“It was not,” Clarissa wailed. “It was not.”

  “Elias Castle,” Edith muttered. “It was Elias Castle. He snuck up on them.”

  “Snuck up on whom?” Samuel said, his patience a mask.

  He knew who; they all did.

  Edith grasped Samuel’s lapels. “Elias Castle killed Ava and Gina and Eleanor. He brought Revelle back from the dead.”

  Betsy’s gaze halted on the pile of clothes and shoes by the door, her stomach cramping all over again. She followed the others through the great hall to the back of the house where a fire glowed, fierce and orange, casting them into silhouettes.

  “Who is Revelle?” Samuel asked softly.

  Edith shivered. “He’s dead. He’s dead. I know he is.”

  Edwin shook his head. “We didn’t see him.”

  “You were right there,” said Edith.

  Edwin looked crushed. “We didn’t see him. I only saw the man with the white hair and beard. I didn’t know who it was. Edith said it was Elias Castle.”

  “He has a demon,” said Clarissa. “It tore at the graves of our harvest.”

  “Perhaps… perhaps that is for the best,” said Edwin. “Bloodborns do not give their allegiance lightly. It might take years to make them loyal.”

  “I shall head out tonight,” Betsy announced, causing a gasp to burst from everyone. “See if there is anything left worth salvaging.”

  “No,” said Samuel. “Absolutely not. It is far too dangerous.”

  “Dorothy, what did you do to your hair, dear?” muttered Edith.

  Dorothy’s distraught face turned down to the floor, her hair cut barely an inch long all over. One compliment from Ava and the little witch had all but scalped herself. She wore her regret heavily.

  Guilt pinched at Betsy’s gut; she should’ve been there. “Where is Birdie?”

  “Sleeping,” said Samuel.

  “Through this?” She turned to Dorothy. “Go upstairs and wake Birdie, Dorothy.”

  Dorothy nodded mutely and hustled away.

  Clarissa glared at her. “What are you doing?”

  She glared back. “What do you mean?”

  “Ordering everyone around, acting like you’re the leader when⁠—”

  “Clarissa!” Samuel warned.

  “I hardly think one little instruction to Dorothy qualifies as ordering everyone around. You know Dorothy will withdraw if I don’t give her small, definable tasks to get on with.” Betsy turned to Didi. “Didi, would you get Edith a brandy? Do you mind?” She sat on the settee next to the coven leader, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. “What happened, Edith?”

  Edith grasped Betsy’s hands in hers, fingers tightening painfully. “I told them to wait by the mausoleum while Clarissa and I went to check on the camp. Everyone was inside for the night. I thought we were safe.”

  “Did you see the demon?”

  Edith shook her head.

  “She saw a man who wasn’t there,” Clarissa spat. “And you’re doing it again. Sending Didi for drinks. Interrogating a sick woman.”

  “I’m not sick,” Edith snapped. “Just… just in shock. Betsy, I might need you to take over for a whi⁠—”

  Clarissa wailed, cutting Edith off, sobbing into Edwin’s shoulder until he wrapped his arms around her.

  “It will all be all right,” he murmured, patting her back gently.

  “How on earth will it be all right?” she wailed into his shirt. “Everyone’s gone. Edith’s not in her right mind, and she …” Clarissa pointed an accusatory finger at Betsy. “She should’ve been there.”

  Birdie stumbled through the doorway, their face pale in the firelight. “Dorothy said… Dorothy said… How can it be true?”

  Samuel held out his arms, and Birdie rushed into them, followed swiftly by Dorothy. Betsy’s eyes stung.

  “This is your fault,” Clarissa spat, sneering at her. “You should’ve put the coven first.”

  “I always put the coven first,” Betsy said, shocked by Clarissa’s outburst but willing to allow her some slack while she was still in shock.

  “Did you put the coven first when you allowed Edith to take over?”

  “Edith was elected fairly.”

  “Because you never ran. It should’ve been you, but where were you? Going on about not wanting power. Well, how does it feel to be powerless, Betsy? You let us all down.”

