Witch's Secret

by Emma L. Adams

  “Then you know what to do,” she said. “Kill the mage.”

  “Kill the mage,” I muttered to myself. “Sure, I’ll just stride in and murder the most powerful man in Edinburgh.”

  “You have power over life and death,” Evelyn pointed out. “He can’t claim that much, at least.”

  You want me to haunt him to death? I knew the limits of my own power. I could set a zombie army loose on him. I could rattle the windows of his bedroom all night. But as a ghost, I was limited to the spirit realm alone.

  I needed to be there in person.

  “Look, I spent my teenage years with mages,” I said. “I saw first-hand the lengths they go to protect themselves from potential assassination attempts. They go out in groups, they have reserve teams scattered throughout the city in strategic locations—and since he knows I survived, he’ll have a crack team of witches on his side, too. Necromancy isn’t much use against living people unless you’re dealing with another necromancer or—” I broke off.

  “Or?” Evelyn tilted her head, her eyes gleaming in a way I didn’t like.

  “You use blood magic,” I finished. “That was a one-off.”

  I’d used blood magic to kill the Whisper, but I had no intention of making a habit of it. Blood magic had been outlawed since the mage council’s inception. I was supposed to be clearing my name, not adding to the list of crimes on my head.

  “It’s your choice, Jacinda,” Cordelia said.

  “Look, it’s Lord Sutherland who summons beasts from between the worlds on his days off,” I said. “Blood magic—sacrificial magic—it’s his area. I already set one deranged god loose by messing with the forces of nature and I’d rather not do it again.”

  Oh, I wanted to destroy Lord Sutherland. I despised him for everything he’d done to me, and to Isabel, and Wanda, and all the other people he’d hurt. There was nothing I wanted to do more than destroy him. But using blood magic? Tapping into the power of the gods myself? The risk wouldn’t rebound on me, but on everyone else around me. The gods were unpredictable and dangerous, and more to the point, the Hemlocks ought to be entirely against using the magic whose roots lay in the realms they’d given their lives to protect the world against.

  Instead of answering, Cordelia disappeared, and so did the cave, leaving Evelyn and me alone on a forest path.

  “What’s got into her this time?” I said to the empty silence. “I would have thought she’d rip my head off for suggesting using blood magic, considering it already wiped out one coven. I’m on the run and she suggests breaking more rules?”

  “Exactly,” said Evelyn. “You have nothing to lose.”

  “I think you mean you have nothing to lose,” I said. “I still have friends out there, and I won’t let them be collateral damage.”

  “There’s a simple solution. Ditch them.”

  “Give it up,” said a voice, and Isabel stepped out from behind a tree. “You’re not going to convince her, Evelyn. Jas doesn’t abandon her friends.”

  “Damn right.” I walked over and hugged her. Isabel was a couple of inches taller than me at five feet, slender and dark-skinned, with her hair braided with bright ribbons that matched the band-shaped spells decorating her wrists. She wore jeans and a denim jacket over a yellow shirt which looked downright unsuitable for the weather.

  “Glad to see you, Jas,” she said. “I got Lloyd’s message.”

  “It’s great to see you, too,” I said. “The Hemlocks have been letting you in here and not me? I’m insulted.”

  She grinned. “Don’t worry, we’re not plotting behind your back.”

  “You know they think I should assassinate the mage council? That’s their big idea.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t they think the other mages would jail you for life if you did that?”

  “I guess they think I have nothing to lose.” Which was partially true—but I dreaded to think what the mages would do to my friends if I failed. “They don’t seem to have considered that if there’s nobody to take their place, someone worse might end up in power. Not to mention the mages might still have witch allies.”

  “That’s my job,” Isabel said. “I’m heading to Edinburgh now to look into ways of tracking and isolating the witches Lord Sutherland and his allies might be hiring to help them. Asher asked me—”

  “And to think I thought you came to see me.” I put on a mock-hurt expression.

