1. Chapter 1 #2
“Ugh. You know I love fingers—” She jumped back, yelping when I sprinkled water on her face. “Was that corpse juice?” She licked her lips and smacked them together. “Tastes fruity.”
Ethel and I were both abandoned as infants on the steps of the orphanage where we’d lived for seven years—only a few weeks apart in age.
When we’d outgrown sharing a bassinet, the matrons had moved us into what had been a larder, far away from the rest of the children.
And we’d shared that tiny, enclosed space that had barely fit our mattress for all the rest of those seven years.
After the Holy Mother had picked us up from the orphanage and made us pledge to the Crimson Weaver Coven, we’d been separated, pulled into different cadres.
But still, every night, she’d somehow found her way to my room, and had curled up by my side like we’d always done.
“Ronnie!” I shouted when the creature lurched at Ethel, who’d taken another step past the doorway.
She blinked slowly at me, entirely unaware of the spectre who was looking to frighten the living daylights out of her.
“Eh-thuhl. Come on, my darling hag, we’ve known each other for twenty-six years now.
You once held my hand after I ate a red wartberry cake and nearly shat my guts out.
” She extended her hands in my direction and wiggled her fingers.
“Beautiful times. We should do that again.”
Pretty sure I’d held her hand through worse things.
Ethel had a tendency to tiptoe on the precipices of what stood between life and the Beyond.
She’d once entered us in a poison testing competition for some wealthy merchant who was dabbling in trades for—you guessed it—poison.
Of course, she’d won. But I was pretty sure she was now missing at least a few parts of her stomach and intestines.
“I’ve told you Ronnie doesn’t like people coming in here.”
Her eyes narrowed on me as I moved about my work room, tidying the mess I’d made. “When are you going to tell the Holy Mother and the rest of our coven that your curse isn't killing anyone, your ghost friend is?”
I threw a white cotton sheet over the warlock’s corpse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You can’t keep taking the fall for Ronnie’s mistakes. They’ve nearly killed you for it.”
Nearly being the keyword. They could only torment me for as long as I was the Holy Mother’s closest advisor.
And I knew they enjoyed tormenting me more than killing me.
I’d been their entertainment for nineteen years.
The dart board for every joke, every prank, every pointing finger.
They loved to laugh at me more than they’d love to see me dead.
I carried the tray of instruments to the sink. “They won’t. It’s more fun if they just watch what this curse does to me. I’m safe.”
She glared even harder, her jaw set tight. “What if I tell her?”
“Please,” I whispered, wrestling the stained white apron and hat off my body.
“They will exorcise him, you know it. Whoever he is waiting for, they will come. I know they will.” Ronnie, despite his unsightly appearance, was a big romantic fleshy guimauve who had only wanted one thing.
To meet his old lover one last time before passing through the gates of the Beyond.
I’d found their letters stuck to the crevices of the tile walls back when they’d fitted the orangery into a post-mortem room.
According to what I'd pieced together, they’d snuck around behind everyone’s backs, meeting here in secret.
Then he’d gone and died in the coven fire. And she’d never come back for him.
“He’s just a ghost.”
“He’s kind.”
Her anger softened. “He kills people.”
“What do you think those people came down here to do? Chat with me? Braid my hair? I’m lacking in the department of sympathy.”
I grabbed my grey cloak and threw it over my shoulders to cover some of the muck that still clung to my skirts.
There was no point stopping in front of a mirror.
I knew a crow could find a perfect nest in my greying hair and my eye bags had fully fermented into two puffy skin bags after nearly thirty-eight hours of no sleep.
I stopped by the exit, turning to him one last time. Ronnie had gone back to sit at his corner to watch the shadows on the walls twisting with each ebb wind against the high tree branches surrounding the orangery. With each flicker, I could see him shift closer, hopeful.
Oh, Ronnie.
Ethel handed me a licorice root as we stepped into the gardens of the atrium, already suffering from this summer heat. “You look more tired than usual.”
