22. Sabbat

twenty-two

An hour later, Milla re-entered the bizarro-world version of her home. The same hardwood flooring and soft off-white paint with its faint greenish tint. The same arcing entryways and open-concept flow from the kitchen to the living room, where a coven of witches huddled around a coffee table that had not been there the night before.

Darkly jerked his head up as she and Diego entered and burst to his feet, the sudden movement and his outfit startling Milla to a halt. Though she had seen the clothing hanging in his closet, seeing the witch in a tight black V-neck, a slouchy heather gray beanie, and low-slung faded black denim jeans was a different experience altogether.

She trawled her gaze from the arresting green eyes staring at her from behind tortoiseshell glasses down to the cuffed hem of his jeans brushing the top of black matte leather boots. The overall effect was, for lack of a better word, mouthwatering. She licked her lips and made the mistake of meeting his gaze.

“Please.” He gestured to his vacant seat, and the rasp in his voice broke Milla from her thirsty shock. She glanced at his vacant seat and the witch beside it.

Icy blue eyes, white blonde hair, broad shoulders, and a cold, stoic expression.

Her back hit the wall, pulse thundering as Agent Sterne tipped his head in a tight nod.

“Milla?” Diego’s face hovered into view, but she couldn’t look away. The tips of her fingers tingled, and she pressed harder against the wall, every muscle in her body taut. If she was fast enough, she could make it out the door before Agent Sterne tackled her. This was her neighborhood, her city. With luck and adrenaline, she could make it across the Flagler campus and lose him in the Colonial Quarter.

The tingling spread into her hands, and white static bled from her toes into her feet. She bit her lower lip, the flash of pain not enough to distract her from the fright of seeing Agent Sterne here because wherever he was, the other witch wasn’t far away.

“I know what you are thinking.” Milla twitched her head to the side, startled by the presence of a witch she had not noticed. A hair taller than Diego, slight and entirely nondescript, he had wedged himself into the corner of the room. Leaning closer, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They are all so tall.”

“But now Milla is here.” Diego brushed fingers against her arm, settling her in the here and now. The tingling receded, bit by bit, and after an odd lurch in her belly, she took a long, slow breath. “Our numbers are growing.”

The other witch laughed and nudged Milla with his shoulder. “Cyrus,” he said. “It is nice to see you again.”

“Again?” She stared at him, unable to place his face, but who could? No remarkable features, no birthmarks or blemishes to recall. He was the most normal, boring-looking person she had ever seen and yet, something about that struck her as familiar. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall—”

“No one does.” He shook his head sadly and gestured to his face. His voice was rich and thickly accented, perhaps the most distinguishing feature about him. “Features only a mother could love. If she could remember what I looked like.”

“Your utter forgetfulness has served us well on more than one mission,” Lou called from across the room. “And now that we are all here, finally , we can get started.”

“Lou, you have already met,” Cyrus told Milla. He smiled dotingly at Lou, a feat she didn’t think was possible. “And that is Rai Zhou.” He pointed to the vinefica, who waggled fingers at her. “But I believe you know her as well?”

“Yeah.” Milla nodded.

“Good. The stern-looking German is Tobias Sterne.” He pointed to Agent Sterne. “We were fortunate to have him in the cells to look after you.” Darkly snorted, drawing attention to himself as he took a seat. “Keir, of course, who we are glad to have back in fighting form, which brings us to me, who you do not remember from your arrest.”

Milla stared at him, running through the faces of the witches she recalled. Agent Sterne in his bathing suit, the large meteomantic, Lou, a Green Witch, and—“The hippocromantic.”

“The what?” Cyrus looked affronted.

“In the trees. You had the medical bag,” she explained. “And in the ambulance, I thought …”

“Cyrus does not like to get his hands dirty,” a new voice said.

“And that,” Cyrus smiled and pointed at the large witch entering the room, “is Donmar Bolatov.”

