Poison and Potions: a Limited Edition Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection

by Erin Hayes

  Two witches, one male and one female, stood above an elf who was chained to the floor with iron manacles. The metal cuffs dug into the elf’s wrists and ankles, setting off the common Fae allergy and causing the skin to blister and bubble. Where the blisters had burst, the skin was rubbed away entirely, leaving angry, seeping wounds.

  I couldn’t see the elf’s face—he’d dropped his head forward so that the ratty remains of his once-careful braids hung down in front of his eyes.

  “Look at me,” the woman barked, her voice harsh and commanding. When the elf didn’t respond, the witch kicked him with a heavy boot.

  I circled around inside the cell, stepping lightly even though I knew I was merely an observer and no one would hear my steps. When I had moved far enough inside, I carefully examined the two witches’ faces. They weren’t from my island.

  “Bring him,” the woman instructed the male witch with her, pointing her chin at the elf on the floor.

  The man pulled a key from an enormous ring at his waist and used it to unlock the Fae’s manacles. I half expected the elf to take the opportunity to bolt, but his hands just dropped to the floor.

  “Get up,” the man grunted. When the elf didn’t respond, he simply grabbed the Fae by the ankles and began dragging him out of the room. After the man had pulled him several feet down the hallway, he dropped the elf’s legs heavily to the floor. “You ready to get up now?” He sneered.

  I gasped aloud when the Fae pulled himself to sitting, and then onto his knees. His back was a confused welter of old wounds and new. Being tugged along the rough stone flooring had scraped scabs off his back, and I could see, now that I looked, a trail of blood along the hallway floor.

  I chanced a glance at Kaedon. His jaw was set, his face grim.

  “Where are we?” I asked, not certain I wanted to hear the answer.

  “Northwestern Witches’ Island,” he answered shortly.

  It wasn’t my own island, but it was home to a coven my own considered a sister group. They were on the far side of this mountain range, almost as far away from my own home as it was possible to get. What I knew of our history told me that the elves and witches had long ago shared our entire world. But since the elves had discovered they could use the witches’ magic as if it were their own, they had fought to make us their slaves, and we had retreated to the edges of the continent, finding refuge on small, easy-to-protect islands.

  “The islands’ isolation—both geographically and from one another—makes it easy for each coven to commit whatever atrocities they please without fear of discovery or reprisal.” Kaedon’s statement almost seemed to flow from my own thoughts, though it was nothing I would ever have said or even imagined. I wanted to protest, but the sight of the elf with the bloodied back stumbling down the hall behind the two witches silenced me.

  Kaedon’s tone didn’t invite disagreement, either.

  We seemed to follow them deeper and deeper into the dungeon, past cells full of moaning elves. When they finally reached their destination, the elf finally balked. Turning to run, he found himself yanked back by his hair, forced into a room that clearly functioned as a torture chamber.

  Iron implements of all sorts hung on the wall—hooks and knives and strange, spiked shields. I could only guess at their uses, but they made me shudder nonetheless.

  The captive elf began crying before they even finished chaining him to the table in the center of the room, silent tears streaming down his face in anticipation of what was to come.

  Anxiously, I glanced at Kaedon once more. This time, he returned my look, his gaze steady. “We can leave if you need to,” he offered.

  I shook my head resolutely. “No. I need to see what they’re doing.” My voice sounded hoarse, as if my throat had been scraped raw by the unspoken screams of denial struggling to escape me.

  Kaedon merely crossed his arms over his chest, his lips tight with anger as he watched the male witch leave the room.

  “What do you think we should try today?” the female witch asked her victim. Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “Your back is bleeding again, so I thought perhaps we would focus on other areas today.”

  She moved around the edges of the room, lovingly caressing the instruments on the wall. If I had met her in any other context, I would’ve seen nothing but an older woman, slightly plump, with short, gray hair and a pleasant face.

