Mist, Murder & Magic

by Dionnara Dawson

  Mist, Murder &

  Magic

  The Promised Witch Series Book Two

  Dionnara Dawson

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  FEATHERS, TAILS & BROOMSTICKS

  Copyright © 2019 Dionnara Dawson.

  All rights reserved.

  Written by Dionnara Dawson.

  Copyeditor: Todd Herzman

  Proofreader: April Bennett

  To every person fighting to do the right thing, be a better person, and combat their demons: and to my own hero, without whom the battle of this book would not have been won.

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire,

  I hold with those who favour fire.

  But if it had to perish twice,

  I think I know enough of hate

  To say that for destruction ice

  Is also great

  And would suffice.

  —Robert Frost—

  Prologue

  Harrow

  Harrow Nympha held Hella Corvime—the almost-dead promised witch—by her throat against the wall, her breath coming out in shaking gasps. Darkness roiled inside him: a void deeper than his change as a young teenager. It felt like a bottomless pit of hate and anger, and he was drowning in it. She did this to me. After everything he had gone through to be good, to do better. After everything he had survived, Hella had torn away his soul, his only chance of humanity. Harrow barely registered the look of surprise on Hella’s face, the wild panic in her beautiful green eyes, as he squeezed the life out of her. His claws dug into her throat, spilling red blood down her neck as he choked her.

  A very tiny part of him, some glimmer of his former self, wished he could stop. He looked Hella up and down, and something she had said to him once ran through his mind. They had been in this room, and he had been helping her use her new powers and teaching her about the magical world. He’d shimmered for her then, shyly, showing his true, part-demon self.

  ‘You’re so…’ she looked at his tail, his scales. His claws and his vertically-slit blue eyes. Harrow expected the worst. ‘What? Ugly? Terrifying? Come on, do your worst. I’ve heard it all before.’ Then her eyes seemed to soften. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Wonderful.’

  His claws loosened on her throat as her kicking ceased. No one had ever said he’d looked wonderful before. Certainly not in his warlock form. Harrow’s jaw set. That made the betrayal that much worse. He could have loved her. He kissed her briefly on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, little witch.’

  Hella’s eyes rolled back into her head. Her body fell limp in his arms.

  Chapter One

  Tahlia

  The council had issued Tahlia a van, a run-down old thing which had seen its better days when Tahlia had been a toddler. Somehow it still groaned down the bustling streets of Mill Valley. Tahlia looked around. Of course, bustling in this town was a stretch. There were maybe twenty people in total roaming the streets on a Saturday morning, doing their shopping or out for a coffee. Tahlia passed them all, the van squeaking as she turned a corner out of town and onto what they generously called a highway, up to Camden Haven to complete a rather unsavoury task.

  It was not a task she had volunteered for, processing the awful crime scene of what used to be the angels’ headquarters in this area, where they had held Cambions, tortured them, and removed their Marks. Despite the warm breeze floating in through her open window, the thought still made the warlock shudder. It would be all the worse, of course, if the rumours were not true, or if they had been wrong about the outcome of the spell.

  What if the angels weren’t really banished to Heaven after all? Or residing in some other after-place? Camden Haven was about an hour’s drive from Mill Valley’s Warlock House, and she spent that time fretting over the task ahead and pondering on the story of the battle her nephew, Tommy, had told to her. She didn’t believe he would lie—he was a good boy—but what if he were wrong?

  The angels and their horror had been a part of the fabric that made up their reality for so, so long. It was like if you’d gone to sleep in a house full of family one night, then woken up to find them gone. Tahlia still felt as if she would have been wandering the halls, peering into the rooms, even looking in the closets. It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be.

  Tahlia wound her way through the quiet roads in silence, the containers in the back jiggling together as they turned. The van would be necessary to collect the evidence and process the crime scene. She had never been to a Captor’s Point before. She had been a lucky one, to not have been captured. Tahlia followed the directions on her phone’s navigation, which led her up the long, narrow driveway of a tall building, larger than any in Mill Valley. She pulled up the van, crunching gravel under the old tyres. Tahlia parked close to an entrance and killed the engine. She unclipped her phone from the dash and stuck it in her pocket.

