"You too," Morgan said. Did her anguish already show on her face? She felt as if the pain of her decision must surround her like an aura, visible to anyone who knew her. "I got tea for two-want some?"

"Please," he said, and Morgan poured the spare mug full of tea.

Hunter stood up and dropped his wet coat over the back of his chair. He took a sip of tea, stretched, and rolled his shoulders. Morgan knew he had just come in from Norway.

What to say? How to say it? She had rehearsed this scene for the last two weeks, but now that she was here, going through with it felt like revolting against her very being. And in a sense, it was true. To end a relationship with her muirn beatha dan was fighting destiny.

It had been four years since she had first met Hunter, Morgan mused. She absently turned her silver claddagh ring, on the ring finger of her right hand. Hunter had given her this ring when she was seventeen, he nineteen. Now he was twenty-three and a man, tall and broad-shouldered-no longer a lanky teenager, the "boy genius" witch hired as the youngest Seeker for the International Council of Witches.

And she was no longer the naive, love-struck high schooler who had just discovered her legacy as a blood witch and was struggling to learn to control her incredible powers. She'd come a long way in the few years since the summer after her junior year of high school, when she'd first learned there were actually a few surviving members of her mother's coven, Belwicket. She'd been spending the summer studying in Scotland when they came to her, finally able to reveal themselves after the dark wave was defeated and- more importantly- Ciaran MacEwan was stripped of his powers. They'd told her how they'd survived the destruction of their coven by escaping to Scotland, where they'd been hiding for decades. When they'd heard of Morgan's existence, they'd come to enlist her help in rebuilding the coven that had shaped their families for hundreds of years. And she'd been doing just that since moving to Ireland a year after her graduation from high school, and loving every moment-except for the fact that being in Cobh meant being apart from Hunter.