  Right now, it was that odd juxtaposition between her kindly expression and the horrific acts she was about to commit that turned my stomach. When she chose an especially sharp-looking blade from the collection, my determination to see this out wavered, but I swallowed my horror and gritted my teeth.

  Kaedon noticed my distress but didn’t mention it, and I was grateful.

  “You know,” she said, moving toward the center table, “I’ve heard it said that our two peoples spring from a common ancestor. That would make us cousins, of a sort.” With the tip of the knife, she flicked the tip of one of his ears, barely seeming to touch it. The elf whimpered, blood welling up in a bright red line. “But none of my cousins have such ugly ears.”

  With that, she waved her knife alongside his head. The elf let out a howl of anguish, and the witch caught his ear before it hit the ground. She’d sliced it off so quickly that I’d hardly had time to realize what happened before she moved around to the other side.

  “Perhaps I should leave you one, just so you can remember who you are.”

  Torturers shouldn’t have beautiful laughs. The thought wandered through my mind as the elf’s second scream cut the air. I pressed my hands to my own mouth as if to help him hold it in—I could see how much the sadistic witch loved the sound.

  “That’s enough,” Kaedon announced, his voice grim. He closed out the vision mirror so quickly that I stumbled, disoriented by the sudden shift in scenery.

  In his study now, Kaedon sloshed generous portions of liquor into our glasses. He tossed his back quickly, then slammed the glass down onto the serving cart to pour more into it.

  I almost didn’t dare to speak, except I knew his ire was not directed at me. “Is there no way we can save him?” I hadn’t meant to whisper.

  Kaedon shook his head once. “Not my job. There are others tasked with rescue, though I suspect it’s too late for that poor soul. No, the most I can do is work to end this war—to make sure there is no longer any excuse for these atrocities.”

  “We are supposed to be better than that.” My words were more for myself than for Kaedon. “All my life, I’ve been taught that witches are morally superior to elves.” Eyes narrowed, I spun around to confront the elf. “How do I know that was a true vision? That you didn’t contrive it merely to convince me to work with you?”

  Kaedon’s laugh held little humor. “Examine it for yourself. You don’t need my shortcuts—all the usual vision mirror commands will work as well.”

  Nodding, I turned back to the mirror, even though part of me knew the Fae lord was not lying to me. “Exsero domum,” I whispered. Show me my home.

  Seconds later, I stepped into the same field where I’d been stretched out, staring up at the sky, when Lacey had dragged me to the Choosing ceremony. I could hear children playing in the distance. There was no way Kaedon could have prepared this ahead of time—no one else knew I considered that single spot more “home” than any other place on the island.

  After a few seconds, I closed the vision. Without a word, I downed the amber liquor Kaedon had given me, savoring the fiery burn as it went down. The elf was kind enough to ignore the way I choked and coughed. He merely took my glass and poured me another drink. I sipped at this one.

  “Why aren’t you more eager to help the Fae win the war? If my people are torturing yours, what is stopping you from joining the battle to defeat the witches?”

  Kaedon’s smile was as humorless as his laugh. “Are you ready to see the things my people do to yours?”

  I wasn’t ready—I was certain of it—but I needed to see it for mys
elf. I nodded. Taking a final swallow of my drink, I once again stepped up to the vision mirror.

  Having seen the witches inflicting torture on an elf, I believed nothing could shake me any further, that nothing could be worse than what I’d already seen that day.

  I was wrong.

  “We don’t have time to ease into this one. I’m sorry,” Kaedon murmured into my ear as we emerged from the other side of the vision device. If we had actually been traveling, I would have assumed he meant to keep anyone else from hearing. Since this was more akin to a mirror than a portal, I almost thought he didn’t mean for me to hear his half-whispered comment at all.

  Intentional or not, his words made me steel myself before I had even fully comprehended the scene in front of my eyes. I blinked several times before I could see past the flashes of blue and red light.

  Witches.