  Tahlia opened the sliding door and clicked open her black toolbox which held gloves, a first-aid kit and flashlights. She peeled on the latex gloves and slung a camera over her shoulders, picking up the box that carried smaller evidence containers, and brought it with her. A sense of dread fell on Tahlia’s chest; in her mind, she knew that the place would be unoccupied (at least, entertaining the idea that it was occupied stressed her out, so she had decided that of course it would be empty), but the eeriness of the partly dilapidated building was palpable. She almost wished someone had accompanied her, but she swallowed that feeling. She didn’t need a babysitter.

  Overgrown grass encircled the building, swaying in the warm breeze. Tahlia followed the remains of a cracked path toward a door. The grass was more worn down here, as if this was the entrance used most often. Tahlia put a hand over her mouth when she noticed the drops of colour decorating the grass: black, grey, green, indigo, silver and golden blood. Cambion blood. Tahlia closed her eyes briefly. She used the camera to snap a photo then didn’t even check to see if the quality was sound. She powered through her mission.

  Tahlia Terra came to a thick wooden door and pulled it open. The hinges screamed. And she almost threw up. She took a shaky step back, stumbling on the path, her eyes wide.

  Inside, even from the entrance, she could see a long, wide hallway with stretching walls, part of the sky visible through a vast hole in the ceiling. Covering each centimetre of the walls were a framed Cambion Mark which had been ripped off a Cambion—warlocks like herself, faeries and even the outcasts of vampires and werewolves. Tahlia had no love for vampires and werewolves, but even a glimpse of a severed wolf paw tore at her insides. The atrocity alone almost stopped her from entering. She steeled herself. The job must be done. She stepped inside the enemy’s lair.

  The floor was muddy with countless shoe-tracks: angels weren’t ones to mop up after themselves, apparently. The building partially opened out onto the ceiling and daylight streamed in, illuminating thousands of dust particles in the air. She noticed that while there were many frames here, the sunlight only touched the walls, not the floor. She wondered if it was a problem for the angels, or if only direct sunlight burned them.

  Regardless, Tahlia took the camera and started clicking photos to show the council. Other Cambions were doing the same, she knew, in other Captor’s Points all over the world. Now that the angels were supposedly gone. One snap after the next, Tahlia documented shining gold, silver, pink and indigo wings: the faerie Marks. There were blue, green, black and silver-white tails, scales and claws: the warlock Marks. Tahlia even shuddered at the vampire fangs, stained with blood, and the werewolf fangs and furred paws and tails. It made her want to be sick,
so she clamped her jaw shut. The walls were high, the frames seemingly endless. Her head swivelled this way and that, trying to see them all. Tears welled in her eyes.

  Hundreds of her kind had been brutally tortured here.

  Even faeries that she knew: Meele Scire, Amara Sana and little Tessa Mea.

  Thinking of her allies here, locked up somewhere, their Marks being ripped away—it was so wrong. We should have come to find them, she thought, shaking her head. Should have saved them before the witch did.

  But saving a captured Cambion was like screaming over a storm: impossible and futile. It had always been that way, no matter how hard they had prayed to the stars that it were not. Astra inclinant, sed non obligant. The stars incline us, they do not bind us—so their saying goes—but it sure felt like it bound them sometimes.

  This was going to take a while. Tahlia pulled out her phone and texted Julie Ventus, another warlock on their council, to let her know. There was a lot of evidence to collect. Tahlia took photographs of the rest of the hallway, then found a set of stairs and took them up one floor, following the path to another, narrower hallway filled with barred cells. She peered down the shadowed length of the corridor to her left, then to her right, shaking her head in surprise. So many halls. So many cages.

  So many victims.

