Page 18 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches
SIXTEEN
The chapel Ada stood in was empty. The floor was littered with debris. Covered in wood hunks from the crumbling ceiling, caked in dust so thick it was practically carpeting, while the single tall candle in the room flickered with its black-and-gold flame.
Ada turned jar after jar around, reading the labels, as she walked along the far wall, muttering to herself. She was looking for a box, one she had misplaced hundreds of years ago. Or so she pretended. She was waiting on the shadow of Lenora MacKinnon to return, and the spirit had been gone far longer than it should have taken to assess the situation.
Sending the spirit to spy on the witches should have been as easy as breaking a bone, but they weren’t listening. Either their humanity was waning or Ada’s hold over them was. She had to believe it was the former because she could not lose the power to control these souls until she had succeeded in finding the one lost to her.
Ada’s spirits always ended up unruly—their humanity faded the more she used the bits of their souls, the more of them she took in. Bits of this person and that, a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster. Or, to be more precise, the truth of what Mary Shelley had seen when she’d stayed in the wrong castle, with the wrong ghost.
The shadows liked to torture the living, and Ada only cared to control them when she needed them. She’d never wanted children, and having an army of clingy ghosts had reinforced the belief a thousand times over.
She studied the bones on the ground before her, how lovingly they were arranged. She brushed the dust away from the skull, poking the empty eye sockets with her pinkie, waiting to feel something in her own eyes as she probed. But there was nothing. No pain or pinch. The only thing Ada felt was the gnawing ache of a lifetime of loss, and the pinprick of fear that her time would run out.
“Where are you?” she called out, the flame flickering in reply. She walked along the far wall and turned into the corridor, a board on the floor catching her eye. It was tilted up in the corner, and a silver spoon handle stuck out of the raised end.
“Ah,” she said, the memory rushing in. Of the box being sunk into the space beneath the board and the ghost storing it there. “That’s where you went.” She walked toward the board. She should have known Lenora might try to hide the paper. It was a warning. But while Lenora might think she could change the course of Ada’s plans, she was still her puppet. Nothing and no one would ever alter that. Ada reached down to pry the board up with the spoon handle, and, when that didn’t work, kicked at the board until it popped free. She knocked the raised board out of the way, revealing a dusty box. Ada reached down and opened it, the wood creaking in time with her mismatched bones. She pulled the scroll free and let out what some might call a laugh and others a bellow.
Ada unrolled the scroll and flexed her fingers as she began to read. The ache bloomed into a break, and it took everything she had in her many bones to keep reading the journal entry, to allow herself to look back.
September 1232
It wasn’t that I didn’t love Hastings. I’d known him as the boy from down the creek for so long, with his bright eyes and a smile that promised trouble. The trouble had always involved a forage into the forest, him telling me to try the next tincture I was afraid to mess up, me believing a little more in myself because of him. That sort of support made it impossible not to adore him. Hastings didn’t just befriend me, he saw me.
But he didn’t change the way I saw myself. That honor didn’t belong to him.
Hastings MacDonald became my best friend the way the leaves change on an oak tree. There are subtle signs, hints of gold mingling with the green, until one day you look up to find the most vibrant red you’ve ever seen. He was kind too. He brought me a dog when I fell and broke my leg. The resetting of the bones had been so atrocious I was too afraid to walk and spent weeks in bed. Until I had to chase the dog. I went from terrified to running in no time.
In return, I taught Hastings spells to curse his enemies. To mix in a bit of their hair or fibers from their clothes in a tincture of moonwater and pumpkin and thyme, how it would enable him to shift the tides in the autumn when they were turning on him. Soon he taught me ways to bend the wills of anyone who dared challenge me, which I used often on my poor lady-in-waiting.
Hastings and I… we were the happiest of companions… until our families had a falling-out.
The threat of war over land shifted our dynamic, with the two families at odds, and then there were no more excited grins and delicious mischief. No more star-gazing or foraging. I worried over him when the big war began, the battles growing bloody and fierce.
For a long time, there was only his letters, until those too tapered off. Months passed, a year, two. Then more.
Time had a way of helping me move on. Time and a new friend whose lips tasted of cherry wine and whose voice followed me into my dreams.