  Rows of them in some wide elfin hall, lashed to evenly spaced poles, as if preparing to be burned at the stake as they were in the stories from the old world, before they had found their way to this one.

  Elves moved purposefully from witch to witch, pausing now and again to place a hand against a forehead, touch an arm or a leg, or even, once, heft a woman’s breast. And everywhere the elves touched, a black scorch mark remained. The witches’ bodies were covered in crisped, blackened skin.

  The scent of burning skin, not unlike roasting meat, permeated the air, just as it had on the battlefield we’d seen before. Here, the smell was underscored by the echoing screams of witches with enough energy left to resist.

  Fighting down my rising nausea, I forced myself to take in as many details as I possibly could. The witches with the least number of burn marks remained better able to fight against their captors—not only because of the physical debilitation, but because, I realized, this was how the elves were taking power from the witches.

  Every time an elf walked away from the newly scorched victim, he or she moved to the front of the room, where another elf—a tall, willowy woman with long, blonde hair—worked a complicated magical spell, swirling visible energies into glowing pink and blue confectionery swirls, as if the resultant magics were sugar-laden sweets rather than death-dealing explosive spells.

  “This is how elves take power from witches?” I hissed at Kaedon. “This is unconscionable.”

  “I agree,” he said calmly, his voice steady and strong despite the horrors in front of him. “But there’s worse to come—and I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you must see it.”

  He led me around the edge of the room, as if he didn’t want to invite me into the center of the witches’ suffering. At the far side, a single staircase spiraled down to another floor. This floor had been broken into small chambers, much like the one we had seen the elf’s ear removed in.

  Unlike that one, however, these had windows allowing observers to stare in, to watch what was happening inside. One had gathered a small crowd of elfish men, who watched whatever was going on inside with an odd combination of hoots of derision and cheers of encouragement.

  I moved forward to see what they were responding to, but Kaedon grabbed my arm and held me back, leaning down to urgently whisper in my ear.

  “No matter what you see here, this is what I am trying to stop. It does not have to be like this between our people. We can show them. We can make it work.”

  This time, the dread inside my stomach was a sinking lead ball, heavier than my mother’s hidden magic. Worse than anything I’d ever felt before.

  I was able to move almost up to the window, though.

  I soon wished I hadn’t. But I moved forward anyway. As an observer, I could slip through the small crowd easily to the glass viewing window.

  Inside the room, an elf stood in front of a witch who’d been strapped to a table. Like the elf the witches had held in their own torture chamber, she was held still for him to enact horrors on her body.

  I wanted to believe that was where the similarities ended.

  I couldn’t.

  The torturer-witch had chosen a blade as her weapon.

  But they both violated their victims.

  Rape had always been the ultimate way to take a woman’s power. Here was no different. It simply involved the addition of a more literal magical power.

  I couldn’t make out much of the witch’s features, but she was too exhausted, too burned, and too injured to do more than feebly protest.

  I could, however, hear the laughter of the men watching through the window. My throat closed with gagging horror.

  When the elf tied a length of rope around her neck to choke off her air supply, I whimpered and pulled back toward Kaedon. Then I realized I was turning to an elf for comfort.

  Before I was fully aware of what I was doing, I’d stumbled to the main hall, through the witches tied to the stakes. Not until I was halfway across the floor did I realize I didn’t have to stay. I didn’t even have to get back to our entrance point to leave. Instead, I made a motion with my hands and closed the vision portal.

  Gasping, I emerged into the elf’s study. I dropped into the chair that had been mine all afternoon and placed my head in my hands, rocking back and forth with the absolute misery and injustice of it all.

  Kaedon placed my drink in my hand again without a word. This time, I didn’t hesitate to gulp it down. The fiery burn of the liquid into my stomach seem to calm me enough to talk.

  “That’s how you steal a witch’s power?” I whispered raggedly.

