Page 19 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

SEVENTEEN

The Goodbye Castle’s stark stone walls and climbing lilac wisteria stood out vibrantly against the hazy indigo skies. This time, there were no melodies following the travelers as they made their way up to the arch and moved inside, and the castle’s fires flared to life as soon as the three entered. The walk there had been brisk and quiet, save for the loud thudding of Doreen’s heart in her chest.

Ambrose had not spoken so much as a vowel as he led them down a path, onto a road, up a hill, and down another path. Doreen had the sense he could have led them in his sleep. He didn’t miss a step. He also didn’t look at her. Not once.

It was unnerving how she had disappeared from his consciousness. Or so she felt.

“You okay?” Margot asked her, as Ambrose left them in the entryway of the castle to walk down a hall.

“Sure,” Doreen said. “Never better.”

“Dore,” Margot said.

“Remember when Nick Hargroves was obsessed with you, and you cried for days after you realized it wasn’t real?”

“How could I forget?”

“Remember how I didn’t say a word, I just brought you Skittles and horror graphic novels of zombies eating hearts?”

“Some of the best stories I’ve ever read.”

“Let’s invoke the same unspoken rule now.”

“A few years ago you declared processed candy vile and disgusting.”

Doreen’s stomach rumbled and she sighed. “I would eat my weight in Skittles right now.”

“Let’s see if we can’t find something to eat in the horror of this place. Any idea how we can find the kitchen?”

Doreen shrugged. “No clue.” She looked around and had a thought. “Uh… Sinclair?”

The slender ghost walked out of the fireplace, and Margot let loose a scream.

“Holy ghosts, don’t do that,” Margot said, a hand over her heart.

Sinclair dipped into a low bow. “Apologies, I didn’t realize we had a lady in the house. How may I assist?”

“Margs, meet Sinclair, Ambrose’s valet. Sinclair, is there a kitchen, and can you help us with food? The kind living people eat. I assume you dine on the air of inequity or the sorrow of the masses.”

Sinclair lifted a brow. “I prefer to devour the happiness of a quiet afternoon, but I believe I can help with your needs.”

True to her word, Sinclair led them to the kitchen in the lowest level of the house. It was a staff kitchen, and it was both large and imposing. There, Doreen and Margot found a fully stocked pantry.

“How is this here?” Doreen asked, studying the various fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts.

“It stocked itself when you arrived,” Sinclair said.

“The food just appeared?” Doreen said.

“It disappeared from the gardens and reappeared here.”

“A self-sustaining kitchen,” Margot said. “Clever.”

“It’s tied to the needs of its host,” Sinclair said. Her mouth moved, but no sounds came out. There it was—a frozen glitch in Sinclair, similar but different to the one with Eleanor. Sinclair cleared her throat and spoke again. “I do hope it will help. If you have need of me again, you only have to ring that bell, on the far wall, or call my name.”

Then Sinclair was drifting toward the bell, and through it.

“That was odd,” Margot said.

“The frozen-mouth thing?” Doreen asked.

Margot nodded.

“Did it remind you of Eleanor, and her glitches from black-and-white to in living color?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

They stared after her for a moment before Margot finally cleared her throat. “I think it’s time you read, while I whip up something for us to eat.”

Doreen nodded. She climbed onto the large stone table in the middle of the kitchen, sat crisscross-applesauce, and opened the green journal, eager to see what secrets it held. After rolling her shoulders back, she nodded to herself and began to read.

Autumn 1289

It started with a kiss.

Or to be honest, it started with a girl. The summer our family came to stay was the summer everything changed. She was my first friend, and the first person I met who I couldn’t stop staring at. I tried. I even forced myself to count the minutes when I wasn’t looking at her so I wouldn’t be tempted to. It became a game. Can I get to one thousand before I allow a glance? How high can I go? What if I count other things, the number of objects in the room that are blue?

It was astonishing how beautiful she was, how smart and funny, and everything about her looked so soft and warm.

She loved the garden. The stars and the sea.

Eventually, she loved me.

It started with a girl, which led to a kiss, which changed everything.

Doreen stopped reading as Margot slid a plate with freshly sliced strawberries, almonds, carrots, and cashews before her. She grabbed a handful and chewed greedily before she registered that Ambrose had come into the room. She swallowed, twice, and put the book down. Margot had placed a mug of water by her as well, and Doreen drank. Ambrose watched her, tracking all of her movements. It shouldn’t have felt so intoxicating, but Doreen could barely breathe while his eyes were on her.