  Clarissa stormed out of the room, and it was hours before Betsy drifted off to sleep, her hand still in Samuel’s as he stared unseeing into the fire.

  The next morning at breakfast, Clarissa was still frantic, and Edith’s health had taken a turn for the worse. Birdie said she looked like she’d been drained of blood and her hair was falling out in clumps.

  “Edith is in no fit state to govern,” said Samuel, his gaze faraway.

  “Perhaps it is time for you to stand, Samuel,” said Betsy.

  “No,” he barked.

  “You shall take over, Betsy,” Birdie announced. “It’s an easy fix, exactly as Edith wanted.”

  Clarissa snorted. “She had her chance. Instead, she left us to Edith’s poor leadership. Not only have we lost our harvest, but three of our dear sisters.”

  “We need an interim leader, Clarissa,” said Birdie. “And nothing that happened last night was Betsy’s fault. She wasn’t even there.”

  “Convenient, that.”

  Betsy gasped. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that you are lucky indeed not to have gone through what the rest of us did. And you are right, Birdie. We need an interim leader. I shall nominate Edwin.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Birdie. “He’s been with us a day.”

  “He’s been here for weeks,” said Clarissa.

  “God, do you even hear yourself? Weeks? Betsy has been with us for decades.”

  “And yet, she chooses her own comfort over leadership.”

  “That is not fair. And Edwin is simply too new to be leader,” Birdie gritted out, sending the man himself a somewhat sympathetic look.

  “Until Edith is better,” said Clarissa, leaving her half statement hanging.

  It didn’t seem likely Edith would get better. She’d been talking gibberish all morning.

  “I shall leave you to your business,” said Edwin, standing suddenly to wipe his lips with a napkin. “I intend to journey to Oxford this morning to await news of my daughter.”

  Clarissa gasped. “But Edwin⁠—”

  “I know you mean well, Clarissa, but surely we cannot speak of new leaders so soon after the events of last night.” He looked around the table, his blue eyes wide and sad. “Let us have time to mourn. There is no need to appoint a new leader just yet. Edith’s health may yet improve, and Betsy assures me the coven operates on a fair and democratic basis.”

  Clarissa nodded. “You are right. Betsy, I… I’m sorry. The shock is… I’m so sorry.”

  Clarissa ran from the room. Edwin watched her but didn’t follow. Instead, he headed for the front door.

  “I’ll drive you.” Birdie clapped Edwin on the shoulder. “I have council business, as it happens.”

  Betsy watched them step out into a new day.

  A day her sisters would never see.

  11

  Sub Rosa

  Lotus burrowed deeper into the tree roots, batting away the scattering remnants of her nightmares. The second she realised she was moving, she stilled, squinting into the gold-green light of morning, where it burned through the moss-misty woods, tingeing the air nutty and green. The only other scents were those of dewdrops and mud. No trace of last night’s visitors lingered. No cautious return of woodland creatures laced the air. Lotus was alone.

  Her body was stiff when she stretched, mud drying on her feet and peeling off in flakes. Scratches marred her hands, and dried blood gathered beneath her fingernails.

  She tracked movement ahead. It was just a curious badger, standing upright on its hind legs behind a chalk-smeared birch, almost like it was a lookout sent to give the rest of the animals the all clear.

  Beside her, a dragonfly nestled in the crumbling dirt, its sun-tipped wings like church glass, like the gilded silhouettes of the leaves turned translucent above her. This new day, aglow with possibilities, felt all wrong.

  She wasn’t sure she’d seen anything at all last night. Perhaps every second of it was a dream. Every snuffed-out scream and drop of blood. But the teeth were heavy in her pocket, and the graves were turned over. She saw that much from the tree line. She scanned the camp for signs of life, but there were none. Did Edwin come for the archaeologists working Castle land too?

  It didn’t seem right that the bodies in the graves should be seen by the sun. And what if Adam saw? She couldn’t bear to see devastation on the boy’s face. She watched from afar as she pushed the crumbling dirt back into the hole from which it came and patted the earth flat. She dusted her palms together, as if she’d used her bare hands and not magic to lay the dead to rest.

