The witchery, p.9
The Witchery, page 9
“Let’s do trust falls!” Morgan Ramirez said, and they looked to Thalia for approval even though their tone didn’t imply that they were asking for permission.
“Be careful,” Thalia replied.
She and Jailah sat against the wall. The younger witches formed a circle. Giggling from the middle of it, Jenna Prim pricked her finger and sent Lilly Han into the air with a levitation spell so lurchy that she almost hit the ceiling.
“Careful!” Thalia and Jailah shouted at the same time.
“I got it!” Jenna said, smirking.
Her wand wavering a little, her face furrowed with concentration, Jenna drew away her hand.
Lilly fell from the ceiling with a cut so sharp, the others shrieked. But Jenna stopped her just before she could crack her skull against the floor.
Thalia watched them put their lives in one another’s hands. She rubbed at her tattoo. “We gotta help Logan. She should love her witchery like this.”
Jailah nodded. “You got a plan?”
“Yeah, I got a plan.”
If there was one thing she remembered about the day she told Jailah her secret, it was that they were ferociously close in that one tense moment. It was the indescribable kind of friendship that no one had given Thalia until then, the kind that she never knew she ached for.
One week until the Haunting Season
The Everglades were on fire. The archery fields smelled like smoke from the acres of land burning up just fifteen miles away. The homegrown Haelsfordians seemed unbothered. Apparently, these fires were common, and what could really scare anyone who lived with Wolves in their backyard every winter?
“You got this!” Iris shouted. She had one arm hooked over the stone arm of Hattie Mesmortes, and she swung from it gleefully.
Jailah cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted encouragements that Logan could barely hear over her own ragged breaths. Thalia stood in front of Logan, gray eyes glinting in the moonlight, her bloody thumb pressed against the thin skin of Logan’s inner elbow. Smoke hovered in the air from Logan’s shitty attempts at the Haunting protection spells.
“It’s okay. We’ll keep trying,” Thalia whispered. She was trying to be soothing, but Logan could hear the fatigue in her voice.
“Can’t you give me something?”
“What, calming elixir?”
“No, like, something to make me stronger, like when we got tested for Pulls—”
“An amplyfyr?” Thalia frowned. “Your magic is clearly strong already. You’re trying to learn it, to control it, not multiply it.”
“At this point, I’d try anything.” Logan drew her hand away.
Jailah joined them. “Good job!”
Logan gritted her teeth. “I didn’t do anything but contribute to Haelsford’s poor air quality index.”
“But you tried! That counts for something, right, Iris?”
Iris was unfocused. Her gaze went distant, as if she’d forgotten where she was.
“Hellooooo?” Jailah waved her hand in front of the deathwitch’s face.
Iris didn’t seem to see her. She stretched slowly. Her palms angled outward, her braids splayed out in the air, and her feet lifted a few inches off the ground.
“Oh, here she goes.” Thalia wiped her glasses on her cape. “Who is it this time? Murder victim need you to avenge them?”
“Nah.” Jailah smirked. “Hot ghost boy looking for his deathwitch bae.”
They laughed.
When Iris spoke, she had two voices at once. One was her own, but the other was richer and much older. “Yeah, yeah, y’all are sooo funny.”
And the laughter stopped. Logan’s own fear surfaced as Jai’s brow furrowed and Thalia took a step backward. Whatever they’d seen of Iris’s death magic in the past, this was different.
Iris’s body kept still except for her mouth. “Guys. Meet Madeline Donahue. She’s going to help us end the Haunting.”
The night was warm, but Logan shivered.
“Oh!” Jailah reached out and touched Iris’s cold hand. “You’re a legend! I’m Jai, I’m sure Iris has told you about me, about us, we’re her friends, nice to meet you!”
Thalia’s disposition was less sunny, though she seemed relieved. “What have you found?”
Iris’s fingers twitched. “It is not what I have found, but what you must find. Four witch girls here, so four answers I will give. Then you and I will both be free.”
“Who is the Wolf Boy?” Iris asked immediately, in her own voice.
And she answered in another. “His name has been scrubbed away. He is blessed and he is cursed.”