  She continued taking photos, having left her box downstairs, though apart from the chains bound to the walls, there wasn’t anything she needed to collect up here. Tahlia peered into a cell, wondering which ones the faeries had been held in. Which one Leo’s cousin had been killed in. All the others they had lost and left to their cruel fate. At twenty-seven years old, Tahlia had seen a lot of terrible things in her life, more so since being on the council. But she had let those things settle in her mind as a part of life—what could you do? Die fighting an angel? Swarm a Captor’s Point, supposing you ever found one? Every possible thought was suicide. Even a hundred Cambions (grown, well-gifted and trained) didn’t stand a chance against that many angels. The angels had been top-dog, that’s just how it was. The best you could do was hide, stay at home. Stay close to your family. Be afraid.

  For a reason she could not explain, Tahlia checked every single cell she could find, wondering if there would be a poor lost soul who hadn’t escaped when the angels had been forcibly recalled to Heaven. But to her relief, all the cells were empty. She continued taking photos and moved on.

  Tahlia found a balcony overlooking a vast oval-like area, the grass all kicked up and muddy as if a tornado had rolled through it. Descending the stairs, she found her way down to the pit, and entered through a shadowed tunnel entrance. The morning gave way to mid-afternoon, the sun shining brightly in the Australian sky. It lit up the pit in full display: along tall walls encircling the pit were countless sprays of red blood.

  Vampires and werewolves, she thought, stepping closer. The angels had no interest in humans. As she clutched the camera, Tahlia wrinkled her nose at the rotting, sun-burned smell of old blood and even some body-tissue and snapped more photos. Even the outcasts of their world had not been safe. Though they had no traditional Marks like warlocks and faeries, apparently the angels had made the vampires and werewolves fight each other. A gladiator sport, Tahlia thought, thinking back to her history lessons: brutal and bloody, meant for vile entertainment. Tahlia sighed, wondering if all the angels’ Captor’s Points had been like this. Her mind still in the cells upstairs, a sudden guilt struck Tahlia. Not only had her kind been imprisoned here, but the witch, Hella Corvime—she had come to the faerie’s rescue when Tahlia and the council had not—Tahlia had even allowed that same girl to be locked up against her will at The Force. They should have rescued her.

  Tahlia rubbed her aching temples. She went back for her equipment in the van, needing bigger and larger evidence containers, and set the camera aside. In the main hall, Tahlia used her earth magic to find the tree roots nearby, the plants outside, and pulled them inward: long brown roots snaked into the building, burrowing through cement, concrete, mortar and brick to shake the walls of the hallway. Tahlia gripped her magic and forced the roots all the way through, causing an earthquake to shudder the frames, and sent them shattering to the ground. Marks rained down around her in a bloody, gruesome display of severed body parts.

  Tahlia spent some time organising the Marks and setting them carefully into her evidence containers. She should not be touching these. Not with gloves, not at all. It was worse than invading someone’s home and stealing from them, worse than digging up a grave, or biting into a human. In more ways than she could count, touching severed Marks was grotesque.

  As Tahlia wished she had flat-out rejected this job—though, as a member of the council, she had little choice—she stepped away from the mass grave of Cambion Marks to get some fresh air and wandered out to the verge of the fighting pit. At least here she was outside, the sun warm on her face. She avoided touching her long blonde braid with her soiled gloves, glad she had tied it back earlier. She took a deep lung-full of fresh air—ignoring the stale and rotting smell of the old, and slightly newer, blood splatters—and looked out over the horizon, wondering if she would still be here come night fall. It went against her nature (something Cambions shared with humans), the idea of being out at night when there were predators who might reach out for you from the shadows.

  As the thought passed through her mind, a darkness fell over part of the sky: azure turning black. Tahlia squinted. Something is wrong, she thought, fear gripping her chest. Tahlia snapped the gloves off, tossed them on the ground, and pulled out her phone as the darkness solidified before her: the rough figure of what could be a man or woman rose up, yellow eyes glowing.

