Page 10 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

NINE

Dust doesn’t bother ghosts. Dust, dirt, grime, cracked floors, scattered glass, damaged hearts, dried blood, cracked toenails. These were things to be used. To blend into paste and press to the wind as they merged and formed something new. Something petrifying.

Ada liked decay. She liked mess and disorder, the way the world was more broken than whole. It was a reflection, she thought, of what waited for her in the mirror. In her caves, she moved in and out of the shadows, taking a pinch of shade here, a nibble of essence there. Her hands roamed, and if one looked close enough, they might see the way they pulled a hint of light from the darkness.

Shadows were echoes of souls, so the bits didn’t fill her up the way the real thing did, but she found it satisfying in the way icing complements a cake. They were fuel and they were power.

Ada stopped in the crypt hidden inside the tunnels under the canals. Here was a forgotten graveyard, one that once housed the bodies of former queens and kings, of witches meant to rule and reign. Superstitious, that’s what the living were, and why they forgot about these witches and their lineage. If they had remembered, they’d have to be terrified of them. Creatures who had held the true magic of the world, before it was plucked away by the gods.

She crossed to one of the crumbling holes in the far wall and reached inside. She pulled out a small box with a set of symbols carved across its surface. She scratched in new lines, the symbols solving the lock, and then opened the box, revealing a smaller box made of pewter.

She scratched the same symbols into its surface and the top sprung open, revealing a small wooden doll, with a gaping mouth and tattered dress.

Ada removed the doll, brushing a hand down the few strands of human hair clinging to its head. She pressed a finger to one brow and then the other, before singing softly to it. She cradled it in her arms, circling the room, the haunting lullaby bouncing off the floors and walls, filling the air.

“Wake for me,

Light the day,

Bring me truth,

Show me the way.”

As Ada sang, the doll’s eyes filled with light, blinking up at her. Impossibly, its mouth stretched wider, a cavernous yawn, emitting a brilliant glow. Light sparked and glittered, and Ada lowered her face to the doll’s, pursing her lips as though she were preparing to kiss the screaming mouth.

She leaned in, hovering an inch away, and sang louder. The light lifted from the doll like breath on an exhale and flowed from its mouth into Ada’s until her form flickered. Ada’s eyes shifted from pearls to an iridescent violet, and back again. She drew in a long lilting sound, like a deep bell being rung, before she burst into a firework of dazzling light and ether: particles and starlight. The remaining dust in the room flew into the air and sprinkled down, raining ashes and history. The doll rolled onto the floor, rocking from side to side, its mouth open, the eyes blackened out.

Ada was more, but someone, somewhere, was less.

Doreen fell for a very long handful of seconds before hitting the water hard. It slapped against her side, bubbles coming up and tickling her nose as she tried to pinwheel her arms. She couldn’t feel Ambrose’s hand anymore. He had let go, or she had let go, and now she was going to drown in a murky body of water beneath the castle.

Doreen thought of what a tour guide had once told her, about how the people who lived in castles had thrown their bodily fluids out the upper windows and into the moats that surrounded them. She was swimming in pee water… or worse. Of course, there could be fish and other creatures in the water, so they likely peed in it as well. Really, she was swimming in a petri dish, that might also have a Loch Ness Monster, which would have a lot of byproduct, and… she forced her mouth to stay closed as the scream built and the pressure to breathe crushed against her lungs. She swam up, and up, and up, and as she reached for the surface, her breath fighting to get free, she remembered.

The Goodbye Castle didn’t have a moat. Or a body of water surrounding it, outside of the sea beyond the cliffs.

Where the hell was she?

Doreen broke through the surface, gasping and panicking. She looked over to see Ambrose swimming toward her. Strong arms slicing through the dark water. Relief cut through her, until she took in the terror on his face.

“Go!”

“What?”

“Now,” he shouted.

Doreen saw beyond Ambrose’s broad shoulders to where the water splashed behind him. There was foam floating on top of the navy waves, ripples spiraling out. But her mind struggled to compute the rest of the image. What she was seeing was impossible. Rising out of the water were two large nostrils attached to an elongated snout. Wide eyes tinged with crimson flashed as it surfaced above the water for a moment. Sharp, pointed ears peeked out, twitching back. As it dove, its jaws snapped into the water, as though it were practicing how it would eat them, and that’s when she understood.