Until one day, a new enemy hundreds of miles away cropped up for both our families. The two factions decided to repair the dispute. Decided to bring the two clans back together with a binding that would be unbreakable.
I had thought to reconnect with my old friend. I’d even daydreamed of how we might perform a spell under the new moon, lay a feast for the goddess of remembrance and rebuild what had been broken.
I had been a fool to think such niceties would suffer the folly of rushed men. Instead, it was I who was gifted like a loaf of bread, packaged, and delivered to a doorstep. Promised with words that had not been anyone’s other than mine to give.
I was offered to Hastings like I was the second-best mule. Ten years and one heartbreak later, handed off to a boy who had grown into a man who fought his own battles and carried too many scars.
My friend was changed. And in due time I learned that what was lost could not be found, not when what he wanted was something I could and would never give.
“My love,” the shadow whispered, crawling out of the wall.
“I have not called for you,” Ada said, refusing to look at the shape lurking beyond her shoulder. She dared not move, lest she reveal the weakness of her heart.
“You always call for me,” it said.
Ada waited, knowing it would come to stand before her. Not quite the man he was, but as determined even in servitude.
Hastings MacDonald’s ghost was a quiet and irritating thing. It was clear he carried love for Ada, no matter what she had done to him, to them both. He also carried revenge in his bones, and Ada could never trust him because of it. Which was why she had stored the rest of his soul and humanity far away.
He had been with her the longest, and she knew his humanity was dangerous. Hastings could no longer evolve—he was dead, after all—and yet, he had been observing the world for as long as she, watching her. He was always watching, always there, and she could no more let him go than she could give up her search.
“I never call for you,” she replied, not meeting his gaze.
“You do,” he said. “You call for me even as you seek her.”
“Do not think her name,” Ada said, her pearl eyes flaring as she finally looked at him.
Hastings flickered before her, the man behind the ghost showing before it shrank back into the thing she’d made him by binding him to her, by feeding on the few remaining pieces of his soul that she kept along with all the others tucked away in the jars of her caves.
She much preferred to imbibe on living souls, but the witches of the MacKinnon line protected themselves now. They were stronger than she had ever been. She had pride over that, over how her blood and Margaret’s had made it so. Their oath and bloodletting together bound them, the same as their love—the ties that bind are simple, and for Ada and Margaret they had been true.
The coven had driven Doreen to her, and then cast out Margot. She had two living vessels waiting, trapped.
Ada smiled at Hastings. She could afford to be lenient when she was so close to getting new power, so close to the end.
“Why are you really here?” she asked.
“You have my bones.”
“I am not using them.”
“No, but the boy will.”
Ada stopped what she was doing and looked up at him. “How could he? He gave them to me.”
“You’re not as clever as you hope,” he said. “Send me to him, and I will make sure he doesn’t have the chance.”
“You would harm your own?”
“I would do whatever was required to protect you. It’s all I have ever tried to do.”
Ada shook her head. “Too risky, and you can’t be trusted. I’ll keep an eye on them all the same.”
He nodded once, his gaze going to the back wall, where the jars waited. Ada did not see the smile shift across the caverns of his face, rendering him almost human, nor see him flicker in and out one last time.
He faded from the room, shade into shadow into shade. Ada remained lost in the past, her eyes focused on the parchment in her hand and the story it contained.
Eleanor stared at the group in front of her. Ambrose, with his posture somehow both unguarded and upright. He always seemed ready to go into a battle. He shifted closer to Doreen, seemingly unaware he was doing so, as Doreen glanced at him in surprise. Doreen was a sloucher, but in a graceful I-can’t-be-bothered-to-use-my-backbone sort of way that reminded her of a cat being petted. She arched and elongated like a tabby, unlike Margot, who stood with her feet planted and her hand fisted at her hips. Power radiated off her in a more aggressive way than how it rolled from Doreen. Together, though, they were mesmerizing. It was little wonder Ada wanted them for her collection; she could last hundreds of years off their brightness, their goodness.
“We called for Eleanor and received a book?” Margot said.
“I think we found what she was telling us to find,” Doreen said.
