Page 39 of The Blood Witch
Elon shakes his head wearily at my question and looks over at the whimpering woman and then back to me. “You’re looking at what’s left,” he declares, a hollow ache in his tone that feels like a cannonball to the gut.
I put my hands over my mouth and silently plead with the universe that he’s wrong, that what he’s saying is impossible. But I can see the truth of it in the haggard planes of Elon’s face and the bitter torment glistening in his eyes.
In all the magic in this world, we’re the only Bone Witches left.
Horror assaults me, and I feel dizzy with the implications of what this means.
“What?” sneaks out of my appalled lips, but Elon doesn’t answer.
How the hell did we let this happen? How did this whack job destroy so much completely unhindered?
I stare at Elon, completely unnerved. I hate myself for asking this question, but I need to understand what’s at play.
“Why hasn’t she killed you like she has the others?” I ask quietly, shame sloughing off of each syllable. What an awful thing to ask someone, like I’m insinuating he doesn’t deserve to be alive, but there has to be a specific reason the others are gone and he’s not, and I need to know what it is.
Elon scoffs incredulously and looks down at his hands as though he doesn’t quite get it himself. “She likes to taunt me because of Nikki. She also gets a kick out of fucking with me because of who my family is,” he confesses. “Story of my fucking life,” he grumbles almost inaudibly, but I catch it all the same.
He extends his legs, crossing them at the ankle as though this conversation is simply casual and he’s been forced to have it far too many times. “She’s looking for the witch who has the source line for our magic; I think she assumes because of who my uncle was, who my family is, that I’m that source. She keeps saying she’ll pour everyone’s magic into meand thentake it, like it will hurt worse and I’ll suffer more because of that,” he offers with a shrug. “That’s why I’m still here when the others aren’t. Trust me, if I could have changed that, I would have.”
Understanding and pity hit me like a semi. The torture and pain he’s being put throughagainin his short but scarred life makes me steep with rage. No wonder he’s shut down. She’s saving him for last. What an awful fucking feeling that must be. I watch him for a moment. His body language communicatesno big deal, but the pain in his gaze is so intense and raw that I have to look away. It’s one of those messed up situations where you wish you could do something, say something, that would make all the hurt and suffering go away, but you know you can’t. There isn’t a magical word or incantation to combat suffering, no matter how much I wish there was.
“How long does she usually leave for?” I ask, gesturing toward the doors to the church and offering him some reprieve in the form of a change of subject. “Is there a way to stop these symbols all around us from working? Is there a way to override them?” I look down at the soot-stained marks in the ground and then over to the same lines of symbols that have Elon and Brianne trapped.
“Don’t bother,” Elon dismisses. “There’s no way out of these unless Jamie wants you out. They’re tailored to fuck with our magic and to listen only to hers. Save your energy for what happens when she pulls you out of that cage,” he warns, and it causes a shiver to flick up my spine.
I stare at the foreign markings for a moment longer and then return my eyes to Elon’s, not sure what to say to that or to his clear surrender.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he growls. “You think you’re the only one to try and escape? Everything you’re probably thinking of doing has been tried before by witches who are now dead. I’ve watched as other Osteomancers broke their own bones and tried to use them as weapons. None of them succeeded.”
He shakes his head, his eyes hard.
“I fought at first. I tried everything I could to get out of here, to save the others as they showed up one by one. Nothing I did made a difference. I discovered that it pisses her off more when I don’t react, so that’s what I do now,” he explains adamantly, as though he needs me to understand why he is the way he is, like he needs to defend against the judgment I must have let bleed out of my eyes.
The doors to the church slam open again. The boom they create from hitting the stone walls is a little less sonorous, like even they’re done with this overdramatic type of entrance. I still jump, surprised, and let out a frightened squeal. I clutch my chest as Jamie stomps in, once again alone, one arm threaded through the handles of three buckets, and in the crook of her other arm are three small packages of something.