  “It’s not how I take power.” The elf lord paused. “But yes, all too often, my kind has enslaved yours and taken power as if it were our own. I can’t allow it to continue. We were not always at odds with one another—I choose to believe that we don’t have to be enemies forevermore.”

  He leaned into me, the expression in his eyes intense and almost terrifying.

  “What your people do is practically mechanized.” I almost spit out the last word, using the worst insult I could think of, a term that embodied the elves’ uncaring attitude toward the rest of the world around them.

  “I agree,” Kaedon said softly. “And the witches’ torture is terrible. I want us to overcome both kinds of evils, together.”

  Standing, he held his hand out to me, as if waiting for me to take it. With the other, he plucked my drink away and set it on the sidebar. “Stand with me,” he urged. “Will you help me end this?”

  Slowly, I reached out and clasped his outstretched hand.

  “I will.”

  Chapter Six

  I woke the next morning, my shift damp with sweat. All night long, I’d dreamed of the torture I’d seen.

  Then the dreams would change, and I would take the place of the people I’d seen—sometimes the torturer, sometimes the tortured. Between dreams, I slept fitfully.

  Near morning, the nightmares changed again. This time, I stood in the center of the gathering circle. Other witches surrounded me, their voices loud and mocking as they denounced me for a traitor, a collaborator with the Fae.

  Condemned, just as my parents had been.

  Their condemnation had ended in exile. In my dream, I was strapped to a tall, wooden table. Mother Jonas loomed over me with a wickedly sharp knife. Laughing, she used it to slice open my dress as I screamed. And as I begged for mercy, she swirled the blade around in my abdomen until she found what she was looking for. With one hard stab down, she pulled my mother’s magic out of me. Like it was an apple on the end of the cooking knife, she took a bite out of it.

  That was the one that finally jerked me upright, fully awake in the early gray light of dawn.

  Hurriedly, I dressed and made a cup of tea from the remains of the kettle hanging over the fire. Then I settled in to wait for Lord Kaedon’s summons.

  I suffered through the long, dragging morning, realizing I had no idea what Kaedon did in the castle outside of this room and his study.

  And it’s foolish to wonder about it, too, I reminded myself. At least for now.

  If he were to be trus
ted, if he really planned for us to work together to end the war between Fae and witches, then I would have plenty of time to find out, because we wouldn’t ever be going anywhere again. We would be traitors to our peoples, likely to be unwelcome anywhere in either race’s realm, no matter what the official stance on elf-witch relations might become.

  By the time Kaedon sent the same maid to escort me through the dark, stone hallways to his study, I was a mass of quivering nerves and unanswered questions.

  I didn’t even wait for him to speak before I jumped in. “What were those elfin—”

  “Elven,” he interrupted me sharply.

  That’s right. Elves had some strict hierarchy of language, rules about how they referred to themselves. I’d probably offered him some horrible insult.

  Well, given the situation I found myself in—a lone female witch held in the fortress stronghold of one of the infamous elf lords—I was probably lucky a slight rebuke was the worst I had suffered.

  “Elven,” I corrected. “What were those stakes the witches were tied to in the elven hall you showed me yesterday?”

  “Good eye.” Apparently, he had decided to ignore the interaction over the adjective as well. “It’s a power-conduit pole. It amplifies what the elves take from the witches.”

  “The elves tie them to those poles and then literally burn the power out of them? And that second scene? Is raping witches something the elves do for fun, or is it designed to get power out of them too?” I hadn’t intended for my voice to come out quite so angry, but the scenes from the day before, combined with my horrific nightmares and the anger I felt toward both our people, boiled over into a bubbling rage.

  Kaedon narrowed his eyes, staring down over that aristocratic nose of his. “Trauma,” he said.

  I had just been winding up for a full-on rant, but the single word stopped me in my tracks. “Trauma? What about it?”

  “Elves can draw witches’ power from them, even more so when the witch is under duress. Add trauma to the equation, and an elf can drain a witch of every drop of power she has.”