“Don’t you dare do it, Gwenlyn—”
“Promise me, Morgan.”
The words echoed through my head. I had made so many promises already. More and more, it felt like I wouldn’t be able to keep them. The paring knife quivered over Gwenlyn’s wrist, and when I saw the tendons there tighten with intent, I broke.
“I promise, Gwenlyn.”
I closed my eyes as steel met skin, but not soon enough to avoid seeing the rush of blood that welled up at the long gash Gwenlyn had made along her arm. When I gathered the courage to glance up again, the olive-wood bowl overflowed with Gwenlyn’s blood, and she lay on her side, her entire body illuminated with the forest-green hue of her witchcraft.
I felt a pull at my core, as if someone had tied a cable around my waist and was yanking me along behind a truck. Beside me, Dorothy chanted in Latin, and the glow of her craft filled the room and pushed at my back. The magic smashed me against the window as if trying to force me through it. I released a strangled yell as an unyielding force tightened around me, strangling me from head to toe. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear.
And then I took a great, gasping breath of putrid, earthly air.
Chapter Six
In Which I Reunite With My Sisters
The unmistakable smell of rot attacked my nostrils. I lay flat on my back, cold mud seeping through my clothing, and stared up through the thick trees at a navy night sky that indisputably belonged to the real world. The stars blinked down at me, a serene sight that clashed with the abrasive scent of decay invading my nose. Gwenlyn’s ritual, her sacrifice, had worked.
Gwenlyn. She was my first priority. How long had my return to the mortal world taken? Was Gwenlyn still alive? I pushed myself up from the earth, my hands squishing through the soft, overturned dirt. It would have been too easy for Gwen’s ritual to dump me right at her side. No, I had been yanked back to some dark corner of the forest with no knowledge of how many miles it might be back to my loft. It didn’t help that my head felt so light that it might float away like a balloon in high winds. Traveling between spirit realms was no walk in the park. I rested my forehead in my muddy palms, willing my body to get it together. The longer I lingered, the less likely it was that Gwen would survive. If she didn’t pull through, I’d never get the chance to shoot Dominic in the face.
A sudden shot of panic pulsed through me. Had the beast’s pistol made it back to the mortal world with me? I didn’t remember having it in the last level of the otherworld. I patted myself down, finding nothing, then combed through the dirt and dead leaves in the hopes of unearthing it. Finally, my fingers made contact with smooth, cool metal. A moan of relief found its way out of my mouth as the pistol’s neon-blue lettering flared beneath my touch, and I tucked the gun into the back of my jeans for easy access. Then, with the help of a sturdy tree trunk, I heaved myself to my feet and lifted my eyes to take in the world around me. Immediately, my ribs tightened around my lungs.
I was standing at the edge of the cemetery, in full view of every ghost and demon that Dominic had managed to enthrall.
The only good thing was that none of Dominic’s minions had noticed my presence yet. The demons seemed incapable of much movement without Dominic’s immediate influence. Most of them sat near the graves they had so recently vacated, staring longingly into the gaping holes of the earth as if wishing they could return there. The ghosts, on the other hand, lingered near the outer edges of the graveyard, chatting with each other or herding wayward demons back to the center of the cemetery.
I swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in my throat. If any one of the ghosts noticed me, they would certainly alert Dominic to my presence in the mortal world. The only upper hand I had at the moment was Dominic’s ignorance of my return. I had to get out of the cemetery unnoticed. With a steadying breath, I took one tentative step backward, away from the hellish scene of the graveyard. None of the ghosts noticed my agonizingly slow retreat. So far, so good. I took another step, then another, feeling each footfall out to avoid tripping over any tree roots or rocks. When my view of the graveyard was obscured by the trees, I pivoted on my heel and took off at a dead sprint toward the direction of my loft, where Gwenlyn lay dying. As I vaulted a large boulder, I pleaded with my shaky legs to support me long enough to reach her.
“Going somewhere?”