  She drifted closer to the river with leaf-strewn calves and mulchy ankles, Adam’s wellies forgotten. Silver birches marred with scratches and bursting with eyes watched her. She took in the sun-hazed field with its foggy shrubs, and every time her gaze wandered away, a violent shadow or a soul-black silhouette pulled it back. The danger was gone, but its violence remained.

  She would’ve left then, gone far away from this perfect place forever tainted by murder, but she couldn’t leave. Her scratched feet were rooted to the spot by the sound of Adam’s reluctant sobs.

  He tumbled down from the mausoleum roof, swinging from one low branch to another, then ran into her open arms. “I waited in the mausoleum for you, but you didn’t come.” He swiped his eyes with his sleeve. “I saw… I saw⁠—”

  A fresh wave of sobs cut off his words, and Lotus held him tighter.

  “Let’s get you home.”

  “Grandad will be angry with me.”

  “Were you out all night?” she asked. “You saw…?”

  “A man stabbed three women, and they disappeared like ghosts. There were two women left, and when the younger one hugged the man, I thought he’d kill her too, but he didn’t. And there was another man. He… he looked dead. The other woman was frightened of him, and when she tried to run, the younger one stabbed her in the back.”

  “Not the man?”

  “No. He was talking to the… to the dead man. But it wasn’t a man, Lotus. I saw him turn into a woman with long red hair.”

  “Did you see anyone digging?”

  Adam frowned. “Digging? You mean the archaeology team?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I was so scared the man would see me.”

  “You did well to hide yourself, Adam.” She stroked his hair away from his face. “You’re so brave.”

  “You think I’m brave? But… but I cried.”

  “Bravery isn’t about not being scared. It’s about being scared but going into battle anyway. There is no bravery without fear, Adam.”

  He smiled small. “That sounds like something Grandad would say.”

  “Well, he is a brilliant man.”

  “He says that too.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “Nana says he’s a big-headed so-and-so.”

  “She sounds like she might be clever too.”

  “She is. Grandad says she’s the cleverest woman he knows.”

  Adam was right about one thing; Elias was angry. Angry that vampires trespassed on Castle land. Angry that Adam was out of bed all night and he hadn’t noticed. Angry that Adam and Lotus had been in terrible danger.

  Unable to keep her safe in the house, Elias bundled Lotus into his car, packing Adam into the back with some clothes his wife had found for Lotus, and drove them straight to Malcolm Blackmore.

  “Promise you will stay there,” Elias said, taking the turns of the country lanes too fast to be safe.

  “If you want me to be safe, I suggest lowering your speed,” she said mildly.

  He exhaled slowly. “You’re quite right.”

  Outside, the scenery stopped whizzing by.

  Lotus hadn’t told Elias about the desecrated graves because she didn’t want Adam to know, and the boy had scarcely left her side all day.

  When Elias and Adam left, she sat with Malcolm in his library, watching him work at the desk by the left-hand window. She watched his glasses slowly slide down his nose, then get pushed back up by a thick finger. She examined his suntanned skin, cataloguing the way the fine hairs on the back of his hands glinted in the sunlight streaming into the room.

  Malcolm didn’t seem to keep his books near the windows. They were crammed into the shelves along the walls, and perched on the waxed table running the length of the room, but there were none on the desk. There would have been more light still if the tasselled and fringed curtains weren’t there to make the windows fussy.

  Behind Malcolm, in the corner of the room, was a dressing screen, as if he barely bothered to leave the room to dress. She wondered if that’s where he kept his entire wardrobe of blue clothing.

  She sighed heavily and stood. Malcolm’s lips curved up gently, but he didn’t speak. She walked to the other window where a curly rocking chair was almost buried beneath a tumble of blue wool blankets. The window looked tobacco-stained, like Malcolm sat here night after night with his pipe, but the chair itself didn’t look like it could survive Malcolm. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and dropped into it, letting her momentum rock her gently.

  She gasped at the sight of a stuffed raven perched on a glowing crystal ball, and Malcolm let out a chuckle.

