The Witch of Fading Echoes A Fading Witch. Four Fallen Gods. One Deadly Bargain. #5
For a second, something pale pressed against the glass. A hand. Too small. A child’s hand, fingers spread in the rain.
Then it slid away.
The last words in the jars began whispering all at once.
Run.
Hide.
Don’t open.
Saints preserve—
Blood—
Selene’s heart slammed against her ribs.
Lucien’s head tilted, listening. “That would be our cue.”
“You are not leaving,” Selene snapped.
Ronan stepped closer to the circle’s edge. “Break the salt.”
“No.”
“Selene.”
Her name in his mouth struck too deep, too familiar, as if he had been saying it in dreams she could not remember.
She hated that most of all.
“No,” she repeated. “Not until I know why Niall had that ritual.”
Elias went very still.
The room changed.
Even Lucien’s careless expression sharpened.
Ronan said, “Who is Niall?”
“My brother.”
“How old?”
“When he died? Ten.”
Dorian’s jaw flexed.
Elias looked at the spellbook on the floor. “He wrote the warning.”
Selene’s throat tightened. “You knew him?”
“No.” Elias’s gaze lifted to hers, dark with something too much like grief. “But something knew him.”
That was not an answer.
It was a wound with words around it.
Selene bent, grabbed a pinch of grave salt from the tray, and flung it toward the circle. The grains struck the air and sparked against an invisible wall around Ronan.
A test.
The circle still held him.
Barely.
But Lucien and Dorian had already crossed it. Elias had never been inside it.
The magic was wrong.
The ritual was wrong.
Everything was wrong.
“I am done being answered in riddles,” Selene said.
She lifted her bleeding thumb to the air and drew a quick sigil: hook, lock, thorn, command.
A small binding charm.
Nothing grand. Nothing dangerous. A child’s knot compared to the spell that saved the boy downstairs.
Just enough to keep the four men from vanishing before she had the truth.
Ronan’s eyes flashed. “Do not.”
Too late.
Selene closed her fist.
“Stay.”
The charm snapped shut.
For one heartbeat, the attic obeyed.
Black thread leapt from the floor, rising like living veins around Ronan, Lucien, Dorian, and Elias. The grave salt flared white. The stolen coins spun in place. Every jar of captured last words screamed without sound.
Power punched through Selene.
Not much.
Not like the echo-spell.
Only a thread of magic.
Only a tiny command.
Only one more.
The cost struck instantly.
The world flattened.
Selene staggered.
At first, she did not understand what had changed.
The attic still stood around her. The blue candle still burned. The men were still there, bound in black-thread light. Rain still struck the roof. Her hand still bled.
Then she inhaled.
Nothing.
No burnt rosemary.
No candle smoke.
No old dust.
No wet wood.
No blood.
No rain.
No iron-smoke-winter from Ronan.
No sweet spice from Lucien.
No forge-heat and leather from Dorian.
No ink and night air from Elias.
The attic became empty.
Not silent. Not dark.
Empty.
Selene took another breath, sharper this time.
Nothing.
Panic opened beneath her feet.
“No,” she whispered.
The knife slipped from her fingers and hit the floor.
Her knees buckled.
The black-thread charm dissolved.
Elias reached her first.
She did not see him move. One moment he stood near the trunk, the next his arm was around her, catching her before she struck the floorboards. He lowered her carefully, one hand cradling the back of her head, two fingers pressing against the pulse in her throat.
She could feel that still.
Thank the dead, she could feel that still.
His touch was cool and steady.
Ronan broke the salt circle without effort. Grave salt scattered beneath his boot. Lucien came off the shelf with all the grace gone from his face. Dorian turned toward the window, shoulders going rigid.
Elias’s eyes were on Selene.
Then his expression changed.
Not fear.
Worse.
Confirmation.
“She has already lost two,” he said.
The words seemed to strike the others physically.
Ronan’s face hardened into something brutal. Lucien stopped smiling completely. Dorian’s hand moved to a blade Selene had not noticed before, dark metal catching the blue candlelight.
Selene shoved at Elias weakly. “Let go.”
He did, at once, though he stayed close enough to catch her again.
That obedience almost undid her.
Rain hammered the roof.
Then came the scratching.
Slow at first.
Delicate.
One nail dragging down the attic window.
Selene turned her head.
The covered curtains breathed inward.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Dorian placed himself between her and the glass.
Ronan stepped behind Selene, not touching her, but close enough that his shadow fell over her like a wall.
Lucien looked toward the window, and for the first time, there was no flirtation in him at all.
The scratching stopped.
Outside, in the storm, childlike voices began to sing.
Soft.
Sweet.
Horribly near.
