Weather Witch

rush of blood filling people’s ears at sight of the Wardens invading their festivities.

Tall, broad, and dressed in hip-length charcoal-colored cloaks and sleek trousers tailored to slide over black boots, the Wardens were the most elite of guards. Unshakable, undaunted, and irreversibly silenced by a mysterious event rumored to be called “Lightning’s Kiss,” their faces were carved with crimson fern-shaped tattoos recalling their arcane path to power.

Behind the Wardens something else whispered with movement, things so tall they were more long than tall, more sleek than slender, and a more accurate description than saying that they walked would have been to say that they glided, they drifted, they haunted the space between the Wardens and the walls.

Until the Wardens parted and, black as a heartless sea, the Wraiths flowed forward.

Wearing relentless black, from their strange soft boots and long frock coats to their tall crowned top hats shrouded with mourner’s black, the Wraiths cut imposing figures against the backdrop of the crimson-and-bone hall. Still as stone they stood, faceless beneath the dark veils hanging along their hats’ brims; even their hands were robed in gloves the color of a moonless sky.

Deaf as doorstops, they were a sharp contrast to the Wardens. To many it seemed all they had in common was witchery. And the power of flight.

Everyone in the hall stood mute, their eyes fixed.

Everyone except Morgan Astraea—the man whose youngest daughter’s extravagant birthday party was being ruined.

“What is the meaning of this?” Jordan’s father stormed, his face purpling as a vein rose by his hairline.

The Ring shifted, the Wardens took one stomping step to the side, and Astraea immediately recognized the Councilman. Though a range of emotions slid across his face in rapid succession, surprise was not among them. But rage? It settled on his features and he thrust a pointing finger toward the foyer. “We shall speak. There.”

The Councilman nodded, following old Morgan Astraea, the Wardens marching behind, and after the Wardens drifted the Wraiths, every piece of them swallowed up in fabric and unimaginable. The crowd hissed, seeing one last person in their ranks.

A man so thin he seemed nearly skeletal, ceremonial robes hanging off him like draperies from a pole, slunk in amongst the Wardens, a slender cane wrapped tight in his gnarled hand, his other hand sheathed in metal—a contraption more mechanism than man. For a moment he turned, icy eyes scanning the crowd.

They gasped again. Although most had never seen one before, all the party’s attendees knew him by his manner as much as his clothing.

Tales of the Testers were not easily forgotten.

Holgate

After he’d returned to the library adjoining his laboratory and withdrawn the journal he kept hidden in the false-bottom drawer, he tucked it into his belt, then stoppered his ink bottle, picked up his pen, and laid them both into his travel bag. The bag had served his father well as a rifleman’s pouch, but as Bran benefited from the lessons his father had imparted as the Maker before him, so he also benefited from the scant remainders of the dangerous wartime exploits that helped make his father’s name immortal.

Taking a lantern from off his wall he walked to the Tanks more slowly now, no need to rush as the dead certainly didn’t.

With barely a moment’s hesitation, Bran slipped his arms around the child and carried her out of the compound, beyond the unassuming door beside the main gate, and down to the small slope where the dead were buried. She felt lighter in his arms than he’d expected, like something had left her—some heaviness connected to life. He set her on the grassy ground and, raising the lantern that now shown with a steady white light, looked around for a shovel.

Briefly.

Burying the dead was not his job.

But filling her spot in the Tanks was and as suddenly as the request for a Tester and a Ring of Wraiths had come into Holgate, he knew at least one Tank wouldn’t remain vacant long.

He pulled the journal out, sat down only a few feet from the body, and began to write.

The girl in Tank 5 has expired under strange circumstances. She was not in my care for long, showed strong potential and was most easily persuaded to work when introduced to the cat. Death was not fever- induced and yet she said the strangest thing and seemed quite convinced of the reality of her words. “They are coming and there is naught to be done for it.” It causes me to speculate on the cause of her untimely death. She was not broken to the point of d

The pen stilled in his grip, a breeze rallying and lifting off the water. It moved like a specter up the slope, slinking around the dead girl’s body and ruffling her dirty hair before stroking its cold, damp touch across the Maker’s face and dissipating.

He squinted at the corpse. Had she stirred? Setting aside his journal and pen he leaned across her, holding the lantern to her face. No breath moved within her. But the breeze came back, this time running icy fingers through his hair and stroking the back of his neck so its every hair stood straight up. Something slipped along his ears, chilling even the insides of them with what sounded distinctly like words. “Murrrrderrr.” He shuddered, tilting his head. “Murrrderr,” the wind sang again. Then something new followed and, heart racing, he listened. “They commmmme,” the wind hummed. He rubbed his ears. “Soooooonnnn they commmmme…” He pawed frantically at his ears and stood, the journal and pen falling into the grass, his gaze wary on the water.

Last summer’s cattails waved in the wind, whistling an eerie tune. Surely that was all it had been—the wind through the rushes. Still, he gathered his things and gave one last glance to the body before walking much faster to the compound than he’d walked on his way out.

His returning speed was not because he felt lighter being relieved of the burden of the body. It was rather because the wind chased him like a hound snapping at his heels.

Philadelphia

Pushing his way through the astonished party’s crowd, old Morgan Astraea addressed the uninvited men who now stood in his foyer. “What precisely are you doing here?”

Jordan’s mother stroked a careful hand down his back as they huddled as near the door as he could maneuver them.

“We’ve received reports of a potential Conductor being in your household.”

“Why would you presume a Witch is here?”

Thunder cracked so loud the huge house rattled.

Morgan Astraea nodded. “An unpredicted storm would raise questions, I suppose.” He groaned. “You discovered one just two years past—and we were as surprised as you,” Morgan assured. “We need no taint nor the blasphemy of magick in this household,” he assured. “Root the devil out!”

The Councilman smiled, signaling the Tester with a simple sweep of his fingers. “Signal the servants,” he suggested. “Such trouble is nearly always breeding in their ranks.”

The servants were gathered and although Rowen did a tremendous job keeping most of the guests focused on him—one of his more stellar abilities—Jordan could not help but slip from his grasp and make her way toward the staff that waited for the Tester’s verdict.

Behind her Rowen paused in the midst of telling some joke and she sensed the crowd breaking apart, watching her and watching him equally. Footsteps followed her—his boots covering the distance quickly, Catrina’s heels clopping in a harried fashion.

Jordan stood at the edge of the circle of Wraiths, Wardens, and servants, watching the Tester’s eyes rove in a strange, unceasing manner. Two years ago the Councilman had come and taken Marisca, Cook’s daughter. There was no Tester needed. And, much as her parents had adored her, no one dared hide her from the Council’s eyes. The punishment for Harboring was swift and sure.

They all heard tales of the posses that rode, rooting out anyone using magick or displaying magickal abilities. This was the New World. A world free of the taint and trouble magick brought.

A world unlike the one across the Western Ocean where magick tore dynasties apart and brought wars of