The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(27)



University students? Possibly. They’d always flocked to the village on their summer breaks, accosting any woman in a fringed shawl to read their palm or sell them a love potion. Some, though, did go looking for more, like hex stones and evil talismans to use on their enemies. The sort of items a certain pair of witches liked to hawk out of the back of their mule cart. Her skin still prickling from a roused instinct, she thanked the clerk for his help and stepped back onto the street with no better idea of where to find Jean-Paul than when she’d started. How could no one have seen him? Unless he never came to the village after their fight.

Her mind tumbled over demons and dead cats as she turned left at the next street corner. A block later she turned left again, letting her feet lead her far from the center of the village to the low road, where the gutters fizzled into open sewers and dogs with matted fur slinked between overturned rubbish bins. The ugly business with the dead animals still nipped at the heels of her instincts as she walked past the barrel maker, farrier, and laundry shop at the end of the lane. At last she stood at the mouth of a desolate alley upwind of the last establishment in town. It meant something, all those killings. She felt it in her blood. And if Jean-Paul genuinely didn’t wish to be found, then perhaps there was another way to salvage the trip to the village. After all, he wasn’t the only missing person she was looking for.



The old building had barely changed in the years Elena had been gone. And probably hadn’t in the two hundred years it had been standing. Or leaning, rather. The dilapidated tavern and flophouse known as Grimalkin & Paddock’s had rightfully been kept at arm’s length from the rest of the village. It was the sort of place most mortals never heard about. They didn’t dare venture into the grubby dead-end street overrun with rats and sewage and transient witches.

These were not the sought-after vine witches who tended the vineyards and stirred the magic inside the grapes to encourage the wine. No, the spirit folk who limped through Grimalkin’s existed on the fringes, dabbling in the junk arts like erectile potions, cures for warts, and penny jinxes to inflict a rival with a case of pink eye, which they hocked on the high street to the gullible on festival days. And occasionally there were witches who practiced the darkest shades of magic out of sight of the All Knowing’s eye. Summoners of murder, whisperers of ambition in powerful men’s ears, and perhaps conjurers of transmogrification curses.

Yellow gaslight gleamed inside the tavern. Yet even the glow had a dingy quality, diminished to a greasy haze from the buildup of smoke and grime on the windows. Elena emerged from the alley thankful she’d worn the old goatherd’s clothes. On the main street the clothes had made her invisible among the well-heeled villagers, but here she’d be scrutinized with third-eye vision by the aura readers, psychics, and overly curious. The clerk’s quick observation earlier had her dim her spectral glow to better match her appearance and mask her true identity long enough to ask a few anonymous questions.

The hinges on the enormous door screamed like a wounded man as she entered the tavern. She skirted the small crowd seated near the fire, keeping her head down. A few raised their noses, squinted their eyes at her, and then turned their attention back on their mugs when she proved unremarkable. Having passed the first test, she sat in an alcove built for two at the back of the room. A stub of candle fused to the center of the table flickered to life as a dangling cobweb floated above her head on an invisible wave of warm air. Nearly a dozen witch-folk huddled over meals of lumpy soup and frothy brew, despite the early evening hour. Though it was nearing dusk, many, she knew, were only beginning their day, as their work often called for the cover of darkness. She looked from face to face, hoping for a spark of recognition or a sense of déjà vu, but the only sense of the familiar she picked up on was a fellow vine witch, past her prime, seated in the corner. She sipped a glass of garnet wine, smacking her tongue as she tasted. Elena inhaled the whiff of cherries, black currants, and dark coffee. A Chateau Vermillion? No. The minerality was wrong. More likely it was one of Bastien’s new labels. His scent was everywhere lately.

She’d just brushed the unwanted thought aside when a gray-haired woman with gray skin and pale-gray eyes approached her table with a quill and parchment in hand. Madame Grimalkin.

“What’ll you have?”

The red wine tempted. “Gin . . . and information.”

“Can you pay, étranger?”

Elena set three coins on the table. Madame Grimalkin nodded and slid the change into her apron pocket.

“The gin I can manage, but the information depends on what kind you’re after.”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Aren’t we all?”

The gray woman held up two fingers to the rotund man polishing glasses behind the bar and called for the gin. She took the chair opposite, eyes squinting as if trying to decipher the aura around her newest customer. “You haven’t been in here before—I’d know. Give me your palm.”

Elena tried not to stare at the woman’s gray teeth as she opened her hand on the table. It was all part of the ritual, of verifying her identity to see if she was who and what she claimed to be. She hoped the woman didn’t read anything into the dampness that slicked the shallow crevice of her lifeline.

The woman made a soft rumbling noise in the back of her throat as her third eye probed the edges of Elena’s thin disguise. She cradled Elena’s hand in hers, dragging her fingernail over the open palm and tapping briefly on the lines for the heart, mind, and fate. After tilting her head one way and then the other, she looked up with an unnerving grin. “I’d say you know your way around poisons. And you’re searching for the person who cursed you.”

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