“Angelus mortis lives,” the skull crooned the moment I got within inches of it, its voice eerily similar to my twin’s. Fine hairs rose along my arms. It was as if Vittoria crossed the barrier between life and death to send a message, except it was slightly off, wrong. “Fury. Almost free. Maiden, Mother, Crone. Past, present, future, find.”
“Vittoria?” The fleshless jaws went slack, and whatever dark magic had fueled the skull vanished. I swallowed hard, unable to take my eyes off the cursed messenger. “Goddess above.”
How someone had snuck an enchanted skull in without Anir or me noticing was almost as troubling as the magic used to power it. I’d never heard of a spell that commanded the bones of the dead. Sure, there was necromancy, but that’s not what powered the skull. This wasn’t even il Proibito. This was something other, something more terrifying than the Forbidden.
I left the skull where it was, plopped onto the glass chair, and took a healthy sip of wine, my mind racing. I thought about Nonna’s lessons on dark magic, specifically spells using objects touched by death—how both should be avoided at all costs. Never, not once, did she ever tell us a story about a witch who could manipulate life into something long dead. If that was even what happened. It had to be demon magic. Which meant the sender was likely a prince of Hell.
The question was which one and why.
I replayed the message in my mind. The angel of death lives. Fury. Almost free. Maiden, Mother, Crone. Past, present, future, find.
To simplify, and to keep from panicking over the macabre messenger, I decided to pick it apart line by line, starting with the angel of death.
Claudia, my best friend and a witch whose family openly practiced the dark arts, used a black mirror and human bones in her last scrying session, and her mind had been taunted with the voices of the dead. She’d also mentioned something about the angel of death.
I did not believe in coincidences.
I got up and paced around the room, struggling to recall more from Claudia’s scrying. That night was filled with terror, and the details were fuzzy. I’d found her on her knees in the courtyard outside the monastery, her nails broken to the quick, as she recited nonsensical messages from the cursed and the damned. She told me to run, but there was no way I’d leave her with the superstitious holy brotherhood. She’d said something about a cunning thief stealing the stars and drinking them dry. That he was coming and going.
That it should have been impossible…
I knew at least four demon princes who were roaming Sicily at that time. Wrath, Envy, Greed, and Lust. One of them had to be the angel of death. Maybe not in the literal sense, but it could certainly be a nickname. I stopped dead in my tracks, heart pounding.
Only one demon fit that description. I’d even called him Samael one night—the angel of death and prince of Rome—thinking it a clever description of him. He’d given me a bemused look, right before he’d warned me to never call him that again. Wrath.
He didn’t hide the fact that he was the general of war. He excelled in violence. If he was Death, maybe he hadn’t been chosen to solve the murders; perhaps he was furious someone sullied his title and involved him without the devil’s consent. That would explain why Pride didn’t want to invite him into his circle. The devil was punishing Wrath for disobedience.
Which, if true, threw into question every last bit of information I’d wrung from him. If Wrath omitted basic truths about his involvement, there was no telling how far his deception stretched.
I rubbed my temples. Wrath was my top suspect for both the angel of death and the fury portion of the riddle. Next came the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. That part was harder to connect to the murders. According to our history, the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone were three goddesses who ruled the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.
Old witch legends claimed they’d given birth to the goddesses we prayed to, and one of them—the goddess of the heavens and sun—was La Prima Strega’s mother. The Maiden, Mother, and Crone were to our goddesses what Titans were to the gods in mortal mythologies.
If she was real and not a fable, the goddess of the underworld—or any of the goddesses birthed to her realm—would likely possess the kind of magic that animated bones, but why she’d send a cryptic message to me remained a mystery. Goddesses had never shown interest in involving themselves with witches before. I doubted they’d start now.
However the Maiden, Mother, and Crone fit, it wasn’t through a legend I’d been taught. It wasn’t a stretch to think demons had their own stories and histories about them.
Answers weren’t going to present themselves by staying locked away in my chamber.
I removed a scarf from the wardrobe and picked up the skull, careful to avoid touching it without cloth. If Vittoria were here, she’d have plucked it up and danced it across the room without a moment’s hesitation, fueling Nonna’s worry about her affinity with the dead. A smile almost tugged at my lips before I banished it. I glanced around, searching for a hiding place, then knelt down and shoved the skull deep inside the wardrobe and shut its doors.
Situation resolved, I dusted off my hands and went to search House Wrath.
I stopped counting how many stone staircases I’d descended somewhere around a dozen. Each magnificent landing ended on a floor that spanned what seemed like thousands of meters. Which must have been deception magic—Wrath’s castle couldn’t be that large.
On the next landing, I stopped to look out a trio of arched windows. A large body of merlot-colored water pooled at the bottom of a valley, smoke rising in lazy tendrils from its surface. A branch from a nearby tree fell into the water, immediately bursting into flames.