1. Chapter 1 #3
“Just leave them,” I said, prying Thomas off the ground, brushing the dirt off his short white fur and sticking him in my pocket.
I couldn’t blame them for the way they were.
They were a product of a slowly decomposing ecosystem that survived on the success of hierarchy.
An ecosystem that bred this shared mentality in a tiny jar like antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The strongest, healthiest, youngest sat at the top.
Then there were the bottom vermin; the sick, the diseased, the half-breed witches, who didn’t even belong in a coven like the Crimson Weaver that had survived for so long by eliminating the weaker caste.
The coven had built a layer of a compacted strata that didn’t allow any blend which could compromise its integrity.
Ethel and I didn’t belong. And everyone knew it.
Ethel tugged on her licorice root, chewing with her mouth wide open as she mouthed all kinds of profanities at them. “Muck-sprouting harpies. They give me itchy fingers.”
“You haven’t cast a single hex in your lifetime.”
“Just waiting for the perfect bitch-witch to light on fire.” She spat a dollop of the chewed-up root at their feet as we passed by. “How you aren’t tempted boggles me.”
I glanced at them, trying to see what made Ethel so angry. But their faces were always blurred together as one. They were all copies of each other. Near perfect replicas of what a factory that demanded perfection had churned out. “I can’t seem to make myself feel anything for them. Good or bad.”
“I think you just don’t prefer debating with people who’d contribute nothing to science if you sawed through their cranium. Sometimes I forget you see us all like skin sacks of blood, bone, and organs.”
I’d spent all my life knowing people inside out. It was hard for me to see the outside first.
I bit down on the licorice stick until my teeth burned. “Do you think I’m weird?”
“You’re very fucking weird,” she said, cracking the licorice stick apart and shoving the entirety of one half in her mouth.
Ethel gave me a playful shove, but my knees buckled under my weight and I landed on the ground.
Her amusement wiped clean off her face as she straightened to her full height. Her chest rose steadily for a few moments, and then the storm started brewing, shooting thunder. She helped me up to my feet and shoved my sleeve down, and I looked away when her mouth pursed in a tight line.
My witch’s birthmark was almost entirely faded. The grey half moon looked like a mere shadow.
“That old crone Agnes is working you to your death!” she hissed, crushing the licorice and throwing it to the ground.
“You know it doesn’t work like that. The Holy Mother knows that, too.”
A curse wasn’t like a true human illness.
Rest did nothing for it. There was no cure, no remedy.
The older I got and the more chaos my body accumulated, the quicker it would kill me.
I’d already lived way past its course. Most barely made it past their teens, when chaos manifested at its highest. My malediction was a slowly ticking bomb that would detonate sooner rather than later.
She grabbed my chin. “Whatever she wants, tell her to go fuck herself. You do enough for her.”
I do it all for you, I wanted to say, but couldn’t.
The Holy Mother, or Agnes as very few were allowed to call her, stood by one of the tower’s arched glass windows overlooking the city of Meridian, the home of witches, and the one place in the vast lands of the Epiron continent where they would struggle to find willing humans to gather wood for pyres to burn us on.
The one place where humans and all other creatures alike had accepted a witch to rule over them.
Though Agnes did not give herself a title like many other rulers had given themselves, she carried equal responsibilities over Meridian as they did over their own kingdoms. Perhaps more considering both our neighbours, Faegard and Greyvale, the lands of the fae and the lycan, had often sought business with Crimson Weaver to protect themselves against the constant plague that ailed Epirea—humanity.
The human king who ruled Morngate, the city furthest north on the continent, had been eating away at any piece of land he could claim, cutting as many heads as he could stick his flags on despite our ancient agreements to remain in our own separate domains.
No amount of magic had ever managed to contain them, for humans had their own ancient ways of protecting themselves from it.
That and the fact that they procreated like critters and at the speed of a sneeze.
Draped in their cold iron shields, their cold iron walls and their cold iron weapons, they hunted us for fun—mostly.
