Chapter 2

Iwokeandslowly unfolded myself from the yellowed pages of the cursed bestiary to the sound of swearing. I had felt the planar shifts—I knew the book had been pulled from one realm to the other, but still, the sharp tingle of magic over my aura was like an unexpected, and not entirely welcome, touch against my barely remembered skin.

I should have noticed it the first time the witch brought the book across the planes to the human world, but…sometimes I slept, and my absences from the waking world seemed to get longer as the years went by. If it wasn"t impossible for a creature of my caliber, I might worry whether a ghost could suffer from depression.

More likely, my spirit just wasn"t meant to be abused like this, worn away and chipped with despair. Any being would feel weary at this point.

Another round of colorful cussing shook me out of my melancholy. Once, I had been a creature of compassion and love. But somewhere along the line, the dulcet tones of a witch in distress had become music to my vengeful ears.

Fortunately—or unfortunately, for my dark tendencies—this witch appeared to be trying her best to prove there were still some good ones left. Even if she did cuss like a minotaur with a hangover.

"Are you well?" I asked, manifesting as much of a presence as I could, just in case. She was the key to destroying the Lovell abomination of a grimoire and granting my freedom, after all. It wouldn"t do to let her be damaged before she could finish the job.

Angry gray eyes met mine from under a fierce set of nearly-black brows. This witch really was…solid…for a woman. "Fucking peachy," the witch replied, rubbing her abused shin. "I must have moved that damned thing last time I was here and forgot to put it back." She shoved the footstool aside and I took the chance to study my surroundings. Ah, the infamous Lovell castle. Overkill, of course, and unpleasantly creepy, even to a ghost. The place was soaked in pain and misery. But I supposed it was a beautiful structure, under all the dark, simmering energy.

No doubt some would find it lovely just as it was. My previous owner certainly had. I barely held back a sneer. I was supposed to be convincing this Lovell to help me. "Are you sure you can trust any of the equipment here?" I asked, wincing as I started to levitate a mortar and pestle toward the box she"d brought. I thought better of it almost immediately. No. Not that item. That one had been used for something involving blood and semen a little too recently for my liking.

At all was too recently for my liking. The heavy stoneware hit the rug with a thud when I released it.

Only then did I realize my error. The Lovell witch was watching me with narrowed eyes. "You"re a poltergeist," she said, crossing her strong arms over her chest. This woman was certainly no one"s idea of delicate. Quite a few ancestors were probably rolling over in graves and all that. But maybe all that solid presence meant she was a survivor. Maybe she would at least survive long enough to destroy the damned book.

I sighed. "Yes. I"m a poltergeist."

She paced around me in a circle as I hovered over the bestiary. "Not just any ghost can effect solid objects. I knew you weren"t human." She lifted a brow. "What are you?" Those sharp gray eyes were flashing, a clever mind trying to figure out the energies coming off me—energies she had likely never encountered before.

I crossed my arms over my chest and tilted my chin in my best righteous intimidation pose. "What are you" was just a step away from "How can I use you and everything you are?" A person only fell for that once in his lifetime. Especially if it got him killed and bound to a spellbook. "I"m a ghost, woman. A shade. A specter. A spook. A haunt." I arched a brow at her. "Are you addled? A bit slow perhaps?""

She wasn"t impressed. "You know, whatever you"re hiding, I"ll figure it out eventually."

She was so sure of herself, so unconcerned. I really had no doubt she would. Eventually.

"You will certainly try," I said, swirling away to become mist, then rematerializing behind her. "But you have better things to do at the moment, Miss Lovell."

It was strange, I didn"t even know her name. Her weird, loudly dressed human roommate had come home and the witch had ignored me until the woman left again for some outing with friends. I could have sworn I heard the roommate call his new witch Andy. But that had to be a jest. No self-respecting magical practitioner, let alone a Lovell witch, would allow herself to be named Andy.

"Never," a low, rich female voice growled at me, magic lacing every word, "ever, call me that."

I blinked at the spitting fury before me. "What? Miss Lovell? Whyever not?"

