Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley (best ereader for textbooks .txt) 📕

get up, to fight back. She owed it to herself, to Wren, to the world falling to pieces. She was so close to saving them all, and yet even as she thought it, the light began to slip away. She was so, so tired. Tired of trying and tired of failing. Maybe it would be better if she just gave up. Gave in.

The room shook wildly. The roar of the ocean nearly drowned out Marlena’s words. “Good night, sister.” Marlena raised her arms, determination on her face.

It was fitting, in a way. Tamsin had always been willing to give her life for her sister. Now she finally would.

TWENTY-TWO

WREN

The day her mother died, the earth had shifted beneath Wren’s feet—a great, rumbling quake that mirrored the breaking of her heart. As her father set to work methodically building the pyre on which to burn his wife’s body, Wren fought to find her balance on a ground that would not stay still. Tried to reclaim her place in a world that no longer made sense.

No one else had ever mentioned the shaking. Not even her father, who had been working mere feet away from the ground where Wren stood. But she had always known it was the earth opening its arms to welcome her mother back to the dust from which she had come.

As the ground beneath Marlena’s room began to shake, Wren wondered whom it would claim this time. She tried to open her eyes, but they felt sewn shut. Her bones were heavy and aching.

A high-pitched buzzing echoed in her ears, like a thousand baby bees. There was a flash of light so bright Wren could see it through her eyelids. A clatter. The scent of charred sage was overtaken by the stench of soured milk. Another clatter, louder this time. A soft swear. A sigh. And somewhere, far away, the crash of the sea.

Wren wrenched her eyes open. The room was ruined. Chairs were overturned, china shattered, tables broken, and a deep crack ran through the floor. A figure was kneeling next to a pile of pillows.

Marlena. Or was it Tamsin? Her vision was fuzzy. She couldn’t tell the sisters apart.

Wren tried to focus. Her head pulsed with pain; her tongue was dry; her vision blurred. Strange that Marlena owned pillows the same color as Tamsin’s cloak. Her brain buzzed droopily. She ought to tell Tamsin. Perhaps she’d find the coincidence funny. Maybe if she could make Tamsin laugh, a real laugh, just once, that would be enough to end all of this. Wren swept her eyes around the room, but the witch was nowhere to be found.

Movement. The kneeling figure brushed a hand over the pile of pillows, a dark curl catching on her finger. Wren’s heart clenched as she realized it was Tamsin on the floor, Marlena above her. The ribbons of Tamsin’s earthy red magic were no thicker than a sewing needle. Tamsin was helpless. Unable to fight back.

Wren braced her hands on the wall behind her, the structure grumbling like an empty stomach. She pushed herself up, as slowly as possible, not wanting to draw Marlena’s attention. Her muscles screamed in protest. Her body ached as though she had taken a beating from a club fitted with a thousand tiny pins. Everything hurt.

“Without you, I’ll finally be free.” Marlena’s tone was oddly grief-stricken, the way Wren’s father’s had been as he scattered his wife’s ashes to the wind. “Good night, sister.”

“Don’t.” The word escaped before Wren could think better of it. And really, she should have thought about it, for now she had the full attention of a witch armed with dark magic. Wren couldn’t use her own power, couldn’t fight back. All she could do was watch as darkness swirled around Marlena. Ribbons of dark magic clung to the girl like a shroud. But her attention was no longer fixed upon her sister. The tiny threads of Tamsin’s clay-red magic still hung about her head. She was still alive.

“I thought I killed you.” Marlena’s eyes flashed with annoyance as she turned away from Tamsin’s limp figure. “I might need Tamsin alive, but I don’t need you, too.” She shot a spark halfheartedly at Wren, but Wren, who was able to see the magic before it was thrown, dodged it.

Marlena’s nose wrinkled with displeasure as the spark hit the wall beside Wren instead, and the quaking of the room turned to a full-blown roar. Marlena stared warily at a large crack that crept quickly toward the ceiling. Wren’s stomach clenched. With Marlena casting spells at such a dizzying rate, there was no telling the effect the plague was having on the world beyond the trees.

Dark magic was forbidden because it was unbalanced. It was power pulled directly from the earth without anything offered in return. When Tamsin described the earth’s reaction to dark magic, she made it sound as though it was the world that was behaving badly: The world rebelled. But how else could the earth exist if not for the power it held just beneath the surface? It was magic that made the rain fall, magic that made the trees grow, magic that guided the winds. It was magic that made flowers bloom and birthed animals and caused the sun to shine.

Now Marlena was stealing that magic, taking and taking and never returning. The sun had disappeared from the sky. People were losing their memories. Water howled and stone screamed. The earth wasn’t rebelling.

The earth was dying.

“Stop.” Wren marveled at how authoritative she sounded despite the fear housed in every inch of her body. “That magic doesn’t belong to you.”

Marlena merely rolled her eyes, shooting another shower of sparks across the room. Wren dodged them again. The crack in the ceiling widened. A sliver of night sky peeked in, as black as the magic surrounding Tamsin’s sister. It held not a single star.

The endless night was as hopeless as Wren felt. She couldn’t evade Marlena’s spells