The Witching Elm (A Memento Mori Witch Novel, Book 1)

by C. N. Crawford

  Though Thomas wanted to be anywhere else at that moment, he knew, at least, that he was somewhere.

  44

  Adepti

  Tobias was muttering something about trees, when Fiona heard a rustling and snapping noise from the other side of the clearing. Another woman ran toward them, followed by a man whose collar was up around his neck. The unruly hair almost looked like Jack’s. No, it was Jack’s unruly hair. What was he doing here? Didn’t he know the danger? Fiona opened her mouth to call to him, but before she could get his name out, Tobias’s hand clamped over her mouth. He held on to her, whispering something into her ear. She struggled to get free until she heard the words “hawthorn tree.”

  Restrained by Tobias, she watched as the lady in front of Jack dashed into the clearing, screaming. Jack sprang forward and grabbed the back of the woman’s dress. He whirled her around to face him. She stared into his face and screamed again. He pulled her close and said, “Shhhhh,” pressing his finger over her lips to silence her screams. He reached around her back in a tight embrace.

  He pulled his arms open with a cracking sound. Long, bloody bones jutted out of his hands, and he tilted back his head, sighing with exhilaration. The woman crumpled to the ground, ribs protruding from her back like broken wings. Her body twitched. Jack bent over and plunged his hand into her back, pulling out her heart. He turned toward the clearing, closing his eyes as he bit into it. He chewed slowly, rolling his head back and moaning as though he were eating a deliciously ripe pear.

  Fiona’s heart seemed to stop. Even with Tobias’s hand over her mouth, she unleashed a piercing scream.

  Jack opened his blue eyes, staring directly at her. Blood ran down his chin. “Fiona?” he said, walking toward them.

  She shook uncontrollably. Her mind couldn’t process it.

  Tobias held her arm. “Transform.”

  Fiona stared straight ahead at Jack as he whispered something. With a flick of his hand, he sent Tobias flying until he hovered by the tops of the mayflower trees. Jack stalked toward her as she stood transfixed with horror. She couldn’t breathe.

  He wiped his hands off on his coat. “Your Tatter friend brought you here. I told you to stay away from him.”

  She tried to say the word “what,” but she just uttered a half-strangled noise.

  He leaned against the tree, close enough to pull an errant ringlet out of her eyes. She flinched, and the sound of her own pulse roared in her ears.

  “I kept him alive for you, because you seemed to like him. And really, I’m not likely to be brought down by a baker’s son.” He turned to Tobias, still hovering in the air, and called out. “Sorry, but it’s true.”

  Fiona glanced up at Tobias, her eyes wide. His lips were moving as though talking, but no sound came out.

  Jack sighed. “I thought I’d warned you off magic with the bone warden I sent to your séance, but apparently it wasn’t enough.”

  Fiona finally found her voice. She stammered, “I don’t understand. We came to fight Rawhed. Are you him?” She could hear the ragged edge of hysteria in her voice.

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped off his chin. “I’m sorry you had to see that. It’s distasteful, I know. Don’t think that I enjoy it.”

  “You sounded like you enjoyed it.”

  He looked away. “There is a certain visceral thrill from corporeal nourishment, but of course I hate that it’s necessary. I only consume flesh because it’s what I’ve needed to do to stay alive over the years.”

  Her knees buckled as she stepped back from him. “How many years?”

  “Over three centuries, anyway.”

  She shook her head. Is this a nightmare? “Tobias said something about the founder of the Mather Adepti. Is that you? Are you that Hawthorne?” She felt electrified with adrenalin and fear.

  “Yes, well, Hathorne actually. John Hathorne.”

  Her lip trembled. “From the Salem Witch Trials?”

  “Right.” He shrugged, wiping the blood off his hands and face. “But it was a difficult time.”

  “But, he was so old. I mean, you were so old.”

  He crumpled up his handkerchief, stuffing it in his pocket, and locked eyes with her. “You’re hung up on this age thing, aren’t you? Eating flesh keeps me in my physical prime while I’m completing my work. The number of years I’ve been on this earth isn’t important.”

