I leave her to it.
I open drawers. I lift books off shelves. The kitchen yields jars of dried things still labeled in the same slanted script I saw at the apothecary, a pestle worn smooth at the handle, a row of glass bottles tucked behind the flour tin. Behind the bottles, wedged against the back wall, my fingers brush leather.
A notebook. Spine cracked. Heavy.
“Sienna.” It’s Violet, from the back room. Her tone is a mixture of awe and fear.
I find her holding a strip of dark fabric, her thumb running over the embroidered edge. An armband. Faded, but the symbol on it is still visible.
“I’ve seen this emblem before,” Violet whispers. “The men who came after me and Anne last year. They were wearing these.”
My breath catches.
Darius takes it from her hand, his expression tightening. “The Covenant. This cloth is old. Fiona, you said our kind took your aunt?”
She nods. He looks at Violet and me, and he doesn’t have to say out loud what we’re all thinking. What did the Covenant want with a witch twenty years ago?
We all move back to the front room. I still have the notebook I found in the kitchen, and I set it on the coffee table. Fiona identifies it the moment I lay it down.
“That was hers.”
She lifts it gingerly, cradling the leather in both hands. Her fingers shake. She opens it carefully as I look over her shoulder.
It’s a lineage.
Names. Mother to daughter, generation by generation, going back at least a hundred years. Fiona’s lips move silently as she reads down the column. Then, she begins speaking the names aloud—softly, slowly, prayerfully.
“Aoife. Brigid. Maeve. Niamh. Una.” Her voice catches. “She used to tell me stories. Said we came from one of the most powerful witch lines in the region. I thought it was just family pride.”
She turns the page. Her own name is at the bottom of the lineage, in the same careful hand. Fiona. Niece. Blood kin. Next of the line.
Fiona’s hand closes over her mouth.
I take the book back gently. She lets me. I turn past the lineage.
The next page also has names in a column, but it’s a different list. Each name has a date attached, each entry clean and deliberate.
Cassius Steele.
Edmund Steele.
Henrik Steele.
Thomas Steele.
Lucas Steele.
I read them aloud. “Every name above Lucas’s has been crossed out.”
The room goes silent.
Lucas takes the book from me. His fingers close around the edges of the leather, and he stares at the page. I am at his side, my shoulder brushing his arm. The bond carries his pulse to me: hard, slow, a drum pounding deep in his chest.
Fiona steps closer to look. She says doesn’t recognize the names, but she knows the writing. The pattern, too. Her aunt’s record-keeping has a rhythm to it that Fiona knows on sight.
“She used to travel,” Fiona adds slowly.
Lucas looks at her.
