Page 25 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

TWENTY-THREE

The pressure was gone. Doreen shot up like a cannon, the water bursting through the stone like a geyser. She blasted out of the water and was tossed onto the shore, where she coughed and gagged and tried to claw her way up.

As she rolled onto her side, she found herself on the shore by the sea, and ahead of her was a cave. To the right was a set of cliffs, and to her left was a meadow. All four corners of the world, all at the edge of the world.

“I didn’t realize how coarse the sand is,” a voice said, sounding amused and irritated. “Who knew?”

Doreen looked up to see Ada sitting on a washed-up tree trunk. She looked different. Her bones were in the right place, and her eyes didn’t shine like sunken pearls. She was more human than Doreen could recall ever seeing her before.

“Aha,” Ada said, smiling at Doreen. Her mouth stretched twice as wide as it should, and Doreen swallowed her revulsion. “You did it.”

“Did I?” Doreen asked, looking around for Ambrose or Margot or a door to anywhere else.

“Yes. Congratulations on beating the trials. It’s a rare rite of passage.” Ada tilted her head and then it twitched. Once, twice. A jerk that was far too robotic to be real.

“What are you?” Doreen asked.

“I am the queen,” the robotic Ada said. “What are you?”

“I’m the witch,” Doreen said, and lifted her hands. “The spell is the truth, the truth is the spell. Eviscerate. ”

The Ada that was not Ada exploded into a thousand fragments. She rained down around Doreen, splashing into the ocean.

“Nice trick,” Doreen called, brushing her hair—heavy and laden with clumps of sand—from her face. “Scared to face me?”

Eleanor MacKinnon strode out from the cave. She was no longer in Technicolor or black-and-white. Eleanor was a sepia dream. A beige-and-tan perfection. She wore a dress Donna Reed would envy and a beehive that had Doreen wincing for her scalp.

“I take it back,” Doreen said. “No one needs to face whatever this is.”

“Clever witch,” Eleanor said.

“Not as clever as a witch with the ability to wear every face it has ever stolen.”

Eleanor grinned, and then she tore at her own face, ripping it free. The grim bones and pearled eyes of Ada remained.

“Like I said,” Doreen said, terror clawing up her spine, “clever. Though not as clever as the ghosts you impersonate.”

Ada rolled her neck, her bones cracking and shaking the sea. “You think they have autonomy? That they weren’t working at my behest? Who do you think told Eleanor to befriend you, to help you, to tell Ambrose the truth? Who do you think encouraged you to keep going, not to give up?”

Doreen swallowed but didn’t shift a muscle.

“Sinclair showed you the way, helped me get you here. Even Hastings, fool that he was, played the part. His love had him rolling over for me. Begging me to pet his belly one last time. All of it led you to me.”

“You didn’t need the trials to trap us,” Doreen said. “We’ve been here all along.”

“Yes, but your will wasn’t. You were doing what you could to break the spell.” Ada smiled now, a real one that was so sweet it terrified. “Cut off from me even as you stood in front of me. Lenora cursed Ambrose to love her against his will, and he cursed you all to never find true love. To reconcile the two, someone from each of your lines had to fall in love with the other. The curse is broken, but soon you will be nothing but a broken doll for my collection.”

Ada launched herself at Doreen and pinned her down. She held her arms over her head as she leaned in, her eyes sinking deeper into her rotting skull.

“You found your love,” Ada said, “what you always wanted. Now you are open. It’s time for me to claim what I have been looking for.”

Doreen burst out laughing, exhausted and near hysterical, and broken . Ambrose was gone, as was Margot. Any love Doreen may have had Ada had destroyed. Ada snarled at the laughter, slamming Doreen so hard against the ground she saw stars. Ada curled a bony finger and reached toward Doreen. She tugged, and Doreen gasped as her pulse stuttered. A spark, bright and true, lifted from her mouth.

Ada began to sing.

A lullaby, haunting and sweet.

Tears rolled down Doreen’s cheeks as her soul shifted, a splinter pierced her being, and she could feel her spirit being pulled apart.

This was how she would die, then. She would become another ghost, bound to this monster, to this cruel prison of a world.

The stars flickered overhead, and Doreen thought of Stella. Of her aunt telling her forever . She thought of Kayleen and the others, of Eleanor, Sinclair, Sera, Margot, Ambrose, and Margaret. Of all the family she had and did not know. Finally, she thought of her mother and how she’d defied Ada. Her soul was not willing.