She chucks a bucket at me, and it goes careening just past where I’m sitting, hits the wall behind me, and then rolls, stopping just before the symbols trapping me in from the right side. Something else hits my foot, and I look down to see a package of original flavored digestives, or at least that’s what the package says. I have no idea what that is, but it looks like gingerbread cookies or something, based on the packaging’s picture.
I side-eye thebiscuits, not nearly close enough to starvation-mode to risk eating anything someone this crazy is offering so freely. What I really want is water, but I’m not about to ask for it. I’m not going to give the woman anything more that she can lord over me.
Elon’s bucket and crackers are tossed his way, and Jamie tromps toward Brianne, who is still huddled on the floor, her chest shuddering with grief, even though I can’t hear her crying anymore. Jamie looks as though she’s just about to toss Brianne’s bucket and food her way when suddenly she stops herself. Her head tilts to the side like a dog who’s staring at someone quizzically. She sets the bucket down on the wrong side of the scorched marks and slowly opens the packet of cookies or crackers or whatever they are.
One by one, Jamie removes a wafer from the package and crushes it in her hand. A small pile of crumbs starts at her feet as she destroys Brianne’s food. The look in her eyes is malicious. She stands there as though she’s daring the broken witch to look up and beg Jamie to stop, but she doesn’t.
“You can’t run from me,” Jamie snarls at Brianne as she crushes another cracker. “There’s nowhere you can hide that I won’t find you.”
Goose bumps crawl up my arms as fire licks through my veins. I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut when it comes to bullies. Jamie crushes another cracker, and I start to see red. How much more broken could she want this witch to be? She’s literally crumpled into a ball of grief in the middle of a magical cage she can’t get out of at the mercy of a woman who just killed her husband.
It makes me want to rip Jamie’s head off and shove all those wasted morsels of nutrients down her throat. The carved marks in the ground all around me make it impossible, so I do the only thing I can to show her just what I think of what she’s doing. I figure Jamie threw these crackers at me with no issue from the demonic symbols that comprise my cage; hopefully, I can do the same.
I grab the mysterious red and blue package of digestives at my feet and cock my arm back. I give my biscuits a good throw and watch them sail through the air, past the line of onyx symbols of my cage, arcing into Brianne’s cage with a spiral that would make Tom Brady proud. They fall to the ground and skid just past Brianne’s feet, coming to a stop where she’ll be able to see them when she comes out of her current state of shock and emotional agony.
Jamie’s head snaps in my direction, her features painted with rage. Defiantly, I stare at her, wondering if she’ll breach the symbols on the ground and go retrieve the sleeve of cookies so Brianne can’t have them. She doesn’t. Instead, she walks over to my cage, and as mutinous as I feel, I also can’t help feeling like I’m swimming in a pond and was just spotted by a crocodile. I have no idea what I might have just unleashed, but I guess it’s time to find out.
“Awwww, the little Bone Witch has balls,” she coos at me, like I’m some baby animal at the zoo. “You’re willing to starve for her, but would she do the same for you, Leni?” she tsks, as though she’s genuinely disappointed in me. “I know you’re new to this whole witch thing, but let me fill you in on a little something. There isn’t a more selfish species in existence than witches. One minute they’re your friends, and the next they’ll stab you in the back if it means keeping themselves safe or taking something they want.”
Unbidden, Rogan’s face pops up in my mind and slowly fades away just to be replaced by Major Griego’s face, then the faces of every Order member who’s interrogated me. Lastly, the image of the High Priestess of Witches and her two council members waves into focus in my head. My thoughts silently concur with the venom spilling out of Jamie’s lips, and I hate it almost as much as I hate that I’m here, staring into the cruel eyes of this demon-tainted abomination.
“Your grandmother was friends with my aunt, even looked out for Nikki when the magic passed to her, but did the great Osteomancer ever check in on me? Did she even once ask how I was doing after my line was stripped of the same magic running in her veins? No, she treated us like the pariahs everyone else did. If only she could see me now, see what’s going to happen to her line of magic when I take it from your very marrow,” she practically snarls at me.