“Where is the Wolf Boy?” Jailah asked.
“His bones remain in Haelsford, like so many of the Wolves’ kills.”
Iris’s hand opened toward Thalia.
Thalia crossed her arms. “What do we need to end the Haunting?”
“The boy holds your absolution. It can only end after it has begun. The Wolves must be awake to be put to sleep.”
Logan forced out the words. “How can I help?”
“You are the anchor.”
The answer was worse than she could’ve imagined.
Her heart thrummed. “What? How?”
Iris breathed out, her body rattling as she floated to the ground. Every bit of her personality was restored as she immediately launched into a spiel about the Wolf Boy. Jailah and even skeptical Thalia joined her, theorizing on what these messages meant.
Iris gleefully threw her arm around Logan. “See, I told you! You’re a part of this. We’re gonna save Haelsford, baby witch.”
Logan attempted a smile. She wanted to be excited with them, but Madeline Donahue’s words only made her more uncertain of her witchery.
Things had changed since Hallowe’en. She hadn’t felt quite right since that time in Roddin’s shop. More not-right than before—everything still blew up around her, her potions went sour, and the cactus she was looking after for Remedial Herbalism died within two days, to Thalia’s horror. She was used to these things.
But when she slept, she dreamed in fragmented clips of the Haelsford she’d never lived in, that place the Red Three showed her in smoky vignettes. She didn’t want to hide this, but she couldn’t tell them, not until she felt like she could be the witch that they wanted her to be. Whenever these hallucinations came to her, her witchery surged. Was that what the Madwoman of Haelsford meant as she spoke through Iris? The anchor. As a proxy, was she meant to bring everything together?
She imagined going back to her family with her own legendary accomplishment: I helped break the curse of Haelsford. I played a part in ending the Wolves.
She had visited Roddin’s in the early morning, knowing what she needed from the unwitch. She was tired of waiting for dreams and hallucinations, or for magic to come to her.
To find the Wolf Boy in her dreams, she would have to scry for him.
Logan had never attempted it, but she had once seen Margot scry. Perched over her sister’s shoulder, Logan had felt Margot’s skin grow pale and cold. At first, Margot had wept tears of joy, for the vision she’d chosen to relive was one where their father had never left them. But when Margot grew lost in the finger-length sliver of scrying glass, their mother had to rip the glass away from Margot’s bleeding fingers. Logan had never seen her so furious, or so terrified.
Never again, Diane Wyatt had said.
In the shop, Roddin had prodded Logan. “You are not scared of being taken by it?”
She hadn’t answered. “How much?”
Roddin’s eyes softened. “Repay me by keeping your wits.”
And when Logan eyed the necklace of hexed jade on her way out, Roddin let her have that, too. Logan had slipped the heavy chain around her neck and felt the soft heat of her mother’s Look subside.
Now in her dorm room, she lifted the scrying glass. It’d been the ugliest one in Roddin’s shop. With jagged, sharp edges, it looked like a star, but as if the angles were done without care. When she looked into it head-on, her left eye and a slice of her chin were missing. But it fit well in her hand, the edges effortlessly melding into the space between her fingers.
“Show me the Wolf Boy, the boy from my dreams,” she whispered.
He came to her in a haze of smoke. He brought old Haelsford with him, and suddenly Logan saw a whole world in the piece of misshapen glass. It was even more real than in her dreams, though she could feel the wooden floor of her dorm under her crossed legs, grounding her to reality.
She enjoyed magic like this. The type that didn’t ask for her wand and a mouthful of words. Just some blood, a thought, and a look. If only all witchy things made use of a magicked object like scrying glass. The glass showed her Mesmortes Chapel, pristine and pure, nothing like the haunted thing it was now.
“There were three witches that attacked us!” one of the sisters said from the altar. Sloane Strigwach, Logan wagered. The middle child. Her pale cheeks were flushed as she fueled the congregation’s fury. “They flew onto our farm and declared their love of the dark prince. They killed our father first, then our mother, and tortured our little brother! Will you hunt them down?”
The men in the pews shouted in bloodthirsty affirmations.
