1. Chapter 1
Willow
The eyes in the walls were always bleeding.
The twisted red phantom pulled its mangled, skinless limbs out of the walls and dragged itself to the darkest corner of the old orangery, cultivating dread under the afternoon shadows.
A spectre was as violent as the nature of their death.
They preyed on anything whose fear they could consume.
But I was of no consequence to him. Between the two of us, he’d always thought of me as the pathetic one.
Both of us were cursed, but only one of us was going to die because of it.
His face, all raw bone and muscle and blood, turned to me when the charriere bone saw started composing macabre melodies against the corpse's cranium. The alloyed symphony of a metallic, ridged bow rubbing against the bony bridge oscillated like a severely off-key violin around the old orangery’s walls and solarised glass ceiling.
My sad one-woman orchestra with a spectator who had no taste in the art I practiced.
“If you’re going to be so grumpy about it, you can go back into the wall,” I murmured, wiggling my mouth to wipe the sweat settling against my moustache on the mask.
The ancient spectre let out an unsettling groan, his vertebra cracking as he turned his attention away from me. I’d named him Ronnie. He’d come as part of the job when I’d succeeded the previous occult pathologist working for the highest-ranking witch in our coven.
The air stank of aerosolised bone dust, musky and earthy, as I pulled my mask down to itch my nose on my shoulder and reached to angle the overhead heliostat to reflect some of the daylight directly onto the exposed cranium.
Just like any virus or bacteria or disease, magic left its traces.
We inhaled, absorbed, and consumed chaos—the raw material—to produce magic.
And chaos stored itself in what we called alchemical nodes, found in almost all anatomical structures of our bodies, both in gross and microscopic levels.
Chaos also killed, it harmed, it degenerated mass and muscle and organ, it could sometimes grow like cancer, or it could pass through us like a common cold.
Everyone was born with an alchemical system and the ability to contain chaos, but not all were equipped with the ability to produce magic.
The fae, witches, and sirens used chaos to make magic—and then there were others like lycans who used chaos to fuel the process of lycanthropy.
For vampires, on the other hand, chaos gave them heightened senses and their inhuman strength.
Dropping the wet saw on the table, I reached for the chisel and mallet to gently loosen the calvarium and expose the dura layer.
The metallic tray clanked again as I swapped for the scalpel to cut through the thick, fibrous membrane to peel it back.
Severing the cranial nerves and blood vessels at the base of the brain, I gently lifted the organ onto my work table, studying its surface.
Hexes left the most physical traces. They manifested like disease, took root like cancer, and killed almost as discreetly as one to an untrained eye.
Curses, on the other hand, required a degree of creativity that not any other death or injury did.
Curses were inflammation, almost auto-immune in nature.
They conjoined with our anatomy to make them seem like part of our biology.
Fae and siren magic was a tad bit trickier because they manipulated chaos in other structures of nature to compose magic.
Therefore, it was unpredictable and difficult to translate injuries into intent.
Sometimes, a simple enchantment could manifest itself into a curse.
And while creatures of the Beyond who managed to breach the barrier between life and death mostly infected and injured the mind, the human body had a way of mapping out the violence.
But what I had in front of me was no hex, not even an enchantment.
The huge sigil branded across the warlock's throat looked old, yet still angry and swollen. As if it had never healed properly.
Heretic, it read.
And then there were humans. Their magic was of a different kind.
They loved to cover their victims in sigils of their faith, marking them as sinners and punishing them as such in the name of their Gods.
They loved to involve their deities in their twisted pursuits.
Put their marks and their words on violent acts, and call it heresy.
The poison that was their fear—crippling their souls one prayer at a time.
But a mark was a mark. And though humans refused to accept magic, each little act they committed carried sin in it. And sin was chaos. A dark kind of chaos.
The brain knife sank into the tissue which was still too soft, making a coronal section.
A formalin bath would have hardened the tissue and made the section easier to cut through, but certain forms of chaos remained in our bodies after death for only so long before they would rot and decompose into another form—just like the rest of our matter would.
