The Vatra Witch (The Lost Souls of Eraphon #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Seraphina

All she saw were their small bodies burning.

Children, their faces dirty, their screams joyfully shrill under the hot sun, were burning one moment, and normal the next. Ablaze in black flame while kicking up dust in plumes. Then laughing while they dueled each other with stalks of straw for the honorary rank of Mesar.

It wanted them to burn.

Seraphina Wildrick leaned against the corner of the weathered notice board in the middle of Jedan Quarter. The graying wood groaned beside her as she pressed her thumbnail so hard into the center of her palm that she shook.

The elixirs were barely working anymore.

Now the only thing to suppress the abomination within her was pressure points or pain.

And Sera would rather let Jedan Quarter burn—with its dilapidated buildings and less-than-level roofs—than look like an idiot with her thumb pressed between her eyes in front of a mass of children on their way to Darine Hall.

So pain it was, and she sank her nail deeper.

“Excuse me, Keeper Wildrick?” A young witch tugged on her cloak. “Mama told me to give you this.”

The girl held up a white rose.

Sera turned to face her. “I don’t know who your mother is.” The girl’s warm brown skin was washed in freckles, not so unlike her own when she was a witchling.

“She said you might say that. Anyway, she told me to give you this and to say thank you.”

A flash, and the girl was alight. Her mouth open in a scream, her hair curling in flame.

Sera blinked away the image.

“Your mother has nothing to thank me for.” Sera lowered herself to her haunches and broke off the thorns and half the stem. She pushed the rose behind the young witch’s ear. “You keep it. Go on, you’ll be late.”

The witchling beamed at her and hurried to catch up to her classmates. Such a young little thing. Her whole world was in front of her, if she was lucky enough.

Sera stood and observed the new bartering posters crowding the notice board. So many. There were so many who were in need, and what did the Council do?

Nothing.

Darkness surged under her palms, begging her to devour the poorly constructed buildings. The papery silber bark they used in the slums would all go up in a matter of seconds. A voice deep in Sera’s mind asked her, Why not let them burn?

The upper classes avoided this part of the white city as if it were a disease.

Jedan class wasn’t afflicted. They were born with shallow wells.

Sera ripped one of the pleas from the board, folded it, and shoved it deep into the pocket of her navy cloak. Later this evening, she’d supply this family with whatever they needed.

It’d be her penance for envisioning their children burning.

“Hello, beautiful,” Dominick called out, jogging toward her. His floor-length gray oracle robes fluttered behind him. The reddened bags under his eyes against pale skin made them twice as blue, and his light blond hair was tousled in a way only rolling in a bed could achieve.

“I hope your tryst was fun. Galene’s going to shrink me and lock me in one of her glass cabinets if I’m late again.” Sera charged toward the center of the Citadel.

Dominick smiled, quickening his gait to match hers. “And you’ll look so adorable as a figurine.”

“Easy for you to say.” She sank into the weight of his arm around her shoulders, grateful that the rattling inside her was finally beginning to calm.

“Moons, you’ve been so cranky lately. When was the last time you got laid?” he asked, shaking the Jedan dust from his hem. “Not counting that magical appendage you keep under your mattress, that is.”

She smirked. “That’s none of your business.”

“I’m wounded. It’s absolutely my business. Otherwise, what’s the point of being best friends? Didn’t you go on a date two nights ago?”

“I canceled it.”

They crossed the quarter line and stepped from dirt onto the cobblestones of Dobro Quarter.

The buildings went from shacks to stone constructions with perlin beams and thatched roofs, and the sweet aroma of cinnamon and sugar from the bakeries and shops at the ground level perfumed the air.

Sera’s stomach growled. She’d forgotten to eat… again.

“Why?” Dominick asked.

Slipping out from under his arm, she rubbed the damp from her brow and picked up the pace toward Darine Hall. “Because after the tenth time he brought up his mother on the last date, I decided it was never going to work.”

Dominick opened his mouth, then closed it again and shrugged. “Can’t really fight with that logic.”

She raised her dark brow at him in surprise. She’d expected he would shove another one of his friends in her path. Someone broody, maybe, or like the last few—pretty to look at, but dumber than the gulls. Regardless, Dominick wasn’t the kind to give up.

“Oh”—he chuckled—“I have to tell you about Sam last night…”

They turned toward Citadel proper, and Sera stopped short.