“Do we think it’s Ada?” Margot asked.

“It sounds like her, and the date is right.”

“Ada and a girl, huh?” Margot asked with a nod, tossing a cashew into her mouth.

Doreen nodded. “Can’t imagine that would be well received in their time.”

“So does this mean we have two of Ada’s journals, then?”

“I guess, though I don’t know why this one was locked away when her other pages were in the main room.”

“I wonder if it was real for them,” Ambrose asked, moving farther into the room. “Does the book say?”

Doreen returned to the book. She ate another handful of nuts and vegetables, swallowed, and resumed reading.

Winter 1292

Hastings has returned, bringing with him a storm. Biting winds so cold they freeze the tip of your nose and an unforgiving rain. The wet sinks past all layers of clothing, nipping into the bone. Fire does little to chase it away; the drafts find us without hesitation in and out of our homes.

Our last visit was tense. There is a sickness in her, a gnawing worry about us being caught. She is pulling away. The looks between us don’t last as long. When I enter a room, she barely acknowledges me. Occasionally, she leaves as soon as I take up my knitting and sit.

She leaves tomorrow. The clan meeting will soon be over, and I am not sure when she will return.

Hastings haunts the hallways; he doesn’t speak, but the looks he gives me are ones I know well. They remind me of the ones I have given to her.

The storm is a warning of what is to come.

I do not know how we will survive it.

How I will win her heart and refuse his.

“Was Ada married?” Margot asked, interrupting Doreen. “What do we know about the queen of the dead?”

“She was not,” Ambrose said. “She was betrothed to Hastings MacDonald. The handfasting never took place. A feud arose and the MacDonalds broke the arrangement.”

“Because of Margaret?”

“Because of Hastings,” Ambrose said. “Or that was the legend in our family. They said he only wanted to marry for love and found it elsewhere. He never settled, not even for more money and land.”

“And Ada?”

“She lived to the ripe old age of eighty. Ancient in those days. She never married, and her clan remained one of the greats. There was a sister, younger, I believe, who bonded their clan to others.”

“What about the marker in front of the chapel?” Doreen said, locking eyes with Ambrose. “Margaret MacKinnon.”

“It’s possible,” he said. “The marker for her was the following year of the last entry you read.”

“Shit,” Doreen said, skimming ahead.

“Cursed from the beginning,” Margot murmured, before eating a grape.

Spring 1294

It has taken me time to look back on what happened. To be willing to crack open the thick oak door with its angry iron fittings and large metal portcullis. There is a thread of knowing, perhaps not noticeable to adults. It’s a truth children know, one accessible when you aren’t doubting the truth of what could be and what is. I forgot to tap into that knowledge for too long, even with my powers being as great as they are, even with the tether—a very real thread growing between me and her.

The night of the céilí brought music and laughter, and a coil of tension so tight it thrummed through my whole body. Being near them both under the banner of celebration of our three clans coexisting should have left me on a high. However, it was both easier and harder to tolerate the proximity with the candlelight and flutes and bonfires whose ashes floated to the tops of the tree line.

I sat with my feet bare, tapping against the smooth stones. With every other tap, my big toe scraped against the rough patch of boulder. It coincided with the beat of my heart, and the feeling of eyes on me, a prickle of skin to the left of my shoulder blade. I didn’t want to look back, afraid the wrong person would be watching. It was amazing how much of my day was ruled hoping for the right person to see me.

Not wanting to stay another moment in the anticipation, I left the courtyard and walked down toward the cliffs. I could have taken the walk even in a night at its fullest dark, with all the stars—every last one—blinked out from the sky.

The ocean drew me to it, in the same way the tilt of her head drew me to her.

I reached the edge, stopped, and waited. It never crossed my mind that I would remain alone at the edge of my world on the lush hardscape of the land my family cared for, the land that cradled our bones long after our lives were lived on this earth.

The truth was, I simply miscalculated who would join me. Hastings’s footsteps fell hard and fast. He did not hesitate in his movements. The gait of the man was as sure and determined as the heart of him.

“You are avoiding the world,” he said, coming to stand at my elbow. I did not have to look over my shoulder to know how he would be standing, with his legs planted, his chest out. Hastings was born to take up space.

