The Whisper Witch

by Harvey, Alyxandra;

  Godric came out of the back parlor to join her as she rushed down the stairs to investigate. Smoke choked the air, drifting slowly up the steps. Two maids and a footman were in the hall, coughing. Light flickered ominously in the doorway to the kitchens.

  “Fire!” Cook hollered, sounding more confused than scared. Godric tucked his chin into his cravat, and Gretchen unwrapped the bandeau in her hair and used it to cover her mouth and nose. The smoke was acrid and persistent.

  Cook threw a bucket of wash water at the fire licking out of the hearth, but the flames ducked and split around it. She wiped sweat off her face, bewildered, before spotting the twins. “Get back! ’Tisn’t safe.”

  Godric reached for another bucket from one of the scullery maids, who was pumping water as fast as she could. When he stepped around Cook to toss the contents, the fire growled, shooting up the walls. Something small but remarkably bulky tumbled out, swiping at Godric. Godric stumbled, landing on his arse. “What the bloody hell was that?”

  “Must be something stuck in the chimney and the wind is pushing all around it,” Cook guessed, trying to beat back the flames with a dishtowel.

  “That’s no draft,” Gretchen whispered as the flames responded by coalescing into a squat goblin with red hair and feral eyebrows. Cook clearly saw the fire leaping about and behaving altogether oddly, but not the goblin. He cackled, voice scratchy from constant heat and smoke. He stomped his foot and the fire exploded in all directions. He cackled again before taking off, singeing the floor under his boots as he went.

  “That little blighter.” Gretchen gave chase, leaping over Godric, still sprawled on the ground. She followed the fire goblin, trying desperately to remember if she’d read anything on how to defeat them in her grimoire. She settled for pelting him with whatever object came to hand: a teacup, a small potted fern, and three of her mother’s decorative crystal swans.

  She eventually cornered him in the living room. The tassels on the footstools were smoldering. Smoke billowed mysteriously from under a settee. “Oi,” she said, borrowing one of Moira’s favorite words. The wards were in dismal shape if fire goblins were roaming Mayfair now. Cook might have been seriously hurt. And the next house might go up in flames if the inhabitants didn’t know a fire goblin when they saw one. “You’re not meant to be outside the markets.”

  “I won’t go back,” he cawed, lunging for the marble fireplace with its stone lion heads. Fire licked out of their jaws. The dead coals in the grate crackled.

  “Oh no you don’t.” Gretchen grabbed for one of the vases of flowers her mother liked to crowd on every available surface. If she didn’t have magic to use against him, she’d use common sense.

  And a great deal of violence.

  She threw the vase as hard as she could. White lily petals sailed through the air. The vase tipped, spilling some of the water. Gretchen watched it spatter uselessly over a chair. Finally, it struck the goblin on the back of the head with enough force to fling him into the marble fireplace. He slumped, groaning. Smoke sputtered from under his shirt. His eyebrows sparked but not enough to cause any real damage.

  Godric ran into the parlor, skidding on the floor. “Did you get him?” He spotted the goblin teetering dizzily.

  “We need to secure him,” Gretchen said, “before he catches his breath.”

  Godric glanced around the room. “The urn,” he said. It was large enough that it had served as one of their favorite hiding spots when they were little. It was currently stuffed with ostrich and peacock feathers.

  It took both of them to drag it from the corner. Gretchen’s arms were quivering by the time they reached the goblin. She used her entire body to push it until it toppled over the goblin with a thump, trapping him inside.

  “Now what?” Godric leaned against it.

  “Now we wave Tobias out of the bushes so he can come and deal with it.” Since he was the reason, unknowingly or not, that she hadn’t been able to join Emma, he ought to make himself useful. “Before Mother comes home.”

  Godric paled, looking frightened for the first time that night. “Bollocks.”

  Emma settled back onto the cushions, having already instructed the coachman to take her to her father’s townhouse after she’d visited Gretchen. She’d told Mrs. Sparrow she was spending the night at home and hadn’t bothered telling her father anything at all as he would be at his club and wouldn’t know the difference anyway. She hadn’t even told Gretchen the real reason she was visiting Windsor Forest again. It wasn’t to search for her mother this time. She needed something that had belonged to Ewan if she was going to bring him out of the Underworld.

