Burning

Burning

Central Coven 2

Published by K.D. Carrillo at
Kindle

Copyright © 2014 Kimberly Carrillo All Rights Reserved

Edited by Mickey Reed

Cover design by Indie Designz http://www.indiedesignz.com

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission.

This book is also available in e-book format.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the incredibly talented crew that helped me with this book.
  First I want to thank Dafeenah Jameel from Indie Designz for another fantastic book cover.  You always take my concepts and pull an image right from my brain.  I don't know how you do it, but keep it up!  Thanks Mickey Reed for all you're hard work editing, and your friendship this last year.

Most of all I want to thank my best friend Fawn Sanchez.  Thank you for reading and re-reading every word that I write.  Thanks for listening to me brainstorm every plot twist.  But mostly thanks for keeping me sane for the last year.

For Fluffer Nutter

You are my inspiration to follow my dreams. 

Prologue

The land was cloaked in darkness.  The moon and stars were hidden behind a thick blanket of black clouds. Not a single ray of light escaped.  It was early spring and still very cold.  She had run out of the house in nothing but a thin nightshirt and no shoes.

She stopped to lean against the trunk of a thick pine tree to catch her breath.  Her
light-auburn hair whipped in the wind.  It was left hanging loose, and the natural curls were becoming large snarling tangles.  She tried to listen for the oncoming mob, but all she could hear was the
thump, thump, thump
of her heart pounding in her ears.

Where was she going to run?  Her feet were bleeding from running over rocks, and she was shaking violently from being out in the cold.
  She tried to keep going, but she couldn’t see. 

The
thump, thump, thump
changed to a crunch of heavy boots on rocks.  Then she realized that she could see.  The night was becoming gradually brighter with the orange glow of torchlight.  Her breath quickened—they had found her.  Then she saw it. She had run out of room to run. She was at the edge of a cliff.  She could allow them to catch her—and they were surely going to if she stayed still—or she could jump.

A tear rolled down her face as she reflected on how she
’d gotten into this situation.  She was only sixteen, after all, and she’d tried very hard to be careful like her father had wanted, but such thoughts don’t live up to teenage love. She was sixteen and extraordinarily beautiful.  Teenagers can be rash when it comes to love. 

How pitiful,
she thought, trying to choke back tears, that with all of her powers she’d been undone by a seminary student.  He was eighteen and marvelous.  She was nothing short of spellbound by him.  He loved her desperately and had prepared to leave the seminary for her.

How careless
!  A seminary student, of all the men she could have chosen! But he had been beautiful, sensitive, and soon her entire world.  If his family had known how large her dowry was, they would have welcomed the match, but they had not taken the time to find out.  His family wanted him to enter the church, and she threatened to lure him away.  Her father would not have. He hated humans, and in his opinion, they were beneath witches.   Disappointed by her affair with the human, her family abandoned her to fate. 

They called her a harlot and then
sealed her fate in this age of Inquisition. They accused her of witchcraft and heresy.  It was the sixteenth century, and an accusation was as good as a conviction.  In the end, he let her go. He said that she’d tried to seduce him with black magic.  Her father was right; you couldn’t trust humans.

Burn or jump?  She was told that witches couldn’t be killed
—at least not easily—but having never tested that theory, she wasn’t looking forward to being burned.  She was excellent at teleporting, and she knew that, if she jumped, she could escape.  She had seen a burning, a girl tied to a post, surrounded by kindling.  The fire had danced and consumed.  Oh, and the screams.  No, she was definitely not going to test the theory with burning. 

“There she is!” someone in the mob shouted. 

Women wearing muted shades of brown and black hung around the fringes while their husbands circled around.  She walked backward until she felt the edge of the canyon with her feet.  She took a deep breath and jumpe
d
.

Chapter 1

Begin all over again

Grey

A thousand years was a long time to live.  A very long time when you factored in the cruelty humans were capable of.  I was not innocent; I had caused death in large numbers.  Yet even with all of the blood on my hands, my crimes couldn’t compete with the genocides, wars for profit, or degradation of humans as humans themselves were capable of.

Despite all of the evil I
had witnessed and perpetrated, I’d naïvely thought that the burning times were over.  The witch hunts and inquisitions to root out heresy should have been left in the Middle Ages where they belonged.  We lived in a post-Enlightenment world ruled by logic and science.  Yet there I was, staring at the remnants of the pyre that had consumed an innocent.  Anna Bisset, a nineteen-year-old girl, had been abducted and murdered by the heirs to the Inquisition, a group known as the
Auto-da-fé.

