Page 9 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches

EIGHT

Ambrose would say of his ancestral home only that “it’s a fortified cage, gilded and drafty, and I’m sure you’ll fit right in.” He was increasingly cranky as they drove closer. The clear blue skies and rolling landscape did nothing to soothe her worry, and she hated that she was worrying about him at all, fearing what Stella and the coven could do if they discovered them. To distract herself, Doreen had discreetly given Ambrose the middle finger while they idled on a narrow country road and he gazed at the sweetly fat roaming sheep who were overtaking the lane in front of them.

Ambrose was, annoyingly, an excellent passenger. Quiet and calm, and in another life, it would have been an enjoyable experience—watching the sun set as they drove through the quiet countryside and exhaustion pressed in. Doreen wished she had headphones so she could tune out the family’s sigil and the ceaseless notes that filled the quiet of her mind. The relentless minor chords, bumbling over one another, not quite even, not quite meant to pair.

Eventually Ambrose directed her off the main road onto a smaller pebble-and-dirt one. The sedan bumped along steadily as they climbed a hill and then crested it. Ambrose motioned for her to stop the car and put it in park before he said, “We’ll walk over the last bit of hill.” He already seemed miles away, his eyes seeing whatever was hidden by the fairy mound before them.

Then he was out and stomping ahead like he could tame the very earth beneath his feet with the determined set of his shoulders and force of his hips. Doreen eyed his swagger for longer than necessary before she unclasped the seat belt and exited the vehicle. He did not stop, but he slowed, and she supposed that was as gentlemanly a response as she could expect from a man who was as tender as a tempest. At least he hadn’t tried to club her over her head and drag her by the hair.

The muscles in Doreen’s calves and thighs were aching by the time she reached the top of the climb up into the MacDonald estate. She paused, hands on knees, and stared at the vast expanse of land. Brilliantly green cliffs stacked like fists one over the other, reaching out into the ocean before her. In the middle of the bluffs stood a stone castle covered in wisteria and ivy, featuring four turrets and an entire wing that seemed to crawl along the backside of the cliffs like the tail of a dragon. The stone monstrosity reminded her of an ancient creature; it was both beautiful and cumbersome, and as she stared at it, a flash of vision hit her so strongly she staggered beneath it.

She was inside a courtyard with a stone fountain, the roots of a tree sticking through its side. A spray brushed her cheeks, the cold a relief to the heat, flushed through her. Ambrose stepped into the water, his chest bare, and—

She blinked and Ambrose was in front of her. Clothed and with stark irritation marring his nearly flawless annoying face. Stupid stingray.

“What?” Doreen said, the word coming out harsh.

“You’ve been staring through me for the better part of a minute,” he said, his tone curt.

“Oh,” she said, and stepped back. “I thought I saw…”

“You aren’t a seer.”

“No.”

He blinked, his chest rising and falling. She refused to focus on it. “What did you think you saw?” He ground out the words in an accusation.

She lifted her chin, refusing to be intimidated by his harsh features or tone. “You.”

His face remained impassive aside from the irritation. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

She nodded, unable to put into words what she saw, how it felt. How light her heart had been at the sight of him, how thrilled. Doreen had never felt such a thing before, not even with Jack, and she did not trust it. The hope in it terrified her.

“I’m tired,” she said, instead. “My mind is hazy, and the air is thick with wasted magic. I need to rest.”

“Wasted magic?”

She waved a hand around. “The cliffs, the sea, the land that once teemed with it, still carries the echoes. Can’t you taste it? Clove and honey in the air. Old magic, not quite in reach, but it remains.”

He took a breath. “There are memories, here,” he said. “I can’t say anything for old magic, but be mindful of the past. That you don’t get stuck in any memory for too long.” He looked as though he wanted to say more, but instead gave a short nod and walked along her side—though with enough space for three people—until they reached the curved arch of the entrance to the castle.

“This is a little more than a home,” Doreen managed, staring up at the trellis.

“It is Bonailie Castle,” he said.

“My Scottish is a bit rusty,” she said, trying to place the words. “What does that mean?”

“Loosely, it means the Goodbye Castle,” Ambrose said, his tone ominous, a hint of a deep brogue shifting into it. “If you darken the halls with ill intent, the castle will spirit you to the motherlands.”

“Oh goodie,” Doreen said. “A murder castle.”

“More than you know,” he said, before he walked ahead of her and went inside.