  She covered her face with her hands, hoping he would disappear. This didn’t make any sense. John Hathorne. Rawhed. All the same person—all Jack. “Why were you at Mather at all?”

  “I was looking for something I need. If you’re here to fight Rawhed, as your Tatter boy calls me, I suppose maybe you were looking for it too—the poem.”

  She was on the verge of tears. “I still don’t understand. How could you be a witch trial judge, but you’re also a witch?”

  “Philosopher. Look, I can see you’re upset by all this. I’ll be totally honest with you, and I think you’ll see my side of things.” He took another step toward her, resting his arm against a tree and boxing her in. His face was clear of blood now except for one bright red drop near his mouth. “Salem was complicated. The women weren’t really witches. Only men were philosophers then, but the Purgators never knew any better. At the time, we believed that if women used Angelic, they would die. Stupid, really.” He rolled his eyes.

  How was he able to carry on a normal conversation after he’d just killed someone? Maybe this wasn’t a normal conversation. She couldn’t tell anymore. She had an overwhelming urge to vomit.

  “But it didn’t matter that they weren’t really witches, as the Purgators liked to call them.” He drew even closer. “What mattered was what people said, and people said they were evil. The Purgators were powerful back then, and they wanted blood, guilty or not. They hanged Ann Hibbins when I was a student at Mather.” He looked past her as he recalled the memory. “I saw her face turn purple, and her bony feet danced in the air over the Common. They left her body to rot.”

  Fiona shuddered. She’d seen enough hangings herself.

  His pale blue eyes gazed at her again. “After I saw the Purgators kill her, I only practiced magic in secret. I left the coven and went back to Salem. I did my best to fit in. I got a wife, a bunch of land.”

  “You had a wife?” She shook her head. What did that matter? “Never mind. What were you saying? About turning into a three-hundred-year-old cannibalistic psychopath?” Her heart raced, but her anger gave her courage.

  “I was walking in the woods one day when I was getting on in years. I saw a little sparrow with broken wings. She was writhing in pain, and her mother had deserted her. So I used a simple spell to heal the poor creature. Two girls saw me, spying on me from a thicket. I had to muddle their little minds to make them forget. They would have told the Purgators, and I didn’t want my feet dancing in the air like poor old Ann’s.”

  He stroked Fiona’s cheek absentmindedly, and she shuddered.

  His voice was flat as he continued. “But the spell made them insane, and it spread like a sickness, and then all of a sudden everyone was a witch. I had to get some control of things before the Purgators found me out. I didn’t want to do it, but better that I kept the bony finger of death pointing at others than at me.”

  “How very noble of you.” Somehow the rage stopped her from crying.

  There was a look of hurt in his eyes. “It wasn’t just for my own sake. I have to fulfill my destiny for all of our sakes.” He sighed again. “I know, I may have gone a bit far, and the other philosophers created Maremount to escape the persecution. They locked me out of it. I’d survived the horrific purges, but as time went on, death beckoned anyway. And so I found a way to restore my youth, to continue my work.”

  “What destiny? What work?” She was losing patience.

  He looked at her with a sudden intensity. “Let me ask you this. What do you think is the worst thing that can ever happen to a person?”

  For the first time si
nce she’d seen Jack murder someone, she let out a sob. “Having your ribs torn out of your back and being eaten.”

  “That’s hardly the worst thing, but of course, you’re such an innocent thing.” He wiped a tear from her cheek. “You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen. When I was born, entire tribes were dying of smallpox. Sometimes, just one or two people remained behind out of a whole community, people who watched as everyone they loved, and everyone they’d ever known, succumbed to a virus that turned a person’s flesh black and peeled it off their body in sheets. Imagine watching all your own children die that way. And then the Christians came and told them it was their own fault for being sinners. Those who lived had to spend the rest of their miserable existences wandering alone, awaiting their own deaths.”

  Fiona sobbed again and glanced up at Tobias. He remained suspended in the air, yelling to her with no voice.