Though…I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that. It was soaked into every surface, suffused the very air around this place—Lovell wasn"t a name, it was a curse. An insult. A black mark to anyone who didn"t care more about titles than basic decency and the lives of other beings.

She snorted. "My name is Oleander. But even that is theirs. So it"s Andy. Andy Love. Because that"s an acceptable human name."

She smirked, the dangerous expression just like her ancestors, but better…strangely alluring somehow. "And it sounds absolutely stupid. So that"s an added bonus." She lifted a middle finger and waved it at the hall in a rude gesture. "Fuck you, Lovells, with your fancy silver forks and your basement horror show. Fuck. You."

I gaped at the creature, with her frizzy green hair standing on end, in her ripped jeans and her anything but elegant female form. Then I did something I didn"t know I even could do in death.

I…laughed.

It didn"t feel the same. And judging from Andy"s expression, it sounded awful. But it was genuine. It was feeling something other than tired, futile rage.

"Come on," Andy said, stuffing her green hair back into a messy bun and scooping up the book. "All the better spell stuff is upstairs in the workroom." She shook her head. "Either there or in the basement. But the entire fucking world could burn before you talked me into going down there ever again. I"m stupid. Not suicidal." She rubbed the top of one foot against her opposite calf, her face pinched in remembered pain.

Ah, yes. If I recalled correctly, the basement laboratory had been booby trapped when I was last called on to serve a Lovell. Nasty work, that. The woman was lucky she still had two legs, if she"d stepped foot down there unawares.

I followed along after Andy as she made her way across the entryway to the sweeping staircase that led to the second floor. It was strange to see the Lovell mansion looking so shabby and abandoned. It was obvious no one had lived here in some time, everything just as I remembered it from when this witch"s father had last called on my powers to allow him to spy on a rival—but everything was covered in a deep layer of dust. A few items were missing here and there, expensive things that held no significant magic. Interesting. "I quite understand why you choose not to reside here," I said as I trailed along after the witch. "But why is a witch of your caliber residing in the human world?"

She huffed and kept walking, treating me to a marvelous view of her plump ass, something I wouldn"t have appreciated nearly as much when I was alive. Sadly. Being dead had a way of changing your outlook on life.

"You knew my family, right?" she ground out. "One of them…did this to you." She glanced back over her shoulder, anger flickering like a live flame in those dove gray eyes.

I was taken aback. It was…touching…that she should give a damn about my treatment. No one else of her lineage ever had. "Yes," I said slowly, drifting beside her as we reached the second story landing. "I had the unfortunate pleasure of knowing several generations of Lovells. It was your…great grandmother…I believe, who tricked me and turned me into this." I waved a see-through hand at my misty form.

She nodded, the gesture sharp and hard. "Well, then you know what kind of people they were. All of them rotten to the core. People like to throw around the word "evil." But usually they don"t use it in the right context. In the case of my family, "evil" doesn"t even begin to describe it." She shrugged. "They"re all dead. Most of the family died in some epic battle when a bunch of asshats tried to take over the magical world—the gloaming, they called it. My parents were executed for their crimes." She turned to me, trapping her full bottom lip between her teeth. "I was just a kid. Six years old. They couldn"t very well behead me alongside my parents. So here I am. But the entire magical world knows the Lovell name. If a magical family wasn"t in league with the assholes, then they probably had loved ones who were tortured or killed by them. I can"t lift a finger without drawing the attention of everyone around me."

I nodded in understanding. No one held grudges or clung to suspicion quite like a supernatural being—and witches were the worst. They had one foot in the magical world and one foot in the human one. It tended to make them more vulnerable than their supernatural peers—and more paranoid and guarded.

I followed Andy to the workroom on the second floor. It was a handsome room—if you ignored the macabre implements and the grime. A small area had been cleared on the wooden workbench under one tall, stained-glass window. Clearly this witch didn"t spend much time at the ancestral home, but it looked like she did come here from time to time. Probably when she needed to do serious spellwork. Magic came easier in this realm. She plopped the bestiary in the center of the cleared space and put her hands on her hips.

"Okay." Sighing, she stooped and riffled through a small stack of books that were tucked away under the bench, free from dust, their covers gleaming with care. "Bindings. Right." She pulled out an intermediate magic book and flopped it on top of the bestiary. "Piece of cake."

