Bone Witch Read online

  “You looked pretty bad. I didn’t want to wake you.” Amelia put the cups on the counter before waving me over.

  “I need to get going,” I said reluctantly. I had no idea how to even ask for her help.

  “You need to calm down,” she said instead.

  “People are after me. Dangerous people. If they find me, they’ll find you, too.” I couldn’t afford to look after anyone other than myself right now. And honestly, her death on my conscience was not something I wanted to live with.

  “Nobody’s going to find you here, Winter.”

  Amelia almost rolled her eyes as if I’d offended her. She sounded so sure of herself, too, but she hadn’t looked death in the face three times in two days like I had. She didn’t know what kind of people I was dealing with.

  Still, I was there for her help. I should have been thankful that she was even talking to me and giving me coffee. I walked to the counter and wrapped my fingers around the mug. I took my coffee with cream, but I didn’t dare ask her for it. Or for sugar. Black would have to do.

  “The ritual…it went badly. I think I did something wrong.”

  I’d rehearsed the words in the car on my way over to her. It was what made sense the most, but since she knew that this face was what was going to happen to me, the chances were that maybe something was wrong with the bones. Or the spell Mother taught me.

  “I didn’t do any of the traditional things. No wild flowers around. It wasn’t midnight. I didn’t create a protective shield. I just touched the bones and said the words.”

  From what my mother had said, the flowers, the time of day, the shield—they were just what the Bone coven did for the ritual. They weren’t necessary to the spell itself. But maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe they had been necessary.

  “Why not?” Amelia asked, raising a brow. I flinched.

  “I was…kind of in a hurry.” Telling her that a werewolf had been right behind me, coming to kill me, wasn’t going to be of any help.

  She put both her palms on the counter and looked down at her mug. “You did nothing wrong.”

  “Are you blind? Look at me! I look like a fairy.” There was no way she’d missed it.

  “I know.”

  At least she wasn’t denying it. Since I didn’t know her, I’d had no idea what to expect from her, so it was natural for me to doubt everything that had to do with my aunt.

  “That’s why I’m here. I need your help, Amelia. I have no one else to turn to that knows Bone magic as well as you do. I need you to help me fix the spell. Or reverse it. Anything at all will do.”

  Just as long as I get to go back to the way I was.

  “I can’t.” Amelia grabbed her cup and walked out the kitchen.

  God, how I hated people who ran away from conversations. Dylan used to do it all the time, too. With my own cup in hand, I followed her back into the living room.

  “I’m begging you, Amelia. Please, you’re the only person that can help me.” I was going to get down on my knees if that’s what it took.

  “I can’t help you, Winter.” It almost sounded like a warning. I expected her to say this, but it didn’t mean it hurt any less to hear it.

  “You’re my aunt,” I whispered. “We’re family. Does that mean nothing to you?”

  “It means everything to me!” she cried all of a sudden, taking me off guard. “But I can’t help you. I can’t.”

  A lump formed in my throat and drawing in air became a bit difficult. “Can’t or won’t?”

  Amelia looked away from me. “I can’t.”

  Shivers washed over my body and a dark veil fell in front of my eyes. But my ears were working just fine. I heard her next words with perfect clarity.

  “You can’t fix the spell because it isn’t broken. This is you.”

  The most ridiculous thing I’d heard in my life. “This is not me. I’m a witch. I look like a fucking fairy!”

  Pressing her lips tightly, she shook her head. “I knew it. I knew this day would come, and I told her. I didn’t want to be the one you had this conversation with, but my sister never cared.” Amelia laughed like she’d lost her mind. “She never gave a shit.”

  “Stop it,” I hissed. “Stop this nonsense. If you aren’t going to help me, just say so.”

  “I can’t help you, Winter. I can’t change who you are. Nobody can.”

  “I’m a witch!” Her own fucking niece, too. How could she even think that this was who I was?

  “You’re a fairy, too.”