I plunged through the silvery light of a ghost, emerging on the other side feeling as though I’d just taken a dip in a frozen lake. Stumbling, my foot caught the underside of a tree root, and I tumbled forward, reaching out to break my fall. I spun around, frantically crab-walking away from the ghost as I tried to regain my footing. The ghost chuckled darkly at my feeble escape attempt then reached down to grab the front of my T-shirt and hauled me to my feet.
“Ronan,” I gasped as the ghost drew me closer to his face. He had been a mountain of muscles when he was alive and possessed the kind of bulk that wasn’t possible without the help of a cocktail of steroids. Unfortunately, death hadn’t diluted the effect. Ronan was Dominic’s right-hand man, and before my jaunt into the otherworld, I’d managed to piss him off a fair number of times. Of all of Dominic’s ghosts, Ronan was the worst one to welcome me back to earth.
“Hello, Morgan,” said Ronan, baring his teeth. I pushed at his hands, which were still wrapped tightly around the neck of my T-shirt. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Yeah, I was just out for a stroll,” I snapped. He lifted me up, and my feet struggled to find purchase with the forest floor.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he snarled.
“The otherworld wasn’t really my scene,” I said, shrugging.
Ronan narrowed his beady eyes. His knuckles pressed against my throat, but I held back the cough that threatened to escape. “Your boyfriend misses you.”
“Ugh, how many times do I have to say it?” I said, my voice crackling past the force of Ronan’s tightening fingers. “That repugnant asshole is not my boyfriend.”
“In any case, I’m sure he’ll be over the moon about your sudden reappearance.” Ronan smirked as my mask of indifference fell. He knew that I’d be screwed if Dominic found out about me. “How’d you manage it anyway?”
“Manage what?” I choked out.
He shook me, and my feet abandoned the ground entirely. The breath whooshed out of my lungs with the punch of Ronan’s movement, and I scrabbled at his wrists, desperate for air. “You’re alive,” he hissed. “Dominic’s tried every damn ritual in the book to make his mother and sister human again. Nothing’s worked. Yet here you are. I saw you vanish into the otherworld. For all intents and purposes, you should be as dead as my late wife.”
My voice was barely a croak. “It didn’t take.”
“This will.”
He set me down to grasp either side of my head with both hands, as if he intended to twist it off like a bottle cap. “Say goodbye, Morgan Summers.”
But before he could so much as twitch my neck in either direction, I reached swiftly for the back of my jeans to free the pistol, pressed the barrel to the underside of Ronan’s jaw—“Goodbye,” I said—and pulled the trigger.
A blinding bullet of blue light ripped through Ronan’s face, exploding out of the top of his head. For a second, I saw his eyes widen, then the swirl of tattoos on my arms flared as if in reaction to my use of the pistol. Ronan stumbled backward, releasing me to cradle his own head between his palms. The blue light of his bullet wound flashed again, brightening, and began to devour him whole. With an inhuman scream, Ronan folded in on himself, shrinking into the dark dirt of the forest floor.
And then he was gone. No trace of the ghost remained, and I stood stock still, my hand still frozen in position around the grip of the gun and my lungs working furiously to return blood to my brain.
The tattoos on my arms faded as I gathered myself. Then, with renewed vigor, I ripped through the rest of the forest at a breakneck pace. There was no time to stand around in awe of the pistol’s power. Gwenlyn
needed me.
I burst through the unlocked door of the loft, practically kicking it down, then raced up the stairs to the bedroom. Gwenlyn lay slumped over, the bloodstained paring knife still between her limp fingers. The olive-wood bowl had tipped over, spilling her blood across the oakwood floorboards. It had pooled around her, soaking through the fabric of her clothing and matting her hair. I fell to my knees at her side, taking her ruined wrist in my hands. She had drawn a long gash parallel to her forearm, tearing into the artery there. Thankfully, the blood had already begun to clot. Gwenlyn’s unconsciousness was most likely a product of the ritual, then, rather than blood loss.
As gently as I could, I drew Gwenlyn into my lap, straightening her limbs into a more comfortable position. Then I pried the paring knife from her hand.
“Please let this work,” I whispered, my eyes turning skyward. I thought of Dorothy, watching from that warm, safe cabin in the otherworld as I attempted to save Gwenlyn’s life.