I gaped at her. "Are you jesting? You…don"t know how to do magic?"

She leveled that intense gaze at me. "Of course I know how to do magic. I"m a witch, aren"t I?" She flipped a page, running a finger down the table of contents, and her cheeks flushed a bright, angry red. "So I don"t have formal training. Big deal."

I sighed. Breathing wasn"t strictly necessary, but there were times when it was required to express one"s absolute horror. "The bestiary is high magic! It was created by the matriarch of the Lovell line. And you think you"re going to destroy it using a magical primer for children?"

She slapped her hand flat on the book and turned to me, her lips twisted into a sneer. "Do you have any better ideas, asshat? How"s your magic working ability these days? I assume if you could just spring yourself, you"d have done it by now."

I glared, feeling my aura surge within me, the little remaining dregs of my power swirling through my noncorporeal being. "I can sense strong magic in you. I assumed you knew how to use it. This is pointless." I waved at the instructional book. "Take me to an elder."

She snorted. "You want me to take this thing," she said as she shoved the bestiary across the workbench, "to an elder magic practitioner and trust that they"ll destroy it rather than hiding it away and continuing to use the people enslaved in the pages? Or better yet, maybe they"ll study it and figure out how to make a book of their very own, so they can trap even more living creatures to do their bidding."

I exploded, my misty form puffing out into nothingness while my voice remained. "Don"t be daft."

She rolled her eyes. "Spooks. Nothing but smoke for brains." Then she went back to perusing her little instructional book.

I floated in the in between, feeling lost and dejected all over again. For a moment there, I had dared hope. And that flare of remembered light made my entire being sing. But an untrained witch who had to use manuals was never going to be able to destroy the book. And the finding and subsequent loss of that rare hope was like a physical blow, after having been without it for so long.

Sometime later, I became aware of nagging. Rousing himself from my stupor, I flowed into my visible form. "Finally!" my new witch was griping. "What were you doing? Napping? Come here and tell me if this will work."

I floated over to the workbench, taking in the array of ingredients and spell paraphernalia that were littered across the surface. I had no idea how long I"d been out of it, but Andy had been busy during my break from reality. "Attempting to just destroy the whole book runs a really high chance of killing the creatures who are bound up inside it," she was saying, her strong, plant-stained hands dancing as she spoke. "And I"d probably blow myself up in the process. You just know there are counter spells and shit woven in there." She grinned at me, manic light dancing in her gray storm cloud eyes. "But I bet old Granny Crazy Pants didn"t worry too much about someone in her own bloodline coming along and teasing out the bindings one by one." She slid a pile of spellbooks over for me to look at. "See. If I do a few smaller spells at a time and tailor them to the specific creature we"re targeting—one by one—I think I can wiggle them free."

I blinked at the mad genius standing before me. "Wiggle them free? You"re insane." But as my eyes trailed over the notes she"d scribbled down and the potions and sundry items she"d prepared, I almost felt like I had a real body again—as if my heart was racing. "This…might actually work."

She gave me a dangerous smile. "It might. Are you on speaking terms with the other residents the book? Cause I"m pretty sure they"re gonna be pissed when I start yanking them out."

I rolled my eyes heavenward, praying for mercy. "We have a minimal awareness of each other, but we have been called upon to use our powers together at times. Most will at least recognize me when they emerge."

She chewed on her lip again. And really, that shouldn"t affect a dead person, but here we were. It made me wish I had a body so I could reach out and use my thumb to save the plump skin from damage. "You"re different than them," she said, oblivious to my strange thoughts. "She bound you so you can travel more freely."

At my nod, she continued. "What about them? Do they even know what"s going on? Are they aware?"

I met her eyes. "They are aware. But it"s a disjointed, unsettling sort of existence. Every time a witch uses the bestiary to call on some portion of their power, it…it"s like a portion of them is sliced off, torn away and disconnected. And when they are summoned fully, they have lost bits of time, so they will feel disoriented and defensive."

"They"re going to be angry," she said flatly. "Powerful beings, newly free, and full of rage."

