Witch's Shadow (The Hemlock Chronicles Book 1)

by Emma L. Adams

  So much for running away.

  “How?” I whispered. “How am I here? I left.”

  “You did,” said Cordelia. “You abandoned your coven.”

  “And am I banished to hell as my punishment?” I didn’t think so. I hadn’t even passed through the gates of death before I’d been yanked back into the land of the living.

  Okay, ‘living’ was a stretch. However old the Hemlock witches had been when their magic had trapped them here in the forest, they were no longer alive in the technical sense, but also unable to die. It wasn’t a lie when I claimed to be the only living Hemlock witch remaining, not really. And if I’d been born with any magical talent, I would have suffered the same fate as they did. I’d be stuck in this forest for the rest of my life.

  “I’m dead,” I said. “Aren’t I? I can’t be immortal like you, because I don’t have any magic.”

  But judging by the throbbing pain in my head, I wasn’t in Death. Ghosts didn’t feel pain, no more than echoes. They left all physical injuries behind.

  “You have magic,” said the leader of the Hemlock Coven. “I see you’ve been making use of it.”

  I took a step backwards, my foot catching on a tree root. “Look, not that it isn’t nice to see you, but I really don’t understand how I’m still alive, or how I got here in the first place.”

  “You know perfectly well where you are,” said Cordelia. “You’re here because I sent someone to watch you. As for how you’re still alive… we’ll get to that later.”

  “This forest is hundreds of miles away from Edinburgh,” I said. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe I’m really here?”

  “Are you really so close-minded?” she asked. “The necromancers have clearly been a bad influence on you. Aren’t you going to ask me how the coven has got along without you?”

  “Perfectly fine, I imagine,” I said. “Since you can’t leave here, and I have no more magic in my entire body than you do in the wart on your nose.”

  Cordelia scowled. “You don’t have magic,” she said. “But she does.”

  Something in the way she said she chilled my blood. “Who?”

  “I think you know who I mean.”

  I shook my head slowly. “No. I really don’t.” If you weren’t born with magic, nobody else could give it to you. It was one of the basic rules of the supernatural world. No exceptions.

  “You didn’t inherit the gift,” she said. “But your spirit is bound to someone who did. Have you ever heard of a shade?”

  I shook my head automatically. My mind was whirling, and a cold pit opened inside me as denial dug its heels in. There was no way—no way I wouldn’t know—

  “A shade is a spirit that inhabits the body of one of the living while that person is still alive,” said Cordelia.

  “What?” My voice was barely a whisper. “It’s not possible, not when I’m still living and breathing and walking around. There’s no spirit inside me except my own.”

  “Wrong,” said Cordelia. “I’d be surprised if you’d never felt her presence, being a necromancer, but the shade is so close to you that I doubt anyone would have noticed you weren’t the same person. After all, she has been dormant most of your life.”

  “You can’t have two spirits in one body,” I said. “It’s one of the standard rules of necromancy. It’s possible for someone to be temporarily possessed, but not permanently.”

  “This is no possession,” she said. “Her spirit is attached to yours. And that means her magic is yours, too.”

  My cloak caught against the cave wall as I backed away from her stare. “You’re being absurd. Who even is this… shade?”

  “Her name is Evelyn Hemlock. Since your parents are dead, and no other living heirs remain but you—”

  “Sorry, but I’ve spent the last seven years living in the same building as experts who would swear point-blank that it’s absolutely impossible for a spirit to survive inside another person’s body.” Even if it was possible, possession was dealt with in one way: by kicking the offending spirit right into the afterlife.

  “Most spirits aren’t strong enough to survive it,” she said. “But we Hemlocks are stronger than most people.”

  Because that wasn’t egotistical at all. Witches weren’t typically big-headed or ambitious, certainly not compared to the mages, and I’d gathered that said big-headedness had been responsible for the Hemlock witches ending up stuck in a cave for all eternity. They never had volunteered the details of how it’d happened. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

  Speaking of things no sane person would want to know…

  “How did this… Evelyn Hemlock person end up being bound to me in the first place?” I asked.

