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Istinia
My fingers trembled as I reached for the old grimoire, its decaying pages barely held in the middle. It, like the three others shelved next to it, was bound with human skin. I pulled it from the dusty shelf, willing the bile in my throat away. However much I wanted to burn the thing, its contents were irreplaceable, its cover a reminder of the witches’ grisly past with the humans, a time when they’d hunt humans and humans would burn them in return. It was over—for the most part.
My nose wrinkled when I noticed the rough texture on the front cover under my fingertips, probably hair follicles. The golden-brown, plain cover looked unremarkable when compared to the other books in our library with their fancy lettering or symbols. I turned the book over, my lip curling when I noticed areas where the skin pigmentation had darkened.
“Let’s get this over and done with, Edmund.” My gaze drifted to my coven’s grandkeeper, whose lips unfurled into an amused smirk.
“I thought you said this was ‘no big deal,’” he said with an attempt at mimicry. His heightened pitch sounded nothing like me.
“It’s not.” I clicked my tongue. “Now where’s the damned spell?” I didn’t want to hold the thing for a moment longer than I needed to.
“That damned spell, Elle”—he gave me a look—“is a ten-page complex ritual, which will require studying. The pages are faded and the text with them.”
Looking around the small, dimly lit room, where candlelight cast shadows onto velvet-red walls and flickered light to the tall shelves that reached the flaky ceiling, I spotted a rectangular oak desk covered with papers, scrolls, and stacks of books. “Here.” I motioned us toward the desk.
Edmund cleared the space. I placed the book down, relieved to be rid of it. I wanted desperately to go wash my hands, but the lure of the pages scratched with symbols of stars and pentagrams kept me rooted to the spot.
Long-forgotten magic resided on the pages, begging to be practiced. Edmund had been right; the spell was more complicated than anything I had ever seen in my nine years in Istinia. His blue eyes glittered with darkness as we both felt the compulsion from within the pages. Closing my eyes, I blew out a long, shaly exhale and opened them again. I noticed he did the same. Blowing a fluff of hair from my eyes, I sighed. My hair often got in the way, but it was no surprise; it did reach down to my waist. I pulled my brown waves into a ponytail and tied it back with a hair tie I’d left around my wrist. Leaning over the book, I dragged my finger along the page.
“Careful,” he snapped when my finger pressed along a word scrawled in Lor, the ancient language of Istinia.
“How must it feel for normal witches if even we, who are mostly immune to the dark magic residing inside the dark objects, still feel some compulsion from them?” I mused aloud. Other covens, like the casters or potioneers, would fall immediately to its pulls of power. Our coven, the cursekeepers, managed held curses or dark magic. They lured witches and humans into wanting to touch the magic inside them, as if that brand of magic had a mind of its own, then once they did, the magic could then attach itself to the living, then possess, control, and drain them until there was nothing left.
Edmund glanced at me, then looked back at the book. “You mean other witches?”
I smirked. “Right, other witches.”
“This room is our most guarded for good reason.” He paused, looking at the pages thoughtfully. “Well, next to the vaults.”
It was unlikely I would get to see the vaults anytime soon. Only the keepers or grandkeeper in our coven could go to the vaults in the basement, and I was still an apprentice.
I turned my head, scanning the room. My gaze landed on a globe, the color of parchment with long-lost lands, that stood seemingly powerless on a shelf of its own. I knew all too well it was not. Nothing in the room was.
Edmund snapped his fingers, jerking my attention back to the grimoire, the reason we had ventured into the basement of the fifteenth-century mansion we called home. Because we didn’t succumb to the compulsion of dark objects, we were tasked with keeping them safe and, in some instances, deciphering them.
“Do you truly believe this spell is the only way to help?” I asked, noticing some of the etchings pointed toward a sacrifice of some kind.
Worry lines deepened under his eyes, and his thick dark eyebrows pinched down toward his straight nose. “If the elder witch requires it, then I trust her judgment.”
I ticked each of the recent deaths off in my head. “Three deaths so far.”
“Hmm.” He turned the page carefully. “I thought it was two.”
“No. Remember the human girl who was found cut open in the woods by the mountains?”
“Ah, yes. The human.”
Of course he’d forgotten the only victim who was not a witch. The barrier between the mountains separating us from the human kingdom had kept us apart for so long, humans were often an afterthought. Not to me. Not when my sister was one. Not when I had been one.
The thought of her stole my next breath, and I pushed my pain back into the place so deep and dark, it could almost be forgotten. Almost.
Edmund cleared his throat, looking from the pages to me. “Are you paying attention?”
I nodded.
“It doesn’t seem like it,” he said. “The call is next month. If you want to put your name forward, you’ll need to focus more.”
“I’m going to put it off this year,” I admitted, finally saying what I’d struggled with for the past month. Putting my name forward to try to get promoted within the coven, meaning I would finally be a keeper, meant the truth would come to light. I wasn’t good enough yet, but no one could find that out. “I’ll give it a real go next year.”
