War Witch

by Layla Nash

  When there was nothing left to show, Soren exhaled. The chair creaked as he got up. “I still do not like being in your head, witch.”

  The door whispered shut behind him.

  Chapter 56

  The next time I pried my eyes open, Soren occupied the chair once more. I was too tired to care, still too drained and hurt to wonder how long he’d spent watching me breathe. He got up and opened the door, saying something to someone outside, then returned to the chair.

  “You should have called us sooner.”

  Us. Perhaps Kyle and Leif heard me as well. Or maybe he meant that little arrow of power I’d used as a last resort. Either way, it didn’t matter. We could not undo what was done.

  He folded his arms over his chest and frowned at the bed. “Knowing what happened... The Alliance owes you—I owe you—a great debt.”

  I didn’t look at him. My voice still didn’t work right, all gruff and intermittently squeaky. “It was witch business. There is no debt.”

  His head tilted as he studied me. “Anne Marie returned to her coven, or what remains of it. She will officiate the pyre for Rosa, Joanne, and Andre. It will be held in two days. You may attend.”

  It was an honor I hadn’t expected. I’d just assumed my persona non grata status had been reinstated the moment Anne Marie reappeared. “Thank you.”

  I didn’t want to know, but I had to ask. “What was done with Tracy?”

  Someone scratched at the door and Soren rose to retrieve a lap tray from someone outside. He placed it on the bed and helped me sit up, though I flushed as he fluffed the pillows and propped me up, then put it over my legs so I could examine the contents. Soup and pudding, water and hot tea.

  Soren cleared his throat after shutting the door and collapsing back into the chair. “The house burned a great deal before we were able to dampen it, including the basement. What we recovered of her remains, Anne Marie supervised. There was no ceremony. She was submerged in salt water and then cremated. The ashes were mixed with more salt and cement, broken up and scattered on a trash heap.”

  Not even an unmarked grave for Tracy. I still couldn’t reconcile the dark witch with the woman I’d known as my friend. It didn’t seem possible. I sighed.

  I stared at the ceiling, hoping no tears rose to the surface. “And Brandr? Did you give him a good burial?”

  “Brandr?”

  My throat closed. “You found him, didn’t you? He wasn’t in the basement, but he had to be there somewhere.”

  “Not in the house,” he said, picking up his phone.

  “He helped me,” I said, heart pounding. Blessed saints. “He risked his life, and—”

  “They probably killed him,” he said, and it was a testament to the kettle’s cruelty that death seemed the best option. “He’s dead, Lily. I can’t feel him in the pack bonds.”

  “He renounced his alignment before we went after the witches,” I said. “He gave me his ring.”

  It still waited, in a warding box in the Remnant.

  Soren muttered, “Arrogant ass,” then leaned to pat my ankle. “We’ll find him. We can’t use pack magic, but there are other ways to track him down.”

  I lay back, staring at a dim corner of the bedroom. I would find him, once I regained my strength. I wouldn’t leave Brandr with them, even in death. I owed him more than that.

  My throat ached and I attempted the tea, uncertain how well my stomach would tolerate anything when my guts still felt torn apart from the magic. Everything seemed to float, disconnected, and sometimes hurt with a sharp pain.

  Soren put his feet up on the end of the mattress, near mine. “I want you to listen to me, Lily. This is important. I want your word you will consider what I’m going to propose.”

  “I’m tired.” I picked at the soup. “But I’ll listen. No other promises made, Peacemaker.”

  He laced his hands behind his head. “I do not normally offer this unless I am entirely certain of someone’s loyalties, but this seems the wisest course of action, given what happened.”

  My heart sank. If he brought out that diamond ring again, I might not have the strength to refuse. Sheltering behind the Peacemaker as the dark witches hunted me down was just too tempting. Someone else could fight for once, even when it was witch business.