  “Because there was no heir,” Cordelia growled. “There needs to be one. You had no magic, but you’re of the bloodline. The spell would have been performed the instant she died, which made the transfer smooth. You were a baby. You won’t have felt it.”

  I was fairly sure I was going to throw up. “So it was… a sacrificial ritual? That’s what you’re saying? She gave her life to be bound to me on purpose?”

  “To continue the bloodline. Yes.”

  My fingers dug into stone as I steadied myself against the wall. “That is sick. It’s also against magical law.”

  Did it explain how I’d survived the poisoning? Yes. It also explained how I’d survived a fair few other almost-fatal accidents over the years. Two spirits in one body made both stronger.

  “We didn’t have a choice,” said Cordelia. “We need an heir. It’s necessary for the survival of the coven, and should I die, it is you who will take my place.”

  “Lucky you’re not about to expire anytime soon, right?” I said, folding my arms to hide my trembling hands. “Just don’t do anything too rash.”

  “Flippancy won’t serve you well.”

  “Neither will dragging me into your cave, telling me I’m possessed by another person, and practically ordering me to take your place. No thanks.”

  “You will come to understand in time, Jacinda Hemlock.”

  The cave vanished, leaving me alone on a forest path.

  “Oh, come on.” I stared around at the crowding trees, the endless paths leading into shadow. The forest had no clear boundaries, since it didn’t belong to a dimension that made any sense. Which meant I was stuck here until the Hemlock witches said otherwise.

  I felt in my pocket for my phone and pulled it out. The time had stuck at 9 o’clock in the evening. From the light streaming through the trees, it was daytime, but the forest didn’t even subscribe to the usual laws of time and place. Let alone anything else.

  I’m… possessed.

  I ran a hand over my face. Everything was where it should be, down to the lip piercing. I was alive. I’d survived death by hemlock poison and walked right into a life sentence.

  No. I’d find a way out of it, once I got home. If the forest had brought me here, surely it could take me back to Edinburgh, too.

  I stopped walking mid-step. The spirit realm… I’d been half dead when I’d woken up here, which meant I should be able to access the spirit realm from here. If so, I could run a test on whether or not Cordelia was right about there being another person living inside me. There’d certainly been enough moments when I’d tapped into that realm of power, a source I couldn’t explain, and spoken with a voice that didn’t belong to me at all. Had I been channelling the other spirit the whole time?

  “This is batshit.” Unfortunately, it all made sense. Whatever the faerie ghost had seen when he’d looked at me had been enough to send him screaming through the gates of death, but it wasn’t as though I could take a look in a mirror and see what, exactly, had frightened him so much. Ghosts didn’t have reflections.

  Witch or not, there was zero chance I’d be giving up my apprenticeship anytime soon. After all, necromancy wasn’t simply concerned with raising the dead, but also banishing it. Unwanted shades included. As Lady Montgomery’s assistant,
I was one step away from the guild’s top-secret archives, and if anywhere contained a clue about how to get rid of the second spirit, it was there. If I ever got out of this forest.

  I tapped into the spirit realm, and grey fog swirled around me. It was risky going into Death without candles for backup, but I hadn’t brought any with me to the summit, and I was a whole world away from the guild. Besides, I’d survived worse as a guild employee—falling into the river, being flung into walls by poltergeists, and even being stabbed by a fae intruder a few months ago. Lloyd sometimes joked that I had nine lives. Should have figured my luck had a limit somewhere.

  Death looked the same from this angle as it ever did, since the spirit world didn’t overlap directly with the mortal realm. The view looked identical wherever you stood geographically—grey fog, and the distant shape of a set of endless gates. Whatever lay beyond those gates was off-limits to everyone but the highest necromancer Guardians. You needed to be permanently dead to get there. And if this Evelyn Hemlock’s spirit had been lurking around my whole life, I doubted detaching from my body and floating over to the gates would encourage her to hop out of my body without a fuss.

