SPOILER ALERT: Sample may contain spoilers if you have not read Bones of the Witch.
CHAPTER 1
I stood at the foot of two hospital beds. On my right lay Jasher, his face pale and thin, his lashes dark against his cheek. He snored quietly, his hands resting on the covers, an IV sending fluids into his body. To the left lay Evelyn, and though she was no longer in a coma, she still looked malnourished and dehydrated. I had hoped to return her home after the events of twenty-four hours ago, but the potion had only wakened her, not healed her.
I glanced at the clock. It was six-fifteen in the morning and well before visiting hours began, but the receptionist had let me in anyway. She had given me a look that wasn’t easy to unpack, but I thought I knew what it meant. She was a little bit afraid of me, but also reverent, in a way. I had promised I wouldn’t wake my friends, but told her I’d had a bad dream and needed to see them for my own peace of mind. She’d let me pass.
Lachlan had told me how shocked the medics and receptionist had been when he had arrived at emergency with Evelyn and Jasher, both awake but in bad shape. They were further confused when Lachlan didn’t stay with his friends. At some point, someone must have informed the police.
I heard a soft sound behind me and turned to see Lachlan standing in the doorway.
“I got worried when I looked in your room this morning and you weren’t there,” he whispered. His hair was sleep-mussed and he wore a hoodie with jeans and a pair of white tennis shoes. A five o’clock shadow times two darkened his jawline. When he saw my face, his own expression creased with worry.
I waved him out of the room and joined him in the hall, closing the door quietly behind me. As we walked to a seating area a few yards away, Lachlan put an arm around my shoulders.
“Why so upset? They’re going to be fine. Doc says they’ll recover in a matter of days.”
I looked at him, struggling for words.
He kissed my forehead and squeezed me against his side. “It’s all over, Georjie. You did it. Despite the questions we answered yesterday, and I’m sure there will be more, I can promise you no one will press charges. Evelyn is no longer in a coma. Her parents are over the moon.” He looked at his watch. “They’ll be here in an hour.”
He thought I was worried about the cops. I didn’t know how to begin to tell him what the problem really was.
“Interesting that the receptionist let us in.” Lachlan chuckled as we settled on one of the couches. “I think she’s a little afraid of us now.”
I couldn’t find a smile for him. My lower lip trembled and I put my face in my hands. “Lachlan—”
“Hey.” Alarmed, he put a hand on my back. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s not over, Lachlan.” The words spilled out along with the tears sitting in my eyes. I wiped furiously at my cheeks.
Anger at myself boiled to the surface. “I did exactly the wrong thing.”
“What do you mean?” He rubbed circles over my back. “You saved Evie, you saved us all.”
“You remember that I told you how I can see events from the past when I pick up a handful of soil? Whatever happened on that ground appears before me in black and white, like an old movie on a TV with poor reception and no sound.”
“Of course, I’ll never forget it.” Lachlan tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “I hate seeing you like this.”
“I think, maybe, if I was a stronger Wise, I would be able to hear the residuals too. Laec told me how to see the events that happened on paved ground. I’d never been able to do that before and I never would have figured it out on my own.” I looked up at him, wiping away another tear. I was irritated with my own emotions, and truly more angry than anything else. “Laec woke me up early this morning.”
Lachlan’s head recoiled with surprise. “He was in my house?”
I nodded. “I woke up to find him sitting on the footboard and looking at me like…” I rubbed a hand over my eyes, wishing I could erase the memory of his expression. “Like I was a total failure.”
“Georjie…”
“He did something to me, knocked me back into the same residual, the one where I watched that couple entomb Daracha in the wall, only this time it had sound. I could hear everything.” My voice trembled and I gave up trying to stop tears from falling down my face. They were there whether I liked it or not.
Lachlan wiped my cheek with his knuckles.
“I know why they put her in that wall, Lachlan.”
“Why, was she a Wise, too? Is that what’s got you so upset? They had an agenda against people like you?”
I shook my head. “No, she’s not a Wise. She’s like the opposite of a Wise. I felt her power. The ground where she stood felt cold and dead. Impenetrable. Like concrete. What‐ ever magic she has, it’s nothing like mine. Mine comes from the earth, and hers…I don’t know where it comes from. She’s like a black hole.”
“Like the ithe,” Lachlan injected. “It reminded me of a black hole, too.”
