“She said she would do what she had to,” Meiner mumbled.
“And she did.” Bronagh wove her fingers together and tipped her head forward, like she was saying a little prayer or a spell in the direction of the kitchen. “They’re wounded, and gods or no, wounded animals are reckless when they’re backed into a corner.” She waited for Faye and Brenna to follow Cora into the kitchen, and then sank down beside Meiner, skirts pooling at her feet.
“Humor me a minute, lass.”
Meiner flinched as Bronagh reached out and grasped her hand, turned it over to look at her palm. She had cleaned herself up as best she could in the bathroom, and the blood was mostly gone, but Bronagh still narrowed her eyes at her hand as if she could see it somehow. “Did you do it?” she said softly, and when Meiner shook her head Bronagh’s face softened with relief. “Good lass. You made the right choice, though I know it must have been hard.”
“Bronagh, Gran…she had a tattoo on her—at least, it looked like one. It vanished when she died.”
“What did it look like?”
Meiner hesitated. “Like…a weird spiderweb, mixed with a pentacle maybe. And sort of…spiky looking.”
The older witch frowned. “It sounds like a spirit trap, something to draw in spirits and bind them. But you draw it on the ground, never on yourself, unless you’re asking for possession.”
Meiner swallowed hard and nodded, not wanting to hear any more. What exactly had her grandmother been planning?
The two of them started, and Meiner jumped to her feet, as the front door thumped open.
It was Reagan, standing on the doorstep, breathing hard. Her dark eyes were wide. “Dayna. When I dropped her off…We think— We’re pretty sure they have her.”
Meiner gaped at her, dumbstruck. The news seemed to penetrate the wall of numbness surrounding her. “What?”
Reagan opened her mouth to say something else, and then there was the roar of an engine as Yemi turned the minivan around in the driveway, which brought Faye, Brenna, and Cora back into the front room.
Reagan didn’t bother to explain again. “All of you, get in.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
DAYNA
They were going to kill her.
She knew this with a kind of distant, horrified certainty, because when they led her from the car, across an open stretch of green field, they didn’t bother to blindfold her. And when they reached the massive green mound in the center, the tomb had been set up for a ritual.
She recognized the area, the bleached stones at the front, the huge, fenced-off entrance covered in swirling runes. The last time she’d been to the Newgrange tomb had been a class field trip years ago. It had been busy, full of tourists and sunshine. Now the mound loomed over them in the dim light, the dirt lanes around both sides still and empty.
Dubh clutched her arm tightly, shoving her down into the center of a sprawling hexagram. She’d initially thought it was made of white branches, some of them burned or charred. But from the ground, her cheek pressed into the grass, she could see the hexagram was made of bones. Some of them old, cracked and splintered and bleached by the sun, and some disturbingly fresh, stained red in patches.
She swallowed the bile rising in her throat, and watched as they hacked at the grass, turning up the earth inside four points of the hexagram.
Dubh created a shallow hole, into which he dropped a shriveled bit of red meat. A tongue, Dayna realized, horror crawling up her spine. She looked away while he repeated this process with other body parts, muttering under his breath. When the impatient one, Olc, tried to grab something out of the cooler at his feet, Dubh slapped his hand away.
“No. This time it needs to be in order. Go watch for the others.”
Olc grumbled under his breath at this, but both brothers went, moving around either side of the tomb.
Beside the rocky wall of the mound they’d set out a scattering of black stones, and a goblet full of what looked suspiciously like blood. Carved into the stones around the entrance was Carman’s symbol. Dayna stared at it, eyes watering. The carvings filled her with a kind of creeping horror. They meant something was about to happen. Something horrible.
They still had two points of the star to fill, which meant they had taken a fourth victim recently. Dayna swallowed hard. She would be the next point, and then the Callighans.
Dubh released her, stepping outside the circle. Dayna’s muscles were coiled, her body flooded with adrenaline, and for a second she thought about scrambling to her feet and making a break across the field. She was practically on the balls of her feet when she noticed Dubh watching. He seemed to be able to guess what she was thinking, because a cruel smile curved his lips.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I like it when they run.” He gestured across the field. “I’d be able to see you for miles, and you don’t have any magic left. I can feel it.”
She watched, feeling sick, as he hunkered down beside her, balancing a thin silver cigarette case on his knees. He seemed so casual as he took one out and lit it up, like he was a tourist pausing for a smoke, instead of someone about to sacrifice a stranger in the center of a hexagram.
Dubh saw her watching and grinned, tapping the top of the silver case. “Broke into your friend’s car earlier and took this right out of the old woman’s bag. Knew it would fuck with her when she realized I was coming for her. Did she go batshit when she saw it was missing?”
He thought she’d been looking at the silver case, she realized, though it had hardly been the first thing on her mind. “No,” Dayna said. “Didn’t seem to notice it was gone.”
That wasn’t true. She remembered now; Grandma King had torn apart the house looking for something, and they’d dismissed it as more of her dementia showing.
Dubh shrugged, but his smile had vanished, and Dayna felt a little spark of satisfaction at the lie.
“They’re not here yet.” The man with the shaved head reappeared, walking across the grass to stand at the edge of the hexagram. He had the leather book tucked under one arm, and he tipped his head back to survey the sky. “Our window is closing. We should kill her now and take what we need.”
“You don’t kill the bait, idiot,” Dubh growled at him. “Have a little patience for once.”
“Are you sure this is it? We only have one chance.” He frowned down at the hexagram.
“It’s exactly as it says in the book.”
Every muscle in her body was still screaming for her to run, but Dayna forced herself to stay very still. The tomb and the hulking rocks surrounding it cast long shadows as the sun crept inch by inch toward the hilltops. The coming darkness was somehow both threatening and comforting. Under cover of the shadows, she reached out slowly, while Dubh was still glaring at his brother, her fingers closing around a long, sharp bone on the inside edge of the hexagram.
She shifted, covering it with her arm. It was about the right length, and she shuddered at how perfectly it hid beneath her forearm. An arm bone, probably, splintered at the end where the wrist should have been. She pressed her arm against the makeshift dagger and forced herself not to flinch when Dubh turned back to her, smiling, and said in a low voice, “Bone.”
“What?” Her stomach plummeted, and she braced herself, sure he’d seen the makeshift dagger she’d stolen.