2. Freddie
Freddie
Well, shit. So much for that apprenticeship.
“How?” The word scrapes out of my throat before my brain can even process it. “That—that doesn’t make any sense, Stells. I literally just saw her at the apothecary forty-eight hours ago.”
My mind scrambles to line up the Sabine Blackwell I saw two days ago—grumpy, frightening, sharp as a rusted tack—with the idea of her just vanishing.
She’s an elder witch, for God’s sake. One of the most powerful women in Amberhollow and a direct descendant of the original coven of witches who put up the boundary between our town and the outside world in the first place.
Sabine is intimidation personified, and hovering somewhere around a hundred years old.
She spends her mornings shouting at young warlocks for mishandling dried elderberry.
How the hell does a woman like that vanish into thin air in forty-eight hours?
Delphi doesn’t say a word. She just stands there beside the pine bedframe, the color completely drained from her face, staring at the floorboards as if they’re about to cave in under her feet.
Beside the armchair, Jett starts pacing.
It’s not his usual lazy, slow-motion prowl, either.
He’s walking a rigid line back and forth across the bare wood floor, his ears flattened and his black tail twitching in high-strung, erratic jerks.
It’s his nervous tic. I’ve lived with that cat long enough to know that whenever Jett starts pacing, the magic in the air has curdled into something sour.
Stella shakes her head hard, flicks of rainwater flying off her wet ringlets and spraying across the room. She’s shivering so hard her teeth are visibly clicking together. She pushes past me and heads straight for the fireplace, holding her trembling fingers out toward the dying embers.
“How do you know, Stella?” Delphi finally manages to ask. She grips the top of the bedpost just to steady herself. “Who told you?”
“Nisrene,” Stella says, her voice muffling as she rubs a soaked sleeve across her wet nose.
Nisrene is her boss down at the Amberhollow Herald, a woman who spends twenty hours a day fueled by nothing except black coffee and local gossip.
“Her sister went by Sabine’s cottage to drop off her weekly order of tallow candles this morning.
The front door was wide open, Freddie. Her tea was still sitting on the kitchen table, stone-cold and half-full.
Her reading glasses were sitting right there on the arm of her chair.
You know she never goes anywhere without her glasses. ”
Above my neck, a tiny, frantic figure buzzes against my skin. Twyla has burrowed deep into the curls at the nape of my neck, hiding her face, her legs shivering against my skin.
“Hey,” I whisper softly, lifting my index finger to gently stroke the top of her yellow hair and her tiny wildflower crown. “Breathe, Twy.”
She relaxes a fraction of a millimeter, but her tiny wings keep giving skittish twitches against my scalp.
Delphi presses the heel of her hand hard against her forehead, closing her eyes against whatever terrifying thought is racing through her head. “That’s four,” she whispers, sounding entirely drained. “Four people in six months. It doesn’t make any damn sense.”
“None of it does,” Stella agrees, turning around so her wet back can catch the heat of the fire.
“That’s what Nisrene was losing her mind over before I left the office.
There’s no sign of a break-in. No blood, no struggle, no lingering traces of offensive magic.
They’re just…gone. Their homes and shops are left completely intact.
It’s like they walked out to check the mail and slipped off the face of the earth. ”
A cold, heavy rock settles right in the pit of my stomach.
Four people.
First it was Corinne, then Evren. Two young magicals I’d done my formal witch training with back when we were teenagers.
I hadn’t been particularly close with either of them—Corinne was extremely competitive and Evren was a quiet guy—but I was still spooked when I’d learned they’d gone missing.
Then there was Bram, a three-foot-tall, notoriously cranky hobgoblin who’d run the local clockwork repair shop on Main Street for as long as anyone could remember.
When he vanished three weeks ago—leaving a half-assembled pocket watch sitting on his workbench next to a barely-touched tin of ginger snaps—it sent a deep, uncomfortable tremor through the whole town.
Nobody has ever disappeared from Amberhollow.
We’re entirely locked in by the Veil. You don’t just pack up a suitcase, take a spontaneous road trip, or move away to the big city on a whim. There is nowhere else to go. You’re either here, or you’re nowhere.
Or so we thought.
“Why haven’t you and the other elder witches put up more protective wards?” I ask, turning toward Delphi. “Or lined the perimeter with warding stones? If people are vanishing, why isn’t the council locking down the border?”