  “What kind of a monster peels off the skin of all your loved ones right before your eyes?” Jack’s voice rose in volume, and passion animated his face. “I will not submit to such a creator. People think that we’re over the horror—the bodies and heads left to decay on Boston Common, spirits trapped in moldering body parts for everyone to see. People think that belongs to the past. But it’s not over, because the truth is that we are the minds of angels locked in putrefying bodies for no reason at all.” He choked out the last words.

  “And you think you can change that.”

  “I know I can change it. Things got a bit messy with the Harvesters, I know. They’re like a bunch of unruly children that needed to be reined in. I raised them from King’s Chapel using Druloch, but now they serve him as well, which is frustrating. But I’m still going to rewrite the world’s rules.”

  “How do you plan on doing this?”

  “By making a new world, with new rules.” He stepped back and smiled, opening his hands. “Just like they made a new Maremount. I’m really very fond of you, Fiona. You know, at the Athenæum, I really was worried for you when the Tatter assassins were sent to kill me. I hope the necklace kept you safe.”

  “I don’t understand. What could we possibly have in common?”

  “When I first met you, I thought you were sort of a curiosity. But then you seemed so sweet. It’s a shame you’ve been trying to kill me, but you didn’t know any better. You said you’d sweep the monsters away for me. No one’s said anything like that to me in a long time.” He shrugged and smiled faintly. “No one’s tried to protect me.”

  She motioned at the woman’s corpse and screamed, “But you’re the monster. And you’re doing all this just because you’re scared to die.”

  “Everyone’s scared of dying!” he shouted, and as he did, the sky above darkened to the color of a bruise.

  * * *

  Thomas placed the King’s skull in a small hole in the marshy earth. He was alone now, crouching in a grove by the bay. He’d insisted that Alan and Mariana find their way back to Boston. Even the birds had ceased their chatter, and the silence raised his hackles.

  Using his hands, he scooped mud over the skull, combing his memory for facts about 17th century Wampanoag burials. He thought King Philip should be buried with wampum and some corn, but he didn’t have those things. At least he was able to discern which way was southwest and to orient the skull in the proper direction.

  After covering the final inch of skull, he rose and stared at the freshly upturned earth, the only sound the gently lapping waves in the bay. He scrubbed at his face. He’d done what he could. Perhaps it had worked, and the Tatter fighters were being strengthened by spirits.

  As he turned to head north toward the city, a sharp peal of thunder cracked across the horizon. He looked up at the sky, and the hair on his arms stood on end. His heart beat faster as purplish clouds roiled above. He turned to look back at the burial spot, his body coursing with adrenalin. Within the rumbling thunder, something whispered. Though the language was unfamiliar, he could understand the message: I am here. King Philip had reclaimed his voice.

  He surveyed his darkening surroundings as something prickled on his flesh. The sensation of spider webs moved over every inch of his skin, into his nostrils and down his throat. He coughed, struggling against the feeling of being overtaken until strength electrified his muscles, invigorating his aching body. He’d never expected this to happen. The king’s spirit is inhabiting my body.

  Lightning struck the Trimountaine Hills to the north, and something compelled him to raise his arms to the sky. I am here, King Philip’s deep voice rang in his skull.

  The sky blackened further, dark as smoke from a funeral pyre. The King guided his body north again, charging him with a crackling power. Even on his best boxing days, he’d never felt this strong. He ran back to the Fishgate entrance, and the marshy earth beneath his feet trembled with the force of an advancing spirit army.

  * * *

  Fiona watched as Jack stared up at the gathered storm clouds. He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes. There was an electrified, scorched smell in the air as thunder roared through the sky.

  A fat white drop of rain landed on Jack’s rosy cheek. The storm clouds unleashed a torrent of rain, soaking their hair and clothes.

  Out of the mayflower trees, a moth fluttered toward them. But it wasn’t another luna moth. It was a large death’s-head moth, like the one in her vision. It flew to Jack’s ear, and he listened.

  As it fluttered away, he looked at Fiona. For a moment, fear and hurt flashed in his eyes. “The King has been buried.”

  He tilted back his head and transformed into a death’s-head moth himself. Just after he flew into the stormy sky, Tobias fell from the air, collapsing onto the ground.

