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Mel throws her hands up looking lost. Before she can say anything, Ibrahim raises his hand in a calming gesture. “We’ll find her, Mel. Let’s just get Deni home.”
He offers me his wrist, his pulse almost visible under his skin, saying, “As soon as it’s dark outside, we’re getting out of here, alright?”
***
Djinn blood is not the same as witch blood. Rather than sweet, warm, and empowering, it’s overwhelmingly powerful. It feels like electricity is running through my veins. I get the sense I could crush stone with my fists, if only I wasn’t so jittery and uncoordinated. Like the worlds most powerful drug has been handed to a toddler.
It does help me heal, though. Only my regrowing skin makes itself known with pain shooting through my limbs, the occasional fried nerve-ending firing aimlessly to let me know that something is, in fact, wrong. As if the weeping tissue and puss weren’t indicators.
Though her house is full of memories it proves to be a better option for healing from severe burns than Pavel’s apartment, even if it takes some pleading to get Mel to check on Mav twice a day. He, at least, really seems to be improving.
Celeste tidied while I was gone, returning her scattered belongings to their origins as if her outburst never happened. The guest bedroom – my bedroom – has fresh sheets and clean towels sitting folded on the corner of the bed. The sidetable is covered in a small collection of flasks and jars – tinctures, creams, and pain relief for my burns. There’s even some of my favorite tea.
The other thing that has changed is that the house is no longer quiet. Everyone I’ve been fending off while Celeste was in withdrawal has come crashing back in like a tidal wave. The news of her disappearance has spread like wildfire.
Every day countless of them, many witches, snow in the door because they haven’t been paid, they want to work out the details of some delivery or sale – or because they haven’t heard from Celeste and are worried. It shouldn’t surprise me just how many people care about her.
Everyone has one question:where is she?
Of course, I only try to help with finding her because it’s the right thing to do. Not because I’ve forgiven her.
I try, with vigilance, to hang onto my anger. She betrayed me. She knew there was nothing I hated more than feeling powerless and took my agency away anyway. Still, it becomes harder with every passing hour. Her clothes smell like her perfume and I bury my face in them when nobody is watching.
I find small details of her life in every room. It feels invasive to look at her things but I can’t help myself, even if I couldn’t say what it is I’m looking for. Maybe it’s the flowers pressed in between the pages of the thickest and heaviest volumes on her bookshelf or the defunct collection of cassettes she keeps on a shelf in the living room. Maybe it’s the storage box that I remember having been upturned in her search for Ghostshade which holds a collection of photographs, all of them dated and annotated with immaculate handwriting. One shows a group of old-timey witches playing with a red-haired little girl in the snow, another Mel and Celeste on the beach with wide-brimmed hats and round sunglasses, drinking mimosas and laughing. Most of the others are of her and people I don’t recognize.At the very bottom is the photo she took of me in the sunlight, hiding my face in my hands, annotated only with the date and the word ‘Kitten’, followed by a heart. I sit on the floor of the library and read her annotation over and over again, reminding myself that it doesn’t matter.
On the third day, lying awake in bed in the filtered evening sunlight of her enchanted window, staring at the ceiling while hugging one of her cashmere jumpers to my chest, I think of a stupid joke aboutPumpkinthe cat that I know would get at least a chuckle out of her. But she’s not here.
She’s not here and I miss her. Worse, missing her makes me want to be held, and she’s the only person I allow to hug me. Even with Mel and Ibrahim here, I feel so alone. And guilty – why did I go with Dante? Maybe if I’d tried to run away sooner, she wouldn’t have had to do the thing that frightens her most just to save me.
It’s in that moment that I realize I’m in love with her. It comes like a tidal wave, all at once. I love her even if she doesn’t love me back. I love her even if all she wanted to do was use me. I love her even though I’m furious with her. Maybe the only reason I’m so angry isbecauseI love her. Really, it’s so stupidly obvious that I’m not sure how I could have kept this from myself for so long.
I bury my face in her jumper.Stupid. Why are you so stupid, Deni?
And the thought that Dante could hurt her is the most shattering, painful thing I’ve ever thought about. It consumes me. It makes the vampire part of me want to run amok, kill everyone in my path until I find her – and for once, it seems I’m in harmony with it.
I get up from the bed and wander through the house, again, unsure what it is I’m looking for. Without much direction, I comb through the papers in her office, as if I could find some hint about where she might be. The sheer volume of paperwork is startling – I suppose even a criminal enterprise needs thorough organisation but Celeste’s bookkeeping is nothing short of neurotic.
Really, I know that I should leave the sleuthing to Mel and Ibrahim, though it took some convincing to stop Mel from simply marching into the Myrrh & Adder and gunning people down until she got her answer. Ibrahim keeps talking about informants and mutual connections but has come up empty so far. And all of us have interrogated Mav, whose confusion seems to be fading, but his answer never changes: Dante is a voice on a phone, nothing more. They’ve never met. He knows nothing about him.
Nobody can trace her, not with magic and not with technology. The witches think she’s consumed bindweed, somehow cutting herself off from her powers.
I’ve never felt more useless in my life. I trail through the hall and into the basement, checking out all the eyes floating in jars and mummified hands as if they hold answers. I stare at them until eventually I need to admit to myself that my epiphany changes very little. Celeste is gone, whether I love her or not.
When I come back up the stairs, Mel and Ibrahim are standing in the kitchen arguing with someone. For everything that Celeste has been through, it surprises me that she keeps her door open to all these people.
I pop my head through the door. “Any news?”
Mel shakes her head. “This is unbelievable,” she says. “Imagine if one of us just abducted one of Charon’s Veil’s disgusting mafia boss assholes. They’d be here in a heartbeat, it would be an outright war!”
There are two other women in the kitchen, one of which I recognize as the dark-haired witch from that very first night I stayed over. The other is older and very stern, cloaked in crystals and talismans, bangles clinking as she moves. The dark-haired one crosses her arms. “Because they’re organised around violence. That has never been our business. And we don’t even know how involved Dante was with Charon’s Veil.”
“It sounds to me like they simply do the legwork for him,” Ibrahim says. He pats Mel’s shoulder. “She’s right Mel, we don’t have the means to fight them. We need to be smart about this.”
I sigh. “So the answer is that we still know nothing?”
The stern witch shrugs. “We’ve tried every locator spell we’re capable of. But it’s as though she doesn’t exist.”
“Celeste and I have been working for months to figure out if there’s a way around the effects of bindweed but we haven’t had any concrete results. We thought there might be a way around it on the new moon because the plant's power is potentiated then,” explains the other one. “But we just missed it, so it won’t be for another month.”
