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I meet her eyes. There’s a lot of confusion in them, as well as something else, something that looks like wariness.

She blinks and clears her throat, even as the witches around me continue to stare.

“Exceptional work,” she finally says before clearing her throat again. She turns from me then and proceeds to lecture the class about the stela and the power words that could be taken from it.

I frown as I read the rest of the stone tablet. It discusses martial victories against the Nine Bows—the various enemy nations of Egypt. The words on this stela would be better used to invoke dark magic, which is rooted in violence. They shouldn’t be in this textbook.

A bloodcurdling scream cuts through my thoughts, the sound coming from somewhere outside the room.

Mistress Bellafonte pauses and gives us all a reassuring smile. “Probably just Mistress Takada looking at all the spells she must grade,” she says jokingly before peering down at her notes once more.

But another scream follows it, and this one continues on and on.

“Murder!” someone finally cries. “A witch has been murdered!”

CHAPTER15

“They sayher eyes were gouged out and her heart was ripped from her chest,” says Charlotte, the witch sitting across from me. I sit with her, Sybil, and several other witches in our dining room, all of us eating dinner.

I make a face into my food. The details are quickly making me lose my appetite.

“I heard she was naked,” adds a witch named Raquel, and she looks as though she wants to hurl.

For the twentieth time today, my heart races. Memnon shows up last night full of ominous threats, and now a witch is dead?

It’s just a coincidence, I try to tell myself.He wants vengeance onyou, not other witches.

“Poor Kate,” another witch says.

“You knew her?” Charlotte asks, raising her ice-blond brows.

Overhead, the lights in the wrought iron chandeliers flicker, making the gloomy atmosphere all the more intense.

“Mm-hmm. She was a year above me, but she’d taken a leave of absence to work for some company that needed witches. Can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t know she was coming back to school.”

“I think she did move back,” Sybil says. “I’m pretty sure I saw her moving into the house—right down the hall from you, Selene,” she says, bumping my side.

“She’s my neighbor?” I vaguely remember speaking to a few of the girls who lived on my floor, but I don’t remember anyone named Kate.

“Was,” Raquel corrects me.

There are so many wide, spooked eyes around our table. And when I glance at the other tables in the room, the witches present are tense, and their conversations are subdued. I think everyone is considering how the witch found on the coven’s property could have been them.

Another witch with wiry hair and a sharp nose sits down, dropping a massive leather journal on the table. “I want to know what her final words were,” the witch says.

My gaze moves to her shoulder, where a—is that a newt?—sits perched.

“What’s that?” Raquel nods at the book.

“It’s my own Ledger of Last Words.”

“Olga,” Sybil chastises. “Now is really not the time.”

“Actually, now isexactlythe time.” Olga’s eyes get a fanatical shine to them. “And I’m in the process of getting approval to pull Kate’s final words. It could help catch the killer.”

“That’s still disturbing as shit,” says the witch at the table whose name I still don’t know.

Olga lifts a shoulder. “Never said I wasn’t disturbed.” She laughs, and some of the women at the table laugh with her until it dies away. In its wake is a tense silence, one only punctuated by the scrape of silverware.