  She gave me another grin. “It is good to see you. But you know, it’s not safe for you to go too far from Lady Harper’s place.”

  “Nobody knows I’m coming back into the city. It’s fine.” If anything, I’d welcome a tense game of hide-and-seek with the mages to break up the monotony. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d still rather be at the guild, but at least I’m still alive.”

  I didn’t mention the Hemlocks’ suggestion that I use blood magic. Isabel had been forced to use it against her will when the Whisper had possessed her, and while she seemed none the worse for wear from the experience, I didn’t need to burden her with the Hemlocks’ latest absurd suggestion.

  “I told Lloyd to wait for you somewhere that isn’t the guild,” she said. “He’ll have texted you, but I guess you have no signal in the Highlands.”

  “Nope. Lady Harper’s idea of paradise,” I said. “Even the cows and sheep avoid the place, let alone the people.” If you ignored the occasional goblin, anyway. “I just have to make a quick detour to Keir’s house.”

  Keir didn’t know I was coming, but he’d want me to tell him what I’d learned from Lord Sutherland. While he was a second’s distance from me in the spirit realm, our situation had become somewhat complicated after the two of us had found Keir’s missing brother held hostage along with Wanda in the other realm. Aiden’s body was intact, but his soul was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t thought it was possible for someone to survive without a soul, but then again, I was a walking impossibility myself. Aiden’s presence meant Keir couldn’t leave Edinburgh, especially as there was still the slim chance that the mages knew something about where Aiden’s soul might be.

  Yet another reason I needed to leave Lord Sutherland alive—for now.

  “Good luck,” Isabel said, as the forest disappeared, leaving us on the bridge outside Edinburgh’s abandoned train station.

  I drew in a breath of bitterly cold air and took in the sight of the city’s peaked roofs, the castle on the hill overlooking the city, the grey sky. Home. I was home.

  And possibly the most wanted person in the entire city.

  3

  Walking through Edinburgh’s streets to Keir’s apartment, I felt more ghostlike than my night-time jaunts through the mages’ headquarters, a stranger in the city I’d called home for the last seven years. I pulled up my hood, hoping the bulk of my winter coat would make me harder to recognise. I’d also removed my lip piercing but didn’t bother with a disguise spell. If I ran into any senior necromancers, they’d be able to see right through to me in the spirit realm no matter how good my disguise might be.

  I slowed as I reached the cul-de-sac where Keir lived, starting to regret my spurt of recklessness. Aside from Lloyd, Keir was the person I’d missed most in my exile, but being near him doubled the target on both our heads. His midnight visits every couple of days ought to make up for my lack of contact, yet I missed him in the same way I missed the necromancer guild.

  The door opened a moment after I knocked. “Jas?” Keir’s eyes widened. “You shouldn’t have—”

  “Fuck shouldn’t.” I was over the threshold and had my arms around him before he could say another word. He pushed the door closed with one hand and used the other to cup my face as he kissed me. A familiar coolness brushed me from head to toe, and his touch, both physical and otherwise, conjured memories of the all-too-brief stretches of time we’d stolen for ourselves in the last few weeks. Moments in the dead of night, filled with whispers and touches that left me giddy with pleasure. Since I’d accidentally bound our souls the firs
t time he’d fed on me, I was the only person capable of satisfying Keir’s vampire side. Yet something in his touch satisfied me as much as him, and when we broke apart, his eyes were aglow, his face flushed.

  He released me and stepped back into the hall. “I’m hardly going to throw you out, now, am I?”

  “I hope not.” I tensed at a faint creaking noise above our heads. “Does anyone live upstairs?”

  “Nobody else is home, don’t worry,” he said. “The upstairs apartment is owned by some rich dude who hasn’t been here in years, and he has a private entrance round the back, anyway. This is just an old house that creaks a lot.”

  He beckoned me through a door into his ground-floor apartment. The living room was fairly spacious, and while some of the furniture was a little battered, I’d seen much worse.

