The Orphan Witch

by Paige Crutcher

  Her face shifted like molding clay, reforming itself into the face of a woman who looked too much like Persephone not to be her mother, until it showed her the face of the woman from the photograph. Persephone’s grandmother.

  Persephone let out a low moan of pain.

  “My magic is a clever kind of magic,” the witch said. “My body may be one place, but I long ago figured out how to extend my reach outside of it. I am more powerful than you could ever dream.”

  How to extend her … of course. It was simple and awful. This witch, blood of her blood, was physically trapped in the hinterland—but that didn’t mean her mind wasn’t able to travel.

  As Deandra grinned, Persephone thought of how unaffected Deandra had been in the coffee shop. She had been the only person unaltered by her spell. There was so much of magic Persephone didn’t understand, but it was easy to see the witch before her had been possessing people, including those in her life, for years.

  “It was you, all this time?” Persephone said, remembering the pain of so many failed adoptions, and the people in her life who seemed to want her and then not—as if by magic.

  “You will never be a match for me.” The witch’s face shifted again to that of Deandra, and Persephone struck.

  She opened the door to thirty-two years of rage and loss and said a single word.

  “Fuasgail.”

  Release.

  Deandra let out a scream that split the day into night. It rattled down into Persephone’s bones, cracked the earth beneath them.

  The island shuddered as Persephone pulled all the light, all the aether, from the witch. Deandra’s bones snapped, her heart squeezed, the smile crumpled from her face. She rasped out three final words. “You. Will. Lose.”

  The shadows receded, the maelstrom closed in on itself, and the eyes of Deandra Bishop blinked twice.

  The witch was gone.

  In her place, Persephone’s co-worker stared up at her in open horror, before her heart gave a final beat and the true Deandra Bishop crumpled to the earth.

  “No,” Persephone said, comprehension ebbing in. “No, no, nonononono.” The word became a chant, a prayer, as the wards went down. Persephone tried to scoop the broken girl up. “Deandra, please.” Persephone pulled her into her lap, cradled her close to her. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, wake up, wake up, wake up.”

  She’d meant to cast out the witch, but Persephone had never considered the waiting soul. She patted the sides of Deandra’s face, ran her hands over her hair, and tried to force life back into the person who never should have been there at all.

  Persephone turned to the solemn faces of her sister witches who knelt against the earth along the perimeter. “Help me, please. You have to help me.”

  Ellison’s eyes held compassion and pain, but she only shook her head. Ariel dipped her chin to her chest in prayer, while Moira’s eyes filled with tears.

  No one saw Hyacinth leave.

  No one saw the threads of space open and part.

  No one was able to bring the dead girl back to life.

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST time in ten years, Moira Ever helped a Way witch. She aided Ariel and Ellison as they dragged Persephone away after she collapsed over the girl’s body. Helped force a tonic down Persephone’s throat to subdue her enough for what must come next. Loaded them up in the cart, and sent them on their way.

  Moira had not wanted to send Persephone away, but she had not seen another option. Moira had seen broken witches before. She was broken herself in many ways. But Moira had never been the one to do the breaking.

  Moira knew it was her fault, hers and her sister’s. They were responsible for bringing Persephone here.

  Moira didn’t know how Hyacinth had connected with the Mayfair witch, how Amara had worked the possession or for how long. There was so much beyond the veil she couldn’t know. Moira didn’t understand why Hyacinth had betrayed them. Moira had taken her sister at her word when she told her she scryed and the Goddess had finally listened, providing the location of Persephone May after so many years of searching. Moira assumed it was the mark of the one hundred year anniversary coming, that it was fortuitous. She assumed the bridge to the hinterland would open and so the key to unlock it would find its way back.

  It was the Goddess’ will. Fate, Moira had believed, was a fair-weather friend.

  Fate was no friend at all.

  Moira had grown to love Persephone like a sister, to appreciate the witch for her magic and wit, her kind heart and keen mind.

  A mind that was surely cracked after this day.

  Ariel and Ellison had agreed on taking Persephone back to Way House, and Moira had wrapped Persephone in her own blanket spelled with comfort and peace. They’d left Moira with Deandra’s body, tasking her with preparing it for the burial. They all would send her to sea together when the witching hour was upon them. Pray to the Goddess that the girl would find peace in the afterlife.

  As Moira worked, she listened for her sister to return. She did not know where she went, she only knew Hyacinth was responsible for this tragedy.

  There had to be a reason.

  Why bring over Amara Mayfair through a clumsy possession, why risk everything and lose their only way to break the curse? It was counterintuitive. It was baffling.

  Once Moira had properly anointed the body, and prayed over her, she went upstairs. It was at the landing where she felt it. A void in the house, and a longing running through it as though the house was mourning something or someone, too. When she reached the hallway, blood chilled in her veins. The door opposite the room Persephone had stayed in was ajar. It was a room Moira did not like to enter, one that was too close to the beating heart of the mountain, to the secrets buried along the bridge hidden there.

  Moira’s scalp tingled as all her senses told her she would find her sister inside. Clasping a hand over the amethyst she wore around her neck, Moira opened the door.

