Page 7 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

SIX

It was a room fit for a queen… of the dead. The chamber was lit by candles dripping long tails of wax and filled with jars coated in an inch of dust and soot, browning from age. The contents of which looked like a mad scientist went on a rampage in a graveyard, digging up body parts and canning them for future study. Inside the jars sat milky liquids and bits of matter—dried herbs long since crusted and coagulated, rust-colored goo, and foul-smelling tinctures.

It was the house of the Queen of the Order of the Dead, or as much a house as a spirit could claim. There were several piles of books, stacked halfway to the ceiling, a few ancient chairs that might have been thrones in another life, a scattering of large urns, and a cage of bones that stood in the farthest corner. No fires burned in the room. The candles were the only signs of life—flames flickering and casting shadows on the wall, waiting to be observed, hoping for new movement to tell an undiscovered story.

In the center of the room, on a large slab of obsidian, stood a tall beeswax candle. The flame flickered, hit by a gust of wind from nowhere. The light dimmed and the smoke from its ember grew. Out of the smoke a shadow crept, in the form of a spider. It scuttled and slid, skidding into the cage made of bones. Once ensconced, it curled into a ball before stretching out and then rising, its shape shifting. A tall and slender shadow stood where the smoke spider had once been, before the air crackled and the rest of Ada, the Queen of the Order of the Dead, appeared.

The candle sputtered and Ada eyed the flame, her mouth thinning into a fine line. Her pearl eyes darkened, and she waited, watching until the flickering grew brighter. From behind the stack of books closest to her came a squeak. There, ducked low to the ground, another shadow hid, cowering.

“You may speak,” Ada said, her tone indifferent as her gaze flicked over it.

“You lied,” the whisper of a voice said, sliding along the floor to reach her.

“I spoke a truth,” Ada said, crossing to the dilapidated throne and sitting upon it. Her feet levitated over the ground, her being hovering in the air directly above the seat.

The shadow unfurled and followed her, its moves sluggish and confused, as if waking from a long nap. “The trials have never been beaten,” it said. “Not since you, and no one has dared attempt them in centuries.”

“Did I not mention that?” Ada said, waving a hand over the table of candles and watching the flames grow. Even ghosts of the Order understood blatant sarcasm.

“Would it not be better to simply claim them now?”

“I cannot unless they allow it. They are not mine. Not yet.”

“What now, then?”

“We wait,” Ada said. “Soon their power and souls will be mine, and I will be one step closer to finding her.”

“If she isn’t lost forever,” the shadow said, its voice barely audible.

Ada had been dead for a small forever. Before that she had been a Rose, of the Rose clan, one of three that ruled the Isle of Skye, along with the MacDonalds and the MacKinnons. She was woven into the fiber of both, though only one carried a trace of her blood—from a pact she made long ago with the one she loved.

Ada listened, but she did not speak. She simply reached out and plucked the shade from the ground and fed it to the closest flame. Her smile grew small and terrible as it screamed.

Ambrose awoke tucked beside Doreen in the forest they had stood in before. They were cocooned together and surrounded by the startling emerald green of thriving life. Moss-covered boulders the size of small tables dotted the landscape like large acorns scattered across a wide forest. Oak, birch, ash, native pine, and hazel trees pushed in too close together. It smelled of damp soil, decaying wood, and pine. It smelled like Ambrose’s childhood.

Throughout his youth, Ambrose was easygoing and hardy of health. From the age of three, his nursemaids would cuddle him while his other siblings were struck with croup, impetigo, and even coughing sicknesses that were hard to shake. Ambrose, with his dark hair and bright blue-green eyes, with his knowing grin that belonged on a seasoned baron but instead was gifted to a mischievous child, never got the same ailments. The grin grew as did the lad. As autumn winds gave way to winter’s chill, Ambrose found himself rewarded for his good temperament, his pretty looks, and his quick mind. At least, by the ladies of his house.

The lady who had tossed them from her cave was nothing like the women of his youth. He did not know how the spirit had done it. One minute they were staring at Ada, the next she disappeared. Smoke filled the room. Then he was waking on the lush green earth, his aching arms entangled in Doreen’s soft ones.

Doreen shifted closer to where Ambrose’s forearm was wrapped around her waist. He needed to move, to get as far away from the witch as possible. She smelled of rose water and the smoke of the burning fire from the queen’s lair. It was strangely intoxicating, and it didn’t help that as she lay beside him, with the moonlight cascading across the planes of her face, she looked too much like Lenora. It was the stubborn shape of her chin, the fullness of her top lip, the way she scrunched her nose in sleep as though something displeased her.

He was tempted to lean closer to study her, and that would not do. He couldn’t drop his guard with her, not for a moment. He deftly untangled himself and shifted up to sitting. He needed to think, and plan.