Not willing. Doreen could be unwilling too. Ambrose had told her that the memory of spells would be in the land here. She had poured magic into this earth; she had wielded it from others as well.

Doreen furled her hands, and then unclenched them as Ada pulled at her magic, at her soul. She opened herself up and called to those lost souls in the prison world.

Awaken.

The water from the ocean splashed by her feet, and she reached to it and called out in a broken whisper the spell Margot had used to save them when they were children and had been in the lake with the dogs chasing them, the spell Doreen mimicked when she and Ambrose had been facing the kelpie. This spell was theirs, and she would use it with the last of her strength to draw in her ancestral line, to heal the damage and pull those souls to shore.

“Into the water

You will go

To gain your strength

And save our souls.”

Doreen did not call the kelpie monster of the Goodbye Castle’s moat.

This time, she leaned into the door she had opened to Stella, and she threw it wide. Doreen called her family. She called the willing souls to come to her and help her fight.

The pages from every journal kept in the prison world washed onto the shore, one after the other, flooding the shoreline with bits of paper and ink that bled into the earth. The words hit the shoreline, racing across the sand toward Ada, and the voices behind the written words rose like the ascending notes of a redemption song.

When the first line from Margaret’s journal slammed into her, Ada screamed.

The next line, then the next, tumbled from the page and straight into Ada. Soon the other voices and words were rising up and cascading over Ada’s skin, piercing into what was left of her soul.

Doreen lifted a hand as the words rained down on them, mouthing along with the singsong refrain that rode the wind: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.”

The violin’s strings warbled into the night, combined with a layer of tension from the guitar’s most melodious notes, and beneath it the heartbeat of a steady drum.

Ada rolled off Doreen, curling up, trying to fight the words away.

“Make it stop,” Ada cried, writhing.

As the words lifted, they shifted into bright sparks of light. These weren’t words, but bits of souls, taken and stored. Doreen wondered if Ada even knew about them, if she knew the journals existed, or if this was something else. If this was a recording, a narration of their humanity, stored and now freed.

Souls had to go somewhere, and Doreen hoped letting them out would be enough. The words continued to bind to Ada, constricting her movements.

Doreen knelt beside her. “It wasn’t you,” she said. “It was them. They called for help. When you devoured their humanity, it was downloaded into the prison world. You thought to keep them caged, but you couldn’t control those bits of goodness. They stayed, and now they are free.”

The waves lapped at her feet, and Doreen looked down to see a single journal waiting. On the spine was the name Margaret MacKinnon . This one was not like the other one—this was in a hard black binding, and when she opened it, she realized it was new. The story whole and complete.

“She was never in this world, was she?” Ada said with a sob. “Margaret was never here. She never could be.”

She set the book in Ada’s hands. “Her story is written. She moved on.”

Doreen’s heart broke as she studied this sorry excuse for a soul crumpled on the shore before her. Brittle and broken, misshapen and ruined. “It is time for you to move on, Ada. The truth is the spell. The spell is the truth.”

The reality of all the souls being freed, of Margaret’s soul departed, rained down on Ada in a final storm. The thunder rolled and the lightning crashed against the rocks. The words of those Ada had tried to take rushed into her, all the souls lighting her up from the inside, hollowing out the dark, and sending the last of Ada Rose out of the bones she had stolen and into the night’s sky.

Doreen stumbled into the cave and collapsed. The truth hit her hard as she tried to crawl her way into a seated position.

Ada was no longer. Her bones were ash, and the souls of this world were free.

Doreen could rest.

She closed her eyes and thought if she had to go now, it would be worth it. She did wish, however, that she could have told Ambrose she loved him too.

The sea went quiet, the air turned sweet, and Doreen breathed in magic. Golden, bright, and happy. She opened one eye, and thought she saw the woman from the gardens of Ambrose’s home. The lady of the Goodbye Castle, who had haunted near the cliffs. The one who had helped her.

“You’re not Eleanor,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed again.

The same warmth rushed into her, and then a lullaby. The same one Ada had sung, but this time it wasn’t perverted into the dark haunting melody. This was bright and free. It was hopeful, gentle.

A thought struck her, and she managed to crack her eyes open one last time. “Margaret?” she whispered, and then darkness took her completely.