“Thanks. You look wonderful, too.” I raised a brow at her. “Did you steal these?
“Of course, I’m not paying a penny for uncooked licorice.” Wiggling her brows at me, she pressed her nose to my cheek, invading all of my private space. “I bet your ankles still look phenomenal,” she said, shoving her hands under my skirts.
I easily put her in a headlock since she was a few inches shorter than me. “Pervert!”
“Just let me have a look, you virginal hag. I won’t bite ‘em.”
She jumped back when a small white rodent with two piercing red eyes launched at her face, clawing at her skin.
“Only I eat her corpse.” My familiar’s hoarse voice rattled as he shapeshifted from his earthly form into a puddle of thick black tar. “We have a bargain.”
The ancient fiend was made of one thing; his insatiable appetite.
Through lifetimes, witches and fiends had bonded to each other with deals and bargains.
They couldn’t harm or feed on humans or any other creature of this earthly realm unless a witch offered it to them.
And they granted a witch protection from the creatures of the Beyond, offered their knowledge on matters of the Beyond, and of course, company.
In exchange for such perks, he’d asked me to offer him my corpse.
It had sounded like a legitimate deal at the time.
Except, Ethel and I had been drinking some cheap spirit we’d bargained a whole month’s salary for and gotten high on liberty caps we’d found while foraging all day back when we’d been only seventeen.
And I faintly remember him being a dog, not a rat. Alas, here we were.
She still sputtered, wiping her face in disgust. “What sewer did you spawn out of now?”
“Your bedroom,” Thomas gravely hissed. “You smell of children. It makes me hungry. Did you not bring back any?”
Thomas liked children. But not in a creepy way. He just liked to eat them.
When he had discovered what a midwife was, he’d been determined in becoming one himself.
He’d even offered to ditch our deal, and make another deal with her—until Ethel had nearly put him on a sacrificial altar.
The word ‘nearly’ was used loosely because she had physically put him on the sacrificial altar, but she’d not managed to think in time who she wanted to sacrifice him to and what for before he’d made his escape.
Her relationship with our deities was severely malnourished through the many years she’d spent resenting and questioning them, and she didn’t have many earthly requests.
Ethel lived humbly and had always been content with her life as long as she spent every free second of the day basking in the sun, diving in the sea, and helping little humans succeed in coming into this life.
My rat had survived her through pure comic chance.
A few passing witches shook their heads at us as we stepped into the main covenstead hall, making sure to maintain their judgement from at least seven feet away from me. They were all in their black cloaks and white belts embroidered in poppies, heading to the Bloodletting.
“They say she sleeps in a morgue drawer like a corpse,” some young witch whose face I couldn't see under the black hood whispered, giggling with her friends. “Look at the state of her; the rumours must be true.”
I typically never left the old orangery when there was still daylight above, so they must be surprised at my state.
To the rest of my coven, I was only a dim cautionary tale.
Most avoided crossing paths with me, afraid they’d drag my bad luck with them.
Others crossed my path on purpose to torment me—to poke bad luck in the gut until I was sick on my knees, throat burning, scarred and bleeding as they left me to retch on the side of the gardens.
It was more convenient for them to reinvent me rather than know me.
And they did it so well. They could have easily convinced me that I was just a ghoul haunting everything in sight.
But they loved to remind me of my fragile mortal state.
They loved to prod at my mortality just to see how much worse could I bear.
Maria, one of the head witches, passed by us, raking a long look over Ethel, who also unfortunately had a reputation of her own due to her violent sense of humour and the determination to not conform to any standard upheld by the coven. “Someone telephone the circus, they’ve lost all their freaks.”
“You have to come up with something new, Maria,” Ethel called as loud as she could. “We’ve already telephoned all the circuses in the area. No freaks were missing. But they said they’d misplaced a bitch somewhere.”
A wave of gasps choired around us.