  “You do realize how ridiculous you sound, right?” Had I known she was insane, I wouldn’t have bothered to come all this way.

  “Your father,” Amelia breathed. “Your father was a fairy.”

  Really fucking hilarious. I put the cup on the table and stood up. I shouldn’t have gone to her. There was a reason why my mother never even spoke to her own sister. It’s because she knew Amelia wasn’t well in the head.

  I pulled the front door open, ready to run out of there as fast as I could, but the door didn’t budge. I grabbed the knob with both hands, and I finally realized that my arm didn’t hurt. My ribs felt fine, and I couldn’t even feel the cut on my foot, either.

  “Winter, stop it. You can’t leave,” Amelia said from behind me. The smell of wet wood and menthol hit my nostrils hard as I tried but failed to get the door to open. When my hands began to hurt, I stepped back and kicked the hell out of it. It still wouldn’t open.

  Breathing heavily, I turned to her. “Let me out.” I reached for my weapons, but they weren’t there. Wow, I was a naive little fool. How had I not realized that she’d completely stripped me of my weapons?

  “No,” Amelia said. “Not like this.”

  “I’m going to hurt you.” And I would. I’d hurt enough people to do it without hesitation.

  “Don’t try to do any spells. The house won’t let you,” she warned, and I believed her. But the beads around my fingers weren’t spells. They worked just fine inside the house. With a smile on my face, I sent them right in front of her. She took a step back with a gasp.

  “Let me out, now.” It was the last time I was going to ask her.

  “He was a fairy, Winter. It’s why the coven wouldn’t accept you. Why your mother left us,” she whispered instead.

  No, no, no. I would not listen to this.

  “Shut up!” I hissed.

  “We didn’t know for sure if his side would ever come to the surface, but it was a risk. Adeline never wanted you to find out. She never wanted you to do the ritual because she feared this would happen.”

  When had my legs given up on me? Because I found myself on my knees, shaking. “Stop it,” I begged.

  “We tried to change it. We tried everything we could, but it didn’t work,” Amelia whispered, tears streaming down her eyes. “We tried.”

  Was that supposed to make me feel better? It didn’t. A bloody battle was going on in my head. Part of me didn’t believe anything she said. She was never there for me. Never even looked at me. Why would she tell me the truth?

  But another part of me…it was almost like it knew. It knew all along that something like this would happen. It was why I’d never dared to do the ritual in the first place. Why I never insisted when my mother said no.

  The whole world turned upside down in mere seconds. The reality became my worst nightmare. I couldn’t feel my body, and I couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. Only one thing repeated itself in my mind: I really was a fairy.

  Eleven

  Nothing I ever imagined ever came even close to reality. My aunt Amelia was the cruelest woman on the planet, if you asked me. She stood there, looked into my eyes, and told me that my father was a fairy, and that I was one, too.

  I never knew much about him. All my mother ever said when I asked was: “It was never meant to be. That’s all you need to hear.” That was all I had needed to hear, all my life. My mother was more than enough for me. She used to be my whole world. I couldn’t have asked for a b
etter parent, or so I thought. If she’d really lied to me about this, then I didn’t know what to think anymore.

  Amelia disappeared behind a door at the end of the round hallway. I was thankful for it, too. Standing up was not a priority right now, and I didn’t want anyone to see me like that. My chest ached far worse than any physical wounds could. You’d think I’d be drowning in my own tears by now, but no. My eyes were completely dry.

  What I wanted to believe was that my aunt was lying. She was lying through her teeth, and my father wasn’t a fairy. He was a witch—a Bone witch, just like my mother. Just like me. But even I knew that people never lied about things like that. Things so powerful and sharp, they could cut you to pieces. Amelia’s words chased each other in my head, trying but failing to fully convince me of what was going on. Anything else would have been better: a blood witch, green witch, werewolf—even a vampire. But not a fairy. I couldn’t be a fairy. I just couldn’t.