Ada was cunning. She’d have the taste for Doreen now, much as she’d had the taste for him once upon a time. He did not believe Ada desired his soul. What he was certain of was he needed his revenge. Cursing Lenora’s family had been right. He could never regret avenging the woman he loved. That he had made the deal for the curse from a spirit like Ada was, perhaps, where he may have made a small misstep. Ada was made of smoke and lies. He knew she’d beaten the trials, and she clearly wanted Doreen’s soul. The soul of a MacKinnon.

He hadn’t been lying. Doreen had a special kind of power, being of the thirteenth generation. Her soul would be intoxicating to Ada. Helping her would be a simple way to alter the course of things, and perhaps secure his freedom from Ada for good.

And yet.

Ambrose could not bring himself to allow Ada to take Doreen’s soul. To do so would mean sacrificing the last of his humanity. He was, he supposed, not as far gone as he’d thought. Or perhaps, it was knowing he had an option that allowed him to feel benevolent. He could always change his mind.

For now, he wouldn’t trap Doreen. Though if it had been her aunt in her stead, he would not have hesitated. Stella was a dragon and had enjoyed the pain she’d inflicted on him with an unbridled ecstasy typically reserved for ministrations in the bedroom under a fully charged love spell.

Doreen had freed him. He owed her a chance to be free—much as he owed himself the opportunity to balance the scales. They would set out for the trials, they would lure her family to him, and he would get a chance to transform himself.

For that was the reward for winning the trials: the ability to remake yourself into anything.

Ada had won and she had chosen poorly; if he succeeded, he would not do the same. If he could transform into a god, no one and nothing could ever harm him again. He knew that his immortality existed while the curse held, but if Doreen ever found some other way to break it… No, that would be impossible.

There was no doubt in his mind that Ada had held back pertinent information in telling them of the trials. The way to the trials, as the walls had whispered, was going to be a hell of a thing. It would require Ambrose returning somewhere he was desperate and terrified to go.

Doreen shifted, the fabric of her shirt rustling against the fallen leaves. Her hand curled around the object she’d pulled from the fire. He studied her where she lay. It wouldn’t take much to shift the object free with how loose her grip had become in sleep. She mumbled something under her breath, and he was struck a second time by how peaceful she appeared, and familiar. Murmuring in her sleep had been something Lenora had done as well.

Ambrose needed distance. He stood and walked away from the slumbering Doreen, doing his best to ignore the pull tempting him to look back. Instead, he climbed up the hill to where he could peer down on the town in the distance. He stood there, remembering the centuries, trying to wrap his mind about the present while worrying over the future.

Soon, the sun started to shift up into the sky and the moon slept. And as it rose, Ambrose remained where he was, steadfastly watching the world, far too aware of the witch behind him.

As the day warmed, a soft groan finally had him turning. Doreen stretched and rolled to her side. She sat up, rubbing her eyes. After a few moments she stood, pulling her long red locks into a messy bun. Ambrose told himself it was the way the wind was blowing the unfastened strands that made him want to tuck it behind her ears. He didn’t care to know if it was soft or coarse; he didn’t care at all.

“How did we get here?” she asked, her voice a low rumble from just waking. Ambrose rubbed a hand over his sternum, above his heart.

“I have been thinking on that,” he said. “Ghost mist is said to be a powerful intoxicant for mortals.”

“You’re not mortal,” Doreen said, with a grunt.

“I can be killed,” he said. “It’s not easy, but it can be done.”

“We were drugged and dumped where we started?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay.”

His lips twitched at her easy acceptance of the situation. Most witches would be panicking at this stage, yet Doreen simply nodded and started to climb the hill to where he waited.

“What are the trials, Ambrose?” she asked, slightly out of breath when she reached him.

He turned toward her. “What do you know of Avarice?”

“Greed? That it turns wanting into winning and winning into losing.”

He lifted a brow. “Apt. Avarice was also a person, a witch, back when the world was full of us. He gave in to his desires for power, discovered the trials have existed as long as the gods have lived with men, and set out to win them.”

“And?”

“He entered the gods’ challenge for ultimate power. Trials of strength, cunning, bravery, and heart.”

She raised her brows. “Seeing as his name is now associated with greed, I presume they didn’t go too well.”

“He did not pass a single trial. In the end, he tried to destroy the gods and they in turn made an example of him. His name became synonymous with his sin, and his example showed them that mankind was no longer deserving of such magic. They took back most of the power that had flowed freely here, and only a few families were allowed to stay in power. Families they felt were better suited to care for magic; families with, mainly, women.”

She smirked. “Womankind does tend to succeed where mankind fails.”

He grunted but did not disagree.

“And Ada?”

“She tricked the gods. Desperate to find the one lost to her, Ada undertook the trials when the gods would have prevented her from doing so. Ada’s desire to win was as greedy as Avarice’s had been, and therefore would have ruled her out as a champion.”