Ambrose’s family had several castles. Two were in disrepair, crumbling to the point of being little more than a skeleton of bones. A corpse of history and a reminder that time would waste away anything and anyone. The Goodbye Castle, as it had been called in his youth, had been abandoned, but remained mostly intact. It was one of the most haunted places in all of Scotland, and it was secreted away so well, wrapped in an enchantment cast over the bones that had been ground to dust and blended in with the mortar used to construct the home, that none knew it existed any longer. It was an old spell, one few remembered, and due to its bloody nature—human sacrifice had no better reputation in today’s modern world than it had when the castle was constructed—it was not the kind of spell likely to be cast ever again.

Ambrose stood in the main hall, forcing himself not to turn and run. He wasn’t afraid of the ghosts or the damp floors and walls. He didn’t mind the shadows or the way the air was filled with anise and blew cold no matter where you stood in the entryway. What Ambrose couldn’t tolerate were the memories. The reminders of his father, of how Ambrose had failed, and how love could never truly be his.

“It’s the price you pay for being born,” his father had told him, after sending him sprawling across the cold hard floor for failing to use his sight to see what move for power they needed to make next. Ambrose had only seen the ocean and the harsh rocks where the sea met the edge of the cliffs. He’d nearly been tossed to meet them, save for Sinclair, his valet, preventing it. “No one will love you, boy,” his father had said. “You’re hard enough to stomach in small doses. Love is not a creature meant for you.” It was not the first time he had been told he was not meant for love, nor the first time he’d been hit by his father. But it was one of the last.

Light beamed through the arched window across from the first set of stairs leading up to the north turret, and Ambrose hissed a breath at the effect. A rainbow of color tripped down the stairs almost like a red carpet rolled out for a visit from the latest dignitary. But instead of it being a welcome sight, Ambrose’s mouth ran dry, his heart tripping over itself as he studied the way the refracted light continued its path across the floor and up onto the ornate table that stood in the center of the room.

The hulking slab of marble was empty of flowers or vases or any other modern decoration. To its left stood one oversized fireplace, with its twin standing sentry to the right. As a boy, the dual fireplaces with their sturdy warmth had tricked Ambrose into thinking there was no place he’d rather be than standing before them. Taking off his coat and bringing his hands outside the flames as he cupped the air and attempted to pull the heat inside himself.

He’d suffered the heat of the fire as his father often shoved him nearer, and used to dream it would consume him and put an end to it all. Once, he’d nearly succeeded when he’d used his power to yank a flaming log out toward him. In the end, it had only caught a rug on fire—and earned him two matching black eyes and slew of bruised ribs.

Now they stood cold and empty before flaring to life, the flicker of light from before dancing across the marble table. Dust motes pulsed through the air, creating shapes where none should exist. Ambrose could make out the faint outline of a woman. Slender with ample curves, she shimmered there. Ambrose held his breath, then forced a steady exhale in release.

It wasn’t real, he told himself; none of it was anymore. He was the ghost of this castle now.

Doreen was slower to enter, likely caught in the lure of the wisteria and ivy, in the unkempt maze and bushes that greeted those who sought to enter the grounds. He might have been grateful for the moment of pause, if not for the steady old fears trying to seed and bloom inside him. He wished she would hurry.

There was more than his own past to contend with. He did not like the sigil being raised. He knew more of it than even Doreen. He’d been there, after all, when it was used on Lenora.

When the sigil had been raised against Lenora, she had said, “The wind is bringing notes of sorrow. A key plucked and left to trail off, then plucked again. They speed up, like vines tripping up aging stone, racing to find me.” Ambrose had tried to look, to see the sound. And what he’d seen in the end was the trailing of dark green jasmine, its leathery leaves climbing up an ash-colored stone wall. The vine shooting upward as he watched clusters of trumpet-shaped white flowers bloom, interwoven with the spreading leaves, each one reaching up higher than the other until they broke off, petals distended, and the last leaf brown and brittle, flaking back down into the earth. It was that last near-blackened leaf that had terrified him. Lenora had been unable to outrun the sigil, in the end.

Ambrose knew Doreen’s family better than she, and he understood that as the youngest in the line of the thirteenth generation of witches, Doreen was at the height of the family power. They did not suffer fools, and what Ambrose had observed of Stella (and Kayleen before her) was that they would do whatever was necessary to control that power. Ambrose had been forced to bear witness to many truths of the MacKinnon witches. Secrets they would have preferred to roll up and tuck away like a cigarette behind their ears had landed in his lap while they were torturing him. They were gifts he would put to use later.

He shook his thoughts away. The gossamer outline of a person still shimmered before him, a ghost observing its long-lost master returning home at last. Ambrose breathed a slow, even breath as he stepped forward and through it. He didn’t have the luxury of running from the past. Instead, he would go forward and create his future. No matter how bloody or destructive the path he would have to forge.