  He smiled at his hands before looking back at me. “Don’t look so repulsed. My offer is this—align to me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You agreed to hear me out.” He waited until I spooned up more soup, then Soren studied his shoes where they rested on the bed. “You would swear only to me. You owe no loyalty to the Alliance, and you are required to obey no one but me. You would have a direct line to me, the same as Leif and my alphas.”

  Even through my fatigue I could see the obvious flaw. “Anne Marie would kill me before the dark witches got the chance.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. I couldn’t guess the cause of his smile. “Or perhaps we need not tell anyone. There are many ways to approach this, Lily, for us both to benefit.”

  I wondered if maybe it was part of his cleaning house in the Alliance. But I hesitated, wondering whether I’d only heard that from Tracy and had to question its veracity. So many tangled lies to sort through. It would take me weeks to figure out what to trust again.

  I squinted at him, the soup forgotten. A slow swirl of pack magic, complicated and dense with his connection to hundreds of shifters, dominated his aura. “Why, Soren? What do you gain, if no one knows I’m aligned? And why would I want you in my head permanently? The connection we have now is bad enough.”

  “That connection may have saved your life, Lily.”

  As if I needed the reminder. I focused on the pudding. “I would have been fine. We got out of the house okay.”

  Soren shook his head. “You weren’t breathing when we got there. But I’m not going to let you distract me, Lily. If you align to me, yes, I would see benefits. First, you’re powerful and capable, and I would like reassurance that you’re not working for someone else. Second, your knowledge of dark magic exceeds my witches, and it seems like that skill set will be useful in the coming months. We still haven’t tracked down all the demons that escaped during the raids. Third, I owe you a debt, and if I’m going to repay you before you get yourself killed, I need to keep you close. And...” His lips twitched in a smile. “You drive Leif nuts, which is always fun to watch.”

  I refused to be convinced.

  “And for you...” Soren took a deep breath before ticking each point off on his fingers. “If you’re openly aligned, you get a proper ring with an Alliance crest, and all the protections that offers. A place to live, if you need it. A Styrma team at your beck and call until we kill the dark witches and know you’re safe. There would also be a salary and discretionary funds for research and supplies. And—when you are in pain, Lily, I can take it away. It is an alpha’s duty to protect his pack, and that includes bearing the burdens of my people when they can no longer shoulder those burdens themselves. I can help you. I can take away some of the darkness.”

  I swallowed hard as I put the spoon down. Everything tasted like ash. Doing memory surgery on myself seemed like a better idea with every passing moment, so I could be rid of those deep-water days. It was tempting to think he could shield me from the past. But the bad things made us who we were—fire smelted iron into steel and made it stronger. Even when those bad things made me want to crawl out of my own skin.

  “There’s too much tension with your people, Soren. It wouldn’t work.”

  “You mean Leif?” Soren glanced at his watch. “Whatever argument you had, it can’t have been that traumatic. He tore the city apart looking for you. Literally—I have to reconstruct three city blocks. And you reached for him ten times as much as you called me.”

  My eyes burned as I looked away. There wasn’t anything to mourn. Leif had done all that because Soren couldn’t afford to lose another war witch. He’d said it before. Hexing him and accusing him of trea
son only finished off whatever remained of our connection. I’d burned that bridge; it wouldn’t get rebuilt before those city blocks. The dark witches still roamed the night, and I couldn’t risk Leif sharing Brandr’s fate.

  Soren made an exasperated noise and nudged my leg with his foot. “I do not make a habit of involving myself in the romantic entanglements of my people, but from what I have seen, you and Leif are surprisingly well-suited. While I won’t speak for him, he is…unaccustomed to being out of his element to this extent. I would ask you to take pity on him when you are ready to. Even though it’s a great deal of fun watching him self-destruct into a melodramatic fool.”

  “Moriah told me about the bet. How much do you have riding on this?”

  He smiled but didn’t take the bait, instead canting his head at the door. “You want to know the only reason he’s not here right now?”