I nodded. “It’s like that thing is a manifestation of Daracha’s powers, something she created to do her bidding. I don’t get why it didn’t just release her from the wall after she was entombed, but I do understand why they didn’t bury her.” I looked Lachlan in the face and squeezed his hand. “The couple implied that if Daracha was buried, she could come back to life. The only way they could keep her from resurrecting was to keep her out of the ground.”
The pink in Lachlan’s cheeks drained away as he stared at me. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Oh, shit.”
I nodded. “Yeah, oh shit.”
“So, she’s not dead.”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“She’ll come back to life.”
“Yep.”
“When?”
“No idea.”
We stared at the floor in silence for a bit, then Lachlan perked up, hopeful.
“Maybe this time she’ll stay dead,” he said. “Or if she does come back, she’ll go away, go somewhere else.”
“You’re dreaming, Lachlan, and anyway can we really take that chance? I’m the one who killed her, and there was something she wanted from me. She knows what I am. She’ll come after me. Maybe she’ll come for all of us.”
Lachlan’s face hardened. “Then we have to use whatever time we have to get ready for her.”
“How do we do that?”
“Forewarned is forearmed.” Lachlan got off the couch and began to pace, chewing his bottom lip. His eyes looked far away. “We found a little bit about Daracha in the public record, and if there’s a little, there might be more. If we can understand who she is and what she wants, then we can better prepare to face her.”
“We?” I stood and eyeballed him, this sweet man who had come to mean so much to me since I’d arrived in the highlands. His insistence we do everything together, or at least not to allow me to do this alone, warmed me all over. But I couldn’t let more people put themselves in danger for me. “I’ll face her alone, Lachlan. There’s no way I’ll let her get to anyone else.”
“She’s seen us, Georjie. She knows what we all look like, the four of us. You might want to face her alone, but if she decides to come after us, you won’t have a choice.” He stopped pacing and an enlightened look came over his face. “We need to go to where she’s from.”
“Dundee?”
“Aye. She’s a Guthrie, one of the larger clans of that area. They’re bound to have some record of her. Maybe we can figure out how she came to be…whatever it is that she is.”
“A witch.”
“Yes, and maybe your fae friends can help you. They helped once before.”
“The only problem is that I have no idea how to reach them. When I go looking for them, I never find them. They don’t seem to have a problem popping up whenever they feel like it,” I snarked. But I liked his idea of tracing Daracha’s roots. Maybe we could unearth something from her past that would help me to beat her, or at least understand her end game.
“There’s a reason she left Dundee in the first place,” Lachlan said. “Like I said, women at that time didn’t have much reason to travel, except for on the rare occasion that they were married off to a faraway clan. But Daracha did leave. Maybe something happened in Dundee to scare her away.”
I nodded. “Or she got run out of town. How soon can you get away?”
“We can go today, Georjie.” Lachlan took me by the elbows. “If you’re right and that creature is going to come back for us, then there’s nothing more important than this. It’s three-and-a-half-hour drive to Dundee from here. Like all the bigger clans, they’ll have an ancestral home and private family records. We can ask them if they’re willing to share.”
My heart picked up its pace at the idea of rooting out Daracha’s origins, finding out what made her tick. “Just how receptive are highland families to opening their doors to strangers?”
“To a historian, very receptive.” He glanced toward the room where Jasher and Evelyn slept. “We’ll leave these two a note and pop by tomorrow when we’re back. We can book a couple of rooms in Dundee for tonight.”
“What if we find nothing?”
Lachlan dimpled. “Don’t underestimate the pride these highland clans have. A more appropriate question would be: what if we find a mountain of stuff and can’t possibly get through it all in one day?”
“And if that’s the case?” I was on my own schedule; it was Lachlan who had employers to answer to.
Lachlan shrugged and his dimple deepened. “In that case, I call in for a couple of mental health days, and we make a weekend of it.”
I hid my smile and reached for my bag to find a pen and paper. Sitting on the couch, I scrawled a note to Jasher and Evelyn. I left it sitting on the dresser between them and met Lachlan in the hall. We nodded to the receptionist as we passed through the lobby. She watched us go with quiet contemplation.
“Mind if we stop for a cup of coffee on our way?” I asked as I pulled on my jacket.
Lachlan winked as we walked through the sliding doors into a misty highland morning. “Make it a trough of coffee and we have a deal.”
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