Crescent Legacy, Nicole Taylor [best 7 inch ereader .txt] 📗

things have gone differently between us? If his brother Dub hadn’t shown up and lured it out of him, maybe he would still be on my side.

I turned toward the hawthorn and placed my hands on its trunk.

“Did you know who he was?” I asked, tears welling in my eyes. “Did you know he was her son? Did you know he’s a thousand-year-old shapeshifter witch?” I may as well have been talking to myself. “You’re a useless bunch of biatches, you know that? No wonder everyone hates us.”

A hissing and clicking sound echoed behind me, and for a moment, I thought I’d royally peeved off the Crescent ancestors, but I felt darkness looming in the forest. A darkness that was familiar.

I jerked around, my eyes widening as I saw a craglorn move through the trees. I hadn’t even sensed it coming! There was no excuse. I should’ve known it was lurking around the village. I was so stupid.

Its body was the same bluish black I remembered from the last one I’d faced, and its talons were just as razor sharp, too. Beady, black eyes with no whites stared at me as it froze just inside the clearing. It wasn’t as tall or quite as alienesque as its deceased friend, but no less terrifying.

“Magic,” it said in a strange, twisted voice. “Maaagggiiiccc…”

“I’d turn around, and go back if I were you,” I said to the craglorn. “I know you’re hungry, but the buffet is closed.”

The creature’s head tilted to the side, listening intently to what I was saying. “Magic?”

I shook my head. “You can’t have mine. I need it.”

“Hungry…” It glanced at the hawthorn and bared its teeth. “Home. Home. Home!”

It leaped forward, jumping on elongated legs, and I almost fell on my ass in fright. I rolled to the side, dodging a swipe of its claws and summoned my magic. I wasn’t the same Skye who shat her pants fighting the same creature six, or however long it was, months ago. I didn’t need a web to trap it or a charged athame to stab into its leathery hide. All I needed was a can of Crescent whoop ass.

I was strong enough. Just me. Me alone.

My magic rose in an instant, responding to the adrenaline tearing through my veins. The surge of power was a kick in the guts. It was the strongest I’d been yet, and it scared me more than the thought of being gutted by one of those talons.

My golden magic took my breath away as I launched at the craglorn, and the moment the light touched it… Well, a sonic boom had nothing on the way I tore that thing apart.

It wailed, and the sound lodged into my brain. I fell to my knees as the craglorn disintegrated, and the clearing darkened around me.

It’d been so easy to take its life. One second… Something terrible lived inside me. My Legacy wasn’t something to be revered. I didn’t want it.

“Why did you have to do that?” A tear fell from my eye as I knelt by the scorched earth. “I don’t want to kill anything anymore… I don’t want to be a Crescent. Not if it’s like this. I don’t want to care…”

Caring is what makes you different.

My head shot up, and I stared at the hawthorn.

“Who said that?”

Only the wind answered me, fluttering through the trees and rustling the berries on the hawthorn above.

Caring is what made me different? Different from what?

Scurrying forward, I placed my hands on the tree. Closing my eyes, I felt the gnarled bark scratch against my palms as I cast my magic out. Tendrils of golden light probed the hawthorn, but I felt nothing other than the natural growth of the tree. No ancestor spirits, no doorway, and no answers.

Someone had told me about the journey being more important than the destination, but I couldn’t remember who. Is that why they wouldn’t speak to me?

“No one’s going to help me,” I said to the tree. “So it looks like I have to help myself.”

Wiping away my tears, I brushed off the dirt on my knees and straightened my top. Combing my fingers through my hair, I sucked in a deep breath and centered myself.

I could fight the fae and their mummified craglorn cousins, that much was clear, so casting a few barriers and wards wouldn’t harm anyone. It would keep the village and the hawthorns safe or at least slow down anything that decided it wanted to get through badly enough. The magical signature would attract fae like a moth to an open flame, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Time was running out, and an inbuilt intruder alarm would be more helpful now than before. Boone had warned me against it, but he wasn’t here to fly around the village as a gyrfalcon with his gyrfalcon eyes and shapeshifter senses—which I now understood were an added side benefit from his unknown witch abilities—so I had to be proactive on my own.

I couldn’t believe it had taken me almost a month to figure this out. That’s what wallowing gets you, I thought to myself. A bigger hole to sit your ass in.

I made my way back to the village with a new purpose. My fingers felt all tingly from my tussle with the craglorn, and I shoved my nausea away. I’d studied barriers and wards in the Crescent spell book and had meditated on the hawthorns more than I probably should have in an attempt to figure out their secrets.

Spotting Fergus’s donkey hitched out the front of Molly McCreedy’s, I smiled. She was wearing the coat I asked Aoife to make. Emerald green trimmed with earthy brown and lined with the same. It was a sign I was back on the right path, I was sure of it.

Opening the door to Irish Moon, I stepped inside and immediately felt the relieving hum of the crystals. My fingers had just begun getting their feeling back when Mairead blew a raspberry at