  A dozen possibilities scrolled through my head: on the prowl for his next conquest, maybe, or out drinking with Jake. Sacked out on his couch, drinking beer and congratulating himself on not having to deal with any more witch business.

  Soren’s voice dropped as he looked at his hands, shaking his head. “He’s been hunting the dark witches since the moment we found you. It’s been four days and he won’t stop.”

  My heart hurt. And the tears that had gathered in my throat at the small kindness of clean clothes escaped at this much greater kindness. They burned my cheeks, so hot I feared they would scar and the world would always see the marks.

  I wiped at my cheeks, knowing he could hear my sniffles. I tried to compose myself enough to speak in an almost-steady voice. “I didn’t realize you gave out relationship advice.”

  “Yes, well.” Soren leaned close and a few tissues fell onto the mattress next to my hand. “I don’t make a habit of it, or I’d be knee-deep in lovestruck teenagers every day. So don’t go telling anyone.”

  “Don’t tell anyone I cried, and I won’t tell anyone you pulled a Dear Abby.”

  “Agreed.” He stood. “Think about aligning, Lily. I resolved the issues with the Externals, but they won’t leave you alone for long. Stefan has it out for you.”

  I started to speak, maybe shout my refusal, but stopped as Soren turned. A mischievous grin turned his face boyish. “And I have fifty dollars in the pool, so call me when he takes you to dinner.”

  I scowled, “Get out,” and he laughed, shutting the door behind him. I barely heard him talking to someone in the hall before fatigue weighed down my eyelids and I fell back into darkness.

  Chapter 57

  I woke as Moriah threw Kyle out. His weak, “But the Alpha told me—” was no match for Moriah’s strength or determination.

  I waited until she shut the door to lift my head. Moriah sat, and guilt seized me as I saw her reddened eyes and haggard expression. “You’re awake,” she said.

  “Everyone seems surprised by that.”

  “Well,” she said, wiping quickly under her eyes. “You don’t know what you looked like when we found you. You were just…there. Anne Marie said you might not wake up, but I didn’t believe her until we got you back here and you—”

  “Sorry,” I said. “The last fight took all I had.”

  “Anne Marie told Soren the dark witch had you cornered in the basement and would have drained your life force if she hadn’t hexed him.”

  I inhaled to belittle the idea that Anne Marie could ever have saved me when I remembered how I had, in fact, gotten free. Maybe Anne Marie saw me take Sam’s magic and knew that would have contaminated me with demon magic, possibly forever, and she wanted to keep that for blackmail purposes. Or maybe she hadn’t seen and really believed she saved me. Or maybe, just maybe, she saw and wanted to protect me. I scowled. It was probably the blackmail.

  “She said they tortured you and—cut off your fingers.” Moriah glanced at my bandaged hand. “And she kept you from telling them what they wanted to know.”

  Anger burned in my gut; Anne Marie took credit once again. I struggled to keep my voice steady. “What else?”

  “She figured out that Tracy was the bad one, and she was the one who confronted and killed Tracy.”

  Breathing became difficult. I forced my eyes closed, concentrating on the feeling of each breath as I repeated Rosa’s mantra. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter if Anne Marie took credit. I didn’t want credit. If Anne Marie ran her yap about it, then the Externals would go after her instead. She helped me by claiming the spotlight.

  But still I resented it. She cheapened the fight and Tracy’s death and the sacrifices we all made, claiming to have done it all herself. She made me look like a weak, ineffective fool. I was many things, but I was not that. “That’s not exactly how it happened.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have to eventually.”

  “No,” I repeated. “Some things I’ll take to the grave.”

  She told me instead about the search after the demons attacked Soren’s house. She looked at me sideways as she mentioned Leif, how he’d been Death itself rampaging through the city. Apparently he heard me, begging for help as they tortured me, and it drove him and the wolf insane that he couldn’t reach me. My heart hurt to think of the additional pain I’d caused, but there was nothing to do about it after the fact.

