Page 106 of The Witch and His Crow

Do not fear the shadows. Caym’s last words pierced me over and over.Rule them.

I shouted until my throat bled and my lungs ached for the need of breath. Even after that I rasped out the little air in my lungs, taking solace in the pain as punishment for this. When I was exhausted, I did the only thing I could. I held the broken, empty vessel of my familiar close to me. If I could’ve stitched Caym’s flesh to mine, I would’ve. But it was no good. He was gone, and I was alone.

Truly alone, for the first time.

Grief claimed me.

In the still quiet, I heard something beside the noises I made. It was a slithering, a shifting of earth. Looking down through blurry eyes, I watched as green stems snaked up from the dark stain Caym’s blood left on the ground. It stopped me, enough to focus on what was happening. Flowers sprung from his blood, covering the entire space the stain had left until I could no longer see it. Thin springs of vine unfurled at their crown to a harsh violet-coloured, five petalled flower. No, not a flower.

A weed.

Thistlebane. It grew from my familiar’s blood, just as it had with the demon I’d killed in the catacomb beneath the castle. The same weed that blossomed outside Eleanor’s boundary around her village when the demon’s foolish enough to attempt entry would explode upon impact.

Refusing to believe what my mind was telling me, I lowered Caym’s body to the ground. The second it touched the earth, the thistlebane shrub overwhelmed him, dragging his corpse beneath its starving roots.

My hands shaking, I pulled Eleanor’s grimoire from my inner pocket. I knew exactly what page I was searching for. Once I found it, I read the sentence in my head twice, then out loud, as if that would make it any easier to believe.

‘…thistlebane blossoms in place of a demon’s demise. If harvested and used, it has the power to harm the creatures and their powers.’

Caym. Death. Thistlebane. Demons.

Four words that should’ve had no connection to one another, and yet they did.

I’d been brought up believing familiars were banned because they gave a witch too much uncontrolled power. But, as I stared down at the answer before me, I knew that reason was a lie.

Familiars were demons. That was why the Coven had banned them.

The proof was stretched out before me and written with ink in the book I held.

My Caym was—had been—a demon.

Rule them. Win. Become Grand High.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Iwould’ve stayed there for hours, keeling on the ground whilst staring numbly at the clearing of thistlebane. I’d stopped clawing at the weeds when more grew in the place of those I tore out by the root. My fingers were stained purple from the smudged petals and broken stems. I rocked back, breathless and desperate. How had I not worked it out? Caym, and his powers, his voice.

A demon. He had been a demon.

Movement caught my eye, reminding me of the world existing outside of my grief. I drew my gaze away, looking down the narrow pathway ahead of me. Just as they stepped out of view, I saw a person. And not just anyone.

‘Romy!’ I shouted, pushing myself to standing. My cheeks were slick with tears, my mind captured by the unfathomable realisation as to what my familiar had been. The lies, and all the questions that came with them.

The one that didn’t leave me was knowing how Caym came into my life. My mother had summoned him to protect me. That proved that she had, in fact, known of the monsters. Was this the power of the Grand High?

A power that would fall into the hands of the Witch Hunters if I didn’t stop them?

‘Find me.’ Romy’s sleepy voice caught on the wind. Just as it reached me, she turned down another part of the maze, disappearing from view. I ran, chasing after her. It took little time to reach the end of the earthy path, the maze walls so thick that light couldn’t penetrate them. They were so high that there was no hope of climbing over them. I turned the corner, which gave view to a shorter, narrow pathway.

Romy stood at the end with her back to me, as if she was waiting.

Tears dried on my cheeks, my chest aching from the sudden use of energy, fingers stained from the blood of my familiar and the smudging of the thistlebane.

‘Romy’ The moment her name slipped out of my mouth, she was running again. ‘Wait!’

It continued like that for a while. Me chasing Romy, calling after her, begging for her to stop. I swallowed the urge to vomit, not from exhaustion, but from fear. Horror. Because no matter how hard I ran, or how I urged myself not to stop, I couldn’t reach to her.

I’d just rounded a corner, so close to Romy that I tried to reach out and grasp the back of her shirt. But she slipped through my fingers. Not figuratively.Literally. Her body evaporated, shifting to tendrils of smoke.

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