His eyes, however, would remain roaming over the terrain and horizon, into spaces few could ever see in the dark. Danger lurked in every corner for the men and women of our clans. I knew this, but unlike him, I simply did not care. I had power on my side, and enough of it that I had rarely ever been concerned about the things that went thump in the night.

I did not bother turning my head to answer him.

“I cannot avoid it when I live in it.”

“Then perhaps you are avoiding me.”

“I haven’t managed such a feat since the summer I turned thirteen.”

“You refused to leave your room. It was a quiet season, that.”

“I was sick with fever for weeks.”

“You are barely mortal; I don’t see how you could be sick.” He laughed at the joke, one he loved to make. Hastings saw me as stronger than his mightiest enemy. He was not wrong.

“I experience all the mortal atrocities, I assure you.”

He hummed, the sound low and friendly, like a childhood lullaby.

“You know what is coming,” he said.

“You are referring to the handfasting,” I said, never one to run from a truth. I did not plan to marry him, but I had to discover a way out first. I would not hurt my friend. But I would never betray my heart.

“Yes,” he said. “Much will change.”

“Change is always coming; it’s as constant as those waves beneath us seeking the sea.”

He reached for me then, his fingers capturing a loose strand of hair. He brushed through it before releasing it and me. Then his footsteps were receding, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

“That’s all there is,” Doreen said with a sigh. She flipped a few pages ahead and found a page with ten words written across it. “No, wait.”

“What does it say?” Ambrose asked.

Doreen looked up, and behind Ambrose was Sinclair, watching them.

Sinclair shook her head, and Doreen looked back to the words.

“‘The spell is the truth. The truth is the spell.’ I… well, Ada said it to me.”

“I’ve heard the aunts say it before as well,” Margot said, frowning.

“Another family spell?” Doreen asked.

“Or a spell for sending?” Margot said. “Stella said something similar right before she cast me out.”

“So it is a spell for casting out…” Doreen glanced up and Sinclair faded away. “Or summoning.”

Doreen swallowed, and then she took a breath and spoke the words. The rest of the pages filled in, but with a different handwriting.

I stood beneath the stars, speaking to the earth. Calling the vibrations up into me, sending them back down, a blast into the ocean creating jets that never reached where I stood but called to me all the same. It was our game, and the earth was always ready and waiting.

A spray of leaves rained down and I held my arms up and out, smiling as they fluttered into my outstretched hand. The left one. The one Ada would have held, if we were alone and far enough away from home on a walk to forage.

I knew it was her, and I knew she would need answers I didn’t have. There was no future here, and there was no way around any of it. But if you couldn’t find a door in a castle wall, you only had to knock out a window. Power had been granted to me, more than any other witch in our family. More than anyone in the family knew. I would find a way to blast through.

“Did he find you?” she asked.

“He always does.”

“It’s not unlike the way you always find me,” she said.

I nodded. She wasn’t wrong.

“We can’t keep pretending we don’t know how this ends,” she said.

I turned at that, my hands fisting in anger, until I saw her face. How crumpled her brow and forehead, how deep the frown that pulled at her lips. Then I wanted to shake her.

“How can you not even fight it inside your own mind?” I asked. “If you aren’t willing to put up the fight for me before it comes to fruition, it will never work.”

“It was never going to from the beginning,” Ada said, her voice soft. “You know how I feel. I would do anything to be together, but there is no together.”

“Anything is possible; we simply have to find the right solution.”

“The right solution is for our families to stay out of fighting each other. It’s going well enough. Do you really want to risk a war for us?”

I wanted to snort at the nonsensical idea, but I couldn’t. While I could protect myself and Ada from outside forces, not even my power could stop my family from making rash or stupid decisions. I had tried to bind them before; it was impossible to control the line of my blood.

“I won’t let anyone take you from me,” I said. “You have to decide if you’re willing to fight for us, to run for us.”

“Margaret.” Ada whispered my name, and it was so full of longing that my knees shook.

Ada wasn’t a fighter, but I needed her to try. She met my eyes, and I couldn’t stop myself—I reached for her, pulling her into my arms. “Perhaps I have enough fight for the both of us,” I said, making it a promise to myself.

When I kissed her, all my worry melted away. Fear ran from me. All that mattered was this moment. Ada. Our future.

“What are you doing?”

Hastings’s voice cut through the night like a sword through butter. I let go of Ada, turning to face the fire in his tone, putting her at my back to keep her safe.

