Page 56 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

Evangeline nudged me and, once she’d caught my eye, placed her finger to her lips and raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She cast the quieting spell around us, and my ears popped from the sudden reduction of noise. I could still hear the faint sounds of splashing water and scuttling vermin, but they were much, much quieter within the bubble of her magic.

“The place is tiny. How are we supposed to get in without letting her know we’re here?” I whispered.

“The house always lets visitors in,” Evangeline said. “The trick is to keep it from tattling on us.”

The feeling of dark magic was so thick and cloying around me, I barely even noticed the twin smells of sulfur and human waste anymore. Evangeline carefully made her way down the slope of the cavern, stepping around mushrooms and water-slick spots on the stone. When she was just a few steps away from me, my ears popped again, signaling I’d hit the boundary of her silencing spell, and I hurried after her.

The ground at the base of the hut was scattered with sticks, barbed wire, and large gray feathers. The hut itself sat at a slightly odd angle, as though its foundation was crooked. Up close, I could see the windows were mismatched, some of old, bubbling glass covered over with ancient newspapers, and some made of oiled parchment.

Evangeline tapped me on the arm, then pulled out her phone, typed quickly, and held it out to me.

im gonna drop the silencing spell so i can talk to the hut real quick, don’t make any loud noises or sudden movements.

I nodded.

Evangeline twisted her hand through the air, and the spell fell away, making the relative quiet of the cave feel suddenly loud in its absence.

“Hello, hut,” Evangeline said, curtseying to the dark wooden wall in front of her. I erred on the side of following her lead and swept a shallow bow. “My friend and I would like to visit your mistress, please. We have a request for her.”

The hut shuddered, making the mushrooms on its roof send out a cloud of glowing spores as they bumped together. With a jerky, disjointed motion, it rose. My stomach lurched. I had heard stories of witches who lived in huts that ran through dark forests on chicken legs, but this made that seem sweetly whimsical in comparison.

Nanny Murk’s hut unfolded to its full height, standing on dozens of pigeon legs. The entire space underneath was filled with scabby limbs as diseased and twisted as the unluckiest city bird. Matted, oily feathers were packed around the bottom of the hut, and I was deeply grateful I didn’t have to see the point where wood met flesh. A thought rose unbidden to my mind: the image of a rat king, a roiling mass of rats whose tails had tangled together into an impossible knot.

The hut began to turn, a slow shuffling motion I tried not to look at too closely. It swung its door to face us. The door was made of old, scarred wood, flanked by round, mismatched windows that looked down at us like unsettling eyes.

“Please, hut, don’t tell your mistress that my friend and I are here to see her,” Evangeline said sweetly. “She surprises so many people, and we thought it would be nice to surprise her. It’ll be like a party.”

The house cocked to the side curiously.

“And every party has food,” Evangeline said. “Gabriel, give me the stuff,” she added out of the side of her mouth, not taking her eyes from the building.

I handed over the bag she’d picked up when she stopped for breakfast, and she undid the twist tie holding the clear plastic shut, then held out one of the smooth, round shapes inside temptingly.

“My friend and I brought a snack just for you,” she said. “A whole bag of bagels. And they’re a day old, which is even better.”

The hut fluffed up its feathers—a motion that seemed to extend all the way up to some of its shingles. It unrolled a staircase from the base of the door as though it was sticking out a long tongue, which unfortunately implied that we were about to walk into its waiting mouth.

“Thank you very much,” Evangeline said. She set the bagels down at the foot of the stairs, and we went up them together. When we reached the doorway, she pulled her muffling spell back up, and we stepped through into the darkness.

The inside of Nanny Murk’s hut was much larger than the outside. The room we found ourselves in was larger than the entire outside of the cottage, and such a sheer volume of stuff filled it that the floor was barely visible. Narrow pathways led through the space, curving between dusty cardboard boxes and stacks of ancient books. On one of the heaps, a Jansport full of hair sat next to a large skull. The air smelled heavily of mildew.

We eased our way through the twisting maze, trying desperately not to knock anything over. When we found a relatively clear spot, Evangeline closed her eyes for a moment, frowning in concentration, and then held out her phone to me.

i think i can feel the next piece of the artifact. its close to us.

Do you think it’s in this room? I wrote back.

Evangeline shook her head and gestured for me to follow her. We pushed aside a musty curtain and stepped into a hallway that may have once been wide, but with all the junk in it, there was barely a foot of room to walk. Faint, atonal humming came from one of the rooms that let out onto the hallway. Seized by morbid curiosity, we both paused to look.

The room was a kitchen piled high with odds and ends. It had the sickly-sweet smell of rotting fruit, and it looked as though something had been nesting in the pot rack. The sink dripped arrhythmically, sending water trickling down a heap of red-stained dishes.

The witch stood with her back to us, working industriously at a counter. She plucked a few herbs from a chipped flowerpot and tossed them into a large mortar and pestle, grinding them up as she hummed to herself. She was tall and surprisingly broad-shouldered, although her back was hunched with age. Her hair was a hectic cloud of white, dusted with flour and several substances I didn’t want to identify. A length of knotted string wrapped around several small bones and twigs had been woven into her hair and trailed down the back of her tattered gray dress.

She reached out a gnarled, bony hand and pulled a bowl closer to her. From it, she lifted a small limp body. It was a sprite—one of the tiny, relatively harmless fae that flitted around causing light mischief and hurling insults. They were pests but more useful than many people realized. Sprites kept magic balanced, absorbing stray dark magic, and converting it into wild, directionless energy, untethered but harmless. Although they came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, often changing their appearances just to stymie researchers, this one was mostly human-shaped, plump and cherubic, with skin the color of amaranth. Its transparent wings drooped down, brushing against Nanny Murk’s mottled wrist.

The witch pulled a knife from her belt. It was wickedly curved, and looked extremely sharp. With a precise, practiced motion, she began to butcher the sprite, slitting its belly and scooping its guts into her mortar. The dark, soft shapes of the organs passed through her fingers one by one. Liver, kidneys, colon. Purifying organs, I realized with a jolt of horror. She was using the parts of the sprites that filtered out the dark magic; the parts where that tainted power would be trapped and concentrated down.

Nanny Murk hummed cheerfully as she ground the little fairy’s organs into paste. The small body lay abandoned on the counter next to her, already starting to get the blurry transparency of a fae corpse on the verge of disappearing back into the flow of wild magic, collapsing in on itself like a deep-sea fish brought up to the surface too quickly. The witch poured something from a large stoneware jug into the mortar, mixed the concoction one last time, then lifted it to her mouth and began to drink.

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