  A slightly open door at the end of the living room revealed Aiden’s bedroom, now occupied by his soulless body. Keir’s shoulders tensed as he saw where I was looking. My chest went tight. “Is he—?”

  “No change,” he said. “None. I don’t know how long he’s been unconscious for, but he should have died of dehydration or starvation by now. It’s like he’s in a kind of stasis. A magical coma.”

  He crossed to the bedroom door, pushing it fully open. The books on the shelves, the rows of hand-stitched puppets—every item in the room was unchanged since his brother’s disappearance eight years ago. Aiden Langford lay on the bed, his dark hair brushing his shoulders. He and Keir had the same defined cheekbones and long eyelashes, but Keir was an inch or two shorter with broader shoulders and a more solid build courtesy of his martial arts training. Aiden looked younger from this angle, too, though part of that was because Keir looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, with dark half-moons under his eyes and his cheeks dotted with stubble. He swallowed hard as he lifted his brother’s pale hand. “He has a pulse.”

  I took Aiden’s hand, tentatively. His skin was cold, but not as cold as mine when I’d spent hours in the spirit realm. His breathing was quiet, steady. Yet when I tapped into Death, the only spirit aside from mine within the room was Keir’s.

  Aiden’s was gone.

  “I tried to feed him,” Keir said. “Tried giving him water, too. Didn’t work. It’s like he’s under a spell, but I can’t see the cause.”

  “I can check,” I said. “I didn’t think to, last time I was here.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked it of you,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll do him any harm.”

  I dropped Aiden’s hand and held my palms out over his body, feeling for any signs of a spell. A tingling sensation rubbed my fingertips. Magic. Not Hemlock magic, but familiar.

  Trembling a little, I pulled down the collar of Aiden’s shirt, revealing a mark etched onto his skin.

  Blood magic.

  Keir stiffened. “He… no. He can’t be one of them.”

  “He’s not,” I said. “He’s alive. Not a zombie.” The mark looked exactly like the ones on the reanimated zombies held together by witch magic, but his heart was still beating, signalling that he’d never passed beyond the gates of Death.

  “Can you remove it?” he whispered.

  “Honestly? I don’t dare,” I admitted. “He might die, if the mark is what’s preserving his body. His soul needs to be reattached first, when we find it.”

  “All right.” He carefully lowered his brother’s collar again, concealing the mark. “I don’t want to make things worse. But if it’s the same magic Lord Sutherland used…”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “He forced a bunch of witches to, but he’s not capable of using magic like that himself. I can take a photo of the mark and text it to Isabel so she can ask Asher if he recognises it, if you like. It’s more his area of expertise than mine.”

  I dug in my pocket for my notepad, then remembered I’d left it in my necromancer coat back at Lady Harper’s place. As for the fancy sketchbook and paints Keir had given me for Christmas, they were in my old room at the necromancer guild. I hadn’t dared break in to retrieve them, because if I did, the boss would realise I was still alive.

  “Ah—have you got a pen and paper?”

  “Sure.” He crossed to a set of drawers and opened the top one, passing me an old notepad with faded pages and a blunt pencil.

  I copied the mark on Aiden’s shoulder onto a blank page. Then I snapped a picture and texted it to Isabel before ripping out the page and shoving it into my pocket.

  “Keep the notepad,” said Keir. “It’s not like you to leave your art materials behind.”

  I shrugged, looking at Aiden again to avoid meeting Keir’s eyes. “They’re in my room at the guild. You know how that goes.”

  He pulled the covers up to his brother’s neck so he looked as though he was merely sleeping. “If only a few weeks passed for him, then he’s still twenty years old. I was seventeen when he disappeared and I’m older than he is now. I don’t know if he’ll even remember his time in stasis when he wakes up—let alone his life beforehand.”

  “He will,” I said, more confidently than I really felt. “Trust me. When we bring the mages down, we’ll force them to tell us everything.”

  The mages knew how to contact the gods. Maybe they knew how to bring back a soul that was beyond reach.