  Her legs gave out first as Moira collapsed at the sight.

  It would not be a single funeral they held this night. For Hyacinth, her face as gray as the clouds before a storm, lay as cold as the deep of the ocean, dead on the bed.

  Thirteen

  THERE WERE, DORIAN KNEW, prices even the dead could pay. Every light in the library had flicked to life an hour before, and he sat in the main room waiting. It was the first time since he’d come to be the guardian some two hundred years before that the library had reacted so strongly. He wasn’t sure if it was a harbinger of good or bad, and he was growing more and more concerned about Persephone as the minutes ticked by. It wouldn’t do to show it. He wasn’t sure how that would be used against him, but after the kiss he knew he had essentially handpicked the dagger and placed it in the library’s hand. Should she need it, he knew the library would not hesitate to strike.

  He hoped the library would not be able to move against Persephone. Dorian thought about how she had tapped into the life force of the library and used it to her advantage. She was tethered to it, but she wasn’t completely under its spell—even if she didn’t know what she wielded or how.

  Dorian knew the curse Persephone needed to break would require more than one part. Like any well-oiled machine, there would be multiple bolts and screws to piece together. He just didn’t know precisely what she’d need. He struggled with how to gain that knowledge.

  He blinked and thought he saw Persephone’s face peering intently down at his, blinked again and she was gone. It was the fourth time that hour he’d glimpsed her. He wasn’t sure if it was his memory taunting him or the library—though he’d never been prone to visions or hallucinations before.

  A long lazy knock sounded on the front door, and Dorian turned to face it.

  There was a reason the library was called Library for the Lost, and it wasn’t only to do with lost magical objects. He walked to the door, his body taut with tension. He tried to blow the edges out, turn his nerves to his advantage as his sails used to turn the wind to their
s. Instead the hair along his neck curled at attention.

  Dorian opened the door and scowled.

  “Hello, guardian,” the woman said, her voice worn to a whisper.

  “Dead again so soon?”

  The library’s most prized possessions, the ones he couldn’t show Persephone, were souls of witches who showed up on his doorstep when they departed the outer world for the inner.

  The dead didn’t haunt this library, they came home to it. The dead witches of the three islands were housed in the library, and oh were there many, each one kept where the Goddess wanted them.

  Persephone, however, was not the first witch to show up when she should not, when she was not meant to die and arrive. That distinct honor went to the irritating witch on the other side of the door.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “You aren’t a vampire, Hyacinth Lenore Ever. If you were, I’d bottle sunlight and free it upon your head.”

  She sniffed, but walked past him to enter the library. “You are ridiculous.”

  “And you are unwanted. Why have you returned?”

  Dorian didn’t have to ask how—he knew now the witch had learned how to spell herself between life and death. For a few precious moments or minutes, Hyacinth could hover on the precipice long enough to cross the bridge here. She was the first of her kind to do it, and the first time she’d fooled him well into thinking she was something she wasn’t.

  Hyacinth leaned against the small wooden table and it shifted up a few inches to better suit her height. The damn library was most helpful when he didn’t want it to be.

  “I made a mistake,” she said.

  “No kidding.”

  “I…” Hyacinth swallowed. She closed her eyes. “I can’t stop her. I can’t stop any of it.”

  “It’s hard to stop an avalanche, worse to watch it, I’d wager, especially when one causes it,” he said, studying how she gripped her hands together, how the internal war within her waged.

  Hyacinth kept her eyes squeezed shut. She reminded Dorian of a child playing hide-and-seek, forgetting to hide, thinking if you can’t see the person seeking, then they can’t see you.

  “No one was doing anything to stop the curse. I couldn’t let my ancestors die,” she said. “My cousins were just letting fate fuck us. After what happened with Stevie … I did what I could. Did what I had to do.”

  “You mean what you thought you had to do.”

  She swallowed.

  “You made your choice.”

  She nodded.

  “It sounds like you have another to make.”

  “Yes.” Hyacinth sighed and the books around them sighed with her. “I can’t stop her.” Her eyes opened. “There’s only one thing to do.”

  Dorian waited.

  Hyacinth studied the books lining the shelves, taking her time, thinking. Her eyes widened on the tallest shelf closest to them. Dorian watched Hyacinth nod to herself, and as she did, her spine straightened. She lost the frown pulling her lips down, her shoulders rolled down her back.

  Hyacinth had made her choice.

  “I need your help, Librarian.”

  “I helped you before,” he said, turning to study the shelves as the spines of the closest books practically preened at the attention. “I won’t do it again.”

  “You did,” she said, her voice pleasant. “Thanks for that.”

  “I did not help you on purpose.”

  Months ago, Hyacinth had shown up as all wraiths do, lost and dead, confused and needy. She’d played him. No one had ever discovered the library before that wasn’t meant to find it. But Hyacinth Ever with her beautiful eyes and cruel mouth had deceived him. She’d come like the rest, asking for knowledge before she settled into her place with the lost souls the Library for the Lost guarded. Only she hadn’t meant to stay.

