Page 31 of A Grave Girls' Getaway

“Don’t pick just any witches,” I said. “Point out all of Morgana’s cronies that supported her child sacrifices. If the rest of you really want to change your coven’s ways, now’s your chance.”

“No!” screamed a forty-something year old witch with parchment-pale skin and iron-colored hair.

I grunted. “Guess we know which side you were on.”

Several witches tried to run. Bones’s power flashed out, stopping them faster than the immobility spell. Then, his power reeled them back toward the sea goddess, who let out a noise that must’ve been the watery underworld’s version of “nummy, nummy.”

“That one, too,” the pretty black-haired witch said, pointing at a witch that was trying to nonchalantly back away toward the trail. “And that one. Her, too.”

When she was done, Bones held eight witches in front of the sea goddess, far more than the “substitutional” requirement to replace me, Denise, and the kid. Wow, she’d feast tonight.

A hard thump suddenly sounded to my left. I jumped until I saw that it was only Spade, Denise in his arms, landing near the edge of the bluff.

“Not finished yet, Crispin?” he asked, calling Bones by his human name as he always did.

“Almost, Charles,” Bones replied, doing the same. Bones might have chosen his vampire name after rising in a shallow graveyard full of exposed bones, but Spade had chosen his as a reminder that he’d once been referred to only by the tool his prison overseer had assigned him: a spade.

“Quiet,” said the dark-haired witch. “We’re about to begin.”

I didn’t want to watch this, but I didn’t trust them enough not to watch, so I stayed where I was and shut my mouth.

The eight sacrificial witches didn’t. They screamed out threats that abruptly ended when Bones froze their lips as well as their bodies. That made it easy for the dark-haired witch to trace those burning patterns onto their foreheads, marking them as sacrifices. When she was done, she stepped back and the sea goddess surged forward. Then the goddess passed her hand over them, giving each a single touch, before backing away.

That was it? It hardly looked lethal—

The witches suddenly collapsed. In the split second it took them to fall to the ground, they had all turned into water, leaving only multiple splashes to hit the rocks instead of their bodies. The splashes were quickly absorbed into the sea goddess, until the former eight witches were nothing more than another sheen of liquid on her glistening form. Then she, too, turned into water that splashed back down the cliff and into the waiting sea.

I would’ve been less disturbed if she’d opened her mouth and eaten them whole. That, at least, would have left the witches who they were. But she’d reduced them to nothing at all, in less time than it took to blink, and the reality of that hit me like a brick to the head.

That could have been me and Denise. It was supposed to be us, and the sea goddess had been reaching for me right before the spell broke. She’d come so close to touching me…

Rage exploded through my subconscious, almost knocking me flat as Bones’s shields cracked and his emotions burst through. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one thinking about how close I’d come to being a splash on the ground that the goddess absorbed.

Then, that door slammed shut, and I only heard his fury as he said, “You were going to do this to my wife.”

Death dripped from every word. The black-haired witch trembled as she backed away.

“We had no choice,” she said in a hoarse tone. “You saw how powerful Morgana was. She ruled us for over four hundred years! Anyone who challenged her was fed to the goddess—”

“Oh, you’ll wish for such a quick death,” Bones said as his power cracked, whiplike, through the air.

Her eyes bulged and her neck stretched to an impossible length. So did all the other witches’ necks, until they all resembled taffy being pulled by a machine.

“Stop!” I cried out.

Bones swung an amazed look my way. “Why? They meant this for you and Denise. They did this to who knows how many young lads, so they all deserve to die.”

“They do, but then none of them will be left to tell other covens like theirs that the sacrifice of innocents stops now,” I said in as strong a tone as I could manage. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could speak, let alone stand, so I had to make this count. “We found this group through their magic. In the same way, we can find the others, too, so they all need to know that we’ll be checking up on them to make sure that covens only sacrifice the worst of the worst of humanity from now on.”

Bones’s face was set in hard, unreadable planes, but for an instant, his shields cracked again, and I felt admiration threading through his vengeance-fueled rage. He recognized the logic of letting them live to warn the others about changing their ways even though he really, really wanted to kill them.

“Very well.” If death had dripped from his other words, now reluctance coated his tone. “With these terms, you may live.”

The witches’ necks stopped stretching. The ones that were vampires recovered in a few seconds, but the few humans among them dropped to the ground, dead. Then, the black-haired witch gave a solemn nod first at me, and then at Bones.

“We’ll do things differently from now on, and we’ll make sure that we’re not the only coven, or you won’t have to find the others through magic because I’ll tell you where they are.”

With that, a cloud of smoke poofed out. In the moments it took to clear, all of the witches had disappeared. Even their dead were now gone, and I blinked in disbelief.

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