Dot turned her big eyes on me. “It’s true. She put us all at risk. We had no choice but to banish her to her home, else risk everything.”
“Banish her?” I squinted at Dot, feeling as though I was suddenly five steps behind.
“Agatha wanted to change the coven, Price. Something has been happening to our magic, and she had a wild notion that she just needed to find the right witch and everything would be okay again.” Dot’s face was pleading. “She was acting crazy, saying she’d been searching for suitable candidates. Prowling orphanages, scouring homeless shelters—it was madness. We couldn’t trust a stranger with all the magic tied to our coven. All our spells, all our secrets...” Dot’s words faded into an anguished silence.
“Agatha was looking for someone and you didn’t want her to find them,” I said. “Because you wanted to protect your coven.” It made sense in a weird sort of strange witchy way, but it hardly seemed real life. Although, given the strangeness of the last few days, I was willing to accept nearly anything at this point. I turned my head to stare at Bianca. “And to protect your coven, you paid somebody to strangle her to death while you had the perfect alibi of speaking at your fancy-pants conference, and then used your magic to distract the cops and point the investigation in my direction.”
Dot let out a strangled yelp and Bianca stared at me a long moment before she frowned, her porcelain skin creasing as her lips curved into a frown and her eyes narrowed. “No, absolutely not.”
I smacked my hands down on the table. “Bullshit.”
Bianca’s eyes blazed as she leaned over the table. “Watch your tongue, girl. You're on very shaky ground.” She sat back, the rage smoothed from her face, and she folded her hands together in a steeple. “Yes, we fell out with Agatha, and yes, we did act against her.”
“I knew it,” I spat.
“You don’t know anything, let me speak,” Bianca snapped. “We worked a binding spell so that Agatha would be unable to leave her home and continue her search for a new coven member.”
I stared from Bianca to Dot, who stuffed another piece of cake into her mouth. “That’s why she became a recluse,” I said. “You did that to her. You turned her home into a prison.” I dragged my hands through my hair. “God, what a horrible thing to do. Did she know it was you? Did she know what was happening?”
Bianca raised her chin defiantly. “We wove a memory theft spell into the binding. If she guessed it was us, she’d forget the very thought even as it formed in her mind.” I opened my mouth to express my disgust, but Bianca cut me off and pushed herself into standing position, glaring down at me, and I swear I could feel the air buzz with an electricity I hadn’t felt before. Her voice changed as she spoke, and her words echoed through my head. “We didn’t murder Agatha. I wasn’t even here on the day of Agatha’s death.”
I returned her glare, refusing to be deterred. “You’re a witch with a very healthy bank account. Maybe you hired somebody to kill her. Maybe you used magic to do it?”
Dot’s chubby fingers scrabbled at the last crumbs as Bianca hissed at me. “Ignorant human. If I used my magic to murder Agatha, I’d be dead myself. Any witch who breaks the law of life by intentionally doing harm to their coven sister will face the same fate themselves. Do you understand, child? If I had a willing hand in Agatha’s murder, I’d be a corpse.”
Bianca stared at me with such ferocity that I dropped my gaze to the plate in front of me, following the line of Dot’s body over her fingers and up her arm onto her ghostly pale face. The memory of her words when she gave me the apron she’d made for Agatha crawled over my brain like I spider. I answered without taking my eyes off Dot’s face. “I do, Bianca. You’re right. I had it all wrong. You didn’t murder Agatha.” I sensed her body relaxing from across the table, only to snap back to attention when I continued speaking. “You didn’t kill Agatha, Bianca. Because Dot did.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I’m so sorry,” Dot whispered, her hands finally still, releasing the crumbs trapped between her fingertips. Bianca’s face was paler than a new moon as she tried to hush Dot, but the old woman silenced her with a wave of her plump hand. “No, Bianca. No more. No more lies, no more forcing people to do what we want. I can’t live like that, by the wind and the water, I can’t.” She turned back to me. “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, Price, but I thought I was helping.”
“Helping?” I repeated. There was barely a sound from the street outside, except for the distant whining of a siren.
Dot nodded, glancing at Bianca. “Like we told you earlier, our magic is failing, dear. A witch draws her power from the leylines, but in order to tap into those lines, the magic of the blood must also remain strong. It’s like a teeter-totter, it there has to be a balance. Mother Nature will only grant a coven as much magic as their family blood can control. That’s how it’s always been, magic is passed down along bloodlines and new life is what keeps a family’s magic strong; future generations to connect to the leylines and hold the balance.”
I sat forward as understanding hit me like a fork of lightning. “Nobody in your coven has any children.”
“No, dear, we don’t.” Dot’s voice was heavy with the pain of a wound so deep it could never truly heal. A pain I’d watched from afar since I was a tiny child, the wound my mother carried like a knife in her back even after she adopted me. I filled the hole in her life, but never quite to the brim. I swallowed as Dot continued. “Bianca and I were content with our fate. We accepted the magic in our small coven would wane, but Agatha was never one to follow the rules. She was convinced she could game the system and find the right person to bolster our powers. But we knew it would just be trouble. If she found the wrong person, the ramifications could have been terrible. Our magic was becoming unpredictable as it was, can you imagine if we passed the magic to someone not in our bloodlines? The whole city could’ve been destroyed.”
“Or worse,” Bianca snapped. “Our magic could have been taken away completely.”
I raised an eyebrow. Okay. Priorities, lady. Jeez. The sounds of sirens grew louder as Dot continued speaking. “I agreed with Bianca that we had no choice but to banish her to her own home, so she couldn’t search anyone out. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought I could live with it.” She lifted her eyes to look at her coven sister. “But I couldn’t, Bianca. I couldn’t bear to see her at that window, staring out at life from the prison we’d made for her.”
Bianca was as stone-faced as granite as she listened to Dot, but the other woman didn’t stop talking, her words flowing as though a dam had burst. “I waited until you had left the city and were far enough away not to feel my magic, and I cast a silencing spell to seal her lips from sharing any of our secrets.” She turned her gaze to me, pain written on every feature. “It’s not a dangerous spell, the person's lips are sealed physically for only a few minutes. I didn’t even need to be in the building to work it, I stayed right here.” She closed her eyes as if sorrow made it too hard to face the light. “It was a perfect storm of tiny mistakes. I guess Agatha was choking on that grape, right when I worked the spell.”
I opened my mouth to ask about the marks on Agatha’s neck, but Bianca answered for me, her voice as cold as ice as she stood from the table. “And when Agatha couldn’t open her mouth to dislodge the grape, she tried to use magic to break the spell and ended up strangling herself with her own power.”