Mist, Murder & Magic Page 3

  ‘Who are you?’ Harrow asked again, but once more she ignored him.

  Tommy rushed to Hella. ‘Oh, thank the stars. Are you okay?’ He didn’t seem interested in the appearance of the blonde woman, only that Hella was okay. That annoyed Harrow too. He—Harrow—was supposed to be the focus of attention here.

  Hella still seemed to be getting her bearings. Slowly, she nodded. ‘I think so,’ she said, her voice strained.

  While Harrow watched, distracted, he didn’t notice the witch come at him. Hunter, the little one’s sister, punched him right in the nose. Harrow’s head snapped back as dark blue blood streamed down his face.

  ‘You little—’ Harrow raised his hand back, but the blonde woman was there instantly. What was happening? Why all of the interruptions? He growled low in his throat, his tail flicking. He noticed with some satisfaction that Hunter had a gash down her stomach.

  The blonde woman was a lot to look at, especially close up, as Harrow’s vision righted itself. Her eyes were a piercing, brilliant green that he dared not turn away from. Blonde hair splayed out around her, writhing with crackling purple and white shocks, like little bolts of lightning. The rainbow blades weren’t her only decoration, either: her jacket was chock-full of other blades, all shining in the low light. And on each finger was a crystal ring, all of them glowing, as if in anger. Her nails were long and pointed, perfectly manicured black.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said simply.

  Harrow could feel the power rolling off her. He lowered his hand and instead put it to his nose, which might have been broken. Harrow realised he was breathing hard. Some of the blue blood dripped into his mouth and he spat it directly at the stranger.

  She did not look impressed as it splattered her black shirt. She arched a single blonde brow at him. ‘You child.’

  This time it was Hella who asked the woman, ‘Who are you? I mean, thank you—for saving me, us—she looked down at Tessa. But who are you?’ Hella sat on the ground with Tommy at her side. A little too closely, Harrow thought. Geez, get a room why don’t you. The thought made him angrier.

  The woman seemed to consider her answer carefully. ‘I’m a witch. You’re the promised witch. I came to help you.’ Then, she bent down and put a hand on Tessa’s head. ‘You’re connected to her, aren’t you, little one?’

  Tessa nodded.

  ‘How?’ Hunter asked. Lola hovered over the two of them protectively.

  The blonde woman looked Hella over. ‘To connect with the promised witch is a thing not done before. Who knows how it works?’

  Tommy held onto Hella tightly, murmuring something in her ear. Something nice, or calming, Harrow did not know. Harrow could see that she was crying, her green eyes full and scared. And the most awful thing about that was that it cut Harrow like a knife. Perhaps, soul or not, Tommy had been right. He did love her. And that was just his shitty luck.

  Chapter Seven

  Hella

  Hella was still trying to catch her breath. Fear gripped her insides, even though Harrow’s ice was somehow gone. She blinked, and tears streamed down her face. Harrow had tried to murder her.

  Less than twelve hours ago, she had stood in this store and put her life on the line to do the right thing for warlocks, faeries and everyone she had never known existed: the supernatural creatures who had desperately needed her to rescue them from the angels.

  Harrow had needed her.

  They all had. How had everything gone so wrong? A thought ran through her mind that surprised her: Hella wished the necromancy spell that she had unwittingly used had taken her own soul for its price, instead of Harrow’s. She could not bear to see him this way. His eyes were black depths of anger.

  It’s not his fault, she thought. It’s mine.

  Tommy held her where she’d fallen to the ground, almost in a corner behind the couch, but still in plain view of the room. Harrow watched her with those awful eyes. She wanted both to reach out to him, and for him to never touch her again. It was a contradiction, but she couldn’t help feeling both responsible and awfully, terribly betrayed. What were the lines there? If she could do it over again, she didn’t know what she would do: the same, or something different?

  If she’d asked Harrow if she should have used the necromancy spell—before the battle, before he had died—she wondered what he would say, if he knew that this would happen. And what he would want her to do if he did know the price.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Tommy whispered in her ear as the others regained their breath. Hunter was fuming. Blue blood speckled her knuckles.