A dark-haired witch appeared like a wraith from behind Sloane. Adelaide. Her green eyes burned with anger. “Find our attackers before they set their sights on others! Before they come here!”
And this is how they do it, Logan thought. This is how they enraptured the town. With love and bloodlust.
In the pews, the youngest sister turned to the boy next to her. Mathilde placed her silk-gloved hand on his. He looked at Mathilde, and Logan knew that look even if she’d never felt it before. The town might have loved the girls for stoking their gruesome need of witchblood, but the boy had fallen completely for this one alone.
Logan pushed away a stupid flit of longing.
Suddenly, the vision melted into another.
When all the hunters left town with their guns and knives, with their maces and rope, the Strigwachs called their Wolves.
Logan watched in silent awe. Twenty enormous Wolves bloomed from the black muck of the Swamp, their copper fur covered in the filth of it. With sharp teeth and crooked claws, they stepped onto solid land. Red sludge leaked from their eyes like they were weeping blood, and Logan forced back the bile that rose in her throat. None of the stories had prepared her to see the beasts in all their wretched glory.
They howled. Logan thought it sounded like a chorus of human screams.
Then the Wolves crashed into the unguarded town.
Logan released a choked gasp at the Wolves’ unrepentant violence. They ripped apart the weak mundanes who were left behind from the Hunting, their teeth furiously burrowing into their flesh.
The vision shifted once more. The boy was running, and even in the near dark, Logan knew that he was in the Cavern. He was being hunted, but not by a Wolf.
“Wait!” a voice cried out. It was so sharp that Logan was surprised to see frail Mathilde. “Don’t run from me!”
An explosive flash of light from her wand illuminated the Cavern. Guarding himself from it, the boy stumbled into a corner of rock.
The Strigwach stood before the boy, wand raised. Even as she cornered him, he had that look of love.
“I will save us all,” she said, teeming with love herself. “And you, my little wolfboy.”
As she began to incant, the Wolf Boy turned to Logan, eyes wrenched in desperation. “Help me!”
It jolted Logan out of the vision so forcefully that she fumbled the glass.
“No!” Logan shrieked as the scrying glass shattered.
She put her hands over the pieces, then dropped them uselessly into her lap. She knew she couldn’t fix the mirror, and likely would’ve just set it all aflame.
Logan closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She didn’t know his name or what Mathilde did to him. But her hands were warm. The sight of her witchery glowing like sunlight in her shaking fingers convinced her that the dreams and visions she’d seen were true. Her magic was doing it for her, even if she wasn’t the one to call it.
And she felt so, so, so witchy.
The Night of the Haunting Season
Jailah Simmons breathed out.
The arrow flung from her bow: sharp, exact, tight.
As if rigged with magnets, the arrow found the target—a scarecrow marked HAMMERSMITT with great red letters.
She owned it all. The archery field. The humidity slicking her grip. The touch of dirt on her contacts. Jailah wasn’t team captain—she had no time for it on top of Junior Witchery Council and classes and the Haunting. She knew she was the best of the best. But Hardy Schrader, with her trembling hands, had seniority and wanted it so badly.
Please, Jailah, just drop out of the race. I need this. You’ll get it next year.
“Haven’t seen you like this since Veronica was on the team.” Layla Marks said this sweetly, but anyone with a lick of sense knew she was taunting. You didn’t bring up a hexbound ex-girlfriend without questionable intentions.
Jailah sent another arrow toward the hay-stuffed Hammersmitt. It went sailing overhead, a rare shot missed. “Layla, honey, you’re blocking my light. Scooch a li’l, won’t you?” she said.
“You must miss her, no? The girl who got you into all this.”
There was a slight hush. The other witches had turned up to witness Jailah’s golden arm, but now on the agenda was a little fun, the type to gossip and giggle about later.
“Miss her?” Jailah’s sweet Southern tongue spun sugar around her words. “You say that like I have time to! You’ll know what that’s like when you’ve finally made varsity.”
Layla reddened, clear as day on this darkening night. Hardly looking, Jailah sent her last arrow into the strawman’s skull.
