Page 89 of Shadows of Nightshade
“I—” I looked down at my fingers. The pressure trying to keep us back had lifted, and the room was a little bit lighter.
But not by much.
“I don’t know,” I finished. Finn was more of an expert than me, so why bother to ask? Instead, I peeked past him.
The musty scent of old spices tickled the air as the scene came into focus. Across the back wall were thick, shattering shelves, displaying hundreds of mismatched jars in various states of togetherness. In front of the space was a table with a broken leg.
It was very old, and in ruins, as the area was heavy with dust and spiderwebs.
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“It’s an apothecary.” Finn stepped closer to the ruins. “It had to have belonged to a powerful, and probably bad, witch.” He lingered between the desk and the shelves, touching the surfaces and moving the light as he went.
“Why ‘bad’?” I asked.
Finn’s nose twitched as he confidently said, “Because why else would a witch go through the trouble to hide this? It’s expected to have a workstation. Besides, the magic just feels wrong.”
“Well…” I began—that was some leap of logic. I, personally, could understand needing a private space away from nosy onlookers, but maybe he did have a point.
There was an unpleasantness in the air.
“I guess,” I conceded. “How old do you think it is?”
Finn continued to hold the light in one hand and ran his pointer finger over the surface of the table with the other. He pursed his lips, studying the dust, before he replied, “Really old.”
I bit my tongue. Yes, he was trying to be helpful, and it wasn’t his fault that there wasn’t an obvious answer. But right now, everything he did annoyed me.
Would I ever be able to trust him again?
“Some still have labels,” he continued as he turned to the broken display. I stepped beside him, and he touched one of the few unbroken jars. The elaborate cursive on the cracking yellow label was impossible for me to distinguish, but apparently, Finn could read it. “It’s belladonna. Which further proves my point,” he added. “I’ve heard the witches talking about this one before. A lot of these herbs are hard to find, and are not usually used with positive intentions.”
“Really…” I began, allowing my gaze to drift to my right, away from Finn. “Belladonna is also known as Nightshade,” I pointed out, and when he looked at me, I shrugged, “Bryce has been growing some in the greenhouse.”
Did that mean that Bryce was evil? It wouldn’t surprise me.
But still, something didn’t sit right with me. A question was at the forefront of my mind: Why hadn’t Miles, the witch supreme, noticed this place? He’d been here at least twice.
“I wonder who owned this house before,” I mused. Professor Hamway had recently come into the property to use as a renovation project—she’d gushed about her plans before she left.
There was a heaviness in the darkness lingering at my right—a stale air that insulted my senses and couldn’t be ignored.
Finn began to reply, but my attention was entrapped, and I missed what he said.
What was back there?
I left him, feeling my way forward through the darkening space until Finn followed me and brought back the light. At the very end of the wall, at the corner of the room, were five wooden barrels—almost as large as me—unbroken and upright.
“Hide,” the woman’s voice sent a shiver down my spine. “Hide while you still can.”
“They’ve never been opened,” Finn was saying, but I barely paid attention. He reached past me and pressed his palm to the splintering surface of one of the barrels.
Keep going.
It was no longer a warning, no longer the voices from before. There was now a different tone echoing in my head. It was the same as my dream—the melodious male tenor that’d been encouraging me forward through the forests in my childhood. I recognized it now—an internal voice that’d been quiet until quite recently—had always steered me from trouble throughout the darkest moments of my life.
I’d followed it tonight and then ended up here.
But the ghost was nearby too—the girl who’d been warning me to leave—I could feel her presence even as Finn remained blissfully unaware.