Doreen did not trust hedges. They were prickly and aggressive, and if you weren’t watching where you were going, you could accidentally tumble over one. That was the cause for concern with regular hedges, at least. These bushes, however, were atypical. Laughter rose from the surface of them like mist pouring from a frigid sea. It was a disturbing combination, the high-pitched giggle comingling with the lonely drawn-out note of a guitar out of tune. The sound reminded her of being trapped in a dressing room when she was in elementary school. The door had latched closed and refused to open, and panic built as she listened to the cruel laugh of Stella, who ignored her panic as she shopped and flirted with the saleswoman. Later, Stella would tell her “nerves aren’t born of steel, they are made of them. Consider this a free lesson.”

Stella gave a lot of lessons.

A surprisingly aggressive patch of sunlight cut through the cold air, heating the tip of her nose and the backs of her hands as she pressed them on top of her head. The laugh continued its ascent from the shrubbery. The tone shifted, the giggle inescapable, familiar, and haunting. And definitely not her aunt’s.

It was a sound she had never heard outside of a single recording; one she had worn out as a child. It contained the voice of her mother.

High-pitched and near-maniacal, this sound was warped and elongated. A strum of the guitar, light and climbing in melody, paired with the giggle on repeat. The sound drew her closer, an inch, a breath, even as her arms shook and goosebumps prickled across her back. Doreen did not know if this magic was courtesy of Ambrose’s family wards, for surely there were many on the grounds of a castle that kept itself hidden, or if it was something else. The taunting giggle getting stuck in the sigil, perhaps. Or a message sent from her coven. A slap across her face before one of them stabbed her in the chest. This sound was vile, twisting a memory and bringing it to life when it should remain dead in the grave.

She forced one foot up and back. She might as well have been trying to raise a monolith for how immovable her limbs were against the onslaught of her mother’s laughter. It was not surprising to Doreen that heartbreak was the most powerful of spells. It was matched to the wave of a note stark and warbled when it should have been soft.

The longing slammed into her and drained every ounce of energy from her body, stole her ability to care, to move, to do anything more than collapse into herself like a supernova.

The sun drifted over the leaves, rustling across their coppery surface. A shimmering shape crossed into her line of sight. The laughter ceased, the wind blew cold, and Doreen blinked. A woman hovered before her. Her spirit restless, her sadness pervasive. It was like a mist, brushing over her cheeks, down her neck, across the backs of her hands.

“Who are you?” Doreen whispered, searching her face for a sign that somehow, here was her long-lost mother. But as soon as she opened herself, she knew it was not her. She was struck with a bitter mix of sorrow and relief, soon followed by a wash of calm. It slunk across her shoulders as the appearance of the spirit somehow drove back the laughter.

The woman was a profile of gossamer. She shimmered brighter, and Doreen could almost hear her words, an urgent plea, but as soon as her ear tuned into the octave of spirit, she was gone. It was as though Doreen tapping into her frequency had scrambled the ghost’s ability to linger in any corporeal way. A burst of light shot out of the shrubs, and Doreen backed away until she was far from the labyrinth of hedges, gasping for breath and facing the entrance of the castle.

She looked once over her shoulder at the hedge before she took off running for the arch that led to the entrance. Doreen didn’t see Ambrose anywhere, but she didn’t need to. He was home, whether he wanted to be or not, and there was no other place he could be but inside.

She slowed as she reached the entrance, her gaze catching on the violet wisteria and ivy. Locking onto the immense stonework, and the obscene breadth of the castle walls, she stopped under the arch and looked up to the circle carved into the stone with two trees etched inside it. She reached into her pocket and removed the stone she had pulled from the fire. She ran her thumb across it. The two engravings matched. Only one tree was upside down with a line marked over the top and the other right side up with a line marked under the trunk. Yin and yang.

Doreen cupped the stone in her palm and walked deeper in, through the little courtyard, to the thick wooden doors that were thrown wide open. Inside, she stopped abruptly. Took a shallow breath and stared.

Ambrose stood before her, his shoulders wide, his head dipped. His back was to her, and he had both arms braced on the table before him. Not quite on the surface, but instead curling his fingers under the solid oak that supported a slab of marble on top of it. The view of him was startling. He was like a storybook character waiting to be written. She hated how hard it was to look away from him. Perhaps, Doreen reasoned, because she was in Scotland, on a section of cliffs on the Isle of Skye, and everything about being inside the Goodbye Castle screamed Gothic mystery. It was natural her mind cast him in a role of doomed knight.