A Congratulations, novices banner, painted in perfect looping script, swayed lazily in the breeze above them.

Decorative bows and ribbons correlating to the colors of the robes the different occupations wore bedecked each of the posts and balconies toward Darine Hall.

Joyous coven members kissed their lead novices goodbye and wished them luck on their trial day.

She ignored Dominick’s prattling about his rambunctious evening, which involved positions she hadn’t even considered, and stared up at the banners.

The day had finally come, and as much as she wanted to be happy for her baby sister, Sera had been dreading it.

“Are you listening to me? I said that he screeched like a gull.”

“Sorry, Dom.”

Dominick followed her gaze and huffed. “It’s been almost four years. You’re still not over it?”

“No.”

Each banner they passed under squeezed a little more life from her lungs. Every jovial remark and colorful bow or wreath made her sweat. It didn’t help that she and Dominick had discussed this dozens of times.

“You made Dobro, what does it matter now?”

“It matters,” she said, pulling her cloak tight around her shoulders like a shield, and followed the crowd of coven members toward Darine Hall. All while Dominick shuffled behind.

If it were any other day, she’d longingly admire the stunning white buildings with stone arches at every entrance. She’d appreciate the massive domes with their golden-dipped spires piercing the sky.

She’d think to herself about the time she told her little sister Nora that the reason they needed the spikes was that without them, monstrous birds would claim the tops of their buildings and rain shit around them.

But this was not the day.

Sera crossed the white marble entrance of Darine Hall and stepped into the vast courtyard.

The blue wisteria, heavy with blooms, wove its vines around the third-level balcony spindles.

The florals draped the walls, showering the lead novices congregating in the gardens below with stray petals, making the air sickeningly sweet.

So many white robes.

The look of them all sent a chill up her spine. Sera ran her fingernails back and forth across her palm and surveilled the clusters of novices, seeking her sister, when Dominick finally caught up. “Do you see Nora?”

He extended to the tips of his toes. “I don’t think she’s here yet.”

Sera frowned. Her sister should have already arrived. It was unlike her to be late to anything. “I’ll try and catch her before they line up. Meet me in the Menage later?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Dominick said, then waved to a handsome warlock across the courtyard—his latest obsession. Sera didn’t anticipate it lasting long.

They never did.

Soon, most likely in the next week or two, Dominick would make the excuse that he was bored. She knew, deep down, that anytime someone got a little too close, a little too comfortable, Dominick would run in the other direction.

She shook her head.

Moons, she was miserable. Not that Sera would ever admit it, but maybe he was right. Maybe she did need to get laid. Shadow knew she needed a good distraction—a good distraction and a decent night’s sleep.

Her legs burned with each step up to the designated Dobro floor. The middle level of Darine Hall wasn’t as opulent as the Daedeth floor above it, but it was still lovely. Every day, she followed the same path, passing the gold letters stamped into crisp white stone: Keepers of the Artifacts.

The clacking of fellow keepers’ boots faded away as she beheld her name painted on the wooden door.

Sera loved her placement. Each new artifact satiated her curious mind. The texts were like windows into lives so unlike her own. They held knowledge about the rise and fall of empires that had collapsed long before her.

The texts proved that the demon race had ruled over witches and warlocks since the dawn of time until the rebellion.

And yet every morning as she walked through the door in front of her—with her name emblazoned in gold under her position of junior keeper—a bittersweet stone settled in her chest. An unpleasant reminder of how her mother had petitioned the Council to move her from the position of a Glom witch in Jedan to that of a keeper in Dobro.

How, after her first solo assignment, she’d needed her mother to cover up her disaster.

If she had been left to rot in Jedan, then none of it would have happened.

Blazing flame warmed the cage she kept around that dangerous well of magic. It writhed and pressed against the walls she’d built. Sera leaned her head against the door, trying to blink away the spots racing across her vision.

The abomination surged in defiant answer. As if it were screaming at her: How dare you keep me caged.

Her lungs burned against the bubbling well of unchecked magic. A second well. One she was never supposed to have.

Sera pressed hard into the pressure points on her wrists. The one between her eyebrows, then below her ears, and the rattling subsided a bit. Though she was grateful to the healer who had taught her this move, Sera still felt guilty about the lie she had told to learn it.

It wasn’t anxiety that rolled through her.

It was death.