I felt a pang of guilt over calling him Father—especially when my real father was sleeping across the hall. I found Ciaran extremely compelling and charismatic, and the idea that he was a blood relation still confused me. For him, I was the child most like him, the one he wanted most to teach. Yet we both despised aspects of each other, and we had never really trusted each other.

I dismantled the circle, feeling sick and tired and close to tears. What was I doing? This had seemed like a good idea an hour ago, but now the whole concept frightened me. I didn’t know which outcome would scare me more: that he wouldn’t answer my message or that he would. I crawled back into bed, every muscle aching, and lay there in a tense half sleep for I don’t know how long. Then it came to me, Ciaran’s voice in my mind: One hour.

An hour can fly by (when I’m with Hunter) or crawl by (when I’m at school). After I got Ciaran’s message, each second seemed to take an entire minute to tick past. After lying stiffly in bed for twenty minutes as if I had rigor mortis, I couldn’t stand any longer. I pulled on some jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, whisked my hair into a long braid, and, holding my shoes, crept downstairs.

Outside, I buttoned up my coat and pulled on a knit watch cap. Everything felt tight, surreal as I crunched over the spring frost to Das Boot. I felt like I had infrared vision: I could see every tiny movement of every twig on every tree. The moonlight as it filtered through the tree branches was pale and fragile. I opened the car door, put it in neutral, then took off the parking brake. My Valiant began to roll heavily backward toward the street, and soon we bumped almost silently over the curb. I cut the wheel sharply to the left. When I was facing forward, I eased up on the brake again and let myself roll slowly downhill about thirty yards. Then I started the engine, flipped on the headlights and the heater, and headed for the power sink.

When I was younger, I was afraid of the dark. At seventeen, I was more afraid of things like becoming irreversibly evil or having my soul taken from me by force. The dark didn’t seem that bad.

Since I had first started realizing I had witch powers, my magesight had developed, and now I could see quite easily with no light. I parked my car on the road’s shoulder and left it unlocked. Every detail stood out as my boots crunched over frost-rimed pine needles, decaying leaves, and water-logged twigs. I was more than twenty minutes early. Casting my senses out, I felt only sleeping animals and birds and the occasional owl or bat. No witch, no Ciaran.

The power sink was in the middle of the graveyard, and to me it felt like every age-worn headstone had something or someone hiding behind it. Ruthlessly I clamped down on my fear, relying on my senses instead of my emotions. I was cold, whipped by a wet, icy wind, but more than that, I was chilled through with fear. No, the dark didn’t bother me, but the worst things that had happened in my life had all happened in the last four months, and they had mostly been caused by the man I was waiting to meet. My birth father.

I paced back and forth, and slowly I became aware of tendrils of power beneath me in the earth, tingling energy lines of the power leys that had been there since the beginning of time. They were beneath my feet; they had fed this place for centuries. Their power was in the trees, in the dirt, in the stones, in everything around me.

“Morgan.”

I spun around, my heart stopping cold. Ciaran had appeared with no warning: my senses hadn’t picked up on even a ripple in the energy around me.

“I was surprised to get your call,” he said in that lilting Scottish accent. His hazel eyes seemed to glow at me in the darkness. Slowly I felt the heavy thudding of my heart start up again. “I hope you called me here to make me happy—to tell me that we’re going to be the most remarkable witches the world has ever seen.”

I felt so many things, looking at him. Anger, regret, fear, confusion, and even, I was ashamed to admit it—love? Almost admiration? He was so powerful, so focused. He had no uncertainty in his life: his path was clear. I envied that.

I didn’t have an exact plan—first I needed to know for sure what his plans were.

“I’ve been feeling awful,” I told him. “Is it from the dark wave?”

“Aye, daughter,” he said, sounding regretful. “If you know far enough in advance, you can protect yourself from the illness. But if you don’t...” Which explained why he looked bright eyed and bushy tailed, but I felt like I was going to throw up or collapse. “I can do a lot to help your symptoms,” he went on. “And then the next time you’ll be protected before it starts.”

“I’m not joining you,” I said, drawing cold air into my lungs.

“Then why did you call me here?” There was a chill underlying his tone that was far worse than that of the night air.

“My way isn’t your way,” I said. “It isn’t a path I can choose. Why can’t you just let me be? I’m a nobody. Kithic is nothing. You don’t need to destroy us. We can’t do anything to hurt you.”

“Kithic is nothing,” he agreed, his voice like smoke rising off water. He stepped closer to me, so close I could almost touch him. “An amateurish circle of mediocre kids. But you, my dear—you are not nothing. You possess the power to devastate anything in your path—or to create unimaginable beauty.”

“No, I don’t,” I objected. “Why do you think that? I’m not even initiated—”

“You just don’t understand, do you?” he said sharply. “You don’t understand who you are, what you are. You’re the last witch of Belwicket. You’re my daughter. You’re the sgiùrs dàn.”

“The what?” I felt hysteria rising in me like nausea.

“The fated scourge. The destroyer.”

“The what?” I repeated in a squeak.

“The signs say that it’s you, Morgan,” he explained. “The destroyer comes every several generations to change the course of her clan.This time it’s you who will change the course of the Woodbanes—just as your great ancestor Rose did centuries ago. So you see, you have more power than you realize. And I simply can’t let that power be in opposition to my own. It would be... foolish of me to go against fate.”

“You’re insane,” I breathed.

He grinned then, his teeth shining whitely in the night. “No, Morgan. Ambitious, yes. Insane, no. It’s all true. Just ask the Seeker. At any rate, you won’t be around long enough for it to really matter. Either you join me now or you die.”

I stared at him, seeing a reflection of my face in his more masculine features. “You wouldn’t really kill me.” Please don’t do this, I begged silently. Please.

A look of pain crossed his face. “I don’t want to. But I will.” He sounded regretful. “I must. If I have to choose your life or mine, I’ll choose mine.”

Hearing him confirm this broke my heart. I felt a sadness in my chest like a dull weight. Any of the confused affection I had for him, any lingering hopes I had of someday, somehow having an actual relationship with the man who had fathered me dissipated. A real father would never hurt his own daughter—as a real soul mate wouldn’t have killed his lover. Ciaran was failing on all counts.

With no warning I was overtaken by a wave of rage, at his arrogance, his selfishness, his shortsightedness. He would rather kill me than know me! He would rather wipe out an entire coven than achieve his ends in other ways! He was a bully and a coward, hiding behind a dark wave that had killed countless innocent people. He was going to kill me because I—a teenager, an unschooled witch—scared him. I didn’t think before I moved. Suddenly I felt like I was on a play-ground and being picked on. I flung out my fist, catching him squarely on the shoulder. Taken by surprise, as I was, Ciaran caught my wrist in his hand, and then I was twisted down to the ground, crying out. This wasn’t magick—this was just a man who was stronger than me. But then he muttered something and I felt a horrible stillness coming over me, a remote coldness that I had felt once before, when Cal had put a binding spell on me.