Delphi rubs a hand down her face. “We’ve tried, Freddie. We’ve spent the last six months trying to layer new wards over the wood line. But nothing holds. The Veil is weakening.”
Jett stops dead in his tracks. “Weakening?” he repeats. “How?”
“At first it was just tiny tears,” Delphi says quietly, sounding entirely drained.
“Minor fraying that happens every few decades. The elders and I could go out to the boundary, stitch a few containment runes into the ley lines, and it would settle back down into a solid wall. Easy. But lately…it’s like trying to patch a ripped sail in a storm.
Every time we fix one seam, three more pull apart. ”
Her tired eyes lock directly onto mine. “Haven’t you felt it, Winifred? With your own magic?”
I knit my brows together, a cold knot of unease twisting in my chest. I mentally run back through the last few months in my head.
Truthfully, my magic has always been a finicky, temperamental thing, but when I really stop to think about it…
stuff has been off. Brainless, small-scale charms that usually take half a second have felt like dragging a bowling ball through wet sand.
My morning fire-starter charm took three tries yesterday before the kindling caught.
The simple preservation knots I weave into the record store’s vintage album sleeves have been leaving me completely wiped out by lunchtime.
My resonance, on the other hand, has stayed entirely untouched. Still as loud and inconveniently uninvited as ever.
“I mean…” I rub the back of my neck, where Twyla is still huddled quietly under my curls.
“I guess my basic charms have taken way more energy out of me lately. And my prep work at the shop is taking twice as long to get right. But I just thought I was burned out. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the Veil dying or weakening or whatever. ”
“It has everything to do with it,” Stella says, stepping away from the fireplace.
She’s wringing out the soggy hem of her knitted cardigan.
“The Veil holds all the residual ambient magic inside the valley so we can tap into it without frying our own nervous systems. If the Veil loses its seal, the ambient magic leaks out—and our personal reserves have to work twice as hard to fill the gap.”
Classic Stella. Even soaking wet head to toe, she delivers facts like she’s reading them straight from an encyclopedia.
She was always like that—the straight-A overachiever who rarely missed a single morning lecture during our witch training, whose spellbooks were meticulously color-coded with sticky tabs.
It’s that alarmingly brilliant, beautiful brain that got her hired as the senior investigative reporter at the Amberhollow Herald before she even turned twenty-two.
And as much as her boss, Nisrene, loves to gossip over cinnamon rolls down at the bakery, Nisrene is a bloodhound when it comes to source material.
She won’t let a single word hit the printing press unless she’s personally verified it three times over.
If Nisrene cleared the news that Sabine Blackwell is gone, then it isn’t just town rumor or exaggerated panic.
It’s real. Sabine is gone.
I cross my arms tightly over my chest, my heel tapping a restless beat against the floorboards.
“Okay. Okay,” I say, throwing my hands up in a let’s move this along gesture. “So…what the hell are we supposed to do?”
I hate this. I hate standing around in a circle while everything falls apart around us.
I am physically incapable of stewing. Give me a panic-inducing problem and my brain immediately demands a five-step action plan, even if it’s a terrible one.
Whenever I feel stuck or overwhelmed, I have a delightfully bad habit of letting my impulsive pigeon brain take the wheel.
It’s the exact same flaw that led to me getting my nipples pierced on a dare in a questionable parlor, and the time I impulse-bought a broken 1978 moped off a troll downtown that currently sits in my hallway serving as an expensive laundry rack.
I need to be moving. I need a job to do.
“Right now? We dig,” Stella says in her reporter voice.
“Nisrene and I are cross-referencing the initial reports from Bram’s, Corrine and Evren’s disappearances to see if there’s a pattern we missed.
Mayor Brightfang and the council are going to have to call another emergency town meeting by tomorrow morning anyway. ”
“And the elder witches will have to hold a private assembly of our own tonight,” Delphi adds. Her eyes soften as she takes in Stella’s shivering frame. Even in the middle of a town crisis, Delphi’s compulsive hosting instincts kick right in.
“Good lord, Stella, you’re going to catch your death in all those wet clothes,” Delphi mutters, already gesturing toward the hallway. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll pull clean clothes out of the dryer and get you a fleece blanket.”