“It’s fine, Ada could pop up and eat us at any moment, but go ahead, choose now to argue,” Margot said, and inched away from them, slowly making her way to the other side of the room, where she picked a book off the stacks and started flipping through it.

  “It’s normal. I was in shock,” Ambrose said to Doreen in a loud whisper. “How did you expect me to act? I was shaken.”

  “Heartbroken.”

  “Of course I am,” Ambrose said, his voice rising. “I bloody loved her and lost her.”

  “And now you want to stay with her,” Doreen said, slamming her pointer finger into his chest. “Admit it.”

  “There isn’t anything to admit.”

  “You want to stay.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Do so.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Liar.”

  “I do not—” He stopped talking, reached up, and grabbed her finger.

  “What?”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “I…” She tried to yank her finger away. “No, I am not. Give that back.”

  “You are.”

  “She really is,” Margot called from where her nose was stuck in a book.

  “It’s called self-preservation,” Doreen said, trying to tug her hand free and failing.

  “Doreen,” Ambrose said, tugging her to him. “Who is the liar now?”

  “I don’t want to get stuck here, and without you I can’t break the curse. You said it yourself. That’s all.”

  “You sure that’s the story you’re sticking with?”

  “Speaking of story,” Margot called when it was clear Ambrose and Doreen had reached a stalemate and were locked in a staring contest, neither moving nor admitting the truth of what they were feeling. “You two might want to read a few more of these creepy bone histories before we make any rash decisions. Unless one of you is about to confess your undying love.”

  Ambrose dropped Doreen’s hand, and she took a step back. He looked away. She hurried over to where Margot waited.

  “Are they all journals?” Doreen said.

  “Did you look through this one?” She held one up. “It’s your mother’s.”

  Doreen sat down hard on the pew and snatched the book from Margot. She yanked it open, fear and hope flooding her.

  Frances S. MacKinnon

  The name was there, but the words were not. Instead, it simply read:

  Soul Not Willing

  “What the hell does this mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Margot shook her head. “Do any others say the same?”

  Margot walked around, flipping through the journals while Doreen held the book as though if by clinging to it she were holding on to a tangible piece of her mother.

  “Why would Ada take these?” Ambrose said.

  “What do you mean?” Margot asked.

  “Ada needs souls. She siphons their life force and power.”

  “Maybe the souls not willing are the souls she couldn’t take,” Margot said.

  “You think so?” Doreen said, her heart a painful vise in her chest.

  “Yes,” Ambrose said, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. Doreen exhaled, hope and relief flooding through her. “It makes a kind of sense. These could be a record.”

  “Hey,” Margot said, pausing. “Hear that?”

  Doreen looked up. Cocked her head.

  “It’s another ripple in the room, but instead of showing two places,” Margot said, “it’s like there are two sounds fighting to be heard. One of them won’t hold.”

  A book tumbled from the shelf, coming to a stop at Ambrose’s feet. He picked up the book.

  Eleanor Lenora MacKinnon

  Ambrose let out a mournful huff. He flipped through the pages, looked up, and swallowed hard. “There’s something wrong with the ink. It’s rust-colored, nothing like the quills or ink Lenora used. Some of the words have been scratched out and new ones added over them.”

  “How do you mean?” Margot asked.

  “Listen,” he said. “It looks like originally it reads: ‘She wanted to meet her fate, but changed her mind.’ But it’s been scratched out and now reads: ‘She wanted to meet Ada, but changed her mind and died.’”

  “What? Why is it altered?” Margot said.

  Doreen thought of Eleanor/Lenora, and how she was like the two worlds of the chapel—shifting from one form to another. How the sentences were saying one thing and then another, how they were in one world that seemed to be more like two.

  “Miles to go before she sleeps,” Doreen said. She walked over to the hole in the middle of the floor. “What if Eleanor couldn’t come here without being summoned?” she said. “This is a place that is orchestrated, and that means everything that happens is being done on purpose. It’s like there are two sides of Eleanor—the one I met in her home and the other version. What if she’s bespelled?”

  “So why send us here?” Margot said. “Do you think she wanted us to call her here?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Doreen said.

  “She said she’s part of the family,” Margot said.

  “Only one way to find out,” Doreen said.

  “What are you two thinking of doing?” Ambrose asked.

  “There’s a way to call us to one another,” Doreen told him. “A type of MacKinnon communication—the aunts used it when we were little and gone too long into the woods. Though I don’t know if it will work now, since we’ve been untied from our line.”

  “Only one way to know,” Margot said.

  “Safe as secrets,” Doreen said, calling their family motto up, her voice ringing loud.

  “As it ever was,” Margot replied, her voice echoing in the space around them.

  The lanterns in the room exploded, the flames rising high before they shot across the room, creating a bridge of light. The ground creaked, the wind moaned, and the chapel shook before it let loose a bang and the center of the floor caved in on itself.

  They scrambled back, over the pews and away from the sinking floor, Ambrose holding on to Doreen, Doreen pulling Margot after her.