“But she won anyway?”

“She won the trials but lost what mattered most.”

“Which was?”

“She is a shade. Of her former self and world.”

“She doesn’t seem to mind.” A small shiver ran through her as she remembered Ada’s eyes, and she cleared her throat. “If the person’s desire to win isn’t greedy, how can the trials be won?”

“Only the gods know.”

“And the trials are the only way to break the curse?”

He didn’t meet her eyes, choosing to look up at the sky as he answered. “So Ada says.”

Doreen sighed. “What about the symbols in the cave? Did you understand what they meant and the path from them?”

“Scholars have long thought the Pictish Beast needs a cipher.”

“Remind me what a cipher is again?”

“A cipher is a puzzle,” he said. Ambrose gazed out over the city before continuing. “The queen loves to complicate things, and if she can mess with us in the process… well, Ada would gleefully do so.”

“Why does she want to mess with us?”

“Entertainment, perhaps. It’s boring being a spirit. They are trapped and waiting and there’s only so much people-watching one can do over hundreds of years. But mostly, I think Ada is hopeful we will mess up and need her and be forced to trade something in the end.”

Doreen pushed at a mossy patch on the edge of a boulder. “She seemed to want to help.”

“She wanted to eat your soul.”

Doreen laughed, but the sound faded when she realized he was serious. “She did not.”

He shrugged. It was not his duty to convince her of the ways of a world she had too long been shielded from. He owed her a life debt, not an education.

“Be careful trusting the ancient undead,” Ambrose said.

“ Now you tell me.” She grinned. “You brought us to her.”

“She was the only way.”

“And she wants us to go to your home.”

“It has not been home for some time.”

“Do you miss it?” she asked, swallowing hard. “Your home, your life? What it once was? It must be awful to not be able to go back.”

Ambrose was slow to answer, cradling the words before he re leased them, as though they had the power to break him. “It was not always a happy life. As the third-born son of an earl, in a time when the less important sons went to war and found death as quickly as the seasons brought in the changing of the winds, I never bet on life when I was living it. Funny, I should have bet on death. And how little it wanted to do with me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Throughout my childhood, I almost never got sick. Germs were as repelled by my charms as ladies were drawn to them,” he said, flashing the hint of a smile. It was disarming, and Doreen was thankful it disappeared as fast as it arrived. “I didn’t get sick; instead I gained power. Witches ran in the MacDonald line, but they didn’t run our line. My father did, and his talents were not in controlling weather, or turning earth over with a flick of his hand, or even the sobering skill of reading the lesser minds of his enemies. No, the lord of the estate was cunning in weaponry and planning, and he took down anyone who stood in his way. He would have ruthlessly taken me down, too, and he told me so often. Should I stop being his weapon and start being in his way, he would end me.”

“He sounds like a dick.”

“He was of a different age,” he said, before meeting her eyes. “But yes, he was.”

She frowned at how his hand went to the back of his neck. He squeezed it before continuing. “Fortunately, he found a use for his book-obsessed middle child. He had me catalogue the moves of others and, in their sleep, send them nightmares born of the fears I read about. I distracted the daughters of his opponents, catching and releasing them—leaving their hearts banged up but not broken and their reputations in disgrace.” He dropped his hand. “For a long time, I hated my father for forcing me to do it, but eventually I began to hate magic.”

Doreen’s fingers twitched as though she were about to reach out and offer comfort. She stuffed them into her pockets.

“My house never felt like a home, and my life was not one worth living. Not until the night of the harvest moon, when Father welcomed one of our neighboring clans. A céilí, a dance, was to be held in their honor, and it was under the calling moon that I saw her. Lenora.” His voice grew quiet, his gaze far off, and Doreen shivered at the longing that flickered in the depths of his eyes. “She of the bright flame-colored hair and deep green eyes, with freckles scattered across the planes of her face like constellations dropped down from the skies to bless her porcelain skin. I never believed in poetry until that night.”

A goldcrest sang, its twittering song cutting through the tension spilling out from Ambrose and wrapping itself around Doreen. He took a deep breath and looked over at her. His face was impenetrable. Impossible to read.

“Your family tortured me for three hundred years in three hundred thousand ways. Taking my home away was one of them, but not because of the taking of a place. It was in the taking of Lenora.” He held out a hand. “Memories do not fade for me, and so I live with them until I am free from it all. But I have not missed my ancestral home.”

He thought of home and there was a flash of a tree in his mind. The deep rust color of bark, the unfurling of curled branches, the opening of autumn’s flowers—crimson and gold leaves.

The vision shifted and submerged, dunked into murky water as the leaves tumbled down and down and down.

Ambrose let out a shaky breath as the vision receded. “I don’t understand,” he said, as the images remained, imprinted, strong and true.

“You…” Doreen asked, her head tilted, eyes sharp. “Did you see something?”