  Hella couldn’t speak. Her heart was in her throat. She shook her head, more tears falling. Tommy gently pulled her closer into a hug. Hella’s attention finally fell on the stranger who had saved her: the tall blonde woman, clad in black and shiny athames. The woman seemed to sense Hella’s eyes on her and returned her gaze. It was the first time Hella had seen her eyes: a stunningly bright green. Not grass-green like Tommy’s, which resembled the earth of his magic. Not a deep emerald green like her mother’s or Elliot’s. But real green, and there was something so bizarrely familiar about them. Or maybe Hella’s mind was still trying to process the events as fresh oxygen flooded through her brain. Maybe she was just glad to have been saved at the last moment.

  ‘Hellora,’ the woman lowered herself into their little corner. ‘How are you?’

  ‘You healed me?’ Hella asked, wondering how this woman knew her birth name.

  ‘It would seem so. I’m glad. Why did this Nympha attack you?’ She flicked her head toward Harrow, who had a corner of the room all to himself. No one else dared approach him. A thick trail of blue blood ran down the wall where he’d been thrown and her stomach tightened even more.

  Hella wanted to say, I don’t know, or Because I deserved it. Instead, she said, ‘I brought him back to life. I didn’t know what I was doing, and that spell had a cost. My soul or his.’

  ‘It took his,’ the woman said, nodding. ‘Necromancy is a dark and dangerous art, Hellora.’

  Hella nodded, blinking through her tears. The woman’s face was neither hard nor soft. Hella could not tell if those green eyes were made of steel or kindness. Hella guessed the woman was late thirties, but she could be anything. There was a strength, a power to the woman that made everything else hard to establish. But she had saved Hella.

  ‘How did you know he was hurting her?’ Tommy asked, voicing Hella’s thoughts.

  ‘Witches are connected,’ she said simply, as if reluctant to speak of her powers.

  ‘Can we at least know your name?’ Tommy asked. Now that the immediate danger had passed, Hella saw, Tommy had switched back to his ever-polite, practical-self. If she were not so shaken, it would have made her smile. He was dependable like that, she thought. Solid.

  ‘My name is Piper Harlem.’ The corner of her mouth quirked in half a smile.

  ‘I’m Tommy Terra,’ he said. ‘And I guess you know Hella somehow?’

  Piper nodded. ‘She’s a sister witch.’

  Piper, Hella thought, was not one to give out information easily. The woman was being vague, and if Hella were not so tired and emotional, she would press her herself. But now, having barely even rested since the battle of the angels, Hella would very much like to sleep now. For like three days.

  As if sensing her fatigue, Tommy carefully hauled her to her feet. ‘Maybe you should come back to the Warlock House with me.’ He eyed Harrow, as if making sure he knew he was not welcome.

  ‘Actually, she should come back to Faerie House,’ Hunter said. ‘You might have healed her,’ she said to Piper, ‘but she’s still not looking so good. I’ll get Amara to fix her up, and we need to monitor Tessa, too. We still don’t know the extent of their connection.’

  At the mention of Faerie House, Piper stiffened. ‘Fine. But I’m taking Hellora there.’

  Tommy’s grip tightened around Hella’s waist. ‘I’ll help.’ It was not a suggestion, Hella t
hought.

  As if maddened by the lack of attention, Harrow growled loudly. ‘I’m not done with any of you.’ He raised his hand again, black eyes on Hella but Piper was at his throat before Hella could flinch. She held a blue athame to Harrow’s throat which matched his skin and Marks. His tail twitched.

  ‘You are done,’ Piper told him.

  Harrow’s eyes blinked back to vertically-slit blue. It was familiar to Hella now, and she almost wanted to go to him. The pain at her throat and the cool chill through her veins held her back and she clutched at Tommy instead.

  ‘Look, witch, I don’t know who you are, but you should leave while you still can.’ Harrow slashed out at her with his claws, raking down her stomach. Piper cried out, lowering the athame. ‘Hella,’ Harrow started, walking toward her. ‘Maybe you didn’t mean to do what you did. But now that you have—’ She was surprised to hear a hitch in his voice. Tommy stood between them, but Harrow barely glanced at him as he gripped the other warlock boy with his ice and tossed him aside. ‘You were my fire,’ Harrow said to her. ‘You must die by my ice.’ He grabbed her again, this time so hard and so sudden that she did not have time to gasp. Everything went cold. Hella heard poor little Tessa cry out. Then everything was purple and white.