  She waited until the carriage rumbled away again before slipping into the stables. She stole the horse in the end stall because he was the farthest away from the stable hands asleep in the hay. The tapping of the rain on the roof covered any noises she made. She was actually looking forward to the hard horseback ride through the night to Berkshire. It would be a nice change from wondering about her father, worrying about Ewan, and dreaming about the Sisters.

  Invisible in her glamour, she was safe from the dangers of the road, from curious eyes to highwaymen. It sapped her magic until she was limp in the saddle, but it was worth it. On the outskirts of the family country estate, she slid to the ground on soft legs.

  Windsor Forest was dark and moist, like the inside of a giant’s mouth. She shivered, finding she needed more courage than she’d thought she would, just to take the first step. The trees whispered all around her, scraping at her antlers. She risked the light of a lantern. It might give her away to poachers but she’d wander in circles without it. She held a dagger in her other hand, the blade washed in thunderwater and pepper, to cut through all danger.

  She used the tip to poke her finger, smearing a drop of blood on the lodestone Gretchen had given her. A crude stag outline was painted in white, with two “E’s” back to back on its belly. She assumed it was for “Ewan” and “Emma.” Her blood was his blood and the spell would show her the way to his hut, the one her mother had visited once.

  The blood smeared the letters. Nothing else happened. There was no spark or flash of light. She didn’t suddenly see a map printed on the inside of her eyelids. She was still just a girl lost in the forest.

  Frowning, she turned on her heel, looking for clues. She spoke the words Gretchen had taught her. “Sun and moon both light the way, sun toward and moon away.”

  The lodestone grew uncomfortably cold. When she kept turning and was facing south, it warmed. Curious, she took a step in the opposite direction. It grew frigid and coated with ice. Another step back where she’d been facing and it warmed like sunlight. “Sun toward,” she murmured, holding out the lodestone on her witch knot and the lantern in her other hand.

  It led her between the trees, over a creek, and through thickets of ivy and wild raspberry. She kept walking until it was like holding a burning coal.

  By the time she found the remains of the hut, her witch knot was burned in the center. The lodestone went quiet, just another chunk of stone.

  The hut was just like she remembered from the memory trapped in her mother’s spell bottle, though obviously more neglected. The gargoyle in the tree was missing an ear, and the circle of stones out front was filled with old ashes and rainwater. The willow door was splintered and off one of its hinges.

  She stepped carefully inside, picking her way around a broken chair, ruffled with mushrooms. The blankets on the cots were moth-eaten and mouse-nibbled, and there was moss growing on the oak trunks that served as beams to hold up the roof. She wasn’t sure if Ewan’s father was even still alive, but he clearly hadn’t stayed here after Ewan vanished.

  She searched under the beds and in the corners for anything that might have belonged to Ewan. She found spiders and beetles and wood shavings from a whittling project. She investigated all around the shavings until she found a discarded piece of willow wood carved into the likeness of a deer decorated with bluebells. On the
back, in crude letters: For Theo. He’d have spent hours making it for her mother. It was no doubt soaked in his sweat and blood. She tucked it into the reticule tied around her wrist and turned to leave.

  Outside, a branch snapped.

  Startled, Emma pressed against the doorjamb. Lightning slashed the sky. She wasn’t even aware she’d called it until it briefly illuminated the deer in the clearing. The doe was sleek and red, the tip of her white tail glowing whenever lightning flashed. She stomped one foot imperiously, in warning.

  Not just a deer.

  “Mother?” she asked softly, hesitantly.

  The deer flicked her ears. The lantern light showed wide liquid eyes, too human for the delicate deer face.

  “Please,” Emma said, hope and sorrow battling inside her. It was a vicious fight that left her trembling and stumbling around her words. Snow drifted between the branches. “You need to turn back into Theodora Lovegrove.”

  She stepped forward slowly. The deer tensed. Emma froze.

  “Please,” she added. “Sophie is back, which means the Sisters might not be far behind. I need you.”

