Page 3 of SIN Bone Deep

“What was them?” Callista asked as she and Fennel returned to the kitchen.

“The candles,” I gestured to the spell. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Oh dear,” Fennel exclaimed as she saw them.

Callista was silent for a long moment and then reached out and put her hand on my shoulder. “You know what happened,” she said quietly. “You understood what you saw.”

“She’ll go back to him,” I said, my voice hoarse. “And he will kill her.”

Nova dragged in a horrified breath, pressing the fingers of her hands to her lips as if trying to hold it inside. “Are you sure?”

“It is time for bed,” Fennel took the sage out of its drawer and lit it. “Off to bed girls,” she wafted the smoke over us. “What will be, will be.”

TWO

Birch in the fire goes to represent what the Lady knows

– The Wiccan Rede

Iwas not concentrating. My attention was divided between doing my hair and reading about invocations, and when I glanced up to check my braid, my reflected image in the little mirror was not my own. In place of my face was a death’s head skull. In a clumsy grasp for the handle, I knocked the mirror off the table.

I winced as I heard the crack of glass.

“Fuck!” I hastily finished tying off my braid and went down on hands and knees to collect all the little pieces, cursing again as a sharp spike bloodied a fingertip.

“Mirror, mirror, broken glass,

With this rhyme, I break the curse,

Seven years of bad luck let them pass,

Turn the Fate, for good or worse.”

I balanced the pieces on the backing and sucked my bleeding finger as I shoved my feet into my shoes. Skulls in my reflection, broken glass, and blood spilled were not a great omen for the day. I needed to dispose of the broken mirror properly or the bad luck would continue.

As I stepped out into the hallway, a movement at the other end caught my eye. The spirit of an ancestor, her hair piled high upon her head and her waist cinched impossibly small, balanced a book on her palm as she crossed the hall, her ghost dissipating into tendrils of mist as it passed through the door into Nova’s room.

“Shit,” I blew out my breath.

With so many Vossen women having lived and died in the house, it was not unusual for me to see glimpses of their spirits.

Vossen women have always been witches. The family Grimoires that had survived time and violence against us went back centuries, but we knew that our history went even further back, perhaps all the way to the beginning. For us the veil between worlds has always been thinner. Every woman in the family could sense the spirits and sometimes get a sense of the unfulfilled needs that kept them refusing to move on to the Underworld.

Whilst my aunts and Nova could sense the spirits, they did not see them with the clarity that I did. My gift, my Aunt Fennel had told me, must harken back to that ancient role of guiding spirits to resolve what they felt left undone so that they could move on. That was why I had helped that grim reaper and little girl.

No… No… That wasn’t true, I admitted to myself. There had been another reason.

I worried my bottom lip staring at Nova’s door. I should follow the shade of my ancestor and see if she had appeared to me with purpose, but I was distracted, my mind on the burning eyes and gleam of white bone and horn within the shadows of the grim reaper’s hood, the gentle way those bone-like fingers had closed around those of that poor little girl, and how he had enveloped her within his robes…

My skin burned. I pulled my t-shirt away from my chest, aware that my nipples had hardened into points. “Shit,” I swallowed hard. He had been there in my dreams the night before in vivid detail. I knew the texture of his robes beneath my fingers and the smoky exotic scent of incense that clung to them. I knew the feel of his body against mine… and it had not been bone but flesh against flesh.

What was wrong with me that I was having wet dreams about a grim? I chastised myself with a heavy sigh.

I turned away from Nova’s door and continued with my errand, skirting the chaos of furniture and artifacts that occupied our home, relics of hundreds of years of Vossen witches living within its walls. Many of their faces watched me from the walls, their eyes mysterious and the curve of their lips knowing.

The Vossens had immigrated to Mortensby with the first passenger ship to the new country. It was said that we had followed an ancestor who had been transported as a convict, but we had come freely, seeking refuge in a land that was proclaimed to be one of religious freedom – only to discover that was far from the truth.

Once witches had been regarded as wise women, the ones who were sought for aid and advice and who oversaw important ceremonies and rituals. But times had changed and our role within our community had changed with it.

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