  One by one the rows of books toppled as the chapel shook, and then finally stopped.

  A long, terrifying minute passed. They waited for Eleanor to appear.

  The only sound in the room was the swishing of the fabric of a skirt, shifting like a sigh. Doreen turned to Margot to ask her to be still, when she realized Margot hadn’t been wearing a skirt. Neither was she, nor Ambrose.

  The sound came again, the movement growing closer.

  Doreen’s heart thumped so loudly in her chest she wanted to shush it.

  There was a flicker of a light, and then a rumble deep in the chapel. More candles than the room could possibly hold flickered to life. The land quaked. Suddenly, pages shot from the hole in the center of the room. Hundreds of them, one after the other. They rained down on them, fluttering like petals from a giant flower.

  She thought she heard a rush of words from the poem that had pelted their skin once they’d left the castle.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  Briefly, Doreen wondered if those words weren’t for her, or even Ambrose.

  What if it was all for Ada, or from her? Grief in one of its many forms. Haunting them.

  Whispers filled the room, a resonate voice, ageless and tired, and the poem’s words tapered off. The words of the pages bucked as the floating pages came together in a whoosh of air, snapping into line between two thick covers. The book dropped directly in front of Doreen’s feet, and the chapel fell silent.

  SIXTEEN

  The chapel Ada stood in was empty. The floor was littered with debris. Covered in wood hunks from the crumbling ceiling, caked in dust so thick it was practically carpeting, while the single tall candle in the room flickered with its black-and-gold flame.

  Ada turned jar after jar around, reading the labels, as she walked along the far wall, muttering to herself. She was looking for a box, one she had misplaced hundreds of years ago. Or so she pretended. She was waiting on the shadow of Lenora MacKinnon to return, and the spirit had been gone far longer than it should have taken to assess the situation.

  Sending the spirit to spy on the witches should have been as easy as breaking a bone, but they weren’t listening. Either their humanity was waning or Ada’s hold over them was. She had to believe it was the former because she could not lose the power to control these souls until she had succeeded in finding the one lost to her.

  Ada’s spirits always ended up unruly—their humanity faded the more she used the bits of their souls, the more of them she took in. Bits of this person and that, a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster. Or, to be more precise, the truth of what Mary Shelley had seen when she’d stayed in the wrong castle, with the wrong ghost.

  The shadows liked to torture the living, and Ada only cared to control them when she needed them. She’d never wanted children, and having an army of clingy ghosts had reinforced the belief a thousand times over.

  She studied the bones on the ground before her, how lovingly they were arranged. She brushed the dust away from the skull, poking the empty eye sockets with her pinkie, waiting to feel something in her own eyes as she probed. But there was nothing. No pain or pinch. The only thing Ada felt was the gnawing ache of a lifetime of loss, and the pinprick of fear that her time would run out.

  “Where are you?” she called out, the flame flickering in reply. She walked along the far wall and turned into the corridor, a board on the floor catching her eye. It was tilted up in the corner, and a silver spoon handle stuck out of the raised end.

  “Ah,” she said, the memory rushing in. Of the box being sunk into the space beneath the board and the ghost storing it there. “That’s where you went.” She walked toward the board. She should have known Lenora might try to hide the paper. It was a warning. But while Lenora might think she could change the course of Ada’s plans, she was still her puppet. Nothing and no one would ever alter that. Ada reached down to pry the board up with the spoon handle, and, when that didn’t work, kicked at the board until it popped free. She knocked the raised board out of the way, revealing a dusty box. Ada reached down and opened it, the wood creaking in time with her mismatched bones. She pulled the scroll free and let out what some might call a laugh and others a bellow.

  Ada unrolled the scroll and flexed her fingers as she began to read. The ache bloomed into a break, and it took everything she had in her many bones to keep reading the journal entry, to allow herself to look back.

  September 1232

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love Hastings. I’d known him as the boy from down the creek for so long, with his bright eyes and a smile that promised trouble. The trouble had always involved a forage into the forest, him telling me to try the next tincture I was afraid to mess up, me believing a little more in myself because of him. That sort of support made it impossible not to adore him. Hastings didn’t just befriend me, he saw me.

  But he didn’t change the way I saw myself. That honor didn’t belong to him.

  Hastings MacDonald became my best friend the way the leaves change on an oak tree. There are subtle signs, hints of gold mingling with the green, until one day you look up to find the most vibrant red you’ve ever seen. He was kind too. He brought me a dog when I fell and broke my leg. The resetting of the bones had been so atrocious I was too afraid to walk and spent weeks in bed. Until I had to chase the dog. I went from terrified to running in no time.

  In return, I taught Hastings spells to curse his enemies. To mix in a bit of their hair or fibers from their clothes in a tincture of moonwater and pumpkin and thyme, how it would enable him to shift the tides in the autumn when they were turning on him. Soon he taught me ways to bend the wills of anyone who dared challenge me, which I used often on my poor lady-in-waiting.

  Hastings and I … we were the happiest of companions … until our families had a falling-out.

