Witch

The blue light of the laptop screen felt like needles against Anna’s tired eyes. She was staring at a half-finished essay on The Psychological Archetypes of Fear, a cruel irony she wasn't in the mood to appreciate. Across the room, the rhythmic click-click-click of Sophie’s mouse was the only other sound. Sophie was in a shopping trance, scrolling through endless pages of silk, velvet, and lace, determined to find a dress that screamed "Alpha’s Mate" without even knowing the vocabulary for what she was hunting.

Anna’s head dipped. Just for a second, she told herself.

The transition wasn't a fade; it was a plunge.

Suddenly, she wasn't in the dorm. She was back in the woods, but the trees were bone-white and the sky was a deep, bruised crimson. The air was thick, tasting of cedar and something dangerously sharp.

"You’re hiding," a voice vibrated against her neck.

Anna spun, but the forest shifted. Killian was there. He wasn't the polished student from the party; he was taller, his presence expanding until he filled the entire horizon. He moved toward her with a slow, agonizing grace, his eyes no longer gold-flecked but glowing like molten suns.

"I can smell the storm in your blood, Anna," he murmured, his hand ghosting over her cheek. She tried to pull away, but the air turned to honey, pinning her in place. "Why do you wear that dull brown skin? Why do you pretend to be a lamb when you have the heart of a disaster?"

He leaned in, his lips inches from hers. The temptation wasn't just physical; it was a psychic pull. He was offering her a place to stop running. He was offering her the power she had spent fifteen years burying. His scent filled her lungs;earth, rain, and a primal, magnetic hunger.

Give in, the dream whispered. Let me see what’s underneath.

His hand slid to her throat, not to choke, but to feel the pulse of her magic. "Show me," he commanded.

The horror of how much she wanted to show him.the sheer, terrifying attraction to the man who represented everything that had killed her mother…snapped something inside her. It wasn't just fear; it was an ancestral rage.

Get. Out.

Anna didn't just think it; she cast it. She didn't use the shackled, dampened magic of a human girl. She reached for the raw, jagged power of a Warlock daughter and the snarl of a wolf. She slammed a psychic shockwave into the image of him, a blast of white-hot energy intended to shatter the dream.

Two miles away, in the master suite of the Blackwood estate, Killian Blackwood hit the floor with a violent thud.

He scrambled up, his chest heaving, his claws involuntarily unsheathing and shredding the silk sheets. His room was silent, but his head was ringing with the sound of a scream that wasn't a scream. It was a power;a pure, unfiltered blast of arcane force that had physically ejected him from his own subconscious tether.

He touched his lip; it was bleeding. He wiped the red away, a slow, dark grin spreading across his face.

"Witch," he whispered into the dark, his heart hammering with a thrill he hadn't felt in a century. "And a fierce one."

Anna bolted upright at her desk, her laptop screen flickering. Her heart was a frantic drum in her chest.

"Whoa! Easy, killer!" Sophie jumped in her chair. "You were twitching like you were having a night terror. Bad dream?"

Anna’s hands were shaking so hard she had to tuck them under her thighs. She could still feel the phantom heat of Killian’s breath on her skin. The horror wasn't that he had found her in her sleep; it was that she had been attracted to the monster. She had felt the "mate-bond" trying to knit itself into her soul, and it terrified her more than any enforcer's silver blade.

"Just... school stress," Anna managed to choke out.

"Well, look at this to cheer you up!" Sophie spun her laptop around. On the screen was a dress of deep, midnight emerald silk with a plunging back and a slit that went to the hip. "I found it. For you. It’s called 'The Shadow’s Grace.' It’s perfect, Anna. You’ll look like a queen."

Anna looked at the dress. It was the color of the forest at midnight. It was the color of a trap.

"It’s fine, Soph," Anna said, her voice hollow.

She turned back to her computer, but the words on the screen were a blur. The Solstice was coming. Killian knew she was more than human now;he had felt the blow she dealt him. She had meant to push him away, but all she had done was confirm that she was a prize worth hunting.

The only mercy was that he had only felt the witch; he still didn't know she carried the blood of his own kind, a hybrid heresy that would turn his fascination into a death sentence the moment he scented the wolf beneath the magic.

She had four days to figure out how to walk into the heart of the pack and walk back out with her soul intact.