  “When we bring them down?” Keir said. “You have a plan?”

  “I wish,” I said. “I’ve been spying on them for weeks and it’s like they just dropped their old plans. The registry idea is gone, and I thought they were dead set on it.”

  The mages had wanted to put every single supernatural in the city on a list—not a popular idea, since a fair number of people wanted to avoid detection for a reason. The children of the invasion, like me, had no birth certificates or any formal identification, which protected our lives but also made it easy for people to disappear. Like the Briar Coven, and like Leila Hemlock. And now, me.

  “Who knows what they’re thinking?” he said. “They’ve dropped their plan to turn the shifters against the rest of us, then?”

  “They had to,” I said. “Vance and the others got rid of the pieces of Moonbeam stone and buried them miles outside the city. I saw Lord Sutherland last night and he was pissed off about it.”

  “Too bad,” said Keir. “Pity they couldn’t bury him along with them.”

  “They could be plotting to and I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve been stuck in Lady Harper’s junk-filled old house, dying of boredom. Oh, I did find out one useful thing, though. The Briar witches might be in a place called Foxwood. Know it?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Not in Edinburgh?”

  “Doesn’t look that way.” My phone buzzed. “That’ll be Isabel.”

  “I’ll search for Foxwood online.” Keir pulled out his phone and I did likewise. As I’d suspected, a dozen messages and missed calls that hadn’t been able to reach me up in the Highlands had crash-landed at once. I scrolled through a dozen texts from Isabel and Lloyd. No recent replies from Isabel on the spell affecting Aiden yet, though.

  “Isabel’s at the market,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll get back to me later. I’m supposed to meet Lloyd at South Bridge.”

  “Now?” He lowered his phone. “No, Foxwood doesn’t come up when you run a search. Maybe it’s a magically hidden location.”

  “The letter that mentioned the address was written pre-invasion, so the faeries might have levelled it.” And to think I’d thought I’d finally found a decent clue.

  “Are you okay, though?” He moved closer to me, his hand brushing my shoulder. “I wish I could see you in person. I hate that you’re taking the heat for everything Evelyn did. Someone ought to have prepared you for the possibility.”

  “They believed the best of her.” Even Lady Harper. I nearly told him she was the one who’d bound Evelyn to me, but if I got started on that, I’d be here all day. “Lloyd is waiting for me. I don’t want him to get ambushed by zombies when he’s out there in the cold.”

  “I’ll come with y
ou.”

  “I really don’t think—”

  “Not in person.”

  “Oh.” I nodded in understanding. He’d be there in spirit, if nothing else. That was the next best thing.

  I walked out of Aiden’s room and crossed to the living room window, seeing movement on the other side of the curtains. The spirit realm filled my vision, and I stiffened. Three people stood outside Keir’s apartment.

  Mages.

  4

  I jerked out of view of the window, hoping they hadn’t spotted my shadow behind the curtains. Keir walked into the room, hands in his pockets.

  “Relax,” he murmured. “I’ve done this before.”

  How can he be so casual? The mages were barely two metres away from us.

  Keir’s gaze went distant as he tapped into the spirit realm. Turning on my own spirit sight, I followed as Keir floated free of his body, through the wall of the apartment building and down the winding road towards the river. A moment later, two bodies rose from the water, rotting hands grasping the shore to pull themselves onto the cobblestones. On unsteady feet, they both staggered in the direction of the nearest house.

  Smart idea. The zombies were far enough away not draw attention to us, but close enough to cause a stir. When the humans inside the nearby house started screaming, Keir disappeared. So did I, blinking back into my body in time to see the mages outside the window turning in the direction of the screams.

  “Nice going,” I said. “How many zombies do you have, exactly?”

  “A dozen at a time,” he answered. “They decay so quickly it’s a pain, but they’re good for a quick diversion. Also, if the mages got any closer, the security spell would have turned on. It’s an illusion charm.”

  “I didn’t sense a spell outside,” I said. “Some witch I am. Where’d you get it?”