If only I could saw through my skull, pull apart my brain and shake it until it would tell me why—why I had started slowly dying so long ago now.
I jumped upright when the door shook with a heavy knock, the brain tissue nearly sliding off my worktable.
“Ronnie!” I hissed when the spectre crawled on all four contorted limbs in the direction of the intruder.
The thing with being able to see the dead whilst working for the highest-ranking witch in the realm was the fact that no one could know unless I sought exile in some far-away temple to guard tombs and whatnot.
There were no witches with such a sight.
Whatever lay beyond the veil was apparently none of anyone’s business, especially not a witch’s.
Though I was pretty sure we shared the same bureau of business considering our ties to the Lady of Death were just as tight.
If anyone came to find out Ronnie was here, they were going to come and exorcise him.
The Holy Mother had a strict policy on ghost residency in her covenstead.
Ghosts were omens—bad ones. They messed up transmutations and interfered with divinations.
Luckily, no one had ever made it past those doors without dying, so his existence and my secret still remained perfectly concealed.
Probably because of the curse. My curse.
Well, or so they thought. The rumour had spread far and wide after Ronnie had started startling everyone to death at the doorstep of the old orangery. Since no one knew about him, the blame had of course shifted to the witch carrying a malediction like the plague.
Ethel shoved the door open with a bang, crossing her arms as she leaned against the frame.
She stood there, all wild dark curly hair and sunburnt olive skin, sand still sticking to her skirts.
“There’s my chuckaboo.” She swallowed down what I knew was a gag.
“Yum. Brain for dinner, my grotesque paramour?”
Though we’d never really braided each other’s hair or anything like that, I was fairly sure she was my best friend. Twenty-six years of close proximity apparently did that to people.
I dropped the coronal sections into formalin baths and discarded my gloves in soapy water. “When did you come back?”
Ethel was a midwife. She’d travelled over every corner of Meridian, not only aiding witches and humans in their births, but offering guidance and help.
Considering her salty, mildly wet and sandy state, she’d probably spent a few hours sleeping at the beach, under the sun; the only thing she loved doing more than telling women to push.
Ethel had always tried her best to stay as far away as she could from our coven.
But there was only one thing that always brought her back, and I’d never stopped feeling guilty about it.
She shook her booted foot, sprinkling sand all over the entrance of my work room.
“An hour ago. Apparently the Holy Mother wants to see you. She’d sent this tiny shivering witch to come get you.
Found her by the hall entrance, considering her chances if she just ran as far as her feet could get her before the grey witch collected her eyes or something.
Or whatever they are saying about you these days. ”
I peeped at the clock hung on the corner between rows of spines as I scrubbed my hands under the scalding water.
At this hour? It was nearly sunset on the most important day of the year and she was overseeing the ceremony that guaranteed the Blood Chalice—an ancient relic bestowed upon my kind by Lady Death to maintain the veil between life and death—didn’t unleash a curse from the Hells of the Beyond that could kill us all by tonight.
“Isn’t she supposed to be at the Bloodletting? ”
“We’re all supposed to be at the Bloodletting. Didn't you see the cloak I left on your bed?”
“You went into my room?” Which also was in the uninhabitable side of the coven, due to a fire which claimed the lives of nearly fifty witches many years back.
A strategic placement of the cursed witch who no one wanted to have within their vicinity.
Which consequently had stranded me with the ghosts of fifty witches who refused to face the gates of the Beyond and had taken to tormenting me since the age of seven.
“Are you insane? I threw it from the door.” She levelled a glare on me. “Of course I went into your room, you hag. I’m untouchable by your so-called curse.”
I scrubbed every inch of my hands. “If someone saw you, they will be going around telling everyone you’re possessed.”
“They already think you’ve sawed through my brain and have it stored in a cabinet somewhere.”
“Maybe it’s true and you’ll never know.”
She wiggled her brows at me. “Maybe. Just don’t touch it inappropriately. Or snog it.”
“Too late.”
“Tongue involved?”
“Fingers, too.”