  Shaking, Fiona ran to him. “Are you okay?”

  He sat up and gasped for breath. “You need to get back to Boston. The others must have completed the spell. All the Harvesters will be drawn into Maremount.”

  “We need to get back to Boston.”

  Tobias’s hair was already plastered to his head from the rain. He stood and rubbed his shoulder. “I need to find Eden. If she stays a captive of Rawhed…” He stared at her. “I can’t believe he was your boyfriend.”

  “I wouldn’t say boyfriend.” She’d hardly known him at all.

  “I need to go, Fiona.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No. It’s nothing to do with you.” He pushed the hair off his face. “I can’t worry about Eden and worry about you. Fly north and get back to the tunnel.”

  He transformed and took off. Fiona folded her arms and looked around at the muddy grove and the crumpled pile of flesh that used to be a woman. Did Tobias really think she’d let him go alone? It was clear now that she had pull with the person in charge here. And did he really think she knew which way was north? She chanted the transformation spell, her wings snapping outward, and ascended into the heavy rains. She circled until she heard Tobias’s flapping wings in the distance, and followed him through the storm. As they soared over the tall pines outside the city, she glimpsed the swarms of bodies beneath their branches.

  Once over the city gates, she heard the gruff shouts of the Harvesters. As the Tatter army marched toward them, they amassed in the Common.

  Tobias descended near Lilitu Square, and Fiona followed. He transformed in an alley near the Throcknell Fortress and pulled the grate off a manhole. He slipped in, and she flew after him into a stone tunnel. Ahead, Tobias reached an alcove with an iron ladder that he climbed. She waited, and with a few beats of her wings fluttered up after him into an empty stone room and transformed. They were in the depths of the fortress.

  From a dark corner, a stairwell led upward. She tiptoed up the stairs toward the sound of screaming, and, reaching the top, looked out from her hidden position. Candlelight wavered over a black-walled dungeon, a corridor of dingy cells. Across from her, two people lay on a hay-covered floor, and a woman slumped with her back against iron bars. Somewhere, a man repeatedly shrieked, “I don’t know!”


  She peered to her left. Tobias clutched iron bars of his own, whispering to someone. At the end of the row of cells stood a large wrought-iron door. From her right, she heard the sound of heavy shoes on the flagstones. She slipped back into the shadows.

  Jack was Rawhed. Jack was responsible for all this.

  Someone was coming. An enormous guard, almost seven feet tall, stalked past as she hid in the shadows. His palm rested on the hilt of his sword. Fiona’s breath quickened. Tobias had obviously forgotten the cloaking spell, for all his demands that they practice it.

  She peered around the corner again just in time to see Tobias’s head swing round and spot the warden, but by then the guard had grabbed him, his hand over Tobias’s mouth. Two more guards arrived, and one of them opened the cell, pulling out an emaciated girl.

  “A Tatter trying to release one of the Champion’s prisoners?” one of them asked, forcing Tobias and the girl toward the door. “You’ll both meet the three-headed horse for this.”

  Fiona’s stomach dropped. The guard stuffed a gag in Tobias’s mouth, so he would be unable to transform. Fiona chanted the cloaking spell. Unseen, she rushed toward the guard who held Tobias. As he dragged Tobias toward the dungeon gate, she pulled the large guard’s sword out of his scabbard, adrenalin coursing through her veins. The man dropped Tobias, whirling to find his assailant. The heavy sword weighed down her hand, and as she tried to lift it, a piercing pain bored through her skull. Everything went black.

  * * *

  There was nothing—no sound and no light—until a noise like a rushing river arose in her ears. Her clothes were wet, and she thought for a moment she might actually be in a river, but then the noise of the current was overtaken by the sounds of people shouting. She opened her eyes to blurry forms. The back of her head throbbed. She tried to ask where she was, but a cloth gagged her mouth. Her arms were tightly bound behind her back. Her stomach churned. She tried not to think of what might happen if she were to vomit while gagged. She lay on a stone platform in the open air, and rain poured from the dark clouds above.