  Moriah put her feet up on the bed. “We put the wedding off for a few weeks; it didn’t seem appropriate to have the ceremony the same week as the pyre. So maybe in a month we’ll try again.”

  “Bet Mimi threw a fit.”

  “She was hysterical until we found you,” Moriah said. “But when we got you back and it was obvious you helped save the coven, she started pestering Soren to allow you at the wedding. Some good may come of this.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Soren wants me to align to him,” and I repeated Soren’s proposal.

  Her eyebrows climbed higher with each additional sentence, until she let out a low whistle. “That would really piss the Morrigan off, wouldn’t it?”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “Sounds like reason enough to do it,” she said, a grin displaying most of her teeth.

  I managed a feeble laugh. It hurt my ribs.

  “Let me think it over,” she said with a more serious expression. “We can plot back at my house; you’re coming home with me. A pint of ice cream, a few pints of liquor—everything will be clearer. We’ll figure it out. We’ve got time.”

  I attempted a smile, “Sure,” and lost the rest of my train of thought in a yawn.

  She eased to her feet. “Go back to sleep. I’ll get some clothes for you. We’ll leave for the pyre tomorrow and then on to my house.”

  The pyre. I couldn’t think about that yet.

  She said something else before the door closed, but I didn’t catch it. The dark water didn’t swallow me up like before. Instead I drifted on a gentle wave.

  I woke suddenly, stark fear seizing my heart and making the blood pound in my ears. Evil crawled through the room, drenching everything in oil and hate. Sweat broke out on my forehead. No.

  The memory of a nightmare forced me out of bed, hands shaking as I called up protective wards and surrounded myself as I stared around the room. The magic didn’t feel like mine, weak and diluted and shaky. The darkness mocked me. My hand ached as I drew magic through it, the missing pinkie twitching as blue light cast shadows. “Wh-who’s there?”

  Something lurked in the dark, something breathed deeply and evenly. I shivered, backing into the corner near the bathroom as I cast the entire room in brilliant light. It was hiding somewhere. “I’ll hex. I swear. I’ll hex.”

  Panic surged in my throat as the evil grew dense around me, drowning me. I screamed.

  The door flew open and normal light flooded the room. Moriah reached for me. “Lily? What’s wrong?”

  The wards collapsed as I slid down the wall to sit, hugging my knees to my chest, and sobbed. “Something was…was in here.”
>
  She searched the room, going to the window and throwing aside the curtains. “What was it?”

  “Don’t know.” Shame crept over me. It was a nightmare. I’d dreamt they tortured me again, using my fingers for dark spells. Some war witch I was, crying over bogeymen and shadows. I ducked my head, humiliated.

  She shook her head at someone in the hall, “She’s okay,” and crouched next to me. “Hey. Let’s get you up. I’ll stay with you. Just to make sure.”

  I started to argue, but she shot me a look that brooked no objections. Moriah helped me back into bed before she returned to the half-open door. I caught a glimpse of Leif, his face lined with exhaustion as he growled orders to search the grounds, before Moriah shut the door.

  I rolled over, curled around a pillow, as she settled in the chair. The bedside table near the window always held a lamp and an alarm clock, but never before had there been a silver ring with a jade stone.

  The ring gleamed as Sam’s laughter echoed in my head. I couldn’t look away.

  I didn’t sleep for a long, long time.

  Chapter 58

  I had no recollection of how I traveled to the pyre. They held it far west of the city in an enormous open field, large enough to hold several hundred of the Alliance’s top members, with a small stand of trees to the south. Small cairns dotted the field, and a stone fence encircled a wide area. The Alliance traditionally buried its dead in their place of birth, when possible, but laid to rest their heroes in that place, that field.

  We arrived last, Moriah and I, the Alliance already assembled in a silent crowd around the pyre. It was a tall wooden structure, according to tradition, and according to tradition, Rosa and Joanne and Andre lay together. They’d fallen in battle together, they would travel onward together. White silk wrapped each of them from head to toe, and I tried not to think of what the silk hid.