She was seeing not a horse, but a myth. A kelpie.

The breath froze in her lungs, and she tried to think. There was no physical way they could ever outrun a kelpie. They moved at an impossible speed on water and land.

She knew enough about the creatures from Stella’s library and the mythology tucked away there. There were few approved books Doreen and Margot hadn’t perused during the hot and endless summers of their youth. But she had no idea how to get rid of a kelpie.

The not-quite-a-horse gave a cry that was part whinny and part roar, and Doreen wished for Margot. She would know what to do. Margot had handled their last water threat: one spring they had gone swimming in No Man’s Lake on the edge of town and faced a pack of abused dogs that had gotten loose. They had been in the center of the lake when they heard the dogs prowling on the shore. Doreen had panicked, screaming as she saw them slinking into the water. Margot had asked Doreen to swim closer to her. Then when Doreen tried to rush her to shore, Margot had quietly told her to wait. She’d been calm, controlled.

Once the feral dogs were close enough, Margot had started to cast. A spell she later confessed she’d made up in the bathtub years prior while playing with her Barbies. Without missing a beat, Margot spelled the water to form an underwater cyclone. It pulled the dogs under until the girls were up on the shoreline and far enough away before she released them.

It was Margot’s spell, and it would have to do.

The words returned to Doreen in a rush the way all key memories find their way home. She spoke them quickly and clearly:

“Into the water

You will go

To lose your strength

And save our souls.”

A child’s spell, pulled from one of her cousin’s favorite poems, it had the potency of rarely being used and hardly ever spoken. The water swooshed away from Doreen, careening out and into the racing kelpie. It let out an anguished cry before being sucked under.

Doreen didn’t wait. She shifted from treading water to freestyle and swam as fast as her arms could pull her. She reached the water’s edge and clambered up, and then Ambrose was beside her, dripping wet and looping an arm around her waist once more. Together, they ran up the embankment and straight into the waiting entrance of what looked exactly like, and yet could not be, the Goodbye Castle.

The fires lit as soon as they crossed the entryway, and the doors slammed shut behind them. Doreen stumbled forward and dropped into the seat of a tall wingback chair. She fought to catch her breath as her eyes took in the room. It looked almost exactly as it had the last time she had been in it. Two oversized fireplaces, and a looming hallway and stairwell. Only now, there was no marble table, no scent of cedar and clove. The air was perfumed instead with the aroma of decaying roses. The addition of the two deep-green wingback chairs weren’t the only changes either.

Directly above Doreen and Ambrose floated a chandelier. At least, that’s what Doreen thought it was. It hovered overhead, a series of hooked pieces of ivory tethered together with enough space for candles to be wedged inside.

“That’s new,” Doreen said, looking up, and as she spoke, the candles flickered to life. Black flames licked up into the dusty rafters.

Ambrose squinted overhead. “That’s a statement not even my family would make.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are a lot of uses for bones, but a candelabra is not one the MacDonalds typically chose for austere décor.”

“Those are bones?” Doreen asked, her toes curling in her wet shoes at the idea. “Those poor deer.”

“I doubt those are from Bambi.”

“No?”

He shrugged.

“If you’re implying those are human bones, I just… I can’t.” She stared up, the boat shape of the centerpiece shifting from an intricate vessel to a basic structure of connected bones. Understanding clicked in Doreen’s mind and she let out a squeak. It was a rib cage, and spreading out from it were longer bones attached to a series of smaller ones. “It’s a torso, with arms and hands. Dear gods.”

Ambrose shifted closer to stand beside her at the edge of the chair. “The original castle was built with the bones of those who wronged my family. Why should this be any different?”

“I am trying to avoid the reality that we are not where we should be, thanks,” Doreen said, swallowing.

The moat, the chairs, the bone chandelier. That fucking kelpie. They weren’t in their version of Scotland anymore. They couldn’t be.

“Where did we go when we went through that door and over the ledge?”

“Where do you think?”

“I think part of me is scared of the answer.”

“Let me know when you get over your avoidant tendencies,” Ambrose said, closing his eyes and resting a hand on the back of her chair. “Or if you hear that hound of hell coming.”

