The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(47)

“Wow! She did it. She got out.” Yvette spun in a pirouette. “I’d heard about it, but I never thought I’d ever see one combust in front of my very own eyes.”

Elena hugged the blanket to her chest. She’d thought she knew every kind of magic there was, but clearly she was wrong. “How could she survive burning without a protection spell?”

Yvette picked up the cigarettes and matches and stashed them behind a loose stone in the wall. “Thought you vine witches were all educated. You didn’t know she was a jinni? They’re made of fire. Of course she survived.”

“A jinni?” Grand-Mère had always made them out to be more myth than real. Wisps of smoke carried on the wind. The scent of premonition. A streak of madness in an otherwise calm mind.

“One joined the carnival after the last World’s Fair,” Yvette said, taking a last, deep inhale of her cigarette. “He’d traveled across two continents to see the wonders of the new age and then ended up fascinated and in love with our fire juggler. Craziest thing you ever saw, the two of them. Sparks flying every time they held hands.”

A door slammed in the corridor, followed by the sound of running feet. Yvette scuttled into her corner, waving a hand to clear the smoke. Elena stood frozen over the burn mark on the floor, still clutching the blanket.

The prison guard bolted for the cell bars. “Oh, no, no, no!” He reached for his whistle and sounded the alarm. Matron waddled in two minutes later, her robe flowing out behind her.

“What happened? Where is our third prisoner?” The matron cast a spell to illuminate the cell and saw the black char pile in the center of the floor. “She escaped by fire? How did she get access to a flame?” She nearly rattled the teeth out of the poor young guard as she shook him by his lapel, demanding an answer.

“That one,” he said, pointing at Elena. “She had a visitor.” Matron shook him again, so he added in his defense, “It must have been her attorney. They don’t get searched.”

Matron narrowed her eyes at Elena. “You’ll regret this,” she said and snapped her fingers at the guard. “Sound the tower alarm. Notify the mayor. We have a killer on the loose.”



Elena sat up and counted the stars through the bars on the window. More than a thousand of them flickered in the black space within the narrow frame. She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders, inhaled the trace of incense left behind by its previous owner. To be made of fire in a world full of fuel—a whirling dervish of controlled rage, spinning beneath the eye of the All Knowing—the notion sent a chill rippling over her skin.

To burn until even your bones turned to ash, yet survive the transformation without aid of a spell . . . Sidra had been right. For a person’s essence to survive, it had to be so entwined with the core being that chains and counterspells couldn’t impair it, which was why she’d been able to hold on to just enough of herself to stay yoked to her intellect and escape the curse. Her second sight had opened a pathway that allowed her to survive because it was intrinsic to who she was. Just as a jinni was made of fire. And a murderer was drawn to blood.

Yes, that too was something that resided within. She’d once thought herself capable of committing murder, dipping her hands in the blood of revenge to be free of the pain of her curse, but it was a stain her hands would not wear. When faced with the deed she proved no murderer. Yet whoever killed Bastien must bear that brutal streak in their skin, in their hair, and on their breath. They would be imbued with the stench of it, because blood and death were a part of their essence. But what would make a person turn to such depravity? She understood the mind exploring the thrill of the risk, but to leap to the act?

A warning crawled up her back one joint at a time to perch on her collarbone. The archaic rules of blood magic tumbled over in her mind. What value was there in spilling the blood of a fox or cat? Or Bastien’s for that matter? And what spell would allow for either one? For all her powers of second sight, she was blind to its meaning. And without her freedom she was as helpless as any stumbling mortal to figure it out.

She knocked the back of her head against the wall in frustration. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“What, you should be at the cabaret drinking champagne?” Even after Matron’s threat, Yvette smoked a defiant last cigarette after lights out, blowing the smoke high into the air, daring the guards to catch her.

That one was trouble. Too young to foresee the consequences of her rebellion, yet too savvy to claim ignorance in how she might also take others down with her actions. The stars said as much. Emboldened by the dark phase of the moon, the constellations twisted round in their infinite sky, slowly corkscrewing into the future, divining immutable futures for those still awake and gazing up.

“You’ll get us both shackled to the floor if you don’t get rid of that thing.”

“Oh là là, aren’t we feisty tonight.” The young woman stubbed out the butt of the cigarette on the floor near the place where Sidra had incinerated herself. “Happy now?”

“Not at all.”

She ignored Yvette’s rude flick of the fingers under her chin and stretched out on her side to rest her head on her folded arm. The guards had scraped the surface ash from the floor earlier to gather evidence, but a sooty stain remained. Elena stared at it with a stab of jealousy before closing her eyes.