The witch smirked, then frowned as the crystal turned gray, darkening to a murky black.
“Whatever that is,” she said, “you don’t want to know.”
My skin dampened. “What does your crystal say it is?”
“Old magic. Leave it, girl.”
“I can’t leave it.” Everything inside me felt dazed. “The person who destroyed your coven was obsessed with this image. I need to know what it means.”
But the seer was stroking the bone necklace at her throat, stroking the white shards, muttering…
Her eyes were unfocused, drawn to something in the distance.
I leaned forward. “What do you see?”
The witch’s gaze remained on the glass ceiling. “The information you want is costly, girl.”
“How costly?”
“How much is your life worth?” Her witchy eyes burned with a dark fire. “But it won’t matter. You’ll pay any price, and that price will eat at you. Gnaw on your bones at midnight like rats in the dark.” Her lips pulled back. “You’ll crave the good you could do. Reach for the power without seeing the abyss. How far will you fall into the endless dark, before it’s done?”
The words came with the cadence of prophecy, but if she was talking about Barend’s offer, she was a month too late. I’d already rejected it.
The disappointment shouldn’t have nagged so heavily at me, and I asked, “Are you speaking as a seer, now? Or as someone with nothing to sell?”
Tension rippled. The air seemed to expand, then contract into normal. With the smudge stick, the witch knocked the blackened crystal from the paper, and every rational thought I had vibrated into nothing when the stone crumbled into ash.
A breeze scattered the ashes like the remains of the dead. The gritty powder caught on my lips. My stomach lurched. I scrubbed at my mouth, scrubbed again, waiting for the pulse throbbing in my throat to ease. The taste of bitter ashes…
She’s a seer, Noa.
She would know what haunted me, and what I’d witnessed wasn’t anything more than a cunning, witchy trick designed to torment me. Turn me away from the search.
For all I knew, she’d used the bones from last week’s chicken dinner to fashion her necklace, the same way she’d created the little effigies of the Bone Woman. Twigs like bones, tied together. Designed to trigger the imagination, the old stories, with the right words and faked reactions.
As meaningless as the buzzing pressure in my head, the likely result of burning certain herbs hidden in the smudge stick. Hadn’t she deliberately waved the smoke in my direction? And I’d breathed it in, whatever drug it was—known only to a sorceress, what all Gemini Witches were.
Needing to do something rational, something to dampen the heat building in my hands, I reclaimed the drawing, stuffed it into my pocket.
“I can find others who might know.” Effa, or Caerwen. “But the enemy I’m fighting drew this pattern, scribbled it in a journal. The marks are strange, and…”
“Speak no more, girl.”
The witch’s face had paled, but her eyes glittered like obsidian glass, blacker than night and wholly unnerving. As if she was seeing some outcome I couldn’t see.
“Liminal spaces hide between worlds,” she said. “What you seek exists there.”
I braced. “How can I get to this liminal space?”
“Getting there is easy. Getting out is hard.” She stubbed out the smoldering smudge stick, and as she turned to gather the crystals, her colorful skirts swished like Aine’s gown. When her fingers curled around the stones, the gesture was the nymph’s gesture, that vicious crushing of petals before they fell to the ground.
“Better get going, girl. The world is stirring tonight.”
The world is stirring…
The words were hard to shake off. In my pocket, the folded image became a weight I didn’t want. I’d failed in this one task, and the desire to scream in frustration became a knot in my throat. I needed the answers that taunted beyond my reach. But this witch hadn’t offered answers. Not with those tarot cards she manipulated, a mere card trick. Everything else could have been my imagination, mixing with the dodgy magic. My faille sense might be misfiring, and it was possible that I hadn’t fully recovered after nearly burning out.
I frowned over how easily the excuses flowed through my mind. But I couldn’t help Grayson without learning the meaning of that rune. Worse, I couldn’t face a witch from the Gemini coven without feeling the blame for destroying their cave. Was this more of my recklessness, backfiring every time I tried to help? Laura’s words. My fault…