The man I faced was not one I knew. He was confused, angry, and staring at me as though I were his enemy.

He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right.

“Ada Rose, what are you doing?” he said, as she shoved me aside. She stepped forward, her arms braced on her hips and her shoulders back. A goddess rising.

He blinked, as if to clear smoke from his eyes. We were not a thing to blink away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Hastings, I can’t marry you.”

He stared, shock centering across his features. “You can’t marry me, Margaret?”

I shook my head, and he looked between us. His stance shifted from charge to retreat.

“I won’t marry you either,” Ada said.

“Do you think you’re to marry her?” he said, but I could not tell if he spoke to Ada or me.

It was my turn to stand my ground. I planted my feet wide, fisted hands on my hips. Speaking his language. Our language, the warriors’ reply.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t love you in the way you need, and you can never give me what I need.”

He looked to Ada, and she said, “You will never be her, and I—I can’t keep doing this.”

“You have always had too much steel in your backside,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face.

“I won’t bend, but that isn’t a bad thing.”

“No? What do you think will happen if the wrong sort sees you?”

“They won’t.”

“You’re so godforsaken lucky it was me to find you, and not your da.” He looked to Ada, whose skin had blanched to a white crisper than new-fallen snow. “How would your family take this? Were one of your brothers to find you?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t,” I spit the word out. “Don’t scare her off so you can have your way.”

“It’s not my way.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I’ve seen how you look for her, you know. Watched you wait, with your eyes on the door. You follow after her like a child trailing their mother’s skirt. I know you. I have known you all my life. I didn’t realize you were a fool as well as besotted.”

“If you knew, then why are you pursuing me?” I asked, my skin hot, my jaw tight. “If you care so much, why interfere?”

“Who else can protect you?” he asked, his hand going to his belt as though a threat was closing in. “From yourself, from what’s to come for you if you keep up with this, and her. Who else could save you?”

I bit back a strong curse.

“And you, Ada?”

“I don’t need help,” she said, “and those are pretty words crafted to provide the way for you to get what you want.” She reached for me then. I found her hand and squeezed. Hastings let out a muffled cry at the gesture.

One beat passed. Two. She pulled her hand away.

I turned too fast, words tripping over my tongue to yell at her for not holding on. For not fighting for us.

A goldfinch chatted, trilling in the distance. The wind blew a soft breeze over our feet. Below, the waves crashed in their constant, set course.

My eyes were pulled from gazing off the horizon.

In a matter of seconds, my feet had sped too quick. The air rushed from me. I had spun the wrong way. Ada knocked into me. My hip connecting with hers, my shoulder knocking hers back. I stumbled once. A small step back, as though readying to ask her to dance.

It was a simple miscalculation. The tiniest of steps.

In an instant I tumbled down, into the deep, dark, waiting waters.

The power to save myself should have been mine. In my veins, flooding my system, I had so much magic banked—waiting there to call the wind and carry me back.

Instead, I did nothing. I waited in disbelief, wanting everything to undo itself. As though such a thing could exist. Then I hit the water.

In time, Ada would recognize Hastings was holding her. His arms tight, his words low and soothing. She was sobbing yet she did not notice. I was screaming but she could not hear. He carried her home. She never felt the earth rise to meet her.

They sent a group to recover my body, though they never would find one. Our love was gone.

With me lost, there was nowhere to go but inside my mind, into a forest so quiet, dark and deep.

For nothing mattered any longer. Nothing ever could. Not now that she was gone and so was I.

“The journal, it’s Margaret’s?” Doreen said, her eyes going back over the words. Rereading the ending.

“How?” Ambrose asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s all so horrible,” Margot said, accepting a glass of the wine Ambrose had found in the pantry and decanted. “Both heartbreaking and terrifying.”

“It was not the way of things,” Ambrose said, stopping his pour at a fourth of a glass. “To go against the family in those times.”

“She must have felt so close,” Doreen said, thinking of Margaret going over a cliff. Unable to think of anything else, to stop seeing it play out in her mind. “Her dream was at her fingertips, and she sent it tumbling into the deep.”

“No wonder Ada went dark,” Margot said.

“How could this exist, though? If Margaret isn’t here?”

Ambrose shook his head. “I don’t know, but we’re in a prison world that shouldn’t exist, run by a spirit who should be deep in the earth. Maybe the better question is what can’t exist here?”