  Besides… maybe that wasn’t the answer. After all, if she disappeared, so would the last of the Hemlock magic. There must be a way to separate her spirit from mine without either of us dying. Right?

  “You again,” said a cold voice.

  The shadowy male who’d spoken to me before towered over me. I squinted, trying to make out his features. He’s not a shade? Is he? I had no idea what the spirit possessing me actually looked like. But he’d said begone, shade…

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Someone intrigued to know why a shade is wandering around the spirit realm, unchecked.”

  My heart thudded, a reminder of my mortal skin. “What if I came here of my own accord?”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “Wow, you sure know how to flatter a girl. Care to explain what you are?” I vaguely gestured to his shadowy form.

  “No, I don’t think that’s something you need to know.”

  Not a ghost. Was he some other form of necromancer? “Are you stalking me?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea where you are, if you’re still one of the living. Shade or not.”

  “Stalking still counts as stalking if you don’t have a body.” Was he the person who’d whispered hemlock in my ear? It was hard to recall the voice, but something about him seemed familiar to me all the same.

  “How do you know I don’t have one?” His gaze skimmed over me, and though I couldn’t actually see his eyes, his stare was penetrating enough to make heat rise to my cheeks. Could ghosts blush? Yes, apparently.

  “Educated guess. I’m a necromancer.” He must have had training from someone in the know to be able to tell I was a shade. He also hadn’t run screaming in terror, so maybe I wasn’t wearing my shade guise this time around. But nobody except for the Hemlocks could access the forest, so how had he managed to reach me here? He had some seriously powerful spiritual powers… which made him a fellow necromancer. Not a guild one, surely. I might not have spoken to every member, but I’d met most of the senior ones, and he was way too cocky to be a novice.

  “You seem too intelligent to be a guild lackey,” he observed.

  That answered that question, then. “What does that make you?”

  He stilled, his gaze shifting past me. “There’s something here that shouldn’t be.”

  “Yeah. I’m looking at it.” Not that I could actually see him, but if you spent enough time in the spirit realm, you learned to recognise when there was someone close by even if you couldn’t see their face. The spirit sight was a sixth sense of sorts, and right now, it told me there was something inhuman nearby.

  A greyish mass appeared at our feet, trailing white smoke. Wisps—faerie spirits—weren’t supposed to appear in the spirit realm. By travelling into Death in the forest, I must have brought them with me.

  “Shoo.” I waved a hand at the wisps. “Go away.”

  “Is there any reason faerie spirits are tailing you, Jas Lyons?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Don’t you remember telling me?”

  Of course I had. The wisps swirled around me, growing brighter. Their usual trick was to lead humans through the forest to their deaths, which wouldn’t do much good here in the spirit realm. “I can’t banish these little shits through the gates.”

  “Then you’ll have to scare them off.”

  Scare them. Like the faerie ghost. Simple, yet… did I really want this stranger—a stranger who was only partially here, and had powers I couldn’t begin to understand—to see what I could do?

  Magic hummed in my fingertips. The same power I felt in the forest, multiplied several times over.

  Guess I don’t get a say after all.

  The wisps recoiled away from me as my hands continued to glow with the strange, alien power. I lifted my head, and a faint glow permeated my entire body. “Go,” whispered a voice, quiet yet commanding. It came from my mouth.

  Evelyn?

  The wisps vanished, leaving me alone with the strange shadowy man.

  “Tell me where you are, Jas Lyons,” he said. “Tell me what magic you’re using.”

  “I won’t.”

  My mouth moved, but the voice wasn’t mine, and neither was the alien, terrifying power, roaring through my veins.

