Especially when I saw what rested on the ground.
Her eyes stared at the skies above, blank and unseeing, as I maneuvered my body over the edge and went through the window. The witch who’d come to inform me of the death stayed behind, pressing her hand to her mouth.
The body of the young witch was half-wrapped in thorny vines. Her arms and legs covered by roses as if the plant could claim her body for itself and pull her into the earth in that very spot. They moved over her skin, writhing and alive in ways I hadn’t seen in decades.
I stepped closer to her, recognizing her as one of the students we’d brought from outside Crystal Hollow. She was one of the Thirteen—one of the few students in attendance who did not have a family history within the boundaries of the town.
Few knew the truth of the events that had predated the massacre that killed so many of our numbers. Even fewer knew the gory details of the reality the Thirteen students of that year had faced.
I couldn’t recall the witch’s name, but I bent down at her side. Reaching forward, I touched a finger to each of her eyelids—drawing them closed. It horrified me to think that none had bothered already, and I looked up to glance at the gathered crowd.
Willow caught my eyes immediately, staring at the body in confusion. I suspected the young witch hadn’t seen much death in her life until her mother left her.
“We should close the school. Now,” George said, voicing a thought I knew Susannah would not agree with. The Covenant made eye contact with one another, and even Susannah sighed as she shook her head. Her chest fell, her boney body sagging even when there was no air in her body.
Or you know, lungs.
“We will not allow whoever is responsible for this to deter our students from the education they deserve. It must be a copycat, someone who thinks to joke by instilling that terror in the students once again,” she said, and I wondered what it would take for her to see the reality.
If this happened once again, there would be no new blood for her to mix with her witches.
“What of Willow? She isn’t safe here,” George said, glancing toward where the Witchling watched our interaction closely. She growled, the sound rivaling the fiercest of Vessels as she lifted herself over the ledge and into the Courtyard.
She passed by the Covenant, ignoring them entirely as she touched a hand to the vines that had wrapped themselves around the young witch. She pulled at them, muttering beneath her breath in Latin and commanding them to let go of the bounty they’d discovered. The vines obeyed, retreating into the ground slowly, as if they no longer wanted to cause the witch further harm.
“They wouldn’t listen to me,” a male voice said, and I looked up to stare into the brown eyes of the Bray elder. Suspicion lurked in his gaze as he looked at Willow, as she lifted dirt from the ground and rubbed it into the welts on the dead witch’s body. “Interesting that they will listen to you. Almost as if they recognize you.”
“That’s because they do,” Willow said, looking over the rest of the witch. She searched for wounds, I realized, looking for the cause of her death. “I made an offering to this Courtyard when I arrived at Hollow’s Grove.” She pushed the other woman’s blazer away from her chest, wincing when the fabric stuck to her skin.
The blood from the hole in her chest had begun to dry, sealing the fabric against her. She must have lay here undiscovered for quite some time for that to happen.
As it had been fifty years ago, something had been taken from the witch—something vital. Where her heart should have been was nothing but a gaping hole, and Willow stared into it. The other students who had gathered reacted far differently than she did, shocked gasps filling the courtyard.
But Willow just stared in silence, her gaze remaining fixated when others were driven to look away from the blood and gore. As if she couldn’t take her gaze off it. “There’s no sign of her heart anywhere,” she said, rocking back onto her heels as she finally turned that inquisitive stare away. “What happened to it?”
She touched a gentle, probing finger to the slash marks across the witch’s chest, the grooves far too deep to have been made by anything human.
“We haven’t found it,” Susannah answered, snapping out of her trance and stepping forward. She grasped Willow by the forearm, attempting to drag her to her feet as I fought against the urge to tear her bones off the Witchling.
“Why don’t you tell us what you did with it, girl?” Bray asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“You think I did this?” Willow asked, her voice rising as if she couldn’t stop the ripple of shock that stole through her body.
“You made an offering and days later, a witch is dead in the same spot. I do not think that a coincidence,” Bray said, glaring at Willow.
She quirked her brow as she rose to her feet, tipping her head to the side in a way that was far more primal than any witch I’d ever seen. Something about the angle made my spine tingle with awareness, with the knowledge that Bray had made a grave mistake.
“If I wanted to kill someone, it wouldn’t be a witch I didn’t even know,” she said, and I watched as she clenched her jaw. “If I kill, I won’t be stupid enough to leave the body lying around.”
“Enough,” Susannah said, sighing as she glared at Iban’s uncle.
The elder Bray didn’t hesitate to clamp his mouth shut, silencing whatever retort he’d been prepared to deliver. It entertained me greatly that Willow was destined to sit on the Tribunal with him upon completion of her studies at Hollow’s Grove, that as the only remaining Madizza witch, she would become his equal immediately upon graduation.
It would serve him right.
“Willow has no motivation for killing one of the Thirteen,” Susannah said.
“Perhaps she’s killing off those she is in direct competition with, getting rid of anyone who may pose a threat to her interests,” Itar Bray said, and the smirk that came over his voice was nothing short of cruel. “Iban was quite cozy with Miss Sanders before you arrived at Hollow’s Grove.”
He watched Willow, waiting for the moment when her hurt showed, where she crumpled like the jealous schoolgirl he clearly thought her to be. Instead, she jerked her arm away from the Covenant, stepping toward Itar until she stopped directly before him and glared up into his smug face. He had the common sense to falter in that look, his mouth twitching as she smiled.
“What on earth makes you think I give a single fuck who Iban spent time with before he knew me?” She pressed up onto her toes, leaning closer as I fought back the rumble of laughter that fought to break free from my chest.
I didn’t know what I’d expected when the Covenant sent me to retrieve the sole remaining Madizza witch, but it definitely hadn’t been Willow with earth in her heart but fire in her blood.