I drew a long, shallow scrape on my forearm, a mirror of Gwen’s own wound, wincing at the bite of the blade as blood welled on my skin. I flung the knife away—it skittered across the floorboards like a frightened mouse—and lifted Gwen’s arm again. Pressing my arm to the deep gouge in her wrist, I drew my witchcraft from the deep place in my core where it resided and breathed two words in Latin. Heal her.
For one soul-sucking moment, nothing happened. Gwenlyn remained unconscious, her pulse beating feebly against my own wrist. Soon enough, though, my royal-blue witchcraft snaked its way around our entwined arms. As my blood mingled with Gwen’s, my chest tightened. The tattoos on my arms shimmered again, illuminating the loft with a soft beryl glow. A sudden pain shot through the laceration on my wrist as the witchcraft began knitting my skin back together. In my lap, Gwenlyn stirred, her heavily lidded eyes opening.
“Nice tats,” she mumbled.
“Oh, thank goodness,” I said, folding over Gwen to give her a hug.
She patted my forearm, which was still splattered with blood and mud, then pushed herself up from the floor. Her hair was a mess, matted through with dried blood. She looked me up and down. “For a dead woman, you seem just fine,” she observed.
“Speak for yourself,” I said, smacking her lightly upside the head. “I can’t believe you put me through that.”
She examined her wrist. A long, raised scar was the only reminder of her sacrifice, though it gleamed with the same neon-blue light of my tattoos. “It was the only way to get you back,” she said, running a finger over the scar. “Plus, I knew you wouldn’t let me die. I guess we’re officially blood sisters now.”
“As creepy as that is, I thought I’d feel different,” I said. It was true. Other than relief at Gwenlyn’s survival, I didn’t feel anything that might indicate a deeper connection between us. “I mean, a blood bond is meant to share a witch’s power, right?”
“You and I have the same ability, remember?” Gwenlyn pointed out. She reached out to take one of my arms, scrutinizing my tattoos. “We’re both psychic mediums, so why would we feel any different?”
“I guess we’ll find out when we try to link everyone else.”
“Wait, what? Who are we linking?”
I stood up, taking in the mess that we had made on the floor of the loft. I had tracked in mud all the way up the stairs, and I’d probably never be able to get the bloodstains out of the oakwood floorboards. I bent down, collected the paring knife, and stuck it in my back pocket.
“That’s how we can free the rest of the coven from Dominic’s trance,” I said, wiping my hands on the seat of my jeans before realizing how fruitless the action was. My jeans were just as saturated with mud as the rest of me. “If we bind the witches together, they’ll also become mediums, and Dominic won’t be able to control them anymore.”
“That’s genius,” said Gwenlyn. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”
“Because it’s not exactly an option that we can take lightly,” I said. I opened the door to my closet, unearthed two bath towels, and threw one to Gwenlyn. “We can’t do anything looking like a pair of corpses. Take a shower. Wash the blood out of your hair. It’s freaking me out.”
When we had both rinsed off and redressed, we sat at the small breakfast table on the first floor of the loft to regroup. I filled Gwenlyn in on some of my adventures in the otherworld, including the details of how I had acquired my new handgun. Then we tried to come up with a plan. Somehow, we had to link ourselves to every other witch in the coven, but with Dominic’s trance, it was sure to be a challenge.
“We’ll just take it one witch at a time,” suggested Gwenlyn as she chowed down on a package of stale mini donuts that I had unearthed from my long-abandoned pantry. I opted for an overripened apple. Apparently, nearly dying had quite an overwhelming effect on the appetite.
“You don’t think Dominic will know when the trance has been lifted?” I asked, peeling the sticker from the apple and pressing it to the tabletop.
“Not sure. But we don’t really have any other choice, do we?”
I sighed and picked at a dark spot on my apple before taking a bite. “Nope. We’ll start at the main house to track down my mother and sisters. If we get Cassandra first, that will definitely make things easier. The head of the coven is bound to have a huge impact on the bond.”
Crumbs fell from Gwenlyn’s mouth as she devoured another donut. “What do you think is going to happen when we get all of the witches connected?”
