The Witch of Fading Echoes A Fading Witch. Four Fallen Gods. One Deadly Bargain. #2
Glass vials burst on the shelves, spilling memories into the air. A dead man’s first kiss flashed blue above the counter. A widow’s last curse crawled across the floor in red smoke. A soldier’s final prayer beat against the ceiling like a trapped bird.
Selene’s magic rose.
It came colder than usual.
Hungrier.
For a terrifying second, it did not feel like power moving through her.
It felt like something opening its mouth.
She almost stopped.
Then the boy whispered, “Mama?”
The mother sobbed through the lullaby.
Selene clenched her teeth and shoved the spell through.
“Come back.”
The silver thread snapped.
The night-wraith screamed.
The sound tore through the apothecary, rattling every charm, cracking the front window from corner to corner. Something black and faceless burst from the boy’s shadow, all claws and hunger and wet hair, its mouth stretched too wide as it lunged for Selene.
Before it reached her, the blue candles roared.
Fire washed over the room.
Not hot. Not natural. Ghost-blue and furious.
The wraith struck the flame and came apart screaming, shredded into smoke that the storm ripped through the chimney and carried into the city.
The boy gasped.
Color rushed back into his mouth, his cheeks, his fingers. He turned toward his mother and began to cry weakly.
Living.
The mother collapsed over him, sobbing his name into his hair.
Selene staggered back against the counter.
For a moment, she could not hear anything but her own heartbeat.
She had survived.
Her hands shook. Her thumb bled. Her knees threatened to fold. But she was alive, standing, whole.
Whole.
The word rang false inside her.
The mother gathered the boy into her arms. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Saints keep you, thank you, thank you—”
“Don’t thank saints in my shop.”
The woman looked startled.
Selene forced herself upright. “Take him home. Keep iron under his pillow for seven nights. Burn rosemary at every window. If he dreams of faceless women, wake him before he answers.”
The mother nodded, clutching the child as if the world might reconsider and take him back.
“How much do I owe you?”
Selene almost laughed.
Everything, she thought.
Instead, she waved toward the door. “Go before the streets flood.”
The woman hesitated, then pressed a kiss to her son’s damp forehead and hurried out into the storm.
The door closed.
The lock clicked.
The shop exhaled.
Selene stood in the wreckage of broken vials, spilled salt, and dying blue flame. Her throat burned. Her blood pattered softly onto the floorboards. Rain tapped through the cracked window, gathering on the sill in bright beads.
Across the street, beneath the gas lamp, the tall shadow stood again.
Selene went still.
Lightning flashed.
For half a breath, she saw him clearly: a man’s shape, broad-shouldered and motionless, his face hidden by rain and dark. Behind his reflection in the glass, another figure appeared—this one smiling, elegant as a knife.
Selene turned sharply.
The street was empty.
Her pulse quickened.
In the cracked window, a third silhouette stood too close to the door behind her. Massive. Silent.
Selene spun, blackthorn blade in hand.
No one.
Only the shelves. The counter. The blue candles guttering low.
But when she faced the window again, a fourth presence flickered in the glass behind her shoulder: dark eyes, calm and knowing, as if he had watched this moment happen before and already grieved what came after.
Selene’s breath caught.
The reflection vanished.
The shop returned to ordinary ruin.
Not hunted, some instinct whispered.
Chosen.
She hated the thought so much she reached for the nearest sugar cube simply to ground herself.
Her fingers closed around it in the bowl beside the till. White. Hard. Harmless.
Selene put it on her tongue.
Sugar had always been her weakness. As a child, she had stolen cubes from her mother’s tea tray and hidden under the stairs with Niall, both of them laughing as sweetness dissolved over their tongues. After Niall died, sugar became the only comfort that did not ask her to speak.
The cube softened in her mouth.
It crumbled.
Melted.
Nothing.
Selene frowned.
She moved it against her tongue, waiting for sweetness.
Nothing came.
No sugar. No faint mineral bite from the rain on her lips. No bitterness from smoke. No salt from the blood where she had bitten the inside of her cheek during the spell.
The cube dissolved into texture without meaning.
Soft.
Grainy.
Empty.
Selene gripped the counter.
“No.”
She reached for the tea she had abandoned hours ago and drank cold black liquid straight from the cup.
Nothing.
She grabbed a jar of preserved ginger, bit down hard enough to make her jaw ache.
Nothing.
No heat. No bite. No sweetness.
Panic moved through her slowly, with terrible precision, closing one finger at a time around her throat.