When she pulled her gaze away, her eyes went from one fireplace to the next. They crackled in welcome. Hints of cider and allspice drifted on the air, the scents warm and inviting. It juxtaposed the tension radiating off Ambrose. Such an atmosphere would normally have had Doreen wishing for an oversized wingback chair, a cashmere blanket, and a good book, if not for the disarming man standing before her.

He turned to her, and a cold wind blew down the corridor, sweeping into the room and nearly brushing Doreen aside. The fires flickered out. Her gaze tracked to the walls, which grew damp, then the floor, which shifted from gleaming to grimy.

“Did you see her?” he asked, his voice a pit of gravel and pain.

“Who?” Doreen said, even as her mind toggled back to the image of the ghost hovering near the hedgerow.

“Lenora,” he said, the word more breath than sound.

A hard weight plummeted into her stomach. A warbled note rose and slammed into her side, and she shifted away from it. She refused to let the sorrow-filled song move her.

She might have known the spirit who sent the haunting giggles away was Lenora. The woman had been the love of his life. Where else would she go but to the castle that should claim him? Lenora was watching over him; she had been waiting.

Doreen looked over her shoulder, expecting to see her hovering there, and pressed her lips together to bite back the confused irritation pressing against her shoulder blades. It didn’t belong there.

Ambrose gave a low snort, and Doreen looked over to him. His eyes seemed lighter, his mouth not quite so tight, as he stared at her.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s just… the wheels in your mind spin so loud even I can hear them.”

“Very funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes, praying to the gods he couldn’t read the truth on her face. “It must be hard as a ghost, to be stuck here.”

“Spirits aren’t stuck anywhere,” he said, his voice thick with pain before his expression shuttered. “Most aren’t, at least.”

“You don’t think she is?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I never… I didn’t see her, when I was stuck in the nightmare curse your coven held me under. I could see into this castle, into all the spaces that are part of my lineage, part of my blood. I saw others but never her. She must move freely enough. He was stuck here, though.”

“He?” Doreen asked, stepping closer to Ambrose and looking around him, expecting to see another ghost waiting. The air was clear.

Ambrose inclined his head toward the far north corner of the room. “The viscount.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke, the emptiness in his tone left Doreen cold. “Bloody bastard married a lass his brother fell in love with and then sent her back to her family naked on a horse in shame. They tossed her out and left her to her death. The viscount’s brother threw him into the dungeon after she died. Tortured him.”

“That’s horrible.” Doreen’s eyes widened as she downloaded the information. “He died in the dungeon?”

“Yes, after he killed his brother.”

“How did the viscount kill him if he was being tortured by him?”

“He got one arm free and choked him with the last of his strength. Then starved the rest of his days, still half attached to the wall by a manacle.”

Doreen shuddered, looking for the viscount. “He’s not showing himself to me.”

“Small mercy,” Ambrose said. “Give him time.”

“Something to look forward to, then,” Doreen said, flashing him her brightest smile.

He rolled his eyes, appearing far too normal for her comfort.

“Was this your family dining table?” she asked, looking to the giant slab of marble. It could seat at least sixteen people.

“No one has ever eaten off this table,” Ambrose said, a thread of sorrow returning to his tone.

“It’s a bit large for an entry table,” Doreen mused.

“It’s where we would honor the dead,” he said, brushing his fingers over the wooden side once, before moving away.

“Honor?”

“They would rest here on the marble while we sat vigil with them before we returned them to the earth,” he said.

Doreen couldn’t repress the shockwave as it worked its way up her spine, even as she thought there was something lovely about a vigil to honor those you lost. A final goodbye.

“No wonder the ghosts don’t leave,” she whispered.

Ambrose gave a shake of his head but didn’t reply. He led her down a wide hall, dank and dark aside from a flicker of light coming in through thin slats every seven feet. “Why are there holes in your castle?”

“Artillery,” he said. “Need a place to shoot arrows, catapult the silver, that sort of thing.”

“Catapult? I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“I never joke,” he said.

They turned down one hall, then another. Doreen peeked in rooms as best she could, feeling as though they were scurrying like mice down the passages. As they passed the ornate sconces, their centers lit up with flames, though no torches remained. Fire drew itself to Ambrose, much as the wind seemed to be chasing after Doreen’s footsteps here in the castle. Each room Doreen spied into was tiny. High ceilings lifted them up, but they contained no space in which to spread out. They were the opposite of the halls, which felt wide and cavernous.

“Can you slow down?” she asked, struggling to keep up with Ambrose and his uncommonly long legs.

“I prefer not to.”

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know where we’re going.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Sure it does,” he said. He hesitated, then added, “Maybe it doesn’t. If I tell you what I’m doing, you might not like it.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

“I’m following a ghost trail.”