Fae wings for their mantle pieces. Lycan bile for their poisons.
Vampires to torment in the name of their science which was always in the search for eternity.
And witches for their exclusive pleasure of burning one down.
They’d never accepted that it was nature that gave us chaos and our biology that made us capable of turning it into magic, not some devil they knew more than we did—though they did accuse us for selling our souls to him.
There was a slight scent of cloves and something cold and earthy in the air, fighting hard to linger against the myrrh incense lit by the window.
“Willow,” Agnes greeted, pointing to a green velvet armchair next to the crackling fireplace.
Its mantlepiece and the rest of the room were dressed in dried hawthorne and decorated with braided straw baubles for the Sunstead festivities which overlapped with the Bloodletting—the ceremony where a sacrifice was exsanguinated to refill the Blood Chalice.
“Apologies for drawing you out of work so suddenly.”
“Oh, no, I needed to get my legs moving,” I offered, pinching and fiddling with the edge of my worn-out skirts.
“Have I been called out of Meridian?” Occasionally, the sailors travelling up from the Far Isles and the Down Continents hired Agnes’s services to inspect their men before they were let onto land, to make sure none were under the enchantment of a siren.
I was often the first to be recruited in such pursuits when there was nothing for me to pull apart.
And I had to admit, there was no better sight than a dazzled man with scurvy and a mouthful of cavities attempting to rob a cobbler, holding a silk slipper to the cobbler’s throat.
No finer way of using chaos than to make a fool out of a man.
“Nothing of that matter,” she said, filling a cup of tea for me. “This is for something far more concerning.”
I blanched. Had someone finally noticed Ronnie’s presence? Was she going to ask me to perform an exorcism on him? Swallowing hard, I asked, “Concerning?”
“It’s about the Blood Pact.”
Tea spilled from the sides of my teacup, filling the saucer to the brim. “What…what does that have to do with me?”
The Blood Pact. An oath taken to preserve the sanctity of peace between the witches and the vampires; two species who’d been at terrible odds since the beginning of time.
Every year at Sunstead, Meridian fed a witch to Mortdale to honour this ancient agreement between our kingdoms. That witch would be wed to a vampire, and would honour their night code.
Blood be their kin. Blood be their God. Utter blasphemy considering we were like oil and water.
They despised our traditions, our ways of life, the ways we worked to preserve life, our craft, our sciences.
Just the same as we despised theirs. Their hunger was sacrilegious to us as our magic was sacrilegious to them, a thing of the devil—though this very particular devil of the Beyond had never stepped forward to claim either.
But the blood of witches ensured the strength of the vampire bloodlines.
Pure vampire children didn’t live long and were riddled with weakness and illnesses that claimed them young.
And besides humans, no other species was particularly fond of being fondled by a cold-blooded mammal, let alone carrying their very own parasite.
Though I was sure vampires were more than happy to procreate with humans alone, the more powerful the witch, the stronger the bloodline the vampire would sire.
So, the high and noble of Mortdale all lined up and joined a waitlist for the next witch-bride offered at Sunstead.
In return, a vampire was offered to us as a sacrifice, drained in the Bloodletting Ceremony to fill the Blood Chalice and give us another year free from its curse.
The debate on the willingness of the sacrifice was…
questionable. It wasn’t much of a secret that Mortdale was dumping one of their many death row prisoners on us—but no love was lost there, and we still got to survive another year without the threat of extinction.
When Lady Death had brought the Blood Chalice to Epiron from the Beyond, she’d entrusted it to the Holy Mother.
But many, many years ago now, Katya Lovegood, the Holy Mother at the time, had lost it to her lover—who’d turned out to be nothing more than a petty thief who’d tried to sell it to the highest bidder.
Which had angered Lady Death, and the Sunstead Curse had ensued.
Plagues had spread, turning chaos into poison, magic into disease, until Katya had found it and refilled the cup with blood—and that was how the yearly Bloodletting had begun being celebrated.