  Piper’s fire engulfed Harrow, who screamed, dropping Hella. Piper’s blonde hair crackled out around her, streaked with her fire. ‘I told you, warlock, you’re done. You attack my daughter again, and I will burn you alive.’ She let him go, and Harrow crumbled to the ground. Hella smelled singed hair.

  ‘What did you say?’ Hella breathed.

  Piper turned to her, keeping an eye on Harrow, who seemed to have no intention of getting up again. ‘This is not how I intended to tell you, Hellora.’ For the first time, Piper’s impassive face changed, and she looked a little bit vulnerable. ‘It might not make sense to you, but I am your birth mother. The one you know, who raised you, it’s not her. I was forced to give you up. I came here because I can sense you.’ She turned and grabbed Harrow by the chin, her nails digging into his skin, and pulled him to his feet. He did not look happy about that. ‘I sensed that he was killing you. Would you like me to kill him for you?’

  Hella’s head swam. She tried to open her mouth, to ask a thousand questions, but her heart fluttered, over-worked and exhausted, and she passed out. She felt Tommy’s hasty arms around her and Net say her name.

  Chapter Eight

  Maddie

  Madeline Morton had been turned into a werewolf exactly a year ago. As she glanced up at the full moon hanging low and golden in the night sky, the stars dazzling around it, she felt the change wash over her like a tidal wave.

  Against her volition, her lips pulled back from her teeth, she howled into the night, her cries echoing into houses that would dismiss her call as a ‘gust of wind’ or a ‘wild dog’. Looking for her pack, she reminisced on the thought that humans—she had stopped thinking of herself as one some time ago—would always recoil from that which they consider ‘other’. Maddie’s mother certainly had. Now that it had been a whole year, Maddie had almost stopped missing her family.

  Almost.

  But not quite.

  Though she had found a new family in her pack. She howled again, calling for them. Maddie did not want to be out alone, prowling the streets, when there could be angels or demons or whatever the hell was going on these days.

  She knew one thing, though. Werewolves, the outcasts of Cambions, would always have something or someone to fear. Of that, she was sure.

  Chapter Nine

  Hella

  For a time when Hella felt neither conscious nor unconscious, when she seemed to float in a dark limbo somewhere in between, she had a striking thought that she might really be dead and that this was the afterlife. As a normal sixteen-year-old girl, she had never given a lot of thought to what lay beyond life. She didn’t know if she believed in Heaven and Hell. Now, she knew that they existed: she had banished the angels back to Heaven, and she imagined that Hell was home for demons. As far as witchy beliefs went, no one had told her what they believed, but she hadn’t expected a place so shadowy and endless.

  There was nothing. Nothing to see or touch. She wasn’t even sure she was really standing on anything, rather floating or… something. There was only darkness and gloom. Behind that, though, inside of her was a deep and swelling ache of pain: that stinging horror of betrayal. She recognised the feeling from when her father—well, at the time she thought Finn was her father—had tried to kill her for being magical and for using her powers to help other magical people. In the end Hella had ended up killing him in self-defence. That was the double-edged sword of betrayal, that it could cut both ways, because she had betrayed him, too.

  Hella had not known about the magical world for very long, and that she was a witch, but it seemed like a lifetime’s worth of danger she had endured since then. It seemed almost inevitable that she should die, after all, looking back on what she had somehow survived. When she thought about it, it made sense. Hella’s first foray into the real world was the demon, Azazel. Thinking back on it now, as she floated in darkness, she thought he must’ve been teasing her: the way he’d walked up to her, so brazenly on the street by the café in broad daylight, and flashed those piercing yellow demon-eyes at her. She remembered now how he had chuckled at her reaction. Then it was Malachai, a true reflection of the angels’ once-devastating power and authority of all things magical. He had stabbed her in the leg with his sharp feather and slashed at her throat as a warning. Everything from there had tumbled into chaos, blood and heavenly fire. Hella was rather surprised she had lived this long.

  It was heart-breaking, though, that it was Harrow who had killed her.