“You’re what?”

Ambrose paused, looking over his shoulder. “I should have guessed. You don’t know what a ghost trail is?”

Doreen looked down at the ground and along the walls. “I don’t see any trail.”

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Open to the space between here and hereafter.”

“I tried that in the garden of attacking hedgerows,” she said. “Lenora was there, and when I tried to open myself, she disappeared.”

Ambrose’s brows drew together.

A trilling of notes, like fingers tapping one after the other, danced through the air. Doreen swallowed and forced her wince into something resembling consternation. Or so she hoped. “Is this the viscount?”

He shook his head. “It’s Sinclair.”

“Who?”

“My valet.”

“From when you were a child?”

“Yes.”

“Is Sinclair also into murder?”

“Not usually.”

“Terrific,” she said brightly. “So, is following a witch trail like following a phosphorous night-light of a trail? Because that is what it sounds like.”

“No, it’s an ‘I’m a trained witch, and your family purposefully kept you in the dark so you are modestly inept’ sort of thing.”

“Ouch,” Doreen said, rubbing her sternum as the jab found and hit its mark.

He sighed, and scrubbed a hand over his face before turning from her. Doreen wondered if the sight of her made him physically ill; if he couldn’t help but be reminded of those who had tortured him. Her throat constricted at the idea.

“I have a connection to Sinclair,” he said after a long silence.

She studied the back of his neck, how the dark hair curled there and found a freckle hiding beneath the curl. She scolded her eyes and looked down the long corridor instead. “What kind of connection?”

“He saved my life.”

“Your life?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“The usual way. Stopped someone from killing me.”

“Wouldn’t that have bound you to him?”

“I may have also saved his.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, her eyes winning the war she waged and returning to him.

Ambrose rubbed a hand over his head, his long fingers brushing the curl when it got to his neck. Doreen swallowed as he turned to her, and she studied his face. “I was colicky as a child. It was… hard on my mother. Sinclair was close to her, and he stepped in at night, walking me up and down the halls so she could sleep. They said the movement soothed me.”

“How did that save your life?”

“My father didn’t care for my crying; he’d planned to smother me in my sleep, but Sinclair intervened by caring for me and giving my mother the rest she needed so she didn’t come apart. Sinclair was outspoken and often caught my father’s ire as well. His calming me, and in so doing calming my mother’s nerves, saved us both. He was always there, to step in.”

“Bloody hell.”

“It could have been.”

“Have you noticed all the males in your line were bloodthirsty assholes?”

Ambrose’s nostrils flared.

“Just asking.”

“It was a different time.”

“It always is.” She wanted to ask what else his dad had done, and how he’d survived, but she didn’t think now was the time to pry. She wished she didn’t feel compelled to pry at all. She waved an arm ahead of them instead. “Lead on?”

He inclined his head before turning down another hallway. They walked a short way, stopping in front of a dark stairwell. Doreen made herself look at his back instead of the diverting freckle on his neck.

Ambrose lifted a hand, and a torch rose from its holder, floating into his outstretched hand. He curled his fingers around the handle, muttering something under his breath.

“Is fire your element?” she asked, as the heat of the flames licked alongside her neck and cheek. “Along with being a seer?”

“No,” he said, turning his face from hers.

“And yet all the lights flicker alive in your presence here.”

“Fire is the castle’s element. I am the spark.”

“Does that mean the castle sat in darkness for the past three hundred years?”

“While your family tortured me? Yes, likely it does.”

“Oh.”

“Worrying the ghosts might turn on you?”

“Maybe.”

Ambrose’s lip might have twitched, or it could have been a frown trying to pull it down. “Mind the steps,” he said, and then he was moving up and away. So went the light, leaving Doreen to scramble after him into the narrow stairwell.

The stairwell was a slim tube. Doreen thought, as she climbed the small angled steps, that it was like being stuck inside a straw as it was shrinking. The light in the stairwell was a concerning shade of yellow, her vision changing as panic set in. The fading light shined against the cracks in the stone. Doreen put one hand against the nearest shrinking wall and tried to draw in a breath. Each inhale seemed to bring the walls closer to her. “Why is it so fucking tiny in here?” she managed to gasp out.

“To conserve heat,” Ambrose said, “and to give the advantage to those upstairs.”

Doreen tried to draw in a deep breath and failed. “How?”

“The person coming downstairs has a wider expanse of stair, since they are cut on the diagonal. When coming down with a sword drawn, it makes it easier to stab the target, kill them, and keep moving.”