Donmar gently squeezed Darkly’s shoulder as he made his way to Lou. Milla immediately recognized him as the meteomantic who had so gently handled her during the arrest. Just as she remembered, he was a towering mass of muscle and padding. Crow’s feet sprung from the corners of his eyes, and his deeply tanned, wind-worn skin, warm against a cream henley, belied his Way as a weather witch.

“He prefers to fiddle with technology.” Donmar winked at Milla with a tip of his head toward Cyrus.

“It is how we got your location off of Keir,” Tobias stated, his intense gaze leveled directly at Milla.

“Wait.” She found Darkly on the edge of his seat, fingers digging into the armrest. “What?”

He opened his mouth to say … something, but Lou cut him off. “Not now, Toby.”

“It is best to get that out of the way,” Toby said, each word clipped and precise. “How else are we going to work together as a team?”

“I agree,” said Rai. “If Milla cannot trust us, what is the point of having her here at all?”

“Now is not the time.” Lou gestured to the coffee table, covered in tablets and reports. Graphs identical to the one she had shared with Milla in the cell were repeated over and over again, along with photographs of abandoned ritual sites, C.R.O.W. identification profiles, and city maps. “We have a coven of rogue witches to hunt down and a new recruit to train up.”

“If you intend on keeping her in the dark, then toss her back into that dank cell,” Rai sassed back. A silence that could only be described as pre-explosive filled the air.

“No one is putting Milla anywhere,” Darkly rumbled after a moment. “Cyrus, explain; she willnae hear it from me.”

“Rude,” Milla said, more on instinct than anything else. Who was he to decide what she would or would not hear?

“Factual,” Darkly retorted, which, fair .

“Oh!” Cyrus clapped his hands, glee lighting up the plain features of his face into something almost memorable. “You will love this.” He summoned a tablet and huddled close to Milla. “The update is being pushed to all C.R.O.W. issued e-grims at the end of the month, but here, let me show you.”

His fingers flew across the screen, sorting through a file, pulling up a report, and fiddling with settings. “We first noticed your signature in the reading from the Fountain of Youth, see?” He angled the screen and pointed to multiple spikes and lines on a graph. “When I isolated Keir’s signature and removed it, it left us with the desecrant and an anomaly.” More taps and one of the lines, wavering at what Milla interpreted as a lower resonance, or whatever the technomantic term would be, vanished. “The desecrant’s signature matched the readings another team pulled from Hattiesburg, but the anomaly stumped us.”

“Until I left my E.R.I.E. running during lunch with Keir,” Donmar said.

“Exactly!” He tapped the screen again, showing Milla yet another chart with two disparate waveforms over a faint gray blur.

She nodded, even though she had no idea what he was showing her. Lou had explained that each line was a different magickal signature, a different Way, but she hadn’t considered that the E.R.I.E. would also register desecrants.

“This is Donmar, see?” He traced a series of slow ramping lines climbing the y-axis, driving his finger down when they reached their apex and plummeted into a brief flatline, only to begin climbing again. “And here is Keir.” He traced a typical-looking wave, the basic sort she remembered from her pre-calc textbook in high school. “And here is our anomaly.”

Instead of tracing a third line, he tapped the screen twice. The image increased, and what Milla had at first taken as a blur or a smudge became a rapid waveform, the peaks and valleys so tight they were practically on top of one another.

“The E.R.I.E. syncs with my e-grim every hour,” Cyrus continued. “I had a ping set to alert me whenever another anomaly occurred, and it did—when Donmar had lunch with Keir.” Milla glanced at the witch in question, who stared at the table’s edge, his mouth a firm, thin line. “From there, I cross-referenced the anomaly with the Fountain of Youth and your home, which is lovely, by the way, and then widened the field to see if I could determine your location.”

“Wait.” Milla straightened as all of the lingo clicked into place. “You’re saying that you,” she pointed at Cyrus, “got my location off of Darkly.”