“I’m hoping we evolve into an all-powerful superunit that can take down Dominic’s army of living dead without a hitch,” I admitted, though I knew the chances of that were pretty slim. As much power as the blood bond would give the coven, it still remained that my new pistol was the only way to get rid of Dominic’s thralls for good. Even so, I wanted my backup to be as prepared for the upcoming onslaught as possible. At the very least, the witches had a much better chance of survival if we all shared each other’s abilities. I took one last bite of my apple, tossed the rest of it into the nearby garbage bin, and confiscated the donuts from Gwen.
“Hey!” she protested, licking powdered sugar off of her fingers.
“You’re going to crash from the sugar high,” I explained, throwing the package into the trash. “I need you on high alert. Are you ready to go?”
Gwenlyn blinked at me. “Right now? I nearly just died.”
“I was dead,” I countered. I fetched her bloodstained tennis shoes from near the door and deposited them at her feet. “We can’t waste any more time. Let’s go, kid.”
Once Gwenlyn had wiped the majority of the donut evidence from her face and put on her shoes, we turned out the lights at the loft and headed out into the dark forest. I had walked the path between my loft and the main house a hundred times, but now there was something ominous about the way the trees loomed above us. Even the light of the moon, pale and soft, was disturbing, much too reminiscent of the silvery pallor of a ghost’s presence.
As we neared the main house, the trees thinning out ever so slightly to reveal the backyard, Gwenlyn grabbed my hand and wrenched me back into the shadows.
“What?” I hissed at her, peering through the leaves.
“I heard something.”
I stopped breathing to listen. Sure enough, the faint murmur of a silky voice met my ears. Pushing aside a particularly bushy branch, I peeked into the backyard of the Summers house.
“It’s Laurel,” I whispered.
My lungs expanded at the sight of my youngest sister. She lay on her back, near the edge of our thicket of trees. Her long blond hair fanned out in the grass around her as she gazed up into the stars and cooed absentmindedly to the trees. Laurel had the ability to communicate with nature, so it was no surprise to find her out in the yard. If anything, it was a stroke of luck. One more witch to help us reach the rest of the coven.
“How do we go about this?” Gwenlyn asked, her voice just a breath of sound in the breezy night. “Should we just surprise h
er and pin her down?”
“Laurel doesn’t do well with violence,” I said. I leaned against a tree, contemplating our options as I watched Laurel swish her fingers through the grass at her sides. “Besides, I want to know what the coven thinks happened to me. What fantasy did Dominic plant in their minds, you know?”
“What are you going to do?”
Before I could lose my nerve or before I could think better of my stupidity, I stepped out from the shadows of the trees and into the moonlight. Behind me, I felt Gwenlyn’s fingers grapple for my arm, trying to pull me back, but I shook her off. I needed to know if my own sister still recognized me.
“Laurel?” I said in the gentlest tone I could manage with my wavering voice.
Laurel stopped singing to the trees long enough to glance up. Her vacant eyes drifted over me, almost as if I weren’t even there. Then she said, “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
I approached her warily. “Am I?”
“Yes,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “Are you a ghost?”
I knelt down in the grass beside her. “No. Laurel, it’s me. It’s Morgan.”
She tapped my nose playfully with her index finger, making me rock backward in surprise. “You can’t trick me, Dorothy. Why have you appeared to me?”
I stood up again, looking back at Gwenlyn. “She doesn’t even know who I am,” I said as Laurel gazed up at me in oblivious indifference. “She thinks I’m Dorothy.”
Gwenlyn stepped out from the darkness of the tree line, braver now that Laurel’s reaction was so subdued. “It could be worse,” said Gwen. “Dominic could’ve made them hate you or something.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. I took a knee beside Laurel again, extracting the paring knife from the back pocket of my jeans. Thankfully, not every blood bond had to be as drastic as the one I shared with Gwenlyn. A prick of the finger would do it. I forced the point of the knife through the skin at the tip of my thumb, squeezing the blood out, then took up Laurel’s hand to do the same.
Witch Myth Omnibus: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery Page 17