“Of course. Silly of me not to realize,” Doreen said, before her knees gave out. She slumped into the wall, her heart beating in her ears, the stairwell beginning to close in on her completely.

Ambrose stopped, bent, and pulled her up and in front of him. He didn’t say a word, just held the light above his head and wrapped a solid arm around her waist. The feel of him had her breathing in, and then he was shifting so he could guide her up the next step. He walked them one step after another, his chest and heart against her back, urging her own to keep beating.

“Did you know my great-grandmother dreamed of lining the interior of the stairwell with fabric the color of moss and flowers the size of her head?” Ambrose said. “She was fixated on it. Used to draw them in her sleep. There is a room on the uppermost level where all the walls are covered in the remnants of her charcoal creations.” Ambrose spoke in a low, velvety tone, chatting on about his grandmother and her peculiarities as he guided her up. The patter didn’t make a lot of sense, but it distracted Doreen enough to keep her moving until she reached an opening and could stumble out of it onto a solid floor with walls the typical distance apart.

Doreen’s breath continued to evade her, and she gasped tiny sips in, one after the other, while thinking perhaps she would need to be airlifted from the castle. She was never going back in that stairwell again, could hardly see how she would make it another step, and so there was no way she’d get down ever again.

“You’re not breathing,” Ambrose said, his voice deep and low, the words coming out in a discernable puff across her neck.

She failed to draw in a deeper breath. “Hard to breathe when you’re having a panic attack.”

Ambrose kept the hand on her waist steady. He placed her shaking hand on his chest and took a deep breath in. She watched her hand rise and fall. “Now you,” he said. Doreen followed the rhythm of his heart and found she could draw a deeper intake of air, and then another.

As her breath grew more balanced, her thoughts spiraled.

There was little standing in the way of Doreen having a complete breakdown, outside of the man before her. The stingray who studied and steadied her. That he was anchoring her was troubling for so many reasons. She followed the sound of Ambrose’s breath, letting her chest rise and fall to the rhythm. In the back of her mind, she heard a violin sing. A warble of one string, the tug of it being pulled back and rubbed too closely to another. The room shifted, spinning upward, as her heart sped up and then plummeted.

When she was a kid, Doreen had lost control of her magic, and with it, her breath. But Margot had steadied her, saying, “It’s not a matter of mind over emotions. It’s a matter of not trying to control the uncontrollable. Be here now. Be. Here. Now.”

“You are,” Ambrose said, his voice cutting in through the static of her mind.

Doreen found her footing back in reality like a baby finds the ground with its first steps. “Ambrose?”

The room drifted back into focus. Doreen took in the light cutting across the slate-gray floor, making the cracks in the stone sparkle. Her eyes tracked to Ambrose’s shoes, the faded patches on the scuffed dark boots. She wondered how old the boots were. Had her aunts allowed him to change them over the years? Were they three sizes too small and meant to torture him further? Or did he acquire them after she freed him? She didn’t remember him having shoes of any kind when she’d found him inside the Dead House, but also didn’t recall him buying these in Portree. Doreen looked up, and her gaze snagged on the thickness of his thighs, the tautness of his forearms, and finally the pinched consternation of his determined mouth.

“I am?” she asked, her words scratchy and unsure.

“You said, ‘Be here now,’” Ambrose said. “I thought it might help to know you are. You didn’t go anywhere.”

“I had a panic attack.”

“It’s hard to exist inside the Goodbye Castle,” he said.

“I used to suffer from them,” she said. “When I was learning how to use my magic, we didn’t get a lot of formal instruction because Stella was busy and prickly. I messed up a lot. Margot thought that was why my breath got stuck inside me.” She swallowed around a knot in the back of her throat. “Margot was the only one who ever helped. She didn’t judge the episodes, or me.”

“Why would someone judge you over something you can’t help?” Ambrose asked, the hand on her waist squeezing gently.

“I thought you had been eavesdropping on the modern world,” Doreen said, trying to keep her tone light, to keep the hurt tucked away. “We judge first, provide compassion last. If at all.”

“Then I am sorry.”

Doreen looked up at him, shocked. “What?”

“It is unfair to be judged for things out of your control.” His eyes were less turquoise in the castle here; she saw a grayish blue circled in a thick ring of black. “But what you experienced in the stairwell wasn’t a panic attack.”

“Yes, it was.” Her fingers twitched under his hand, where he held it to his chest. “The room shrank, and I thought I was losing my mind. My heart morphed into a Clydesdale, and I knew I would die if I had to spend one more second in that tiny mouse’s closet of a stairwell.” She shuddered. “Imagining Sinclair and Magnus the Third in a swordfight to the death did little to help my undiluted fear.”

