“Thanks for reminding me.”
Kite bent down and rubbed the Beast’s ears. “Stay out of the way, precious. This could get messy.” The Beast barked once, ran a few paces away, and turned invisible.
Kite bent down and breathed on the black surface until it milked over in pearly white. Then she spat on the white and rubbed her hand in the spit. Slowly, she repeated the process all around the boy and the blade, until she had made a complete circle.
Nothing happened.
Pulling on a clump of hair, Kite whispered a few words to the circle, encouraging it to take life. It flared seafoam green for a moment and then flickered out, like a candle being toyed with by the wind.
“I think you need to cut,” she said to Cam.
“Okay.” He swallowed, and then approached the circle.
“Don’t cross it,” she said, and he stopped, nodded, and then knelt down. Using one of the chips of quartz on his knuckle, he scratched a thin line over the saliva on the glass. When the circle was completed he stepped back into the centre. The light flared up again, little flames of white and green, but then died down, leaving only piles of white ash like salt.
“Pain,” Kite said reluctantly. “All magic requires sacrifice.”
“I know,” he said. “The obsidian told me. I was just hoping it was lying.”
He picked up the sword made of gears and spikes and hatred.
The smell of burning filled the air, and Cam let out a small whimper. But he held on despite the pain and dragged the heavy blade with him. Together, they traced the circle for a third time, cutting deeper into rock.
“It hurts you both,” she said. The blade was bleeding just as Cam was, black with an oily sheen of silver dripping between Cam’s fingers.
Gasping he dropped the blade, hands burned raw and bloody, face ashen. “Do it,” he managed.
She could feel the magic now, bubbling to the surface. The fear inside her flared up, hot and sticky. This magic didn’t obey her. It was outcast, destroyed, it wanted nothing and therefore had nothing to lose.
Kite had much to lose.
But she had sworn a promise, and she had a mission to fulfill, and so, compelled, she stepped forward and bit her wrist with an elegant tooth, and let a single drop of sacred witch blood fall into the circle.
The flames raged up, higher than the tallest tree, higher than the Coven.
“This circle is your bondage,” she said, sweat dripping down her neck. “Now you must break it, and from one become two.”
“From one become two,” muttered Cam. “From one become two. From one become two.”
And then Kite heard nothing more because the sword had started screaming.
Kite waited several long minutes before Cam walked through the fire, his body singing a melody of the underworld, of dirt and damp darkness.
He stepped across the threshold and collapsed.
As he crossed the circle, the flame was extinguished, the bond broken. Relief settled in her fingernails like the caress of an insect’s antennae. She stepped forward to retrieve the sword.
A hand made of light reached from the cut in the obsidian and grasped her skirt.
The dead witches were rising.
Thirty-Three
THE HEALER
Tav watched as Eli’s eyes grew large in horror, like two mirrors that reflected Tav’s dirty face back to them. Then the girl looked down at the sliver of obsidian lodged in her body.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, shock blotting out all other sensations like a lunar eclipse.
Tav gritted their teeth and twisted the blade.
Eli groaned in agony. It was an unearthly sound, like a cliff crumbling under a landslide, like a blade breaking on an anvil. The sound rang in Tav’s ears and carried with it the memory of rusted swing sets creaking in the rain and stones thrown by older boys.
Tav turned the blade as if it were a key — and opened a door.
The hole they made in Eli’s body was clean and bright, a perfect circle through an otherwise ordinary-looking human girl (except for the eyes, of course, which had turned pure black, as if the blood vessels had all burst and bled nightmares).
Eli’s mouth closed, but the whimpering continued. The sound reverberated from the plants that covered the windowsill, their leaves trembling wildly. A succulent began shredding itself.
Tav could see a glimmer of black fire through the hole, the lights of fireflies and birthday candles and forest fires and static electricity sparking into life inside the fragile shell of a body.
The fluttering, furious flame of the Heart that had lived for generations under the Coven. That now lived in the vulnerable body of a girl whose touch kept Tav awake at night.
“What did you do?” the Hedge-Witch’s eyes burned with excitement. Her sharpened teeth emerged from her lips like a row of knives. “How did you do that? Teach it to me. Tell me.”
“Take the Heart,” said Tav. “I have cut it out for you.” They kept their hand and blade in the frail body as the lifeforce drained out of the girl. The black eyes glittered and went dull.
Tav was killing her, and they all knew it.
“I knew you were special,” whispered the Hedge-Witch, excitement pulsing through her words. “I knew when it came down to it that you would get your hands dirty. This is the revolution we need. Sacrifice. Pain. A willingness to betray. To kill. You are truly one of mine.” As she reached for Eli, the Hedge-Witch’s hands shook with excitement.
She reached her clawed talons inside Eli, seeking the power that flowed through the girl’s bones and burned her body to ash. “I can feel the power. I can taste it.”
Tav withdrew the blade suddenly and the door closed, skin and hair and stone and hawthorn filling the empty space where the Heart had begun to spill out.
The Hedge-Witch fell back, her hand severed at the wrist. The wound was perfectly cauterized.
“You made a bargain!” she shrieked, saliva dripping from her fangs. She exhaled clouds
