What did it say? Was he telling her where the pieces of the Fallen Key were?
Why the fuck did she look so horrified?
“Give me that,” I snarled, yanking the page out of her hands. Ignoring her protests, I spun away, pacing across the kitchen as I scanned the letter.
“No choice in the matter?” I muttered with indignation.
In reality, I didn’t even know if Phips was referring to me, but I was still affronted on principle.
Returning to the letter, I continued to read, frowning when Phips mentioned me.
Trust The Archer?
So hewasreferring to me? But how could he have even known I’d find her?
And if Phips knew that there was a leak in theUmbra Fratrum, why the hell wouldn’t he have told me?
Reading it a second time, I realized that I was just as confused as before—and twice as angry.
At the bottom of the letter, just below the signature, was the same symbol I’d just seen tattooed on my dead friend’s body. A tree within a circle.
The symbol of the Everwood family.
The family that had supposedly died out that day in Salem.
“You need to tell me the truth,” I snarled, stomping back toward Delilah. “What is your real connection to Phips and this symbol?” Holding the letter out, I indicated the bottom of the page. “Why am I suddenly seeing it everywhere?”
Crossing her arms over her chest, Delilah stared at me, looking like she was considering how much to tell me.
If she thought she could hold back, she was mistaken.
The letter had instructed her to trust me, but that didn’t mean that I was going to trusther.
“I’ve already told you the truth,” she insisted, meeting my stare. “I have never met Father Phips. I was sent to find him after—” she faltered, her face filling with grief. “He was supposed to protect me.”
“And this?” I pressed on, ignoring the way my heart clenched at her pain. Holding the letter up once more, I shook it in her direction. “What do you know about this symbol?”
For a moment, she didn’t move, and I wondered if I’d have to resort to more aggressive means of questioning, but thankfully able to toss that idea aside when Delilah reached inside the neckline of her gray dress and withdrew a necklace.
As she held it up, I could see that the simple clay piece was etched with the symbol of theUmbra Fratrum, which was surprising enough in itself.
She wasn’t a member, so why would she have it?
But when she turned the pendant over to show me the other side, I nearly gasped out loud.
Because there, pressed into the roughly formed piece of clay, was the Everwood coven crest.
“How?” I grit out impatiently. “How did you come to have this?”
“Heidi said that it was my mother’s,” Delilah whispered, her words sad. “My real mother, I mean. Apparently, it was her mother’s before her, and hers before that.” She shrugged, as though it was inconsequential, when in fact, those words were everything.
Because if what she was saying was true, then Delilah just might be the missing Everwood witch.
“It’s the symbol of my coven. Or at least the coven I would have belonged to if my mother hadn’t been killed right after I was born.”
“If they’re a coven, why was Phips involved with them? He wasn’t a witch.” I asked the question mostly to test her, to see just how deep her knowledge of her own heritage ran.
“Mother Heidi told me that he was a friend of the family,” she offered, and I detected no hit of falsehood. Her words were true, she just didn’t know how true they actually were.