The three sat, pulling the pages out and passing them between themselves. They could not know these words were the only true ones in the room. Ada’s words, her truth, was here in more than one place.
“It confirms Ada used her experience in the trials to re-create what she could remember. To build this place,” Margot said, as she skimmed the page.
Eleanor nodded, unseen by those before her. Magic did not stay for long in this prison. It shouldn’t exist at all, but magic didn’t follow a mortal set of rules. It created its own, and what wonderful magic it was, to have the two cousins together.
“She can’t sustain herself without a tie to this world,” Doreen said, reading over Margot’s shoulder. “That was the punishment the gods gave her for winning the trials and asking for power over a soul. They granted her request but gave her a set of parameters that would keep her from tearing the world apart.”
“She wanted the power to find the soul of the one she loved.” Ambrose gave a small smile. “It never goes as it should, does it?”
“You couldn’t have followed me,” Eleanor said to him, her mouth moving but no words rising to reach him. “And had you gone, you may not have survived the storm.”
“I could survive anything for love,” Doreen said, the truth of what Eleanor spoke finding her, though she did not know she was answering Eleanor.
“That’s what Eleanor thought too,” Margot said. “She was right, and she was wrong.” Margot turned to face her cousin. “Listen to this…
“ Ada would lay down her life a thousand, a hundred thousand, an infinite number of times over to find her. To find Margaret. To reclaim her lost true love, who she assumes is waiting, suffering. We all do her bidding, and the creatures she commands are splintered here with her.
“Eleanor is her puppet; it’s the price everyone pays for Ada making her deal with the gods,” Margot said. “All of the journals here tell half-truths, and the spirits bound to this world are half beings. Maybe that’s why the other journals sound like narrations and this one sounds like her real diary.”
Eleanor waited for them to finish piecing the journal together. Then the two women moved from the main room into the antechamber. She sent the last of her power into it, to knock aside the stone in the wall and show them one last thing they needed.
“I am sorry, Ambrose,” Eleanor whispered, as she prepared to give him what he needed to know. “The truth can set you free, but it might devastate you first.” She crossed to him, lifted her hands to his face, and pulled him close.
Ambrose blinked in surprise, sensing Eleanor, though he could not see her.
Eleanor pressed her mouth to his, soft and unyielding. She poured the truth of herself into him.
Then the candles flickered, Eleanor shifted from Technicolor back into black-and-white, and in the next mortal breath, she was gone.
As Doreen and Margot entered the nearly concealed side room, a large slab of marble tumbled out of the crumbling wall. A light flashed by the fallen slab, and Doreen was reminded of the stone table in the Goodbye Castle that Ambrose had told her was there to honor the dead. As she drew closer, she realized that bones had been resting on the marble, but they were now deposited at the base of it. She went to take a step back, but paused when an object to the right of the slab caught her eye. The marble had broken through the wood in the floor, showing a box concealed there. Doreen reached for it.
Her thumb pricked the edge of the box, a drop of blood pooling there. As soon as it dropped onto the latch, the box clicked open.
“‘By the pricking of my thumb,’” Doreen whispered. She opened the box. Another journal lay within. This one did not look like the others. It was soft, the cover green, and it reminded her of a Bible. There was something precious here in these pages, she could feel it. Gently, she removed it and slid it into her pocket.
She glanced over at Margot, who was examining the far wall of the chapel that led outside. A crack had splintered there. It was spreading, reminding Doreen of the lines in the family tree crest at Ambrose’s castle. How the limbs of the tree stretched out and curved and looped.
Slowly, then all too quickly, cracks sprouted in the other walls in the chapel, and the floor groaned. Margot spun around, eyes wide. “We need to get out of here, Dore.”
The chapel shuddered as the walls shifted. The bones and rock on the ground vibrated, and the far wall groaned as more rock broke free and fell.
“It’s ready to cave in,” Margot said, panic in her voice.
“Okay, come on,” Doreen said, her hand checking to make sure the book was secure.
She hurried back to where Ambrose stood, swaying on his feet. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were glazed. She yanked, physically pulling Ambrose from his daze. “It’s time to go,” she said. “The whole place is going to come down.”