I nodded again. I didn"t want to dissuade her from freeing them. But it wouldn"t do any of them any good if the first creature to emerge from the bestiary tore their helpful new witch to shreds. "And there"s also the price."

She closed her eyes and took in a long breath. "Of course." All magic came with a cost. Usually it was paid with ingredients or personal energy. But the imbalance caused by decades of imprisonment and abuse…the universe would demand balance, and the price was sure to be steep.

For one dizzy moment, I saw straight to this young witch"s soul. I saw the burden she carried and the cost she continued to pay on behalf of her family, again and again, long after they were gone from this life.

"Goddess damn them all," she muttered. Then she squared her wide shoulders, and her gray eyes took on a flinty cast. "Well, let"s free a fae. If I"m still alive after, we can tweak this process for the next one."

I reached for her without thinking, surprised when my hand skated along the smooth surface of her cheek before it sank through. Her skin was so warm. So alive. It made me ache like a physical wound. All that warmth, and I was asking—no demanding—that she risk her life to free a dead man and a bunch of cursed beasts.

Maybe I really had lost every last bit of goodness I had ever possessed.

She pulled back with a hiss, her gray eyes wide. "You touched me."

I looked away, pulling in on myself, my misty being roiling and churning on the soft ethereal currents in the room. "Apologies. Carry on."

Andy huffed, then set about placing the bestiary in a spell circle she had chalked on the dusty floor. At least she had the sense to do this here, in the non-ordinary realm. The last thing I needed on my conscience was to know we had unleashed a feral beast into the ordinary human realm.

I watched in silence as Andy lit candles and burned herbs, her magic strangely earthy and grounded for a Lovell. Then she opened her channels and started chanting, murmuring words and drawing graceful gestures to direct and unweave the magic, like a seamstress picking apart a woven blanket. I stared in wonder at the deep well of power that I could suddenly sense spiraling down, down, deep inside Oleander Lovell. She might reject her family"s legacy. But there was no denying who she was.

Thank spirit for that. Because it was going to take all that power to unweave the fae"s binding without triggering the half-dozen traps I could now see woven into the bestiary, revealed beneath the glowing streamers of Andy"s magic. Andy grunted, then her face stretched into a grim smile, her eyes closed as she maneuvered around her grandmother"s traps.

Gods and angels, the woman was actually enjoying this.

"Ah!" she gasped out at last, pulling back her magic with an almost audible click, like a key turning in a lock. A shockwave of magic rippled over the room. Andy fell to her knees as a set of short, sharp antlers began to emerge from the open pages of the bestiary.

Andy scooted back on her ass, accidentally smudging the chalk circle that may or may not have held back the being she had just released. I floated in front of her, as if I could provide some sort of protection from the fury we had just released.

Long, graceful arms lifted from the book, nimble hands gripping the edges as the fae pulled herself from the book like climbing up from a hole. Andy"s back hit the workbench as the tall, slender fae woman emerged in all her glory, naked and strong, her long limbs inked in silvery markings. The terrible fae shook her head to get the long, golden-brown hair out of her face, then lifted a hand and conjured her bow and arrows, nocking the bow and aiming it at the cowering witch. Glowing eyes and short, sharp fangs flashed as the fae"s power-laced voice filled the room.

"Lovell bitch," she said, drawing her bow, lean muscle flexing and magic flaring about her, ensuring her aim would be true. "Cower. Beg."

"Niamh," I said, holding out a hand and manifesting every bit of physicality I could manage. "Please, wait."

Andy fumbled for something in her pocket, and for one glorious moment, I thought she had a plan, a defense, some suitably devious weapon for a Lovell.

I gaped at her when she pulled out a plastic…pen. "Think I know what the price was," she slurred, her eyes going unfocused. Then she uncapped the pen thing, pulled up her shirt and slammed the device into the soft skin of her stomach. "Fuck me sideways." Her limbs trembled and her skin went pale as she listed to the side, her eyes rolling back in her head.

The fae woman snarled at Andy, ignoring me. "I will enjoy watching your blood spill, Lovell."

Then she loosed her arrow.