“It makes sense she’d rage out, but to go from a strong, oppressed badass to the queen of the dead?” Margot said. “I think I need more wine, and a break from reading. It’s devastating, and the words… they’re hard to hear.”

“It’s the truth of it,” Doreen said. “It’s never easy to take in someone else’s truth and force it out. I wonder if this is why there are so many journals. If Ada’s truth is something she has never been able to accept or make sense of, maybe she’s trying to gather everyone else’s?”

“Or she’s simply psychotic,” Margot said.

Doreen snorted as she took her half-filled wineglass and topped it off to the brim. Ambrose made a noise of disapproval, and she shot him a halting look. “Don’t you start with me.”

The corner of his lip hitched up in the smallest of curves, and Doreen struggled to hide the fizz of bubbles bursting inside her at the sight. She knew what Margaret had meant, about wanting to be seen by the right person, about struggling to take her eyes off them.

“I’ll see if there’s anything more to discover,” he said. “I have too much truth floating inside me. I can’t see how one more will topple me over.”

Doreen wanted to ask what he meant, but he simply moved around her. She bit her lip instead, trying yet again to drag her eyes from Ambrose MacDonald and stuff one more unasked question down her throat.

He sorted through the books they had brought and found the one that had rebound itself inside of the chapel. The one composed of the hidden pages that had flown at them, the one they thought Ada had written.

He opened it and began to read.

Winter

There has always been talk of the gods of the forest. Of things otherworldly. Our family has pagan roots, no matter the shift in acceptance of one god for another. We are the outcasts, the fringe clan. We were born with power, but I think it’s the isle that has allowed it to grow. Every generation becomes a bit stronger, though none have the way of communing with the land as I do.

Premonition through dreams as warnings is what we are known for, while Hastings’s people are said to be able to touch another and know their intention. Margaret knew plants on instinct, how to blend them and merge them to make a healing balm or tonic. And how to use them to harm or even kill.

The earth liked Margaret almost as much as I did.

The three clans are the strongest because of our gifts, though I don’t know if any of the others know we all have them. I would not have, had it not been for Hastings and Margaret.

I would not have known what to do with mine, had it not been for him. For the story of the gods and the trials had been told to him by his grandfather. No one had ever won them, but I think it was because only men ever tried. I was not fool enough to think I was stronger or smarter or cleverer than the gods.

I won because I was more desperate.

I woke the statues of the sleeping maidens with the truth. I freed the drowning kelpies, and I traded my echo for one of theirs.

They could not refuse me then.

I stood before them in the center of their labyrinthine cage and made my request—never a demand.

“Power to find the soul I have lost,” I asked for, my voice ringing clear. “I would give my heart and life for it, if I could bring the soul back to me.”

I wanted them to take my life. To send me to her. Instead, they did as I asked. They granted me the power of the lost.

The first ten years were a steep learning curve. I dreamed of the people in Margaret’s line. Of those in my line and in Hastings’s. I did not dream of Margaret. I scried for her and spoke to the wind. I asked the earth to seek her and bring her to me.

Instead, it brought her kin. To my door, seeking guidance or help with their gifts. It was my prize for winning the trials, and because Margaret and I had shared blood under the new moon when we pledged our love. We had given one another a blood oath, and now my blood called to hers—and those of her line. It was on a sunny spring afternoon that finally I realized what I could do. I sat, listening, trying to be patient for Margaret’s sake and to honor her family, when it happened. The young man was speaking of battle and wanting to avoid being injured. He reached out to touch me, and I saw his light. A bright white light scouring through him. Not just in him, but as him. I reached for it, drew it in. I did not know what I was doing, and I took too much. He died on my floor, his soul soaking inside of me, filling up the cold places.

After that, I did not get sick or age for another ten years. I studied the fireflies at the outer edges of the isle, calling them to me from across oceans. I could summon birds, insects, and sea life. A new power, unhelpful in my search, but entertaining. I did not realize I was haunted until the singing started.

A low, solemn note. It was rose soft and sure, low and lonely. It crept in through my open window.

It sounded like Hastings. That was my first thought. Though I had not seen Hastings since I left him by the fireside of his home, so many years before. I had told him I could not, would not, marry him. He did not understand. Margaret was gone, he said. He needed a wife, and the clans needed us to bring them together. He would be good to me, he said. It did not matter. My will was set.