“Hounds are dogs.”

“Hound means to pursue,” he said. “We have pursuers here in the—”

She shook her head. “Don’t finish that sentence.”

“—motherworld.”

“Shit.”

Doreen pulled her knees up into her chest. She wrapped her arms around them and tucked her forehead into the crook of her knees. She turned her head to the side, needing the reassurance of seeing him. “The trials are in the motherworld? As in the underworld?” As in purgatory, the stopover between the living and the dead. The gateway to hell.

“Where else would they be?”

“Somewhere sunny and nice.”

“Sure. What did you do before?” he asked, one eye peeking open. “To the kelpie?”

“I used one of Margot’s spells she created when we were kids to torture her dolls. She used it to save us from a pack of angry dogs when we were in the middle of a lake once.”

Ambrose was silent for a loaded moment. Doreen wasn’t sure how she felt about being able to read his silences. It was too intimate, especially when she considered how prominent his cheekbones were against the dark slips of hair that clung along the ridge of his brow. She wanted to brush the strands back, know how his skin felt to the touch. Gods, being in the motherworld was scrambling her brain.

“Your cousin, the one who warned you, that’s Margot?”

“Yes, she’s my best friend. Or she was. Before she married her Dean.”

His mouth twitched. “I didn’t realize a name could sound like a curse.”

“You’ve never met a Dean.”

“You are telling me she can create new spells?”

“Um.”

“Which means, since you used her original creation, you can mimic.”

“None of that is what I said.”

“It was implied. You’re a mimic.”

“I am extraordinary,” she said, feeling exposed, and yet, caring less. They were in an underworld, attempting trials, and they were a team, just the two of them. Truly. No going back now.

“It’s not done,” he said, both eyes open and on hers. Warming her in ways the fire was failing to.

“What isn’t?”

“New spells and mimicking them. New spells require a counsel, or at least a coven. Solitary witches can’t create them, or they didn’t used to be able to. Solitary witches can’t copy and re-create without knowing the intricacies.”

“You’ve clearly never met Margot.”

“It’s not only her, but also you. The thirteenth generation.” He let out a huff that may have been a sigh. “The rules do not apply to you as they do your ancestors, do they? Be careful of the magic you use, Doreen. When you create a spell in a place, the place keeps the memory of the spell. The truth of it.”

He closed his eyes again with a sigh, and she turned hers back to the fire, relieved and a little annoyed Ambrose wasn’t more intimidated. The logs crackled and snapped, and beneath the fire she heard it. A whisper of a melody. Not longing, not like the sigil. This melody was broken. It felt like a pause in the air, the kind where you reveal a secret only to have it used against you. Sorrowful. Distant sounds, a dissonant chord, one plucked too long before it was played again, this time with the ringing of a bell echoing at the end, close and then far off.

“Do you hear that?”

He shook his head.

Doreen stood and shifted closer. She gazed into the flames, watching as they transformed from gold to black. Inside them she saw a room, an antechamber, and a small wooden doll. As she stared, the doll rolled onto its side, its eyes finding hers and its mouth gaping. Doreen shivered, and the song whispered from its gaping mouth, the bells chiming, and the guitar plucking a mournful string. Doreen leaned closer, an inch, two, a breath further toward the flames and…

She was yanked back, one of Ambrose’s arms around her waist, her heart in her throat.

“Are you trying to kill us both?” he asked, his voice low and thick with something she would call fear if she knew him any less.

“I…”

“Nearly dove into the fire .”

“There was a doll,” she said, her heart racing, the song still wrapped around her tighter than his arm. “A room and a song.”

“It’s a trap. The whole place will be a trap. We can’t trust it or anything in it.” He released her and took a step away. “We can’t linger here any longer; we need to find the next step in the trials, complete it, and get the hell out.”

“It’s ridiculous the trials are held in this shadow of a world,” she said, anger slipping out with her confusion and fear. “There is no otherworld, or there shouldn’t be.”

“The trials could never be in our world, Doreen,” Ambrose said, rubbing at his brow. “They clearly require a leap of faith, which we took. I didn’t consider where we’d leap to, but I should have.”

