Page 4 of Mortdale

The ancient fiend was made of one thing; his insatiable appetite. Through lifetimes, witches and fiends had bonded to each other with deals and bargains. They couldn’t harm or feed on humans or any other creature of this earthly realm unless a witch offered it to them. And they granted a witch protection from the creatures of the Beyond, offered their knowledge on matters of the Beyond, and of course, company.

In exchange for such perks, he’d asked me to offer him my corpse. It had sounded like a legitimate deal at the time. Except, Ethel and I had been drinking some cheap spirit we’d bargained a whole month’s salary for and gotten high on liberty caps we’d found while foraging all day back when we’d been only seventeen. And I faintly remember him being a dog, not a rat. Alas, here we were.

She still sputtered, wiping her face in disgust. “What sewer did you spawn out of now?”

“Your bedroom,” Thomas gravely hissed. “You smell of children. It makes me hungry. Did you not bring back any?”

Thomas liked children. But not in a creepy way. He just liked to eat them.

When he had discovered what a midwife was, he’d been determined in becoming one himself. He’d even offered to ditch our deal, and make another deal with her—until Ethel had nearly put him on a sacrificial altar. The word ‘nearly’ was used loosely because she had physically put him on the sacrificial altar, but she’d not managed to think in time who she wanted to sacrifice him to and what for before he’d made his escape. Her relationship with our deities was severely malnourished through the many years she’d spent resenting and questioning them, and she didn’t have many earthly requests. Ethel lived humbly and had always been content with her life as long as she spent every free second of the day basking in the sun, diving in the sea, and helping little humans succeed in coming into this life. My rat had survived her through pure comic chance.

A few passing witches shook their heads at us as we stepped into the main covenstead hall, making sure to maintain their judgement from at least seven feet away from me. They were all in their black cloaks and white belts embroidered in poppies, heading to the Bloodletting.

“They say she sleeps in a morgue drawer like a corpse,” some young witch whose face I couldn't see under the black hood whispered, giggling with her friends. “Look at the state of her; the rumours must be true.”

I typically never left the old orangery when there was still daylight above, so they must be surprised at my state. To the rest of my coven, I was only a dim cautionary tale. Most avoided crossing paths with me, afraid they’d drag my bad luck with them. Others crossed my path on purpose to torment me—to poke bad luck in the gut until I was sick on my knees, throat burning, scarred and bleeding as they left me to retch on the side of the gardens. It was more convenient for them to reinvent me rather than know me. And they did it so well. They could have easily convinced me that I was just a ghoul haunting everything in sight. But they loved to remind me of my fragile mortal state. They loved to prod at my mortality just to see how much worse could I bear.

Maria, one of the head witches, passed by us, raking a long look over Ethel, who also unfortunately had a reputation of her own due to her violent sense of humour and the determination to not conform to any standard upheld by the coven. “Someone telephone the circus, they’ve lost all their freaks.”

“You have to come up with something new, Maria,” Ethel called as loud as she could. “We’ve already telephoned all the circuses in the area. No freaks were missing. But they said they’d misplaced a bitch somewhere.”

A wave of gasps choired around us.

“Just leave them,” I said, prying Thomas off the ground, brushing the dirt off his short white fur and sticking him in my pocket. I couldn’t blame them for the way they were. They were a product of a slowly decomposing ecosystem that survived on the success of hierarchy. An ecosystem that bred this shared mentality in a tiny jar like antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The strongest, healthiest, youngest sat at the top. Then there were the bottom vermin; the sick, the diseased, the half-breed witches, who didn’t even belong in a coven like the Crimson Weaver that had survived for so long by eliminating the weaker caste. The coven had built a layer of a compacted strata that didn’t allow any blend which could compromise its integrity. Ethel and I didn’t belong. And everyone knew it.

Ethel tugged on her licorice root, chewing with her mouth wide open as she mouthed all kinds of profanities at them. “Muck-sprouting harpies. They give me itchy fingers.”

“You haven’t cast a single hex in your lifetime.”

“Just waiting for the perfect bitch-witch to light on fire.” She spat a dollop of the chewed-up root at their feet as we passed by. “How you aren’t tempted boggles me.”

I glanced at them, trying to see what made Ethel so angry. But their faces were always blurred together as one. They were all copies of each other. Near perfect replicas of what a factory that demanded perfection had churned out. “I can’t seem to make myself feel anything for them. Good or bad.”

“I think you just don’t prefer debating with people who’d contribute nothing to science if you sawed through their cranium. Sometimes I forget you see us all like skin sacks of blood, bone, and organs.”

I’d spent all my life knowing people inside out. It was hard for me to see the outside first.

I bit down on the licorice stick until my teeth burned. “Do you think I’m weird?”

“You’re very fucking weird,” she said, cracking the licorice stick apart and shoving the entirety of one half in her mouth.

Ethel gave me a playful shove, but my knees buckled under my weight and I landed on the ground.

Her amusement wiped clean off her face as she straightened to her full height. Her chest rose steadily for a few moments, and then the storm started brewing, shooting thunder. She helped me up to my feet and shoved my sleeve down, and I looked away when her mouth pursed in a tight line.

My witch’s birthmark was almost entirely faded. The grey half moon looked like a mere shadow.

“That old crone Agnes is working you to your death!” she hissed, crushing the licorice and throwing it to the ground.

“You know it doesn’t work like that. The Holy Mother knows that, too.”

A curse wasn’t like a true human illness. Rest did nothing for it. There was no cure, no remedy. The older I got and the more chaos my body accumulated, the quicker it would kill me. I’d already lived way past its course. Most barely made it past their teens, when chaos manifested at its highest. My malediction was a slowly ticking bomb that would detonate sooner rather than later.

She grabbed my chin. “Whatever she wants, tell her to go fuck herself. You do enough for her.”

I do it all for you, I wanted to say, but couldn’t.

The Holy Mother, or Agnes as very few were allowed to call her, stood by one of the tower’s arched glass windows overlooking the city of Meridian, the home of witches, and the one place in the vast lands of the Epiron continent where they would struggle to find willing humans to gather wood for pyres to burn us on. The one place where humans and all other creatures alike had accepted a witch to rule over them. Though Agnes did not give herself a title like many other rulers had given themselves, she carried equal responsibilities over Meridian as they did over their own kingdoms. Perhaps more considering both our neighbours, Faegard and Greyvale, the lands of the fae and the lycan, had often sought business with Crimson Weaver to protect themselves against the constant plague that ailed Epirea—humanity. The human king who ruled Morngate, the city furthest north on the continent, had been eating away at any piece of land he could claim, cutting as many heads as he could stick his flags on despite our ancient agreements to remain in our own separate domains. No amount of magic had ever managed to contain them, for humans had their own ancient ways of protecting themselves from it. That and the fact that they procreated like critters and at the speed of a sneeze. Draped in their cold iron shields, their cold iron walls and their cold iron weapons, they hunted us for fun—mostly. Fae wings for their mantle pieces. Lycan bile for their poisons. Vampires to torment in the name of their science which was always in the search for eternity. And witches for their exclusive pleasure of burning one down. They’d never accepted that it was nature that gave us chaos and our biology that made us capable of turning it into magic, not some devil they knew more than we did—though they did accuse us for selling our souls to him.