“I’m loath to admit it.” Bronagh stared down at her teacup, a reluctant frown etching deep lines across her weathered face. “But yes…all my readings have been terribly dark lately, and none of them clear.” Her eyes went narrow. “But that doesn’t mean we needed you, King.”
“You will,” Grandma King said. “Something is waking.”
“What is it?” Reagan asked. “What’s waking?”
The blue-haired girl looked at Grandma King, her expression critical.
Instead of answering, the old woman began to turn, eyes fixed on the window. After a moment she spoke again, and her voice was a low mutter. “Where…where’s the light?”
Meiner’s stomach sank. “She’s gone again, sorry. She…hasn’t been herself lately.”
For a moment they watched as Grandma King hobbled over to stare out the window. There was a beat of silence as the other coven exchanged looks with one another, and Meiner’s nerves began chewing at her insides. Then everyone except Bronagh jumped as Brenna slammed one hand on the table in exasperation. She’d been shuffling through her cards for the entire conversation. “Again! It keeps coming up.”
Faye, who’d been lifting her cup from her saucer, looked down at her plate, which was now full of tea. “What,” she said sharply, “keeps coming up?”
Brenna jabbed her finger at the card in the center of her spread. “That.”
The card Brenna pointed to was framed in smudgy black swirls. In the center, a crumbling brick building was bathed in flames, which were creeping up the base, licking at the windows. There was a black silhouette in the air halfway down, arms outstretched, legs splayed. Falling.
“The tower,” she said. “No matter how many times I lay the cards out.”
The tower. Change. Destruction.
Meiner bit the inside of her cheek, stomach twisting uneasily.
The others were silent, and then Brenna looked up from the cards, eyes round. “It’ll be the death card next, mark my words.”
“It’s rarely in the literal sense,” Faye pointed out, though she didn’t look certain.
Meiner cleared her throat. “Uh, I’m afraid it might be this time. Gran had a premonition about a murder specifically. The murder of a witch. That’s why we’re here, because she thinks we need to stop it from happening again.”
She saw Dayna’s brows shoot up, and the Callighans exchanged a look between them. Slowly Faye said, “Again?”
Cora leaned forward at the table, expression eager. “We saw it on the way here, in—”
“The stone circles.” Meiner shot her a dark look. She wasn’t about to let Cora dominate the conversation the way she always did. Not here.
She told them about the body in the field, the tree of life on the woman’s cheek.
Across from her Dayna had gone pale, her fists clenched on the tabletop.
“A murdered witch.” Brenna tapped her nails on the table, lips pursed. Meiner noted she hadn’t picked up another card.
“Gran seems to think there’ll be more.”
Another stretch of silence, broken only by Gran mumbling under her breath as she stared vacantly out the window.
Brenna turned to her mother. “What about the tea?”
“It’s…murky,” Bronagh muttered. The old woman tilted her cup this way and that on the saucer. “It suggests darkness, that something is coming. The rest is just…scone crumbs.”
Faye snorted, leaning back to fold her arms over her chest. “Honestly, Grandmother.”
Dayna cleared her throat, and everyone looked at her. She flushed. “Uh, I’m not sure if this is relevant, but on the way to Sage Widow, they were doing another protest at the church. They had signs with that verse on it, ‘suffer a witch to live’…”
Faye folded her arms over her chest, her face twisted in a sneer. “Oh yes, everyone’s favorite.”
“You think one of those church lunatics would actually kill someone?” Reagan looked doubtful.
“They protested the liquor store last month,” Brenna said, “but they didn’t stab the clerk to death at any point.”
“It’s worth checking out.” Bronagh looked at Dayna pointedly.
Dayna clearly wasn’t happy, but she nodded. Meiner wasn’t sure what the exchange meant. She didn’t go to the church, did she?
“We go to the stone circle tomorrow.” Everyone stared at Grandma King over by the window. She was still facing away from them.
Bronagh’s lips twitched downward briefly before she smoothed her expression. “Oh, do we, now?”
“Our coven does. Come if you like.”
“We’re in this together, whatever the hell it is.” Faye glanced over at her grandmother. “That’s why they came, isn’t it?”
“If we can find something the murderer touched, we could attempt a contact scry.” Grandma King turned around, eyes glittering as she stared at Bronagh.
“Absolutely not,” Bronagh snapped. “Don’t be a reckless fool.”
Grandma King only smiled and turned back to the window once more, and Bronagh pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut in irritation.
There was a stretch of silence, followed by a soft thud as Brenna flipped another card over.
The back of Meiner’s neck prickled. Heavy black lines against a white backdrop depicted a grinning, skull-faced man, the wicked lines of a scythe arcing above his head.
Death.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DUBH
This was how the cycle started, with the memories dropping back into place one by one.
The first: His brothers, not what they looked like, but the feeling of their presence. The tension among them. The anger when one of them hit him.
The second: the symbol, the strange sign with all its jutting angles and scribbled lines…He’d been tracing it for months now, on the bar at pubs, in the steam on the bathroom mirror, in the dirt with the tip of his boot. Now he knew it belonged to his family.
And the third. The certainty of what he needed to do, the parts he had to collect.
Dubh hooked a finger into the neck of his tie, tugging it away from his throat. It was coated in the thick stickiness of half-dried blood. He glanced over his shoulder at the blue cooler on the seat of his rental car.
For a moment he shut his eyes and remembered how he’d dragged her, screaming, into the center of the stone circle. How Witchkiller had its fill of blood.
Some force had driven him to wrench her mouth open. It hadn’t been easy, but he wasn’t satisfied until he had it.
Her tongue.
He was turning back to the road when the dizziness hit him. A surge of memory sent the world spinning, forcing him to jam his foot on the brake.
A woman’s hand on his face, her nails sharp on his skin. Her voice murmuring in his ear.
Tongue and eye, hand and foot. Blood and bone, ash and soot.
He was still shaking with excitement when he drove into the parking lot. He pulled past the Irish National Heritage Park sign and into the first stall, ignoring the handicapped symbol.
The same force guided him now.
Pulling on his heavy jacket, he zipped it up over the blood-spattered suit and tilted the rearview mirror down. He growled under his breath at the spot of blood on the bottom of his collar and tugged his coat up.