  It must have been hours before I was able to think clearly again. I even managed to stand without falling. The cup was by my feet, the coffee spilled on the hardwood floor. Not something I cared about.

  What I cared about was information. I wanted to know everything there was to know about me. There had to be a way to undo the ritual, to take my magic out of my bones. It was it that had triggered the transformation. If I could get it out of me, I’d go back to the way I was. Simple math.

  If that didn’t work, then I could learn to disguise myself. I’d read about witches who could alter their appearances. Not many, but a couple had done it. I could, too. I had a whole life behind me. People knew me. They knew me as a Bone witch. There was no reason for anyone to think that was no longer true, and without those ears and eyes, I’d be just plain old Winter Wayne again.

  The door behind which Amelia had disappeared led to some sort of a storage corridor. Plastic shelves stacked with plastic bags full of dried plants were mounted on both walls from floor to ceiling. You could smell the whole world in there. Flowers, vegetables, things I couldn’t identify but definitely had smelled before. The corridor was ten feet long, and it led to a garden with a thick, transparent cover all around it. It was like a different place out there—or in there. A thin path made of concrete spread like a vein throughout the large piece of land. Flowers I’d never seen before graced the ground. Vegetables, too, and in the middle of it was a cherry tree, full of cherries. I’d ask how on earth this was possible, but I was in the house of a witch. Magic hung in the air, almost visible between all the blades of grass, the leaves and the flowers.

  Around the cherry tree stretched a white bench. On it sat my aunt, a flower and some scissors in her hands. She didn’t look up as I walked over to her, completely mesmerized. This must have been what she did for a living. She grew herbs and probably sold them. My mother had some pots and some flowers, but nothing even close to this.

  “This is amazing,” I whispered when I was close enough to Amelia, still unable to look away from her garden. It was warm there, too. Almost like the sun was shining, though above us were only grey skies.

  “Thank you,” Amelia whispered. “I’ve done this since I was a girl. It was our family business.”

  “Really?” I didn’t know why that surprised me so much. I just never pictured Amelia to be the kind of witch who tended to flowers.

  “I’ve got almost everything here a witch could use to stir spells,” she said, nodding. “It’s a twenty-four hour job, but nothing brings me peace like this place.”

  Little by little, I was beginning to think of Amelia as a real person. Before, I knew so little about her, it was almost like she was a figment of my imagination, but now, seeing all of this, talking to her, it all just made her real.

  “Come sit down with me.”

  She nodded at the bench. The flower in her hands had bright green petals and an orange stigma. Its leaves were in a shape of a heart. Amelia had a plastic bag on her lap, and she was cutting one of the leaves into tiny pieces.

  “You have to help me,” I said with a sigh. It wasn’t an easy thing to ask for help from a person you considered a stranger just hours ago.

  “I want to, Winter, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do.” She put the flower in the plastic bag together with the scissors, and put them all on the bench next to her.

  “There has to be a way to reverse the spell. To get my powers out of me.”

  Biting her lips, she shook her head. “Winter—” but I wasn’t going to give up.

  “No, just listen to me. I was fine before. I looked perfectly normal. I could even conjure a shield strong enough to hold a bullet. The ears and the eyes came after I performed the ritual. If I can undo it, these changes will be gone, too.” It all made perfect sense in my mind.

  “Theoretically, yes, but it’s impossible to reverse something like this. The only spells that can be reversed are the ones that cause physical damage to a person, like a skin cut that won’t close, or blisters that don’t go away—not this.”

  “But this ritual changed me physically! It’s kind of the same thing. Taking it away would be like taking away someone’s blisters.” My heart beat in my throat. This had to work. It had to.

  When Amelia squinted her eyes and took a second to think about it, I almost cried in joy.

  “The problem is that your magic caused the change. You can’t take away magic. It’s never been done before.”

  But she didn’t sound so sure.

  “Doesn’t mean it can’t be done now. We can try, can’t we?” Please, please, please…

  “I suppose we could, but it’s not going to work, Winter.” Her wide eyes were filled with regret.

