house on the label, she felt her resolve slipping. There was a way to see the place without actually going there. This, too, she’d resisted, but the longer she stared at the illustration, the stronger the impulse became to give in to her curiosity until she found herself drifting over the line into the shadow world.
Her vision darkened, the walls fell away, and a sepia sky opened above as sight and sound distorted at the edges of her consciousness. Her mind flew her to an abandoned stretch of road in the valley four miles away. The château where she’d spent countless lazy afternoons believing she was in love materialized out of shadow. The sight struck her as familiar yet strange. The years had changed the house in unexpected ways. The main structure was as she remembered, but a pair of grand turrets now anchored each side, and a new balustrade encircled a second-floor balcony, where a stargazer might search for an impressionist’s vision of the night sky. A fence surrounded the property now too—cast iron embedded with amulets and protective spells, topped with fanciful metal finials. As Elena walked past the gate, she felt as if lightning itself had been channeled into the metal. She’d never encountered anything like it. The woman’s spellwork was even better than she’d thought. Most witches would need a lifetime to master such a graceful enchantment.
Lamplight from a window at the top of the east tower drew her spirit eye upward. A woman’s silhouette crossed in front of the glass. She could understand why a bierhexe might be persuaded to work at a successful vineyard. For some, power was the only elixir that mattered. And Bastien had that now. It radiated off everything he’d touched, though she wondered if the witch behind the glass knew what Bastien was capable of if he didn’t get his way. Had she compromised a part of herself for him?
Just then the window darkened. A face peered outside. Another’s third-eye vision pierced through the veil of shadow, searching for an intruder. She knew she couldn’t be seen, at least not in her physical form, but she shrank from view anyway. Still the intensity persisted, as if a psychic lantern swung its light over the yard, searching. It was her first encounter with one of the northern beer witches, and so far the rumors of their striking abilities proved true. The bierhexe’s perception practically assaulted with its vigilance. To know Bastien had that kind of protection put a frost on Elena’s hopes for easy vengeance, but she’d never give up. Not until her heart got the peace it deserved.
Elena flew back into her body and opened her eyes. The wine label had dropped from her hand. She picked it up again, slipping once more into the trench of pain of his betrayal. With tears brimming, she held the label to the candle flame and watched it burn and curl at the edges until the paper crumpled into a pile of ash. After allowing a single tear to fall onto them, she swept up the remains and sealed them in an envelope. With a florid swipe of her pen, she labeled the outside “bitter ashes” and stashed it away in the drawer. Then she flipped the pages of her spell book and turned her mind to the study of poison.
CHAPTER SIX
Grand-Mère and Elena wheeled a brouette out to the field and made a show of pruning the old vines on the east slope while Jean-Paul hitched up his horse and wagon. At last he pulled onto the road and headed for the village. A trail of woodsmoke seeped out of the brouette as they waved their secateurs in his direction. Once he was out of sight, Elena removed the tallow wicks from her satchel and set to work on her counterspells.
Four twists of wolf’s fur, one for each direction, sizzled and burned at her feet as she and Grand-Mère stood in the center of the property. She recited the spell from her book, the words flat and shapeless in her mouth, and a veil of smoke lifted from the wicks and spread over the vineyard. And though a breeze teased their skirts and rain threatened to dampen their uncovered heads, the spell seemed to hold the smoke in place above the field long enough to swaddle the dormant vines with its protective magic. To the passerby, the winter vineyard looked no different than when filled with drifting smoke from the char burners,