Winter Fire (#3, Witchling Series)

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

“You want your daddy to live, put the soul stone in the heart of the Light.”

Morgan MacLeod snapped awake. The dream was too vivid. She looked around, not daring to relax until she verified she was in the boarding school for witchlings in Priest Lake, Idaho, and not home in New York with the Dark uncle who tormented her for the past four years.

She knew better than to question the man who gave her the tasking. It was the condition her uncle – and legal guardian – gave her in exchange for agreeing to let her come to the boarding school. The mere thought of incurring his anger made the cold winter morning sink further into her skin. No doubt, her Sunday would start the same way it had for the past three weeks, since she arrived at the campus: with her out in the stupid snow, trying to find the heart of the Light.

Her room was freezing. She summoned her fire magick. It crept through her body, making her glow. It was close to seven, time to get up.

She threw off her covers and went to the dresser, picking up the black rock that resembled polished obsidian. It sat in the palm of her hand, heavy like iron. She didn’t know anything about the soul stone, other than it was passed down from her mother, who was also a fire witchling. Whatever knowledge originally accompanied the stone had long been lost. Her mother gave her two simple rules: no one was to know about it, and no one but a fire witchling could touch it.

Morgan understood why. Sometimes, it was cold enough to cause frostbite on contact, if not for her fire magick. Right now, it was chilling her entire room to the point that icy cobwebs spread across the inside of her windows.

She clenched it in her hand. Flames burst out around her fist. She’d never been able to warm the stone itself, but she could counter its ability to make her room cold. When the temperature of the air no longer made her shiver, she released the rock and picked up her phone.

For the first time since arriving, she had the urge to call her father and check on him.

But she didn’t. She didn’t feel like getting screamed at by her father, whose construction accident left him both disabled for life and angry about it. Unable to care for himself, he had invited his brother to move in.

Her life had been hell since that day almost four years ago, when Morgan’s mother lost the custody battle and the courts sent Morgan to live with her father. Connor stayed with their mother.

Restless, Morgan got dressed and left her room. She trudged into the snowy forest filled with towering pine trees, not at all certain what she sought or even how she would know it if she found it.

A native of New York, Morgan was accustomed to snow, but she didn’t have to like it. She jammed her gloved hands into her coat pockets. Her right hand wrapped around the stone she was sworn to let out of her possession only when she found where it belonged: at the heart of the Light.

She chose to walk towards what the campus map called Miner’s Drop. The trail through the forest was knee-deep, and she went halfway down it before turning back and trudging towards the cleared road that led around the witchlings’ Light campus, which lay several dozen kilometers north of the Dark campus.

Movement beyond the boys’ dorms caught her attention. She paused to peer into the Square, the gathering area inside the horseshoe-shaped backyard, edged by the school and boys’ dorms. Witchling students held bonfires here most evenings after dinner, unless it was storming or too cold.

Today, however, it wasn’t a bonfire that caught her attention. A large Christmas tree was being moved into the center of the Square by a handful of hired workers.