The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(67)

The air grew thick with the scent of building magic as the last of the ritual items had been laid out on the stones. The witch reached for her athame. If Elena didn’t keep Gerda grounded in conversation, the witch would speak her blood magic incantation and seal it to the deed. And then what would happen to Jean-Paul?

“But you escaped,” she said, desperate to keep the bierhexe talking. “How did you get out of your cell with two broken legs? What magic is strong enough to overcome that much pain and suffering? Tell me.”

The witch cocked her head ever so slightly, as if her ear had been tugged to the left. She looked over her shoulder, the corner of her wrinkled mouth twitching. “There is glorious magic to be found in the darkness,” she said, as if she had the secret tucked safely up her sleeve.

“Tell me. You said we had more in common than I knew. Is this what you meant?”

Gerda twisted full around. The smile faded. “So it’s true what they say,” she said under her breath. “At night, all the cats are gray.” She considered Elena for a moment, then nodded. “Very well.”

The witch tucked her ceremonial knife away. “There is power in dreams. You know this. But the bad ones attract a different energy than the good or the merely odd. That morning I awoke feverish, chilled, my legs broken and swollen. Certain I would die. But then a weight, solid and warm, pressed against me like a dog resting its head against my chest. I opened my eyes, and there it was grazing on the remnants of my nightmares, the smell of brimstone burning my nostrils.”

A memory flickered to life like a motion picture—a painting of a diminutive demon sitting on the chest of a sleeping woman. Elena had seen it as a child reading at Grand-Mère’s elbow as she flipped through the pages of a spell book. Fear had lodged like a stone in her young throat to know that such a thing existed.

“A demon revealed itself to you?”

Gerda’s eyes glittered bright once more in the candlelight. “He never spoke, and yet I knew he had come to save me.”

Elena’s mind raced ahead, recalling the little she’d dared to learn about the ill-natured creatures. The one thing that let her sleep as a child was the assurance they only showed themselves to a willing heart. “You made a pact? That’s what the blood is for?”

“They’re quite generous beings,” Gerda explained, taking a deep, shuddering breath before releasing it in a gush, as if exhaling all the pain she’d felt. “But they need a conduit so they can travel from their world and ours. Someone who can straddle both.”

“A witch who can see in the shadow world between.”

“They’re more than willing to pay for the journey. They’ll give you anything you desire. Money, sex, immortality.”

“Freedom?” Elena saw the deflation in the witch’s shoulders before she ignored the question.

“He showed me how it was possible to escape my prison. All it required was a small gesture to establish trust.” Gerda rubbed her arms as if she shivered inside her skin, remembering. “The midwife in the cell with me was as good as dead already. Once they’d ruined her hands with thumbscrews she confessed to sleeping with the Devil. For hours she knelt, hands pressed palm to palm like two bloated fish, uttering her nonstop apologies to the heavens. It was a mercy, truly, to spare her the fire for such a lie.”

Elena swayed on her feet and reached for the nearest column to steady herself. “You killed her?”

“Mmm, yes, but I’d bungled it by strangling her. I was supposed to draw blood. So elementary in demon magic. But I’d had to crawl on my elbows to get to her, and by then I’d forgotten my purpose. He made me go back and do it again.”

Elena leaned against the column with her hand held over her stomach. She feared she would be ill, and the reek of sulfur coming off the barrels was only making the sensation worse. If there were some spell she could speak to obliterate this woman—this lunatic—from the world so she could be free of the stench of her, she would do it. But the source of that magic resided on the other side of a dark line she knew she could not cross. Instead, she swallowed a gulp of air and continued listening to the mad confession, knowing every minute the crone kept talking was another moment Jean-Paul remained alive.

“He’d been following the Allfather on the Wild Hunt when he sniffed out my fever dreams and dropped from the astral plane to the earthly realm. Once he was satisfied I was in earnest, he anointed me in blood. Then he turned me into a blackbird, tied a small stone around my leg to keep me tethered to him, and whisked me out of the cell. We climbed the stars until we emerged within the astral plane, and there we joined the pack of hunters as they stampeded over the forests, scooping up the spirits of the dead and undead.” Gerda centered her cane before her, gripping it with both hands. “So you see, I owe him for the long life I’ve enjoyed.”

“And this transformation”—Elena gestured to the witch’s appearance—“is why you need so much blood? You transfuse it inside yourself to replenish your youth?”

“It only takes a spoonful for the spell.”

“But all those animals. And Bastien. They’d been drained. Why bleed them out if all you need is a little? Why kill them at all?”

“My dear, you haven’t been listening. The drops of blood are for me, but the deaths are always for him. Large or small, animal or human, whatever his appetite demands.”