Winter Fire (Witchling Series) Read Free Page A

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.
    Her eyes went to the windows of the girls’ dorm rooms, many of which overlooked the Square. Hers was one, and she frowned, realizing she’d be able to see the tree from her window.
    She wanted to burn it down. Her fire magick stirred with her anger, and tiny sparks landed in the snow at her feet, sizzling to their demise.
    Morgan hated Christmas more than snow. Christmas four years ago – a week before she turned fourteen – was the worst day of her life. She hadn’t celebrated her birthday or Christmas since.
    She turned away from the Square and walked down the road, not wanting to recall that night.  Or how this year, she’d be eighteen, old enough to run away finally, but without anywhere else to go.
    Especially not if her overbearing brother, Connor, figured out her plan.
    “You are way too cute to be frowning like that.”
    Morgan’s breath caught at the familiar voice. She hadn’t heard it since arriving three weeks ago, when the teen boy with a dark complexion and beautiful, blue eyes left her feeling as if her head was either going to explode or float away. He’d accidentally touched her once, and she still remembered the giddy anxiety that flew through her faster than the fire magick did when she was angry.
    And then, like all the rest of the good parts of her life, he had just … gone away. Abandoned her. Someone said he was on vacation in Europe with his family while others said he was in jail for getting some girl pregnant. There were lots of weird rumors about him. She took it as a sign that she didn’t need him in her life.
    “Whatever,” she said without turning. She didn’t think she could look at him without feeling what she did when they met: as if the fire in her blood burned hot enough that she was fevered. The touch of his strong earth magick – calming as it was – distressed her.
    No, he was not what she needed, especially so close to the anniversary of The