She stopped to soothe an agitated succulent, lightly running her fingers along its skin. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered. “I’ll protect you.”
The humans watched her, waiting.
She could see the colours of feeling burning under the skin of each human. Fear. Worry. Anger. In their eyes, she had failed. Whispers swirled around the room — although whether they were words spoken with crooked human tongues or simply thoughts fluttering free from the confines of a leaking mind, she did not know.
What if they’re dead?
We need that magic.
She promised us.
Without the Heart, how can we change anything?
Since when had she become a beacon of hope for the lonely? When had she become responsible for the lives and wishes of such fragile creatures? They craved her guidance, clung to it. They wanted her magic.
Her mouth salivated with the sweet and bitter taste of power, like almond and orange peel.
The Hedge-Witch sighed and reached for her mug of chamomile tea. She added a spoonful of honey, the crystallized coppery sweetness still buzzing with the memory of wings. A sprig of lavender. A rusted iron nail. She took a sip.
Calm radiated through her body.
Where was Tav’s ghost? The creature had followed them willingly, had protected them. Would he work for her, follow her directions, now that Tav was gone?
Not he, it. It was a ghost. She had spent too much time with Tav and was starting to think of it as a person. Where was it now? Waiting at a closed-down bus station, wading in the river, watching The Sun with dead eyes? What would it do when Tav didn’t return?
A sense of foreboding fell across her forehead like a shadow.
She looked up and faced her followers, their eyes desperate for a story. “The Coven will be coming for us. We need to prepare.” Had they been killed? Would it bother her to learn that Tav had died, after all the time she had spent with them? But then humans died so easily, like crickets.
“The Coven?”
“Here?”
“Cam would never tell them about us!”
“Babe, it’ll be okay.” A woman with dark braids brushed a human hand against a non-human arm. The air between them rippled like water.
“The trace spell I planted on them is broken.” The Hedge-Witch took her lover’s hand and kissed it. Her lips left behind the shape of the kiss in orange rust. “Something terrible has happened. I can smell it in the air. I can taste it in the dirt. My dreams are broken. The Heart has changed, and the City of Eyes is changing, too. Magic feels different — the texture is coarser and harder to grasp. You wouldn’t understand.” She sighed again. Sometimes she missed the company of other witches. “Something has changed, but it isn’t what we had planned.”
In the moments that followed, the cacophony of human bodies pounded in the Hedge-Witch’s ears — their twitching eyelashes, shifting joints, grinding teeth. She could hear their skin shedding and growing, their bones rotating in imperfect sockets.
She took another sip of tea. That helped.
“What do we do?” someone asked nervously.
“We should never have trusted that witch-made creature.”
“Don’t worry,” said the Hedge-Witch soothingly. She reached out and stroked a flowering cactus. “We can still get the Heart. This isn’t over. We just have to find the girl.”
She swallowed the rest of the tea in one gulp, catching the nail between her teeth. She bit down on the iron, letting her tongue graze the tip. Blood summoned blood.
The door swung open.
A girl walked in, steely eyes panning the room. Two swords were strapped across her back. One cobbled together from broken bottles and Phillips-head screws. A weapon meant to wound rather than kill. A cruel edge. The other crafted from thousands of iridescent insect wings. The sound of a swarm of wasps followed the blade. It was restless.
The Hedge-Witch took the nail from her mouth and set it delicately in her empty cup.
“You didn’t think Eli was the only one, did you?” She turned to her made-girl, the project she had finally completed after all this time. She offered her daughter three strands of hair, sticky with saliva.
“Find her.”