  Hey. Stop that. I’d completely crossed over into Death, leaving my body behind. If I’d stayed too long, even an extra soul might not save me from being trapped in the spirit realm with this dangerous stranger. I closed my eyes, ignoring the relentless glow enveloping my body, and willed my spirit to return to the waking world.

  The grey fog, and the stranger, vanished, leaving nothing but darkness.

  I blinked awake. I lay on my back on a soft, warm bed, under a ceiling painted in white. The walls were faintly stained with what might have been blood. The modest room contained a few bookshelves and little else. I’m not at the guild.

  My head pounded, and a thin layer of ice covered my skin when I moved. I hadn’t spent that long in Death in a while. If I’d stayed much longer—

  No. Maybe I wouldn’t have died. After all, to the witches, I was a precious commodity, thanks to the other person sharing my mind.

  Speaking of whom, they’d apparently booted me out of their forest after all. But where was I? The window showed only a rain-soaked brick yard. I tried to open it, but it was locked tight. So was the oak door opposite the bed.

  I reached in my pocket for my phone and found the clock had started running again. I also had a few dozen missed calls. After tugging on the door once again, to no avail, I called Lloyd.

  “Jas!” he yelled into the phone. “Where in hell are you? Are you dead?”

  “Do you think I’d be able to use the phone if I was a ghost, Lloyd?”

  “How the bloody hell should I know?” he said. “I watched you die. Then these people—people wearing cloaks, but not necromancers—took you away, right in front of the boss’s eyes. Where in the world are you?”

  “Locked in a room. No clue where. I’m gonna try to break the door down, but I thought I’d let you know I’m alive first. Who—who took me away?” I already knew it must be a witch—someone sent by the Hemlocks—but the bombshell they’d dropped on me had made me forget to ask who they’d had spying on me for the last seven years.

  “I don’t know, they wouldn’t let me near you.” His voice broke. “I didn’t know there was poison in that drink, Jas. I bought it at the market. This is my fault.”

  The market. Panic bubbled up in my throat. “You mean the witchcraft market?”

  “What other market would I be talking about?”

  Oh gods. Someone from another coven tried to kill me. And they know who my best friend is. “Lloyd, who sold it to you?”

  “Haven’t a clue. It was dark and I was freezing, and I knew you would be to
o. I didn’t check.”

  I swallowed hard, my heart hammering a mile a minute. “It’s not your fault, Lloyd. The witches… gods, this is not how I wanted to have this conversation.”

  “What conversation?”

  “The part where I tell you I’m a witch. A rare one. And I think another witch tried to have me killed.”

  “What?” His voice rose to a high pitch. “Is this some kind of—”

  “Hemlock,” I said. “That’s my coven. It’s also the poison they used. I have zero magical skill, that’s how I wound up a necromancer. But I’m Hemlock by birth.”

  “What?” He sounded about as bewildered as I’d expected. “What do you mean, by birth? I thought anyone could start a coven in their own back yard.”

  “They can. My coven… their magic is different. It runs through the bloodlines, and I’m the last of them.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Look, I’m not even in Edinburgh. I’m almost certain I’m in the middle of England, which is where my coven came from in the first place. I can’t even get out of this room.”

  “The middle of England? How? Do you have a secret teleporting ability? Because let me tell you, if you’ve been keeping it from me, we should have words, Jas.”

  Not a secret teleporting ability. More like psychotic relatives who won’t take no for an answer.

  “No, I travelled via a creepy forest which exists outside of space-time.” I rested my heel against the door and wondered if it was worth risking a broken foot to get out of this room. The place didn’t look like it belonged to someone out to do me harm, but then again, neither did the forest, at first glance.

  “Jas, please cut the bullshit. I’ve been awake all night and Lady Montgomery is on the warpath and demanding answers.”

  “We hunt ghosts for a living. Surely a magical forest isn’t that much of a stretch. Look, I have no idea how I got here, but as soon as I get out of this room, I’ll be on my way. It might take a little while, though.”