  The deer watched her for a long impossible moment before turning away.

  “Ewan needs you.”

  The deer paused.

  Emma ignored the snow on her lashes and the mist of her breath in the cold. Wind tore at the leaves around them. “He’s trapped in the Underworld. I can’t get him out alone. And if Sophie tries to open Greymalkin House again, she’ll need me to do it. Ewan sacrificed himself to make sure that didn’t happen.”

  The deer flared her nostrils, scenting the snow and the Greymalkin blood in her daughter, just as it scented Ewan in the hut. Emma noticed the hoofprints in the dirt around the shelter. She’d been here for a while, long enough for Emma to know her mother wasn’t entirely lost.

  “Maman, please.”

  The deer bounded away, sailing over branches and undergrowth without a sound.

  Lightning stabbed at the ground behind her, trees burning like torches.

  When Emma returned to the academy, Virgil was waiting for her. He looked groggy and furious, his eyes still dilated from the herbal tincture. His cravat and coat were creased from sleeping in the bushes. “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  “I went out for a walk,” she replied with a bland smile. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What did you do to me?” There was mud in his hair. “I woke up in a rosebush.” She might have felt badly if he wasn’t always so awful to Cormac.

  “It’s hardly my fault if you can’t fulfill your responsibilities,” she pointed out. “Perhaps you should drink less wine.”

  “I wasn’t drunk!” He advanced, infuriated. “I demand to know what you were doing.”

  “I’ve told you,” she replied dismissively. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have lessons to prepare for.”

  He grabbed her arm when she started to walk away, leaving a bruise. She narrowed her eyes at him, just as thunder shook the sky so hard the ground trembled. “I wouldn’t,” she advised softly.

  “I am a Keeper for the Order,” he seethed. “And you will answer me.”

  He yanked a length of black cord from his pocket, uncoiling it like a snake. Rain speared between them, silver and sharp. She tried to break his hold but he was maddeningly strong. She contemplated using her antlers, but instead of tying her up, he let the end drop to the ground and measured it to her length.

  Before she could ask him what in the world he was doing, a night soil man spotted them.

  “Oi, you let her be,” he shouted from the road, his cart stopped behind him. “Before I call the guard.”

  Virgil released her reluctantly, but there was a smugness to his smile that filled her with cold trepidation.

  Chapter 11

  Tobias knew the exact moment it went wrong.

  Cormac glanced at him. “Where?” He knew perfectly well that particular expression on Tobias’s face, coupled with his own amulets all but sending smoke through his buttonholes, did not bode well.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tobias started down the sidewalk, senses open, nostrils flaring. Tracking was both a physical thing and one bound by magic and therefore less definable. London stank of coal smoke, rain, and horses. He tried to focus on the physical: the waft of scorched lemon balm that always followed a warlock’s spell, or the more common salt and fennel from the magical wards set all over the city. Magic twanged like a broken violin string.

  They emerged onto Piccadilly, gas lights burning fitfully through the yellow fog. Men hurried to the pub and street sweepers waited on corners with raggedy brooms. Ladies peeked through the windows of their carriages. It was a most inconvenient place for a warlock to practice nefarious deeds. Dark magic had after-effects, after all, just as more benevolent magic did.

  “Are you sure this is right?” Cormac asked, peering through the dandies gathered in groups along the sidewalk. The crowds at this time of night always made things more difficult.

  Someone screamed.

  “Quite sure,” Tobias replied drily.

  They broke into a run, dodging around two gentlemen so deeply in their cups they swayed together. The scream had come from a woman pressed against the wall of a fruiterer shop. A pyramid of pineapples trembled behind the glass at her back. She was pale, her chest heaving as she gulped in air. A few young men stood nearby, mostly to admire her impressive cleavage. One of them had pulled out his pistol but wasn’t entirely sure who he was supposed to aim it at.

  “He’ll shoot his own foot off,” Cormac muttered, approaching the group with an easy smile. He had the charm and patience to deal with people, not to mention an arcane ability to flirt. Tobias was too tightly controlled to appear as anything but what he was: a young lord with a healthy respect for rules and proper conduct.

