The Wicked in Me

Her own coven casts her out for dark, death-touched magick

Wynter Dellavale opens her door to find Esther, her Priestess, flanked by the entire Moonstar coven.

Her own coven casts her out for dark, death-touched magick

Wynter Dellavale opens her door to find Esther, her Priestess, flanked by the entire Moonstar coven. The verdict is already final: Wynter's dark magick—warped after she was killed and resurrected as a child—makes her a liability. The coven wants to be chosen by the ruling immortals called Aeons to descend into their underground utopia, and Wynter is the weakness they intend to snip. An Aeon named Lailah arrives to make the banishment official. She lays her hand on Wynter's head, and a paralyzing lethargy drags her under. Wynter's body goes limp, but something is wrong—or right. Her memories stay intact, her mind stays alert. Only Rafe, her mentor and surrogate father, protests as a keeper named Wagner tosses her unconscious body over his shoulder and carries her into the dark.

A creature inside Wynter kills the executioner at the cliff

Wagner drives toward the waterfall, whistling. He tells the paralyzed Wynter a truth she was never meant to learn: no exile is ever truly banished. They're immobilized and thrown over the falls. Her mother Davina died this way years ago—murdered, not released. Grief hits like a serrated blade, but rage eclipses it when Wagner announces he'll dismember her and gouge out an eye as a souvenir for the families of the boys she killed as a child. He pries open her eyelids. Black inky ribbons crawl across her eye, and the entity inside her—a monstrous being placed there by a deity when she was ten—surges to the surface. Wagner sees a metallic blue mark flare on her face. He tries to run. The monster catches him.

Four captives witness a monster and volunteer to follow it

Months on the run, Wynter is captured by bounty hunters armed with tranquilizer guns—the Aeons have put a price on her head. She wakes in a makeshift basement jail alongside four other prisoners: Delilah, a Latina witch who shapeshifts into a monstrous cat and descends from the infamous Black Annis; Xavier, a chronic liar who reanimates the dead and wields an angel-bone rapier; Anabel, a paranoid potion-maker who may be the reincarnation of Bloody Mary; and Hattie, a sweet-looking elderly widow who has poisoned every one of her husbands and shifts into a magick-negating crow. When the hunters open Wynter's cell, her monster obliterates them. The four captives stand plastered against their bars—not terrified but fascinated. They insist on joining her. None of them are entirely sane.