He squinted, his brow furrowing, confusion etching across the planes of his face. “I can’t have,” he said. “It isn’t possible. I lost my power when I cast the curse.”

“It looked like—”

“It’s not possible.”

“I think we’re proving possible is an exercise in discovery and not futility,” she said, capturing his eyes with hers. “Ambrose, what did you see?”

He took a step back from her. He didn’t like how he wanted to lean into the sound of his name when summoned in her voice. “I would be wary of anything after being in the company of the Keeper.”

“Ada seemed to think I should be wary of you.”

His eyes flew to hers, fear and worry flashing before they deadened. “Ada wants to devour you.”

“And you don’t. You want to use me and then what, dispose of me?” She blinked her wide eyes at him, pursing her lips as though deep in thought, and something swirled low in Ambrose’s belly.

“I have no need of your soul,” he said, his gaze snagging on her mouth before he turned away.

He did not wait to see whether she would follow or sink once more down into the bowels of Ada’s hell. Ambrose did not wait for Doreen MacKinnon, and he did not look back. He simply took a single shaky breath and hurried toward the town of Portree.

Margot dreamed of a castle covered in purple wisteria. Of a woman haunting the towers, sobbing as she ran her nails over stone walls and chipped the sandstone away. Inside, Margot was running after Doreen, trying to save her as ivy sprouted from the floor and wrapped around her, before yanking Doreen down three levels into the hidden pool beneath.

Margot could not reach her, frozen as she stared down into the water, as a woman stood at the edge of a cliff, laughing cruelly before she turned into the shape of a horse and dove in.

When Margot awoke, her phone was ringing. She answered without looking. “Hello, Stella.”

“You had the dream too, didn’t you?” her mother asked, her throaty voice choked with fear.

“Perhaps,” Margot said. Stella dreamt every night. The kind of dream any armchair psychologist would call a nightmare, ones built from her fears and the years of tormenting herself and the MacDonald heir. All the MacKinnon witches dreamed. Save for Doreen. The youngest of the thirteenth generation, she’d never had a single dream. “What did you see?”

“I dreamt of Doreen wearing a crown; her eyes were pearls, and her heart was a stone.”

“I saw her going into a pool of water, being yanked down by ivy before a kelpie dove in after her,” Margot said.

Stella hummed a tune that Margot hated. It was a song sigil, a tune that other witches in their line couldn’t refuse. Stella had used it the month before Margot’s birthday to call the coven together for an intervention to force Margot to marry her Dean. She had used it when Margot and Doreen had been girls and fallen in tender love, or lust, the first time, to recruit the other aunts and cousins to intervene when needed. It was a bad omen, and it meant Stella was going after Doreen.

“I told you if the signs pointed to it, I would have to do this,” Stella said, when Margot did not echo the melody. “We must protect ourselves and the coven.”

“Doreen is us,” Margot said.

“She chose to go with that witch, freed him, helped him open a door to goddess knows where. They could have unleashed all manner of mischief and misdeeds by now.”

“You know she would never harm any of us. She loves you, and me. Doreen’s run the shop faithfully for years; she’s stayed in line while trying to break the curse. It turned out she had to blow up the line. She has only ever wanted one thing. To break the curse that binds us all. You can’t be serious going after her like this.”

“The curse will not be broken. He will never allow it. She’s made a horrible mistake, and he will use her. She is now the partner of my enemy and so is my enemy,” Stella said, her voice lowering. “They could end us all, child, don’t you understand ?”

Margot rubbed her temple, trying to soothe the headache building. “You speak of madness.”

“You have no idea what we’re up against now that he is unleashed,” Stella said. “Who he was before he came into power, what he did to get there. The MacDonald males slaughtered hundreds of us, but their power drained as ours rose. He shouldn’t have been what he was, and if he hadn’t been restrained after the curse, gods know what they would have done to us.”

Stella lived in fear of the MacDonalds or any ancient family rising back to power. The gods and the trials, she’d told Margot after she had married Dean, were watching and waiting. Margot thought the gods must be incredibly bored to spend any amount of time caring what the covens did. There were so few of them left, and most of their magic was spent healing. If the gods hadn’t screwed the world up, they wouldn’t have had to heal it. If there was enough magic, life could be harmonious and balanced. Unfortunately, they lived in the meager balance of power and siphoned what they could to those who needed it, or, if you were Stella, who you deemed deserved it.

After another ten minutes of complaining, Stella hung up, leaving Margot sitting in the dark. As she stared at her latest spread of tarot, she thought of her cousin trapped in the ivy, and hoped she did the right thing by giving Doreen the truth. Or as much of the truth as she could. If anyone could break the chain that bound them, Margot believed with her whole soul it was Doreen.

The only other thing Margot knew for certain was that if her mother discovered her part in what had transpired, Doreen wouldn’t be the only one the coven hunted down.