A click-click-clack , long and startling taps, echoed down and around them, and drew their attention from the fire.

Doreen looked around, before she realized where the sound was coming from. Up. Her eyes were slow to travel to the ceiling and to the chandelier looming there. A single bone twitched, and then another. A slender finger, ivory and spiderish, lifted. One hand tapped out against the rib cage, a haunting melody that sounded like a person dancing into the room. The notes were familiar, and she tried to place them.

“He’s right. You really shouldn’t linger too long,” a voice said, causing Doreen to jump back into Ambrose. A form materialized from the shadows flickering against the far wall. It drifted forward, the shape of a woman taking form. She was of medium height, with wide hips and long dark hair.

“Master of the lords and ladies,” she said to Ambrose, before bowing. Ambrose blinked at the ghost. Sinclair had greeted him like that whenever he returned to the castle in the evening, teasing him that he was the little master of all the lords and ladies around him. Could this be his valet?

“Sinclair?” Ambrose said, as he stared, blinking, at the ghostly form.

“In one realm, yes, you did call me that,” the ghost said.

“What do I call you here?” he asked, the disbelief still heavy in his voice.

“I am the creature of the castle,” Sinclair said. “I haunt this realm, and you are not where you belong.”

“Is that why we shouldn’t linger?” Doreen asked, her hand automatically shifting to rest on Ambrose’s shoulder. He relaxed into her palm at the contact.

“No,” the ghost said, turning to face her. “You should not linger, Lady MacKinnon, for the rules of the upper world do not apply here. There is nothing that will not hunt you here, nothing that will come without cost.”

“We’re here for the trials, Sinclair,” Ambrose said. “We are aware there will be a cost.”

Sinclair’s mouth opened and shut. Once. Twice. She tilted her head, as though listening, before replying. “The trials are more than you imagine. So may the cost be. You must prove strength. Then courage. Then cunning. They are not easy.”

“We are aware the tasks require all of our focus and will,” Ambrose said.

“You consent?”

“We are here, aren’t we?” Ambrose said. When Sinclair turned to Doreen, she gave a slight wave and nod. It was odd to converse with ghosts, especially in a place as cold and strange as this.

“Then you must seek the place where voices rise, where what should stay buried cannot, and where only the clever prevail. Find the cave of echoes, and do it fast before you lose your way.”

“A creepy ghost would know where to go,” Doreen muttered, her eyes drifting upward once more. “I hope it didn’t bait us into a trap.”

When she looked back, she found Sinclair bowing so low her hair brushed the floor. She shifted to go, before turning to them one last time, her form flickering. The ground rumbled and Sinclair’s face grew clear.

“You are not safe,” she said, her eyes on Doreen. In them, she read a warning, and worse—fear. For Ambrose? For her? “You cannot be here. Do not dare to trust.”

Before she could ask more, the ghost was gone.

“What the hell was that?” Doreen asked.

“I have no idea.”

“She seemed scared.”

“And angry.”

“I didn’t think sprits had emotions,” Doreen said.

“They don’t,” he said. “Not in the human way. At least not outside of Ada, but I think being a psychopath and a shade is less emotion and more personality type.”

Doreen huffed out a sigh. “Your valet just warned us of imminent danger. Can you not take this a little seriously?”

Ambrose stared at her. “What part of jumping off the ledge of a castle, nearly being eaten by a kelpie, and then saving you from destroying yourself in a fire is me not taking this seriously?”

“The part where you focus on the wrong thing.”

He shook her hand off. “I know what matters here, and it’s not the chandelier or the fireplace.”

“No kidding,” she said, bringing her palms together, hating how his rejection cut.

“Sinclair told us what we face with the trials, and the location of the first one. I know where the cave of echoes is, any good Scotsman does. I can take my family ghost’s warning at face, or spirit-face, value, because I do trust Sinclair.”

“Fine, oh wise one,” she said. “If we end up dead, it’s your fault.”

“Today is not the day for our death. Let’s move,” he called over his shoulder before walking down the hall, away from Doreen and toward the front door.

“Smart-ass ancient idiot,” Doreen muttered.

“I heard that,” he yelled.

Shaking her head, she followed him out.

The ghost in the wall, unseen by them both, watched and waited.