  Harrow, that warlock who had become so familiar, had always had such deep, layered eyes. In her gloom, that’s what she saw now, the myriad hues of deep, cracked and pained blue of Harrow Nympha’s eyes. Back when she had first met him, she had always seen a coat of bitterness over him, like a sheen, and it was deepest in the darkest depths of his eyes, especially when he shimmered and they turned vertically slit. Those blue eyes had once looked at her with care: when he’d saved her from The Force and broken her out, she couldn’t forget the fear in his eyes, fear for her safety. He’d even shown her his vulnerability when he’d first shyly shimmered for her, back when she didn’t really understand it. That blue, she’d always thought, was like the sea roiling in a vicious storm. She never would have believed that Harrow—she had just begun to think of him as her Harrow—could do this to her. Then again, she thought, it was not really him. Not anymore. If the spell had taken her own soul, she wondered what she would have been capable of too.

  Something caught her attention in the darkness. A light. Something bright, and she reached out for it, wanting something to hold on to in this empty abyss. A part of her wondered if she could astral out of here, but, as if her mind had already given up hope, she just reached for the glowing gold light.

  And then she was shoved violently back into her body and sat up as if she had never breathed before, choking and coughing. The golden light, she knew now, looking up, had been Piper’s blonde hair, streaming over her as her alleged birth mother brought her back, her hands aglow in purple-white light.

  ‘Oh, Hellora. Stay with me. You’re okay.’ Piper held her sitting up, a hand on her head. Hella still felt as if she could not breathe, as if there were knives dancing in her throat. She gripped Piper’s arm, hard, her eyes undoubtedly wild.

  ‘She can’t breathe,’ Tommy said somewhere to her left.

  Piper leaned forward, her hands now aflame, and Hella flinched back. ‘No, no. Trust me.’ Piper held her firmly still, and then Hella swallowed the fire Piper pushed down her throat. It felt like warm, delicious soup. Not too hot, just perfect. Hella swallowed, breathing easier.

  ‘Are you okay?’ It was Tommy, his own grass-green eyes wide, his hand on her arm.

  Hella tried to nod, t
hen remembered. Her head whipped about, searching for Harrow. Who, to her surprise, was tied up on the floor at the foot of an armchair. He looked furious. Hella looked back at Piper, her brows raised.

  Piper shrugged. ‘I would have killed him for you, but this one suggested you might not want that.’ She looked at Tommy, who was staring at Harrow. He seemed to be searching for something familiar in him, but did not seem to find it. Harrow’s face was as cold as his magic.

  ‘I don’t want you to kill him,’ Hella confirmed. She got up and, against Tommy’s wishes—he tried to pull her back—approached Harrow. She knelt down to him, trying to find that same boy she had kissed in the park. The one who had kept her close to protect her at the Cambion Den. The one who had come to save her at The Force.

  He shimmered. For once, his tail was still. He didn’t look angry anymore. ‘Everyone, get out,’ he said quietly. There were several people here now, Hella realised. Some she knew well—or, as well as she could in such a short amount of time—others she didn’t. But even Piper and Lola, the ones she knew the least, shook their heads firmly. The others outright scoffed, or told Harrow where he could stick that suggestion.

  Hella felt a surge of gratitude despite the situation. Every one of them had come here to save her. But now, she needed them all to go home. ‘It’s okay, guys. Thank you all for your help.’ Her eyes landed on little Tessa. ‘Are you okay?’ Tessa looked from Hella to Harrow and back, anger and betrayal in her young eyes. She surveyed Hella, then nodded slightly.

  Piper came to stand beside her. ‘I won’t leave you alone with him,’ she said, sounding awfully protective for someone Hella had met about ten minutes ago.

  ‘Yes, you will. I want to talk with you, but I need to speak to Harrow first. You can wait in there.’ Hella nodded to the main room of the store. She acted surer of herself than she was, keeping her face calm and firm. Piper seemed like the kind of woman who was not used to being argued with, but she did as she was asked. Tommy put his hand on her shoulder briefly, then left too. Nerretti looked thoroughly dishevelled and worried. Suddenly, Hella thought he looked like a concerned uncle and smiled at the thought. ‘Net, please?’ she said, and he nodded obligingly, and waited with Piper.