Anna
had come to the council from a small town in the French Pyrenees.  It was well known by her neighbors that Anna was psychic.  They loved her, relied on her advice, and often bragged about her to outsiders.  This bragging brought her to the attention of the council as one of the
aware
, or a human who exhibits supernatural abilities.  She was educated at the council’s preparatory school.  Anna had only returned home for a few months and was welcomed with a grand celebration. 

The loving and tight-knit community did not recognize the danger that had infiltrated their community.  The
auto-da-fé
learned of Anna’s abilities, which was easy enough since the town celebrated her gifts. 

Several nights ago
, Anna’s parents returned home from an evening out with friends to discover their front door ajar, Anna’s room tossed, and that Anna was missing.  The entire town joined the police in the search, but she was not found.  After four days of searching, the search party fell upon a clearing in the forest and smoldering coals around a charred stake.

The smell was sickening,
pungent with the smell of burnt flesh and hair.  No one could deny what had befallen poor sweet Anna.  Carlos Sanchez, Hans and Eliana Christiansen, and I had joined the search at the request of the Council.  Anna was a favorite of Marguerite du Lac, and she demanded we find the perpetrators and harshly punish them. Marguerite tried, but Madame and Mousier Bisset were inconsolable. Before they left the funeral to grieve in isolation, Madame Bisset handed me a small leather pouch. 

“This is all that was found of my Anna.  Please do right by
her.” 

I nodded
, took the acrid-smelling pouch.  “We failed to protect her, and we are desperately sorry for that.  I will not fail her again. You have my word,” I said.

Tears swelled in her giant blue eyes.  She squeezed my hand once then turned and walked away from me. 

I looked in the pouch in my hand and thought. 
Justice for Anna will not be an easy task.  I am sorry that I have to bring this home to you, Chloë, but I cannot do this without you.  I am coming home… I just have a couple of stops to make first.

Chloë

Anita danced around the living room
, arranging pillows on the sofa, straightening picture frames, dusting, and then repeating the whole process over again. 

“Nervous?” I asked her.

“No…I mean
…yeah, I guess.  Come on. Aren’t you…even a little?” Anita asked, temporarily pausing her mindless straightening.

I shrugged.  Was I nervous, restless, even impatient for Finn and Dean
to return from Europe?  Possibly, but I wouldn’t allow myself to show it.  Of course I was excited to see Dean. At least Anita would stop cleaning.  Dean brings light and sunshine with him.  Besides Anita, Dean is my best friend.  Also, I think she was starting to wear grooves in the furniture from her persistent polishing. 

Anita paused with her hands on her hips, looking at me with a skeptical look on her
face. “Really? You aren’t interested at all?  You haven’t even talked to Finn since he and Dean joined their families in Europe. They
have
been gone for a month.”

I shook my head and smiled.
“That long? I hadn’t realized.”

Anita rolled her eyes and grabbed for a pillow. 

I braced my hands in front of my face and stifled a giggle. “If you throw that, it will mess up all of the hard work you’ve done getting the place ready for Dean’s homecoming.”

Anita scowled
and resumed her nervous pacing.  “He is going to like it, right?  They didn’t even see the place before they left.  I wish you had waited until they got back.  Did you have to buy the place so quickly?”

“School starts in a couple of weeks, and I wanted to be
settled.  Relax, will ya?  They will love it.  Well…at least Dean will,” I amended.

“So will Finn.
This place is awesome,” she added.

“Uhm…
yeah… About that.  Finn hasn’t exactly agreed to live here,” I confessed. 

“What do you mean he isn’t going to live here? He
has
to live here.  Otherwise this living arrangement is just weird,” Anita said.

Things had been weird between Finn and
me since last winter.  He was being patient, but he’d made it clear that he wanted our friendship to evolve.  I wasn’t opposed to more—someday. That day just wasn’t here yet.  Okay, so when I pictured Finn, I was close to being ready.  At six foot two, he towered over me.  And my, was it worth the neck strain to look at his chiseled jaw, wavy dark hair, and unnaturally blue eyes.  

“He doesn’t
have
to live here, and I didn’t say he isn’t going to live here.  Just that he hasn’t decided yet. And hey…what do you mean this living arrangement is weird?” I asked.

“Face it
, Chlo. Without Finn, we aren’t a coven living together. Or even four friends living together.  With only the three of us, it is more like me shacking up with my boyfriend in my best friend’s house.” 

“Ok
ay, yeah. I see your point. Weird—very weird. Now I’m totally uncomfortable,” I said sarcastically.

Anita, being her wonderful charming self
, hurled a pillow at me with the accuracy and speed only a vampire could summon.  I was revising my belief that pillows were soft, comforting objects and adding them to my list of dangerous projectiles.  But it did manage to break the tension—
and
a lamp.