Page 38 of The Blood Witch
Faint sobbing reaches me from the woman who was thrown into her magical cage at the front of the church. The small broken sounds tug at my heart, and I scoot over to the side of my cell that’s closest to her.
“Are you okay?” I ask and then groan at the stupidity of that question. “Sorry, I’m a dumbass. Of course you’re not okay,” I correct, internally facepalming. “Are you hurt?” I try again, hating even more that I’m trapped and can’t get to her.
I have no idea what they’ve been through since unhinged Barbie took them, but it’s clear it’s been a lot.
“She doesn’t like it when we talk,” Elon informs me, his voice low and filled with warning.
I look over at him on the other side of the church, opposite me, and my insides both leap with the fact that he’s alive and then crash land because I don’t know if this will be the case by the time Rogan or the Order finds us.
If they find us.
I drop-kick my morbid thoughts as far away from me as I can. I’m not going to give up. This situation isn’t hopeless. I can find a way. If I can talk to Nikki, maybe I can tap into the nice girl I saw radiating out of her photo. I can try to convince her how wrong all of this is and that we’re people who just want to go home to our loved ones. It’s possible even that some of the others that fruit loop, Jamie, mentioned are having second thoughts and might be willing to help. And if playing to their humanity doesn’t work, I’ll figure something else out. I don’t know what, but I do know that I’m not going to quit.
“Do you know where we are?” I ask, taking in our surroundings once again.
“I think Ireland, but honestly, I have no idea. It’s really green outside, but we could be anywhere.”
Ireland.
I ponder the possibility, feeling like the look of this church fits that guess. Like he said, though, who knows? I don’t think we’re in the US, but that doesn’t exactly narrow things down. We only have the rest of the world as options to contend with. The woman’s sobs pierce my thoughts, and I can only imagine what’s happened to them since they were taken.
“They’re looking for us, the Order is looking for us,” I tell her, hoping it will offer some small spark of hope, but she doesn’t show any sign that she’s listening, she just makes herself as small as possible on the cold hard floor and cries softly.
“What happened?” I ask Elon, hoping he’ll ignore his own warning and talk to me whether or not Jamie likes it.
He studies me for a moment and releases a deep enervated sigh. “That lunatic you just met, Jamie, well, she just murderedherhusband,” he tells me, jutting his chin in the direction of the woman who starts to quietly keen at his words.
Abhorrence cools my blood, and my heart breaks for the quietly grieving woman. I watch her fragile frame shake with grief, her blonde hair matted and dirty and her clothes stained and torn. Wait a minute...Nina, one of the other Osteomancers that went missing when Elon did, had dark hair, not blonde. I stared at the brush the Order brought me from her apartment long enough to have that fact cemented in my mind. A sliver of confusion pierces the sympathy I feel for what she’s going through.
“But that’s not Nina,” I blurt flatly as I survey the woman, more intensely wondering who she is.
Elon’s brow furrows with bewilderment. “No, Nina and Bernard, the other Bone Witches who were abducted with me, were killed days after they were taken,” he informs me. “That’s Brianne, she’s one of Europe’s Osteomancers. Her husband, David, was a Soul Witch,” he explains, and I stare at him blankly as I try to understand what he’s saying.
Bernard and Nina are dead?
What?
Brianne is another Bone Witch?
Did the Order lie? They said that none of the missing Osteomancers’ magic had transferred to anyone else in their line. But if they’re dead...
“How?” I ask, my voice suddenly thick and dry. “Their magic…” I start, trailing off as confusion stalls my voice.
“Their magic is what Jamie keeps trying to take,” Elon explains, like he’s talking to someone who doesn’t get the plot of a movie or the punchline of a joke. Only there’s absolutely nothing funny about any of this.
“Trying?” I query, homing in on the sliver of hope in that devastating sentence.
“Yeah,trying,” he confirms. “Things haven’t exactly gone as planned for our kidnapping crackpot. She has a ritual that’s supposed to allow her to take magic from someone else, only it hasn’t worked like she thought. When she killed Nina, nothing happened. But when she went to see if the magic had moved on to the next in her line, apparently that hadn’t happened either.”
“Where did it go then?” I ask, puzzled.
“That’sthe mystery that fucked up fruitcake has been attempting to figure out,” Elon tells me with a scowl. “When I first woke up here, she would rant about restoring fragments of a line of magic back to one person. I guess her ritual is supposed to do that. But she thought those fragments would be given toherwhen she took the lives of the witches who possessed them. That didn’t happen though. She’s been working her way through our kind now, trying to find the source line. That’s where she thinks the others’ magic is reverting back to. Once she figures that out, she can kill the source line and take all of that carrier’s magic for herself. Or at least that’s what she keeps saying.”
Information knots itself in my mind, and I struggle to untangle it all.Grammy was right.Someone is trying to restore the fragmented branches of magic back to one.
I survey Elon’s face as his statement,working through our kind,ominously settles into my understanding like sand settles in water. If Jamie is killing Osteomancers...
“How many of us are left?” I ask Elon, taking in his dirt-streaked face, tired pine-green eyes, and the frown pulling the corners of his lips down. He looks like Rogan. There’s no denying they’re related even though Elon has black hair instead of Rogan’s deep brown, and he’s naturally leaner—even more so since he went missing.