She slung her bow over her shoulder, leaving the arrows for some freshmen to pluck out, in awe of the inconceivable prowess of Jailah Simmons. “I’ll see you all later. Get your game faces on. We’ve got a town to protect.”
Never mind Layla Marks’s little taunts, or the fact that Jailah went into town that morning to buy her favorite shade of lipstick and saw a girl watching her. Tonight was important. It was December 1 and the Wolves were waking up.
The girl wore a snapback and had smudged purple eye shadow all over her eyes like someone Jailah once knew. Though they stood a road apart, Jai could see that her skin had a sickly glow, the kind that came from having your witchery hexed into metaphorical shackles.
The girl wasn’t supposed to be seen, clear from the way she jerked back when Jailah met her eye. The unwitch tried to keep steady, those eyes meant to be intimidating and cruel, but Jailah smiled and blew a kiss. It said, Tell Vero I said hey.
Jailah shook off those thoughts. Vero was in the past, and tonight was about the future.
She ran up to her room in Laarsen House to shower and change. She looked like a dream come true—flawless skin, massive fro, glossy brown lips. Her smile was staggering, her batted eyelashes a charm. Dressing up made her feel just as good as nocking an arrow and watching it fly. When their histories told of the first time the Mesmortes Coven Academy protected the mundanes of Hammersmitt, she would not be a footnote. Her name would be distinguished in the history books.
The others were waiting at the bottom of the Hill. Thalia, with her always-slanted glasses, played fetch with Maverick. Logan watched, her hair a mess, her smile soft and shy. Iris had her hands on her hips and a scowl that softened once Jailah flashed her a grin and asked, “Y’all ready?”
Together, they walked toward the Box Chant.
“A few reminders.” Jailah counted them off on her fingers. “No hostility. We can be a little smug, but not mean. Whatever they give us, we need to be gracious.”
Thalia made a tree move aside its low-hanging branches with just a touch to its trunk. “Any last bets?”
“It’s gonna be something boring, I’m telling you,” Iris muttered, kicking a moss-covered stone out of her way with more force than necessary. “Like some sanctified candles or new cauldrons.”
Thalia perked up. “Like, those brass ones? I’d take ’em.”
Does it matter? Jailah thought. “I’m just happy we’re all here, doing this. What a night.” She turned to Logan. “How ya feeling?”
“I feel like I shouldn’t even be here,” Logan admitted. “You guys are the ones who convinced the Witchery Council to let Mesmortes protect the Hill. This is your thing. And, uh, about tonight … there’s no way I could single-handedly screw up the spells? Like what if I do something wrong, and the protection doesn’t go up the right way, and the Wolves—”
“Chill. That’s not gonna happen. Look, when this is over, we’ll work on some spells, okay? You’ll have my undivided attention.”
Maverick whined suddenly, his eyes trained on the sky.
A black cluster of crows circled above them, each one flapping to the same haunting beat. Maverick nudged Iris with his nose. A bird dropped a piece of parchment onto the brim of her hat.
“It’s Roddin,” Iris said, her eyes not leaving the note. “It’s urgent.”
The audacity. Jailah said, “Roddin can wait. We have to meet the boys, hello, the sacrifice!”
Iris waved the note. “Apparently, the boys have come to us.”
“Roddin!” Iris strode into the empty Emporium yelling. “Familiars are great and all, but what do you have against cell phones? They are perfectly reliable!”
“Hey, I take offense to that,” Thalia said with a tight smile, scratching Maverick behind the ears. “How else would we create melodrama?”
Even with the touch of amusement in Thalia’s voice, Iris noticed the way she kept smoothing her hair with her fingers, her own tell of discomfort. It stung. Iris had spent enough time at the Necromantic Emporium to grow fond of it. When she was bored, she visited the cranky old woman here, the only other deathwitch in Haelsford who understood her Pull. Iris always offered to rest any of the spirits that were trapped in the appropriately named House of Souls, though Roddin seemed to think she wasn’t ready to free the loud ones in the trinkets above them. Iris felt like she and the shop were made up of the same stuff, and if Thalia didn’t like the look of the possessed antiques, then what did she think of Iris, who could speak to spirits?
