“Good night, Gwen,” Dahlia pronounced.
Without another sound, Gwen stood up and began to march down the front walk, away from the house.
As soon as she was out of sight, Scarlett rounded on Dahlia. “What the hell was that?”
“The binding spell,” Dahlia said. “The magic is very specific for this exact reason.”
“What do you mean?” Scarlett asked, her stomach sinking even further.
“We didn’t just strip her powers; we forbade her to talk about magic ever again. This is the consequence if she tries.”
“Why is she back? More important, how is she back? We banished her,” Mei said, glancing around at her sisters.
“We banished her from the coven, not the house,” Scarlett said quietly.
“But what does she want from us?” Mei asked.
Scarlett gazed down, careful not to look at Tiffany. She concentrated on catching her breath. The way Gwen had looked at her . . . it was like she’d wanted to kill her.
“Full moon tonight,” said Vivi softly. Scarlett jumped. She hadn’t heard the younger girl approach. She realized with a sinking feeling that her new Little had witnessed the tail end of this mess. “My mom always said that made people do strange things.”
Scarlett knew better than anyone that Gwen didn’t need a full moon to act out. She had reason enough on her own. Not that that was any of Vivi’s business. She felt a new wave of annoyance at her Little’s intrusion into her house, into her life. “Being my Little doesn’t mean you have to be my shadow, Vivi,” Scarlett snapped. “Who said you could leave the party?”
“Go back inside, Vivi, and bond with your new sisters. We’ll be right in,” Dahlia said. Her voice was gentler than Scarlett’s, but there was steel behind her words.
Vivi looked from one girl to the other, a frown tugging her mouth downward, looking like she wanted to say more. But after a moment, she heeded Dahlia’s words, stepped inside, and made her way back to the living room.
“We should all go in. This is an important night for welcoming the new girls into the fold. Not another word about this until the pledges leave,” Dahlia ordered with a clap. The older sisters nodded curtly, then slipped back inside, whispering among themselves. Scarlett grabbed Dahlia before the older girl could step back into the foyer.
“Dahlia,” she said quietly. “The tarot cards on the door . . . it was Gwen, wasn’t it?”
Before the bid ceremony, Scarlett had shown Dahlia the tarot cards she and Tiffany had found nailed to the front door. Scarlett had wanted to cast a spell to figure out who had left them—and why. Scarlett thought they were a message—a threat—but Dahlia had waved it off as a stupid prank and insisted that Scarlett get rid of the cards before the pledges arrived. “We don’t want to scare them off before they’ve even pledged,” she said. “Don’t make this into something bigger than it is.” After all, Dahlia pointed out, they had done a tarot-themed recruitment party last year; someone was probably still pissed that she hadn’t gotten a bid. People were always jealous of the Ravens. Dahlia had promised her that their secret was safe.
Now Scarlett wasn’t so sure.
Dahlia didn’t look worried, though. Just irritated. She always hated when sisters challenged her authority. “We’ll cast a protection seal on the house once the pledges leave. Let everyone know. We’ll need all hands for the rite.”
Scarlett nodded, not trusting her voice quite yet. She let go of Dahlia’s arm and swung the large front door shut.
She had just gotten to the living room when she heard another heavy thud. Steeling herself, Scarlett stalked down the hall and wrenched the door open again. “Gwen, we told you, you can’t—”
She froze. There was no one there. Rap music floated from Psi Delta Lambda House down the street. Cicadas chirped, unseen, in the grass. But the street was completely empty. Just a few parked cars and a tattered red communal campus bike propped up against an oak tree.
Then she saw it. Something small and silver glimmering in the walkway. It was one of Gwen’s rings, the silver skull. It must have fallen off while she scrabbled at the ground. Scarlett moved forward to pick it up and her foot hit something soft. She glanced down and let out a shriek. At her feet was an enormous jet-black raven, its neck twisted at an unnatural angle. She recognized it from the aviary on the roof. Scarlett’s heart beat wildly. This was an unequivocal sign. It meant only one thing.
Death.
Chapter Eleven
Vivi
It’d been nearly twenty-four hours since the ceremony, but Vivi’s heart hadn’t stopped racing. She felt almost hypnotized by a combination of power and vertigo, as if she’d launched herself off a diving board and was now falling through the air, unsure what would happen when she hit the water. Or if she’d hit it at all. Everything she thought she’d known about the world had been wrong. Magic was real. She was a witch. And she wasn’t the only one.
On the short walk from her dorm to Kappa House, Vivi pulled out her phone and called her mom for the third time that day. Once again, it went straight to voicemail. She’d never minded when her mother went off the grid in the past, but this was an emergency. She had to find out how much Daphne knew about this. Was she also a witch? Were her tarot readings actually legitimate? Or was she as naïve as Vivi, unaware that magic was very, very real?
Magic. She kept remembering the pentacle blooming out of her candle flame. The buzz in her fingertips. She wanted to feel it again. To understand it. To know what she’d been missing all these years. To discover how it was going to change the rest of her life.
She used her newly issued key to let herself into Kappa House, then paused on the threshold, marveling at the fact that the interior looked completely different than it had during her previous two visits. Today, it was filled with modern, light wood furniture and cozy, blush-colored cushions that made the rooms look airy and inviting.
Vivi began walking toward the living room to wait for the others, but she’d barely made it two steps before a hand pressed against her shoulder, holding her in place. “Watch out.”
It was Mei. She was standing in front of Vivi, pointing at a straight line of pinkish-gray salt on the floor that Vivi had almost walked into. In Mei’s hand was a jar of what looked like crushed-up herbs floating in oil. It reminded Vivi of the rosemary olive oil her mother liked to cook with.
“Sorry, I didn’t see that,” Vivi said, glancing at the salt before turning her attention back to Mei. Instead of the purple tips she’d sported last night, her hair was now jet-black and cut in an angular bob that emphasized her high cheekbones. “I like your hair. Did you . . . I mean, is it . . .” She trailed off, realizing that she didn’t even have the vocabulary to ask the question.
Mei smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears. “It’s called a glamour. It’s a spell that comes pretty easily to Pentacles like us.”
The words like us made Vivi shiver with anticipation. “So what does that mean, exactly?” She knew the tarot suits, of course. It was impossible to grow up with Daphne Devereaux and not have a working knowledge of the major and minor arcana, but she wanted to know exactly what that meant for her—for her magic.