  The threat of war over land shifted our dynamic, with the two families at odds, and then there were no more excited grins and delicious mischief. No more star-gazing or foraging. I worried over him when the big war began, the battles growing bloody and fierce.

  For a long time, there was only his letters, until those too tapered off. Months passed, a year, two. Then more.

  Time had a way of helping me move on. Time and a new friend whose lips tasted of cherry wine and whose voice followed me into my dreams.

  Until one day, a new enemy hundreds of miles away cropped up for both our families. The two factions decided to repair the dispute. Decided to bring the two clans back together with a binding that would be unbreakable.

  I had thought to reconnect with my old friend. I’d even daydreamed of how we might perform a spell under the new moon, lay a feast for the goddess of remembrance and rebuild what had been broken.

  I had been a fool to think such niceties would suffer the folly of rushed men. Instead, it was I who was gifted like a loaf of bread, packaged, and delivered to a doorstep. Promised with words that had not been anyone’s other than mine to give.

  I was offered to Hastings like I was the second-best mule. Ten years and one heartbreak later, handed off to a boy who had grown into a man who fought his own battles and carried too many scars.

  My friend was changed. And in due time I learned that what was lost could not be found, not when what he wanted was something I could and would never give.

  “My love,” the shadow whispered, crawling out of the wall.

  “I have not called for you,” Ada said, refusing to look at the shape lurking beyond her shoulder. She dared not move, lest she reveal the weakness of her heart.

  “You always call for me,” it said.

  Ada waited, knowing it would come to stand before her. Not quite the man he was, but as determined even in servitude.

  Hastings MacDonald’s ghost was a quiet and irritating thing. It was clear he carried love for Ada, no matter what she had done to him, to them both. He also carried revenge in his bones, and Ada could never trust him because of it. Which was why she had stored the rest of his soul and humanity far away.

  He had been with her the longest, and she knew his humanity was dangerous. Hastings could no longer evolve—he was dead, after all—and yet, he had been observing the world for as long as she, watching her. He was always watching, always there, and she could no more let him go than she could give up her search.

  “I never call for you,” she replied, not meeting his gaze.

  “You do,” he said. “You call for me even as you seek her.”

  “Do not think her name,” Ada said, her pearl eyes flaring as she finally looked at him.

  Hastings flickered before her, the man behind the ghost showing before it shrank back into the thing she’d made him by binding him to her, by feeding on the few remaining pieces of his soul that she kept along with all the others tucked away in the jars of her caves.

  She much preferred to imbibe on living souls, but the witches of the MacKinnon line protected themselves now. They were stronger than she had ever been. She had pride over that, over how her blood and Margaret’s had made it so. Their oath and bloodletting together bound them, the same as their love—the ties that bind are simple, and for Ada and Margaret they had been true.

  The coven had driven Doreen to her, and then cast out Margot. She had two living vessels waiting, trapped.

  Ada smiled at Hastings. She could afford to be lenient when she was so close to getting new power, so close to the end.

  “Why are you really here?” she asked.

  “You have my bones.”

  “I am not using them.”

  “No, but the boy will.”

  Ada stopped what she was doing and looked up at him. “How could he? He gave them to me.”

  “You’re not as clever as you hope,” he said. “Send me to him, and I will make sure he doesn’t have the chance.”

  “You would harm your own?”

  “I would do whatever was required to protect you. It’s all I have ever tried to do.”

  Ada shook her head. “Too risky, and you can’t be trusted. I’ll keep an eye on them all the same.”

  He nodded once, his gaze going to the back wall, where the jars waited. Ada did not see the smile shift across the caverns of his face, rendering him almost human, nor see him flicker in and out one last time.

  He faded from the room, shade into shadow into shade. Ada remained lost in the past, her eyes focused on the parchment in her hand and the story it contained.

  * * *

  Eleanor stared at the group in front of her. Ambrose, with his posture somehow both unguarded and upright. He always seemed ready to go into a battle. He shifted closer to Doreen, seemingly unaware he was doing so, as Doreen glanced at him in surprise. Doreen was a sloucher, but in a graceful I-can’t-be-bothered-to-use-my-backbone sort of way that reminded her of a cat being petted. She arched and elongated like a tabby, unlike Margot, who stood with her feet planted and her hand fisted at her hips. Power radiated off her in a more aggressive way than how it rolled from Doreen. Together, though, they were mesmerizing. It was little wonder Ada wanted them for her collection; she could last hundreds of years off their brightness, their goodness.

  “We called for Eleanor and received a book?” Margot said.

  “I think we found what she was telling us to find,” Doreen said.

  The three sat, pulling the pages out and passing them between themselves. They could not know these words were the only true ones in the room. Ada’s words, her truth, was here in more than one place.

  “It confirms Ada used her experience in the trials to re-create what she could remember. To build this place,” Margot said, as she skimmed the page.

  Eleanor nodded, unseen by those before her. Magic did not stay for long in this prison. It shouldn’t exist at all, but magic didn’t follow a mortal set of rules. It created its own, and what wonderful magic it was, to have the two cousins together.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28