  While Cormac convinced the gentleman to put away his pistol, simultaneously getting the woman to purr a greeting, Tobias concentrated on pinpointing the source of the forbidden spell.

  The woman screamed again, clutching Cormac’s sleeve. “There! Did you see it? Did you?”

  “Oi,” one of the lads gulped, abandoning any pretense at heroism to hide behind Cormac.

  Tobias followed the trajectory of their stares to a shape in the tattered mists. And another. Malevolence oozed, stretching out invisible fingers. “Shadow people,” he muttered.

  The dark shapes stayed just out of the corner of the eye, no matter how quickly one turned one’s head. It was like feeling the hot breath of a rabid dog while blindfolded. They had no shape beyond that of a shadow that had peeled itself off the ground to walk upright. They carried no weapons and had no physical form, but their mere presence caused a bubbling cauldron of adrenaline and terror in anyone in the vicinity.

  The pistol reappeared. They’d have a riot on their hands within moments.

  “Stay back,” Cormac said. “Looks like a gang of pickpockets,” he lied. It wouldn’t distract them from their fear for very long.

  The shadows grew more insistent and more poisonous. Tobias lifted his left hand and his witch knot glowed with a white-blue fire, spearing them with light. Their nonfaces elongated in silent screams.

  “What’s that light?” a passerby wondered.

  “Broken gas lamp,” Cormac improvised, dropping handfuls of salt on the ground between them and the shadows.

  The shadows recoiled slightly, just enough that heartbeats stopped racing wildly and terror abated to an ordinary fear of pickpockets.

  The shadows turned on Tobias and Cormac, who moved into standard defensive formation. Cormac had his weapons of iron and salt, and Tobias pushed his personal magic through his body, like jagged spring ice tearing at the banks of a river.

  The shadow people exuded bleak and morbid hunger. The gentleman with the pistol fainted dead away. Tobias flung more magic light, even though it cost him to do it. He was starting to feel the way he’d felt after being bedridden with a fever. The shadows parted slowly and fle
d. They left a taint to the night air.

  Tobias caught the scent of scorched lemon balm before he could indulge in even a brief moment of triumph. He followed it into the alley, iron dagger at the ready. Tucked behind a crooked water spout he found a smooth black stone and a bee trapped in a glass jar with broken opals in the dirt around it.

  The shadow people were returning, taking advantage of his distraction.

  The spell was calling them to the area, but it wasn’t the dark magic he’d sensed earlier. And it wasn’t a broken ward or a wayward spell.

  “It’s a diversion,” he told Cormac in furious undertones. He lifted the jar and the bee drifted away, befuddled. The shadow people flickered. “Something else is happening. Something worse.”

  Gretchen was on her way home from Rowanstone when the voices began to wail and screech in her head.

  She knocked on the carriage ceiling and tumbled out of the door before the horses had come to a proper halt. People pushed past her on the pavement. A woman snapped at her to get out of the way. She ignored them all, trying to locate the cause of the warning cacophony in her head. It was different this time. Not so much a chaos of spells being spoken, more like a coven of witches chanting a warning. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, only that it was coming from St. James Church, across the street. The stone walls, worn smooth as butter by centuries of wind and rain, threw their shadow across the street.

  The gate was locked, but the wall was pitifully easy to climb. The spire pierced the sky and the windows were dark, glassy eyes watching her progress through the graveyard. If Godric were here, she knew he’d have seen ghosts drifting across her path. She tried not to think about it.

  “A ring to be wed, and a ring for the dead.”

  “As if I even know what that means,” Gretchen muttered.

  “Cast off your widow’s weeds.”

  She rather hoped that at some point, these bothersome dead witches would start to make sense.

  Bracken-green smoke oozed between the headstones. She gagged, choking on the acrid sting of it. It was slimy and unpleasant, like a film of green water from a stagnant pond. She staggered as it clung to her, shifting to envelope her like poisonous mist. She was immediately ill and light-headed. She had to find a way to contain it before it spread, but she couldn’t see where it came from, could only see more of that bracken-colored fog.