be okay. We’re going to figure this out.” Even though I knew he couldn’t know if that was true or not, I still appreciated the sentiment.
He let me cry on him for a few minutes. I probably should’ve been pissed that he was seeing me fall apart, but anger took too much energy, and I already had all my energy focused on worrying about Rasha.
Taking a shaky breath, I stepped out of his arms and turned back to my daughter without meeting his eyes. Basil stepped closer and put his arm across my back, squeezed my shoulder, and kissed the side of my head. I understood his silent message. He was telling me it was okay that I’d fallen apart in front of him, that he wasn’t going to use it against me—not that I truly thought he would—and he was proving to me that I could lean on him.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he finally whispered.
“She collapsed in class and wasn’t breathing on her own… it’s never gotten this bad before, not to where she’s been unconscious for so long.”
He hesitated before asking, “Do you know what caused it?”
“She’s hexed.”
He stilled, his body going taut against me. “What?”
“A witch hexed her.”
“What the hell kind of witch hexes a child?” He sounded pissed, angrier than I’d ever heard him, and hearing that finally made me look at him. He was staring at Rasha, so tense he could probably cut diamonds. “What happened, Hiro? Please tell me how this happened.” His eyes were blazing, lightning bolts shooting across them, and I could tell he was having trouble keeping his energy in check. If he cared this much, maybe it was time to finally tell him what happened.
With a sigh, I said, “Let’s sit first.”
Without looking away from me, Basil moved his hand toward a chair against the wall and it looked like his shadow magic wrapped around it a moment before the thing went sliding across the floor, stopping beside my chair. He pulled us down into our seats, and I took Rasha’s hand in mine, but Basil grasped onto my other hand, and I let him.
“My wife was a hunter, too. When Millie got pregnant, she insisted on continuing to work even though I protested it on a daily basis. She was very stubborn and independent. Really, it was a small miracle that I’d gotten her to agree to marry me in the first place.” I smiled sadly and waved that away. “We’d been hunting this coven for weeks, but we always seemed to be one step behind. Their pattern of sacrifices was hard to follow—”
“Sacrifices?”
I met his eyes. “The witches from my home country are nothing like the ones here. They… they travel in covens, leaving destruction in their path. This coven had a bounty on them for over a year by the time Millie and I picked it up. They were making human sacrifices all over the country, so we followed their trail of bodies and finally caught up to them when Millie was seven months pregnant.”
I sucked in a harsh breath and closed my eyes for a moment. “They must’ve sensed us on their tail because they came for us in the middle of the night. Ripped us from our bed at the hotel, dragged us by the hair…” I took a moment to get the picture of Millie’s pregnant body being dragged down a staircase out of my head.
Once I locked that image inside a box I never planned to open again, I continued, “I took out four of them before they managed to bind me in their spelled rope. Mills, she, she took out six, I think. She was always a better fighter than me.” I smiled a bit, and Basil squeezed my hand. “But they captured us and took us to a witches circle. They… I showed you some of my runes, yeah?” He nodded. “They couldn’t hex me, but Mills didn’t have any protection runes—she didn’t want them. Since the witches figured out pretty quick that they couldn’t hex me, they tied me to a tree and forced me to watch.”
Basil released my hand and grabbed the back of my neck, massaging the muscles there. “You don’t have to keep going if you don’t want to.”
I shook my head. “Nah, I wanna tell you.”
“Okay.” He kept rubbing my neck and grabbed my hand again with his free one.
“They started the ceremony, the one to sacrifice Millie, and I used their distraction to