  ‘Are they really gone?’ the darkness said, still coalescing.

  Tahlia froze. A demon. ‘Who—are who gone?’

  ‘The angels, of course. They’re not here, are they?’ it said, voice crackling like fire.

  Meeting a demon was a rare thing indeed. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Azazel.’ The figure smiled as he formed into a well-dressed man in a sharp suit. His eyes remained a glowing yellow, like fire. ‘Do you really think they’ve left this earth, warlock?’

  Tahlia paused. ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘They have plagued us for so long.’ She looked out over the bloody fighting pit, then behind her to the grave of Marks that littered the hallway floor. ‘It is hard to believe we are free of them.’ There would always be an ache in her heart for the carnage they caused and the countless terrible, blasphemous things they had done. Whether they were gone or not, that gripping ache would remain.

  Azazel nodded, considering her words. ‘It is indeed. But they are not here.’ He raised his arms. ‘You found this place empty, didn’t you?’

  Tahlia bobbed her head. ‘Yes.’ Then she thought for a moment. ‘Why do you want to know if they’re gone? Do you think they are?’

  Azazel smiled broadly. ‘I want to know because if they are gone, then they won’t be hunting me or my kind either.’

  ‘They’re supposed to hunt you. You’re a demon.’ Tahlia felt the need to point it out, though insulting him probably wasn’t an intelligent thing to do.

  ‘Rude,’ Azazel said. ‘I think it’s my turn.’ He moved closer to Tahlia, who stood frozen in place. Azazel placed a hand, tipped with black, pointed nails, on her chin. ‘You sent them away?’

  Tahlia, her head gripped in place, shook her head slightly. ‘No, not us.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘The promised witch. And her friends. My nephew. She sent them back to Heaven,’ Tahlia said, still thanking the stars that Tommy had survived such a stupid plan.

  Azazel still gripped her face, but now he dug his claws in and she gasped. Dark green blood dripped down her neck. ‘Are you sure?’ Azazel pressed.

  ‘Yes, Tommy told me,’ she said. ‘He saw them, all sucked back up into the sky.’

  ‘It is hard to believe that a handful of people sent away th
e greatest threat this planet has ever faced. Even if one of them was the witch who was promised.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Tahlia said. ‘But maybe they really are gone.’ It was something, it seemed, they both wanted to believe. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Oh, little warlock. Because now, I want to be the greatest threat this planet has ever seen. It’s my turn to burn the world down. You can tell your council, you can scream it from the rooftops, warn everyone you know. Warn the humans in the streets, and then me and my kin will eat them. My family are hungry. And, if the angels are really gone, then there is absolutely nothing and no one to stop me.’ He grinned. Tahlia’s blood ran cold.

  Chapter Two

  Azazel

  Azazel shifted between a human-shaped mirage and his natural black mist, frustrated and impatient with his roaring, unsettled kin. They stood in their cave, their home, screeching and crying out with desperate hunger, their lust to be freed upon the earth. They called for him, uncertain that the angels had really left. If their kind descended upon the world, Heaven’s warriors would surely rain down upon them in the thousands. Azazel shared their disbelief. They had to be certain. Azazel would have to see for himself.

  He departed their cave with a chorus of ‘Bonum Tenebris’ from his family, bidding him well on his journey. Firstly, he would inspect the base the angels had held here, near Mill Valley—in Camden Haven—to see if they still hid there, or if the angels planned to thwart them by luring them out to be slaughtered.

  Azazel soared over to Camden Haven’s Captor’s Point. The place was larger than he’d imagined, and mostly empty, too. Except for a warlock. He could taste it on her, the scent of the earth. She was of House Terra. He descended upon an open space, a wide-open pit. He had seen those before, in old blood-sports, and wasn’t surprised that the angels had one of their own. The little warlock looked afraid, he noticed with a smile. He appeared before her. He would find out exactly what she knew about the angels, and what had happened to them.