“Grab as many bone journals as you can,” Margot called, scooping up books from the pews. Doreen and Ambrose seized what they could, keeping one eye on the far wall as it shook and cracked. Doreen made sure she grabbed the books with her and Margot’s names before nudging Ambrose.
Together, they all stumbled out and onto the grounds behind the chapel right as it wheezed out a puff of stone and dust, sending debris flying toward them. As it rained down, they ducked, using the books as protection over their heads.
The chapel emitted a sound like an old woman sneezing through a cloud of perfume. Then the building settled, and all was as still as the resting dead.
Doreen and Margot gathered the books scattered around them while Ambrose removed his overshirt. Doreen struggled to focus as she watched him undress. His forearms were as solid as the rest of him, his wrists tapering to lead into hands that belonged on an artist. It shouldn’t be seductive, the juxtaposition of strength and elegance, but it summed the man up so perfectly. He was careful and methodical in how he piled the books on his shirt, and she couldn’t help but think that he’d be equally gentle and methodical in any activity—until he wasn’t. The power banked in him was like a cannon waiting to be ignited, and as she tracked the exposed skin on his stomach when he shifted, her mouth ran dry.
She thought of the journal entry she had not written. Of the truth in those pages.
She wanted him, and that scared her. Doreen wanted a man who was head over heels for a ghost and responsible for her being unable to find love. She could die because of him, and she couldn’t stop thinking of how it would feel to slide her fingers up to where the skin was peeking out by his stomach, to inch her fingertips under his T-shirt. She wanted to scrape the scruff on his chin with her teeth, to drag her lips across his wrist and smell the skin there.
She wanted to keep him safe, to make him hers. To win the trials and his heart. It was more than this craving; it was how he made her laugh when she didn’t want to, how he had been through hell and still was somehow clever and kind. He believed in her. He didn’t try and hide magic from her, but instead showed her how to use her own. Ambrose saw her for who she truly was, and he accepted her.
And more than that, she wanted him to see her. She wanted him to want her, to dream of her, to fall for her the same way she was falling for him.
Admitting the truth was like a fire hose blasting across her skin, burning the need into it. Saturating her with a love so heady she thought she might burst. Into tears or fireworks or both.
Doreen had never known this type of love; she had hoped it was possible, but she hadn’t known it might feel so consuming.
“Doreen?” Ambrose called, as he finished tying his overshirt into a makeshift bag to hold as many books as possible. He lifted his gaze to hers.
Doreen stared at him, everything about him in sharp focus. He narrowed his eyes, and she looked away, the words and emotions clogged in her throat. She glanced over to Margot, who was watching her with a knowing glimmer in her eyes and a sympathetic tilt to her chin.
Margot could read her like the alphabet. Doreen blushed and pushed the hair from her face. “I’m here.”
Ambrose passed the books he held over to Margot. He didn’t speak again right away, but he kept those aquamarine eyes on her. Doreen was charged, standing so close to him, terrified to move a muscle. Could he tell what she was thinking; was she wearing her love like a flashing sign across her face?
“We need to go back to the castle,” he said with a one-shoulder shrug. “I know the way now.”
Then he slung the bag over his shoulder and started walking, his steps sure, his head high.
The ground before them glittered like a field of diamonds. A lone pluck of violin strings rose up and wrapped itself around Doreen, tugging as though connected to her heart. The organ itself knocked three times in her chest, her heart giving a painful thunk as Doreen admitted she was falling in love.
A sense of knowing unfurled and rooted. She was in love with a stupid stingray. As the thought settled, the path to the castle grew clearer in her mind.
Heart.
Without intending to do so, Doreen had completed the second trial. She’d found a love story, her own.
Margot reached out, grabbing Doreen’s hand, and gave it a squeeze. Ambrose did not wait for them. He brushed a hand over his lips as he marched on, not bothering to look back.
Unfortunately, she realized her love story was one-sided. Ambrose was in love with a ghost, and Doreen was on her own.
She glanced down, certain the thump she felt was a book dropping to the ground. The journal was still clasped in her hand.
As Ambrose got farther away, and Margot tugged on her arm for them to follow, Doreen realized it had only been her heart plummeting to her feet.