did not.

Nothing would stand between him and his conquest.

At the moment, that conquest was Morgane le Blanc. Soon, he would realize his target had shifted, and the fleeting impulse to kill me would solidify into something very real and very dangerous. When he learned I’d become La Dame des Sorcières, I would no longer be safe with him. Not until he remembered. Not until I recaptured his heart.

“We go where you go,” he said with dark resolve.

My heart twisted with the words, and I turned away, closing my eyes. A web of golden patterns rose up to meet me. Studying them carefully—my lids fluttering in concentration—I discarded one after another, unsatisfied with each. This sort of magic, the sort to hide six people, would exact a heavy cost. Perhaps I could transform their bodies instead of their faces. They could become birds or squirrels or foxes. A rock in a badger’s mouth.

Expelling a sigh of frustration, I shook my head. Such transfiguration would probably kill me. Beau would have to live the rest of his life as a rock—or, more likely, live as a rock forever because rocks didn’t die. After another moment or two of my own fruitless searching, Coco said softly, “Could you make us invisible?”

I didn’t open my eyes, instead widening my inner sight for such a pattern. My skin tingled at the effort. My chest ached, an uncomfortable pressure building there. These cords—they felt simplistic somehow. Inadequate. Almost weak. Had something happened to my magic? Had Nicholina . . . altered me somehow? I frowned and pushed harder, stamping a metaphorical foot at the injustice of it all. Heat fanned across my face in humiliation.

Here I was, La Dame des Sorcières—famed and all-powerful, Mother, Maiden, and Crone—yet I couldn’t even cast an enchantment to protect my friends.

My sister chose wrong.

I could feel their expectant eyes on me now, waiting for a miracle.

I stomped my foot again, this time in desperation, and the web beneath me bowed and rippled outward. Startled, I instinctively stomped once more.

This time, the web broke.

A web of pure, blinding white lay below it, and the tingle in my skin exploded in a wave of raw power. No. Awareness. Every blade of grass, every flake of snow, every needle of pine I felt with such an intensity that I stumbled backward, breathless. Célie caught my arm. “Lou?” she asked in alarm.

I didn’t dare open my eyes. Not when the web below offered so much more. I tracked each pattern eagerly, feverish with possibility. I’d thought my magic infinite before. I’d thought it limited only to my imagination.

I’d been wrong.

My magic had flowed through the land, but this magic—it was the land. This land. The Triple Goddess hadn’t merely bestowed her form. She’d bestowed the heart of our entire people. My finger twitched, and the web rippled outward, connected to my every thought, every emotion, every memory. My ancestors’ too. I didn’t just feel the grass. I was the grass. I’d become the snow and pine.