  The dead did not always go easy. Because of that, they came looking for answers before they were ready to rest. Hyacinth’s arrival wasn’t unusual. Everything was as it had ever been, so Dorian didn’t think twice to give her what she needed—the location of something lost. The library certainly hadn’t stopped him.

  “No, I suppose you didn’t,” Hyacinth said. “But if you hadn’t told me the location of the lost Mayfair witch, Persephone would never have come, the island would stay cursed, and you wouldn’t get the chance to have your heart broken.”

  He shot a look over his shoulder and she smiled.

  “There’s a book missing.” She pointed. “A very specific grimoire that was on this shelf the last time I was in this room. The room reverts to the traveler, doesn’t it? So that means this book is gone.”

  Dorian didn’t say a word.

  “I’ve seen her do it, you know. Travel. I should have known she’d come here.” Hyacinth picked up a vase the color of eggplant and rolled it back and forth in her hands.

  Dorian said nothing, and Hyacinth turned the vase upside down. She moved it in a feverish pace he couldn’t follow, spinning the vase around and around, twisting and turning it so the color shifted into shades of midnight. “The thing is, I don’t really need you to do anything this time. Rather, I need you to not do something.” Hyacinth stilled the vase, and the smile she offered sent a shiver of fear walking down his spine. “This time, all you have to do is duck.”

  The vase flew from her hands, and Dorian foolishly headed her advice. He ducked.

  He’d misjudged her, and the power she’d retained inside the walls of the library. Nothing was supposed to harm him here, but as the vase smashed against the side of his face and the herbs rained down onto him, he saw the hole in his logic.

  Anything could happen inside the Library for the Lost—so long as the library willed it.

  The world faded to black, and the last thing Dorian glimpsed in his mind, before he went under, was Persephone’s hazel eyes, banked in sorrow, gazing down at him with tears freely cascading down the glorious angles of her face.

  * * *

  PERSEPHONE SAT IN the jade chair in the living room of Way House, holding the mechanical man that wore Dorian’s face. She hadn’t turned him on, but every fifteen minutes for the last hour she could have sworn he was looking at her.

  It was oddly comforting, because there was something in his eyes that even felt like Dorian. She wanted to go to him, to escape into the library. She wanted him to tell her it was all a mistake. Hyacinth hadn’t betrayed her. Everything would be okay.

  But she had and nothing was. Persephone was on the island to break a curse. But Persephone’s curse was to be broken by those she loved, and there was nothing anyone could say to change it.

  After Ariel and Ellison had reset the perimeter tests—adding new wards to the island to alert them if the evil from beyond the veil managed to penetrate the island again—they’d closed ranks on her. Persephone told them she doubted the dark witch would be able to regain the strength to return so soon, but it didn’t deter them from settling themselves north and south of her as though they were a fortress.

  Deandra Bishop was dead. She had died at Persephone’s hand. An innocent girl was gone, and Persephone carried the mark of her loss.

  Persephone wore it like you wear a car crash. It was visible in every step she took, every breath she tried to take. The death slashed deep into her soul, a rip down the center of her being.

  There were so many questions. How long had Amara been Deandra? Why had she killed her mother and grandmother, why did she want to destroy Persephone?

  And what about Hyacinth? How could she have thought she was protecting Persephone by teaming up with Amara? How did she contact Amara in the first place? Nothing made sense. Everything had shattered.

  The betrayals and loss numbed the left side of Persephone’s face. She didn’t think she could blink if she tried. Persephone knew she was crying because the backs of her hands were wet, but she didn’t bother to try and wipe the tears away.

  Persephone could shed an ocean of tears and it would not matter. Her pain w
ouldn’t change the tide, couldn’t cause a ripple in the swell of heartbreak. The numbness was a sigh of relief. It was acceptance, the promise of a blank slate.

  The curse could swallow them whole, if it meant Persephone wouldn’t have to feel again.

  “Moira needs us,” Ellison said, sliding something into her pocket before standing and walking to the window.

  “Telepathy?” Persephone asked, still studying the mechanical man’s face.

  “Of course not,” Ariel said, speaking for the first time. “She can send a text on a cell phone.”

  Something was wrong with the ornery witch. Ariel was gray, as though the color had been drained from her. But Persephone couldn’t help her. She couldn’t even help herself.

  “I’ll go,” Ariel said, talking to her sister, who had busied herself on the side ottoman in front of the large window. “You’re better equipped for”—she waved a hand—“guiding her emotional devastation.”

  “You mean because you don’t want to acknowledge your own emotions,” Ellison said, her hands moving quickly as she performed an elegant knit and purl with a soft white yarn that looked like it had been conjured from a cloud’s dream.

  “People catch feelings like travelers intercept the common cold,” Ariel said. “I’ve immunized myself to the bone.” Ariel shivered and nearly lost her footing as she grabbed a light sweater off a hook. Ellison didn’t call her on the lie, and Ariel took a deep breath before she grabbed a basket of herbs from beside the door and slipped outside.

  “Her heart never healed,” Ellison said, watching her go. “Too much time and not enough has passed, and suddenly we’re back in each of their pockets like we’re children again.”