“Witch of fading echoes,” they sang, “give us back our gods.”
The blue candle went out.
In the sudden dark, something smiled against the glass.
The Library That Remembers Skin
The thing at the attic window smiled with too many teeth.
Selene saw it for only a heartbeat before Ronan Blackthorne moved.
One moment he stood behind her, all controlled violence and shadow. The next, he was between her and the glass, his body blocking the sight of the pale face pressed against the rain-streaked pane. The window rattled hard enough to crack the frame.
Outside, the childlike voices sang again.
“Witch of fading echoes, give us back our gods.”
Lucien Foxglove looked up at the ceiling as dust sifted down from the beams. “I hate when choirs travel.”
Dorian Voss drew a blade from nowhere. It was black, wide, and ugly, less like a gentleman’s weapon than a shard torn from the heart of a battlefield.
Elias Nocturne crouched beside Selene, his fingers still near her pulse but no longer touching. “Can you stand?”
“Yes.”
It was a lie.
She tried anyway.
Her knees almost gave out. The absence of smell had made the room feel unreal, like a painting of a place she remembered.
No rosemary. No candle smoke. No rain-soaked wood.
No blood. The men stood close enough that she knew their scents should have filled the attic, warm and strange and alive, but there was nothing.
Just air moving in and out of her lungs, empty of warning.
Ronan glanced back once. “Dorian.”
Dorian kicked the attic trunk aside as if it weighed nothing. Beneath it, floorboards groaned open, revealing a narrow stairwell descending into darkness.
Selene stared. “That was not there.”
“It was,” Elias said. “Not for you.”
“I own this building.”
Lucien smiled without looking away from the window. “Ownership is a charming mortal superstition.”
The glass bowed inward.
A small wet hand slipped through the crack.
Its fingers were gray, soft, and too long.
Dorian cut them off.
No blood spilled. The fingers dropped to the floorboards and dissolved into white ash. Outside, the singing stopped.
Then something struck the window hard enough to blow the shutters open.
Rain exploded into the attic.
Ronan caught Selene around the waist and lifted her off her feet.
She hated the small sound that escaped her.
“Put me down.”
“No.”
“I can walk.”
“You can barely lie convincingly.”
His arm was iron across her middle, his coat cold from rain that had not touched him. He carried her toward the hidden stairwell with humiliating ease.
Selene shoved at his shoulder. “I am not cargo.”
“No,” Ronan said, descending into the dark. “You are a target.”
Lucien followed, backwards, one hand raised lazily toward the attic. A lock of green fire snapped from his fingers and sealed the trapdoor above them just as something shrieked and slammed against it.
The stairwell plunged beneath the apothecary, beneath the cellar, beneath the pipes where the dead whispered. The walls were old brick at first, sweating rainwater and roots. Then stone. Then something black and polished that reflected their shadows without reflecting their faces.
Ronan set Selene down only when the passage widened.
She stepped away from him immediately.
He let her.
That annoyed her more than being held had.
The passage stretched ahead, lit by blue veins of mineral light pulsing through the stone. Selene pressed a hand to the wall to steady herself. She could feel the cold. At least touch remained. At least the world still reached her through skin.
For now.
Elias walked beside her, close but not crowding. “The Choir will search your shop first. We have a little time.”
“For what?”
“To find out how far the curse has rooted.”
“I already know how far.” Her voice came sharper than she intended. “I lost taste and smell. I am not confused about the problem.”
“No,” Elias said quietly. “You are confused about the cause.”
Selene looked at him.
His eyes were almost black in the blue mineral light.
Gentle, if anything about a fallen god could be called gentle.
That gentleness made her wary. Ronan’s severity she understood.
Lucien’s flirtation she could distrust on instinct.
Dorian’s silence was a wall. Elias was worse.
Elias looked at her as if he could see the wound beneath every word she used to cover it.
“I do not like being studied,” she said.
“I know.”
“You do not know me.”
“No,” he said. “But I know fear when it arranges itself into pride.”
Lucien made a soft sound ahead of them. “Careful, Nocturne. That sounded dangerously like honesty.”
Dorian said, “Keep moving.”
The tunnel ended at a pair of doors taller than any building had a right to hide beneath Bellgrave. They were carved from black marble veined with white, and across them were saints with no eyes, no tongues, and no hands. Between their stone bodies, words had been cut deep into the arch.
WHAT IS FORBIDDEN IS NOT DEAD.
Selene swallowed. “Where are we?”
Ronan stepped close behind her. Not touching. Near enough that his coat brushed the back of her sleeve when she breathed.
“The Cursed Library of Saint Orison.”
Selene turned on him. “You brought me to a prison archive?”