  “You don’t know that.” Nobody knew that. I could unbecome a fairy just like I’d become one.

  “I’d need time. I don’t have Pastelis Morgano here but I can grow it in a few weeks. And I’d need witches, at least three strong ones to be able to even start a ritual of this kind,” she whispered.

  My heart almost leaped out of my chest.

  “But you can. You can grow whatever the Morgano thing is, and you have friends, right? Family?”

  She met my eyes, and I could swear I saw fear cross her face.

  “Our coven has been apart for years now. Nobody is going to want to help.”

  “Have you asked?”

  Amelia shook her head.

  “Asking isn’t going to hurt anyone.” But my ears and my eyes would. They were already hurting me.

  “You’re too hopeful about this,” she said. “It’s not going to end well.”

  Her fear grabbed hold of me, but I pushed it away. I couldn’t afford to be negative right now.

  “It is.” I sounded even more confident than I felt. “Will you do it?”

  Amelia looked at her garden with longing, as if she feared it was going to disappear any second now. “I’ll try.”

  “That’s good enough for me.” A bright smile spread on my face. “And I’ll help in any way I can—you just say the word. In the meantime, I need a spell strong enough to transform this, just for a while.” I waved at my face.

  Amelia raised a brow. “Transform?”

  “Yes. Change my appearance,” I explained, just in case she didn’t understand.

  “No, I know what it means. What I mean is, you can’t do it.”

  Offended, I crossed my arms in front of me. “Why can’t I?”

  “Do you have any idea how strong a witch needs to be to actually alter their appearance? You got your powers, what, a week ago?”

  I bit my lip. “Yesterday.” To me, though, it seemed like a lifetime away.

  Amelia laughed. “You’d need years of experience, and nobody has been able to pull off that spell in decades.”

  God, she was so negative. But I did believe her, and it wasn’t like I was too eager to test my powers.

  “Okay, fine. A disguise spell, then. Something that makes others see me as I was.”

  She shook her head again. “You need
power, Winter. A lot of power. We’re not talking about ordinary spells. We’re talking about magic that takes years to harness and even longer to put to use. I’m sorry, but you’re practically a baby witch right now. You’re not strong enough, and you may never be strong enough.”

  “Can’t someone else do it? Like you, for example?”

  Amelia smiled sadly. “There is no witch around here that has that kind of power.”

  Shit. “But I can’t stay like this. People are looking for me and if they find me…” I didn’t even want to say it. My whole life would be over. Amelia’s spells might keep us hidden but not for long. Even if they did, I didn’t want to be there and put her in danger. I wouldn’t cost her her life.

  “Nobody has that kind of power,” she repeated in a whisper, looking down at her lap.

  Suddenly, an idea sparked in my head. A dangerous, dangerous idea. I sat straight.

  “How long did you say you need to get everything ready for the reverse spell?”

  A visible shiver ran down her back. “A few weeks, probably a month, if not more.” A month sounded mighty good. If I had to wait to turn back to how I was, I could use all the time she could give me in between. “Winter, what is it?”

  The smile returned to my lips. “I think I know where I can get that kind of power.”

  Twelve

  The world was starting to make sense to me again, little by little. It was noon by the time I got into my truck again. I tried to keep a happy face for Amelia. After all, she had agreed to help me, and she had enough negativity about that reverse spell for the both of us. I refused to believe it was going to fail.

  By the time I made it out of Bloomsburg, I was sweating again, my mood a wreck. Too much had happened in so little time.

  Apparently, my aunt knew nothing about who my father was, except that he was a fairy. My mother never told her anything about him, but she’d told my grandmother, and my grandmother told the coven leaders about me. Amelia said that was half the reason why my mother decided to leave. She felt betrayed by her own mother and with right. Just like I was feeling now.

  I always knew my mother had secrets, but I could never imagine she’d keep something like this hidden from me. I wasn’t sure what to feel and trying to get my mind off this led me nowhere.