  “That’s Edgar,” he said.

  “He’s delightful.”

  Malcolm looked over his glasses at her. “Sarcasm in one so young.”

  She felt like he was seeing right through to her bones—if she even had bones—when he looked at her like that.

  She looked away, her gaze skittering across the lake where the ultimate folly stood on its own little island. It was built of local yellow stone with Moroccan influences in the carved stone panels, and Indian influences in the ostentatious peacock prancing on the thatched, Chinese influenced pagoda style roof. The thing was a travesty.

  The sky had already lost its blue, and she took a moment to wonder whose graves Edwin and his accomplice had violated. She recited a silent prayer for the three women Edwin killed before the sun set on the world’s first day without them.

  A dusky peach haze gilded the lake, where the fuzzy silhouettes of lush trees on the far bank were reflected in the wind-blown water. She sent out a fervent hope that those women, whoever they had once been, were now at peace.

  Everything belonged in a dream at the Blackmore house. Lotus didn’t want to get too close to the lake, but the pond was manageable, and it fascinated her. She examined everything until it no longer looked real. The deep green lily pads with their crinkled edges looked like little floating gardens for fairies, topped with blue waterlilies large enough to protect a sleeping fairy like her own shell did. The waterlogged stalks poking through the surface created angular reflections, which looked unnatural after a while, like a perfect cube attached to a wildflower stalk.

  Even inside the house, the golden lamps, round like fishbowls, jutted from the walls, undergoing a surreal development the more she looked. Every time somebody turned on a lamp, a goldfish leapt inside it. Malcolm was amused by her every observation, commenting that even he sometimes believed she was really a child. Still, she would not let him see her as she really was.

  Adam and Elias came by every day. The men would have long boring talks in the library, while Lotus painstakingly built bridges between soft and forgiving Adam and his nemesis, Amos, who bore a grudge like it was an Olympic sport.

  They wandered the gardens together in summer-hazy bliss. At first, it was just Lotus and Adam talking; progress with Amos was slow. But the moment he made Adam laugh with a story about glue on the seat of his father’s trousers—a story which caused Adam to collapse into the grass holding his belly—Amos was hooked. He wasn’t a natural charmer like Adam, but his humour was fierce. Like Lotus, he lived to make Adam laugh, and she congratulated herself on bringing the boys together.

  Yes, everything belonged in a dream at the Blackmore house. Perhaps that was why Lotus didn’t see anything wrong until it was too late.

  She followed the sound of Adam’s laughter, wondering what joke Amos had told him now. He beckoned her from behind a bush, then darted sideways behind another. What was the silly boy doing? He leapt out again, laughing at her exasperated expression, then bolted for another bush.

  She waded through the lengthening grass, arms swinging at her side, a smile twitching energetically on her lips. He’d stopped laughing.

  “Adam?”

  The answering silence panicked her. She dashed towards his last hiding place, tumbling beneath it as strong arms and the scent of roses wrapped around her.

  She dreamed on, her panic diminishing. She watched from above, her own legs sticking out from beneath the rosebush beside Adam’s. Or… no, they were too long to be Adam’s.

  She lay there, a frozen lump, lost in the hypnotic gaze of a blue-eyed man who told her a new story. He murmured softly into her thorn-pricked skin, lacing it with kisses and prayers. She drank the unusually red tea, even though it tasted of rust and gun smoke, because she would have done anything for that voice. She couldn’t explain the strange analgesic state occupying her, and she didn’t need to. It was so freeing to see everything but feel nothing.

  A pulse came first, firm and insistent, invading her senses as if it were the beating of her own heart. Then came a rending of flesh. Teeth on skin. Blood on tongue. Sleek white fur and eyes like amethyst. Three women lay at Lotus’ feet, mouths contorted in fear, eyes open to the leafy canopy above, nothing in them but the reflection of stars. Her hands slammed over her ears, and she begged for the snarling to stop. And when she looked up at the wolf, even through its toothy leer, it wore the face of Elias Castle.

 

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