Ambrose’s eyes softened. “It was not a panic attack,” he repeated. “Truly. That was a battle waged by the spirits of the Goodbye Castle.”

He squeezed her hand and released where he held it. She did not move hers from his chest, though. She studied the dark blue of his eyes, how there was a band of silver before the black. “Ghosts of your freaky fortress caused me to nearly lose my mind?”

“Not exactly,” he said, staring back intently. “There is a line drawn here, and the veil between what was and what is blurs on this not-so-hallowed ground. It grows so thin, anything can happen. The truth of what was blends into the possibility of what can be, and it changes the coloring of the landscape around us and under us.”

“Oh, wow.” Doreen stepped away, breaking contact with his body. Touching Ambrose was too confusing. She ran her hands over her face, pinching her cheeks, trying to return the circulation back to her limbs. “I don’t know if I feel better or worse knowing that.”

Ambrose reached out, his fingers gently tapping against the inside of her arm. “That is your proof.”

She looked down at her arm. Directly beneath the bend in her elbow was a patch of white, a series of large dots that connected.

“It’s a birthmark,” she said. “A constellation to nowhere.”

“It’s more than that,” he mused.

Doreen brushed her thumb across it. “All the women in my family have them,” she said. “Witches’ blood, witches’ marks. King James VI would have loved us.”

“He would have loved trying to drown you after his cronies forced a week of sleep deprivation on you.” Ambrose removed his hand, the touch lingering long after his fingers left. “Ada showed me something I don’t think she meant to,” he said. “On the walls. Or something, perhaps, she didn’t realize I would understand.”

“Your vision? I thought it showed you to come here?”

“It did, but I saw something else too. I didn’t understand it until now. Lenora once told me a story. About thin places and the markings witches left for them. How the mark she carried was from fragments of something not of this world. She gave me the knowledge of how to recognize the thin places should I ever need to cross between the worlds. So many of them are guarded by stones carved and crafted, built from sacrifice and power. Like the Goodbye Castle. It has the same fractals in the walls as the ones in Ada’s cave, the same as on your arm. That is why Sinclair led us here.”

Doreen looked to the wall where Ambrose was looking. It seemed perfectly ordinary. “I still don’t see anything. No fractals or phosphorous anything. Not a drop.”

He glanced at her. “What did you take from Ada’s fire?”

“This?” She took it from her pocket, rubbing her thumb over it as she looked down.

He held his hand out.

“The tree of life,” he said as she placed the stone there, “inside a circle. Ada meant for this to guide you.”

“I don’t know how to use it.”

He stared, tracing the stone with the pad of his finger. “Lenora had a favorite spell, one she used often. She would tap on the face of skipping stones and whisper to them: The awakened power in me sees all .”

He handed the stone back to her. “Perhaps start there?”

Doreen tapped three times on the surface of the stone, speaking the words he’d shared. She was glad to have his help, and yet… she barely resisted wrinkling her nose. Lenora was her ancestor, but gods, it grated hearing him talk about her like she was the first coming of a deity. As Doreen whispered the last of the words, the center of the stone shifted from solid to transparent. From a solid rock to…

“Oh,” she said, the realization sinking in. “Lenora taught you how to make hag stones.”

“Aye,” he said, his smile small but beautiful. Then he blinked and stared so deep into her eyes, she had to force her feet to root so she didn’t wobble. “I wonder, though, why no one taught you.”

She swallowed, hating the reminder of what had been kept from her, as much as she hated the reminder that those who had shielded her from that knowledge were coming to stop her.

Panic and fear be damned, she and Ambrose needed to move faster. Doreen lifted the stone and looked through the center of it to the wall. The same lines she had seen at Ada’s were scattered across the surface. Pictish Beasts and fractals interwoven together. She narrowed her eyes when she realized Ambrose had been correct; the spot on her arm looked a lot like broken parts of the fractals on the wall. “I see what you mean.”

“As I said, we are in a thin place,” Ambrose said.

“What do we do?”

“We cross.”

“How? Draw a circle, create a door?”

Ambrose shook his head. “It’s a bit less complex than that.”

She furrowed her eyebrows, waiting, hoping she looked menacing. When his lip twitched again, she had her doubts, but his head gave a tilt to the archway on the other end of the room, and then he nodded to her stone.

Doreen lifted it again and saw the tree of life and the Pictish fractals repeating in a pattern around the edge of the doorway. “Oh.”

She blew out a breath, grateful the shakiness had departed from her limbs. She walked toward the doorway. Ambrose followed close behind. “Where is your Sinclair, by the way?”

