Page 1 of Witchlore
PROLOGUE
The day she dies is beautiful. It’s May, the summer holidays have just started, and the air over the fields is hazy and still, smelling of wild garlic. The light is so golden, it has that intense quality of a lazy afternoon first thing in the morning. She laughs as she tugs my hand, pulling me through the shaded trees toward the cave.
“I’m not sure.” I lag behind, staring at the mine gully suspiciously. The ground beneath our feet is hard and dry but the air coming off the ancient gray stone around us is chilled. With the small hole of the cave a black mark in the green and gray stone, weathered smooth and moss covered, it feels as if all the lush, whispering green trees above us are egging us on toward a secret.
“Please, just try.” Elizabeth cups my face and kisses my lips. She tastes like coconut lip balm. “For me.”
I can never refuse her, tasting so sweet and smelling like sun cream and sweat. Her blond hair is like the shimmer off a puddle or the ocean, catching every particle of light as she moves her head.
“Okay.”
“Great!” She smiles that perfect smile, the one that shows off the slight asymmetric nature of her teeth. “Don’t worry. No one’s going to see at this time in the morning.”
There is nothing inside the cave but a thick black darkness that swallows us. It stinks of wet things, of the mulch under leaves, of the inside of a tree. Reluctantly, I press my right hand against the damp stone, its coldness seeping into my skin, making me shiver.
“Are you ready?”
I should say no, tell her that I can feel something wrong coming toward me, that there is danger lurking under the wet moss, but I don’t. She is too excited, too certain, so I only nod. She grins, the bright light outside of the cave only catching one half of her face, an absurd half smile.
“Let’s do it,” she says. I can’t help my admiration when she holds her hands up in the preparatory triangle, taking a deep breath as her beautiful opal ring begins to glow. She flexes her hands. Watching her do witchcraft is always breathtaking; the way power radiates from her and the air around her smells like toasted almonds. Other witches make me feel inferior with their magic, and watching them only increases my resentment toward them, but not with Elizabeth. I never hate her for possessing the skill I lack. Her hands are so fluid as they move through the spell shapes, polished nails catching the pearly glow of her ring.
Then she starts to chant and something is terribly wrong. The coldness from the stone wall is strengthening like ice in my blood, spreading from my fingertips down into my veins, creeping toward my heart.
“Elizabeth,” I gasp, and my breath is cold against my own lips. I try to pull my hand away from the stone but it’s like it’s glued there and the harder I pull, the more I feel it: the stretching, gnawing feeling that I associate with a shift. “Elizabeth, stop—”
She looks at me with such excitement and I realize she doesn’t know the danger yet, she thinks this is proof that her spell isworking. I’ve lost my voice, it’s been frozen out of me, so I can’t tell her that something awful is happening, something neither of us can control or stop, something worse than a shapeshift, more violent and more powerful. I can’t do anything and I can’t save her from it. The last thing I see before the rushing coldness hits my heart is her eyes; one blue in the light outside the cave, one blackened by shadows. Then light explodes from my chest and I am gone.
CHAPTERONE
FOUR MONTHS LATER
I stare at the red, healing lines on my right wrist.
“Ouch,” I hiss, as I carefully spread on the antiseptic cream and rewrap my arm. “Ouch, ouch, ouch—”
“How is it?” Beryl asks. She’s standing at the door of the bathroom holding Mr. Pebbles in her arms. Mr. Pebbles is not a cat. He’s a demon. He hisses at me and leaps down to stalk along the edge of the bathtub, glaring at me with yellow eyes. He has no fur, which I find suspicious in a cat, and a habit of trying to urinate on everything I own, which is frankly just disgusting.
“The same,” I say. It’s been four months and it still looks awful. In the first two months, I could not stop scratching it, so now it has that slightly gnarly look—as if it is deliberately taking its time to pull back together.
“You screamed in the night,” Beryl says, pulling at the crystal on a ribbon around her neck. “I tried to get in. Did you lock your door?”
“I was fine.” I live in a halfway house for young adult witcheswith “problems” run by Beryl, who is nice but also as sharp as a bowl of marbles. She’s about sixty, with long gray hair that she wears braided in a crown or loose with feathers in it. She loves a tunic and making her own deodorant and looks, to my mind, like the typical midlife white British witch. She’s also kind enough and makes an excellent cup of tea, but since this is a halfway house she is not the only one who lives here, so of course I keep my door locked. People like me don’t do well in shared environments with unlocked doors. Mr. Pebbles hisses. I almost hiss back.
“You’re not meant to do that.” Beryl frowns and takes my other wrist, turning it over, a daily self-harm check. When she sees the skin is cut-free she drops it with a sniff. “Your counselor said no closed doors.”
My counselor at the hospital, Counselor Cooper, is the one who recommended Beryl’s as a good alternative to going back into student accommodation. Given my “challenges.” I could technically leave whenever I want, but it’s better than my parents’ house, which was floated as the other possible option for my mental health recuperation. If their house was a healthy place for mentally scarred shapeshifters, I wouldn’t be in the habit of dodging all their emails. Besides, Beryl’s is convenient for college, even if there is a lot more chat about celebrating the inner goddess and processing trauma through mime than I prefer.
“If you wanted to get in, you could have,” I say. I eye the lapis lazuli ring on her middle finger with dislike. I’ve had quite enough of witches and their damned rings. “But Mr. Pebbles pisses on my bed when I don’t lock it.”
“Hmm.” Beryl twists her fingers in a crooked sequence and the blue stone in her ring glows. Mr. Pebbles is suddenly out in thehall, licking his bum, a glow of dark blue magic settling around his ears. I look away in disgust. As a witch’s cat, Mr. Pebbles is used to being moved by witchcraft. After the summer I’ve had, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “You said her name again. In the night.”
I pause. I am trying very hard, every minute of every day, to not say her name aloud. I should be allowed to scream it in my dreams.
“So?”
“The counselor said, didn’t she, that dreams could be connected to”—Beryl gestures at my body—“all of that?”
Counselor Cooper is right. Apparently shapeshifting, especially changing sex when you have absolutely no control over your ability, can be a bit traumatic. This is ironic because my shift is the least traumatic thing to happen to me this summer.