She cut the tip of her finger again and touched blood to her tongue.
Nothing.
Not even copper.
The shop tilted.
Selene braced herself against the counter, breathing through her nose, through the storm, through the sudden impossible absence inside her mouth.
Taste was gone.
Not dulled. Not weakened.
Gone.
A door inside her had closed, and the world looked exactly the same.
That was the worst of it.
Nothing had changed. The candles still burned. The rain still fell. The dead still whispered in the pipes. Somewhere in Bellgrave, a mother carried her living child home through flooded streets.
Only Selene knew what the spell had taken.
Only Selene stood in the center of her apothecary with sugar melting uselessly on her tongue and grief opening beneath her feet.
The blue candle beside the ledger flared high.
Every shadow in the shop leaned toward it.
A voice rose from the flame, thin and layered, like a chapel full of dead children speaking through smoke.
“One sense given. Four crowns hidden. Five losses open the gate.”
Selene could not move.
The candle flame bent toward her.
Then went out.
Darkness swallowed the shop.
For a long time, she stood there with one hand pressed to her mouth.
Near dawn, after the storm had softened into a gray, miserable drizzle, Selene began tearing through her grimoires.
She searched the locked shelves first: Ashwick family spellbooks, contraband saint-litanies, curse indexes bought from grave robbers, a half-burned anatomy of souls, three volumes on sensory hexes, two on divine parasites, one on self-consuming magic written by a witch who had removed her own eyes.
Nothing.
Every cure required knowing the source of the curse.
Every reversal demanded a name.
Every warning ended the same way.
Do not cast again.
Selene laughed once, sharp and humorless, and threw the book across the room.
It struck the wall beneath Niall’s portrait.
Her brother smiled down from the small oval frame, forever ten years old, forever missing one front tooth, forever alive in paint because she had failed to keep him alive in flesh.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know I’m stupid.”
The portrait did not answer.
That hurt too.
By sunrise, Selene’s hands were black with dust and ink. Her eyes burned. The shop smelled of wet ash and spilled herbs, though she still had smell then and did not yet understand how much she would miss even unpleasant things.
She found Niall’s old spellbook tucked behind a loose brick near the hearth.
Selene stared at it for several seconds before touching it.
She had hidden it there eleven years ago after his funeral, unable to burn it, unable to keep it where she could see it. The cover was soft brown leather, scratched at the corners, with Niall’s initials carved crookedly into the front.
N.A.
Her little brother had filled the first pages with childish attempts at charms. A spell for finding lost buttons. A spell for making beetles glow. A badly drawn fox with three tails. Selene turned the pages carefully, throat tight.
Near the back, two pages stuck together.
Not with age.
With magic.
Selene slid her bloodied thumb along the seam.
The false page peeled open.
Beneath it, written in black ink that had not faded at all, was a ritual circle she did not recognize.
At the top, in a hand far older and steadier than Niall’s childish scrawl, were the words:
TO SUMMON MINOR LUCK SPIRITS IN CASE OF MORTAL DECLINE.
Selene’s pulse quickened.
Luck spirits were nasty little things. Greedy, clever, bargain-bound. Dangerous if insulted, useful if trapped. Minor enough to control.
Possibly powerful enough to answer questions.
Possibly old enough to know what kind of curse stole senses one by one.
Her gaze dropped to the bottom of the page.
There, in Niall’s handwriting, were nine words.
The room went cold around her.
Do not call them by their little names.
Selene stopped breathing.
Below it, pressed so hard into the paper the ink had nearly torn through, Niall had written one final warning.
They are not little things.
Four Names in a Bowl of Salt
Selene Ashwick should have burned the page.
That was the first sensible thought she had after finding the ritual hidden in Niall’s spellbook.
The second was that sensible thoughts had never saved anyone.
She sat on the floor of her ruined apothecary until the gray light of dawn thinned behind the storm clouds, Niall’s book open across her knees and the taste of nothing still haunting her mouth.
Rain dripped through the cracked window and tapped steadily against the floorboards.
Somewhere beneath the washbasin, the dead whispered in the drain, but she ignored them.
Her brother’s warning waited at the bottom of the page.
Do not call them by their little names.
They are not little things.
Selene traced the words without touching the ink.
Niall had been ten when he died. Ten-year-old boys did not write warnings like that. They wrote jokes in margins. They drew foxes with too many tails. They misspelled “protection” three different ways on the same page and got offended when their older sisters laughed.
Whatever had written those words through Niall’s hand had known what Selene would someday need.
That frightened her.