The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,99

the tower, then back to Quinn and Agnes. “Do you feel anything? Any particular power awakening?”

A small, uncertain silence falls as the three of them wait for some mysterious and ancient magic to flood their veins, filling them with the lost majesty of their fore-mothers.

“I don’t think so,” says Agnes.

“No,” says Cleo.

“Neither do I. Well, perhaps there’s some ritual or key inside—a series of clues which reveal a secret chamber, like one of Miss Doyle’s mysteries! Or perhaps if we read the inscription aloud—” Bella bends closer to the door, where words are written in foreign-looking script. “Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.”

Nothing happens.

Before Bella can try anything else, a fourth woman appears at the tower door. Her shift hangs in ash-streaked tatters, clinging to damp flesh, revealing the dark blooms of bruises. Her head is bowed, face hidden by a black tangle of hair. Her breath is a wet rattle.

The woman straightens. As she turns, Agnes sees the red ruin of her throat, a mess of bloody pink and dead white that she can’t look at very long.

Juniper is beaming at them, lips cracked, teeth bloody. Her eyes are a deep gray-green, like the shadows of summer leaves, softer and sweeter than Agnes has ever seen them—until they land on the creature perched on Bella’s shoulder.

“Oh, horseshit.” Juniper’s voice is somehow both wet and scorched, terrible to hear. “How come you get one before me?”

Then, with a strange, boneless grace, she collapses.

Bella is not dead. But, but she thinks her sister might be.

Agnes reaches her first. “June? June, baby? Help me, damn you! Get her inside!” It takes Bella a long moment to realize Agnes is addressing her, and another to crouch down beside her sister’s broken-doll body. She hesitates to touch her—she’s an open wound, a collection of bruises and burns and abuses—but between them Bella and Agnes haul her awkwardly upright.

Quinn pulls hard on the iron ring of the tower door. It opens easily, as if some tidy caretaker has kept its hinges oiled all these centuries.

Bella and Agnes lay their sister on the cool flagstone floor with her hair haloed around her and her throat gaping like a second mouth.

Bella looks a little wildly into the shadows, hoping for a glowing chalice or an ivory wand or perhaps a magical potion labeled Drink me!

There is nothing. Only soft darkness cut with silver shafts of moonlight, and a faint, dry smell that makes Bella’s heart lift inexplicably in her chest.

Agnes’s voice is hesitant, swallowed by the vast dark above them. “Someone will see, soon, and then they’ll come for us. What do we do?”

But Bella isn’t listening. She is breathing in that smell—dust and parchment, leather and cotton, ink made from oil and oak-gall and soot—with a wild suspicion swelling in her chest.

She fumbles a matchbook from her skirt and drags the tip across the flagstones. The light flares, reflected in the deep amber of Quinn’s eyes, illuminating a too-small circle of flagstones. At the very edge of the circle Bella can make out the faint outlines of shelves lining the tower walls. The glass shine of jars. Long benches and scarred tables scattered with leaves and bones and nameless things, as if some untidy woman had been brewing witch-ways just hours before.

Bella stands, lifting the match higher in trembling fingers, wishing for a lamp or torch or even a candle.

From her shoulder, the owl ruffles its feathers. It stretches forward—Bella doesn’t know if a true owl could extend its neck to such an uncanny length, or if the rules are different for familiars—and plucks the guttering match from her fingers. It makes a neat toss-and-catch motion with its head and swallows the match whole, flame and all.

“Oh! Don’t—” Bella makes a helpless gesture, far too late. Golden light is blooming in the shadowed center of the owl, like a candle seen through smoked glass. It glows brighter, spreading until the owl shines the deep gold of a well-tended fire, only the very tips of its claws and wings still edged in black. It spreads its wings and takes luminous flight.

Three faces turn upward to watch as it spirals upward through the tower. In its shining wake they see an endless staircase that circles and twines along the walls, so aimless and haphazard it looks grown rather than built. Landings and ladders sprout from the stairs like branches, lustrous and worn smooth with use, and doors nestle in the shadows, although Bella can’t imagine they open onto anything but