“Ah. He’s trying to block the door.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Why is he trying to block the door he showed us?” she asked, squinting but not seeing him anywhere, through the stone or without it.

“He likely feels compelled to give me the answers, while trying to protect me.”

“Protect you from what?”

“What do you know about thin places?”

Doreen swallowed, thinking that if a ghost was afraid of something, it did not bode well for them. “Margot and I found a book about them once in a box at the apothecary shop,” she said. “The author said thin places were the spaces where the world was loosely knit together, and you couldn’t experience them with any of the five senses.”

“I don’t know that I believe in coincidence and magic. The book was likely meant to find you, and what the author wrote is true,” Ambrose said, his steps as slow and measured as Doreen’s as they inched toward the arch. “However, there is an asterisk to it. Those who are open to the truth can find their way to thin places at any time.”

“And what do we find in the thin places?”

“A door to a world beyond this one. The start of an adventure.”

“You mean the trials?”

“Sinclair led us here, and it may well have cost him to do so. We’re in the gloaming now, the twilight between worlds.”

“It’s another spell.”

“It is the spell.”

“The spell is the truth,” Doreen whispered. The truth was the spell.

Was Doreen ready?

She reached the arch and stared up at how it shimmered. Twinkling light as soft as gossamer filled its opening. Here was the door to the trials. There was no going back, and there was no guarantee that if she stepped through, she would succeed.

But there had never been any guarantees for Doreen, and if she was willing to bet on anyone, it would be herself.

Though she wasn’t alone.

Going on instinct, she held out a hand. Ambrose took it, threading his fingers with hers. For a moment, Doreen was back in the fountain, Ambrose bare before her, and she was flooded with hope.

It didn’t matter if she was ready; it hardly mattered what they would find on the other side. They had to keep going, and they needed to outrun her family. She gave him a gentle tug. Together they stepped through the doorway and out.

And onto the thin lip of a very old, crumbling, precarious ledge.

The skies were ashen. Slate-gray clouds bordered by darkness, and just beyond them it faded into a white mist that blanketed the edge of the world. The wind whipped against their faces, as cold and severe as the warning had been in Ada’s eyes when she’d made the deal with Ambrose so many years ago. The rain lashed for long minutes, and Ambrose dared not move a single inch. Thunder cracked across the moors, the sounds not unlike a cackling queen, calling for the games to begin.

Ambrose’s palm was sweating, and the rain didn’t help. After many, many years of torture, if there was one thing left that he feared, it was heights. He blamed his family. So many had succumbed to dastardly ends by way of elevation. They were pushed, dropped, felled. Off cliffs, ledges, and roofs.

He could not let Doreen see this, not when she had nearly crumbled to dust in front of his eyes not so long ago. Not when his heart had stuttered at her fall in the stairwell. A current of possessiveness ran through him now, and he might hate it, but he had yet to dislodge it.

And dislodge it he must. There was little more dangerous than the way his heart had squeezed over seeing her in distress.

Ambrose focused on what the first test for the trials would be. Thin places steal time, but they expose what is true. Ambrose knew what was necessary, what this journey required. To reach the other side of this one, they would need to take a leap of faith. It’s why they were on the bloody ledge.

He swallowed and looked down at the determined witch beside him.

“Don’t say it,” she said, her voice coming out a squeak.

“Okay.”

“We have to jump, don’t we?”

“You asked me not to say it.”

“Fuck.”

“Pretty much.”

She let out a hysterical laugh, then looked up at him. “Together?”

Ambrose took in a breath, but it only reached the shallow places of his lungs. He stared deep into her honey eyes and thought how much she looked like herself in this moment. Not Lenora, not her mother, not anyone other than Doreen, the forgotten witch of the MacKinnon line. Fierce, even though terrified.

“Together,” he said, knowing that he was agreeing to follow her into hell, and that after this there would be no turning back. He could only hope the outcome would be worth the fall. They would enter the trials, he could trap her family, and he would gain his redemption.

Doreen smiled, tilted her head up, and pressed her lips to his cheek. Ambrose started, his mouth parting in shock. His heart gave another thump of warning and he thought of what he could never tell her.

The trials would be a success for him, but it was a lost cause for her. Because the darkest secret Ambrose kept was this: a MacKinnon witch claiming his heart was the only way the curse would be broken.

And he would find a way to die before he ever fell in love with another MacKinnon.

He swallowed and started to untangle their hands—the proximity, the way her eyes were steady on his, it was too much. Doreen’s grip loosened and dropped. For a moment, his fingers strained for what had been there moments before, anchoring him.

Then she reached up, wrapped her hand in his shirt, and yanked, sending them both tumbling over the edge.