I left him for the trials, and after that, everything was different.

This was not Hastings, however. It was the young man whose soul I had taken, and he was lost now. A shade of himself. I let him in and kept him close. He was bound to me, I soon realized, and until I released him, he would have to serve me. I sent him out into the world to look for Margaret. I knew souls sustained me and made me stronger. Learning I could control them after I took them, guide them to help me find her—it was revolutionary. I could not lose the connection.

It wasn’t thought out. It was instinctual. Most pursuits of power are, though, I suppose. I called to the souls in my line, in those of Hastings’s and Margaret’s. Those bound to me by the loss and my win in the trials.

I did not drain them as I had accidentally done that first time. I siphoned them instead, slowly and over time. It was easy to store the bits of them I needed. A jar here, a box there. The caves beneath my home made it simple, and soon I left the little house on the edge of the cliffs for the caves. I no longer felt the cold, rarely needed food to eat or water to drink. Eventually, I needed nothing at all.

Yet my Margaret remained gone from me.

“That’s a horrible prize,” Margot said. “It sounds as though they handfasted to one another and bound it by blood.”

“Blood that tied her too closely to us,” Doreen said.

“It would be beautiful if Ada hadn’t gone rogue,” Margot said.

“If her vengeance weren’t happening to us, I might agree. Does she say how she defeated the trials?” Doreen asked, finishing the last of her wine. Ambrose flipped ahead, read, flipped back, shook his head.

“Most of her pages are lines of repeated phrases, dark things that don’t tell much other than she was losing her mind. There is one other entry, though.” He paused, reading ahead, his face drawn. “It’s grim.”

“Let’s have it,” Margot said.

Doreen grimaced but nodded.

The Unending Winter

It is always dark now, always cold. Tonight, I stood at the edge of my cliffs once more. It is forever the edge that I return to. The flowers I planted so long ago bloom still, enchanted and trapped in their youth. The petals are marked by the cold; they have gone soft and blue in their frost, no longer pink and precious. Beside them, I grow beyond old.

I have stood on the edge of that cliff an unknowable number of times. I do not feel the cold, I cannot see the dark. The flowers, which once soothed me, no longer bring me solace nor grief.

There is no reason to deny the truth. The need for more grows. More power. More souls. More time to find her.

It is easy to store what I need. The souls in the boxes in the cracks in the corner of my world. Tucked into the seams of the caves that I call home. Hidden in plain sight, not that there is anyone to see anything any longer.

The spirits are with me. Always. I store them well. Keeping them close and safe. If I cannot fly free, neither shall they. Not until she is home to me again.

The spirits closest to her shall lead me to her. They cannot escape once they are in my hands. She and I will be together, and nothing shall ever stand in our way again.

“She hid the souls in the cracks of caves ?” Margot asked, as Ambrose finished reading. “What the hell does she mean that she holds the spirits in her hands?”

“It’s insane how she really has been collecting our ancestors,” Doreen said, downing a fresh glass of wine, wiping her brow. “The graves outside, the ghosts trapped here.”

“Stealing their souls from the beginning,” Ambrose said, setting the book down and moving to stand closer to Doreen. He smelled of wine and cedar and she leaned closer, sniffing as discreetly as possible. It was impossible not to be affected when he was so near.

“We must be missing something,” Margot said, walking to the doorway leading out of the kitchen. “Ambrose, where is this ghost of yours? Sinclair?”

“She should be upstairs by the fireplace. You only have to call for her.”

“I don’t think she wanted us to read those pages,” Doreen said, frowning. “Ada, I mean. It’s why Eleanor sent us there. We need to use the knowledge against Ada.”

Margot nodded. “I’ll be back.” Then she was striding out of the kitchens, leaving Ambrose and Doreen alone.

Doreen looked up at Ambrose and the words died on the tip of her tongue. She realized, as she stared into his eyes, which had gone as dark and broody as his moods, that she had been fooling herself.

She wasn’t going to be able to hide what she felt; she was lost for him. Staring into his eyes, that thread of growing awareness and heat building… it was the most potent feeling she’d ever had.

There was no thrall, no forced desire on anyone’s part. This was real. Real and petrifying.

Doreen knew she should be worrying about Ada, about the souls and how to break free from this place. But she couldn’t think at all when staring into the stormy blue of his eyes, and when he leaned closer, she forgot how to breathe.