Cyrus nodded fervently, showing her yet another readout on his e-grim. This one was a map of the greater Jacksonville area, all the way down to Daytona. St. Augustine was all but obscured by a black circle, set to a low enough transparency that she could still make out the major roads and waterways, as was Jacksonville, and just north of Daytona, where the Halifax and Tomoka rivers met, was another.

“All rituals and Ways leave an echo,” he said, “a social distortion and yours is no different. The magick you used to confront the Loa is still registering on the E.R.I.E. scans taken from the Fountain of Youth. Whatever else you did, it lingers on Keir as well.”

Again, her attention drifted to Darkly, who had slunk down on the couch, spinning a glossy vape pen in his hands and looking everywhere but at her. Had he told them how her Way had gone weird? How his magick had affected hers, and she rotted him with every little touch?

Diego leaned over the table to better see the map. “But Darkly was with her in Daytona. Would it not have been easier to set the E.R.I.E. to search for his signature?”

“Isnae how the Soul Sigil works,” Darkly answered in a toneless voice, pressing the vape to his mouth. A chill prickled Milla’s skin. Darkly was a clown, with his dimply smirk and bad flirting. She had never heard him sound so defeated, so dead.

“After finishing his work with the Shades, Keir is close to burnout. His Way is not strong enough to register elsewhere.” Lou stepped forward and seized command of the room. “Which brings us to the matter at hand.”

“Not quite,” Rai said. “I, for one, will not be able to concentrate until the mystery of the hour has been solved.”

“Mysterious rituals and missing witches aren’t enough for you?” Milla asked, brow proudly furrowed.

Rai shrugged. “I’m from Hong Kong,” she said as if that explained it. “What I would love to know is—is it true she’s cleaved?” This, she asked Darkly, who dropped his head back and blew a vapor stream at the ceiling.

“Wouldnae be here if she wasnae.”

“But how? ” Donmar asked.

Darky raised his head, staring blankly at his brother-in-law for a moment. He sighed and gestured to Diego. “He’s got it.”

“I’m sorry.” Milla pressed a hand in the air, glancing at Diego, who was clutching the terrarium pendant around his neck. “ What? ”

“Noticed it that first day,” he explained, speaking around more wintry-scented vapor. “Diego’s got a wee sliver, and you’re missing about that.”

“Is that what that was about?” Milla asked. She vividly recalled how terrified Diego had been to see Darkly in their living room, and Darkly—his Shades had stretched long across her walls, and he had looked like he’d seen a ghost. Which, she had to admit, wasn’t that far off the mark.

“Again,” Donmar said. “How.”

“Am nae up on my resurrections, but I ken it’s safe to assume Milla gave a bit of herself to Diego when she raised him.”

That landed like a lead balloon. Lou’s coven glanced at each other while Darkly stared at Milla as if waiting for her to argue.

When she did not, and how could she when her thoughts had shot almost twenty years into the past to dwell on the other resurrection she had performed, Darkly shook his head and looked away, pen already at his mouth.

“Now that that’s handled,” Lou said, “let’s focus on the important things.”

She launched into a description of the charts and readouts on the table, detailing the how beyond the readings rather than what they were looking at. Milla zoned out. She knew well enough how the program worked and had been married to the witch who helped train the technology to recognize an obnubilari.

Even if Milla wanted to listen, she couldn’t. Not when everything she thought she knew, the anger that had fueled her time in the cells, had turned out to be little more than a willful omission of the truth, manipulating Milla’s thoughts and actions a certain way.

Lou said she got Milla’s location off of Darkly, and when Milla had repeated as such in the cell, she had not argued. She had let Milla continue to believe it while claiming she needed to trust everyone on the team.

She glanced at Lou now, her arms crossed, head tipped to the side as she listened to Cyrus.

On the couch directly across from her, Darkly dropped his head back. To the untrained eye, he was a witch in repose, bored by the technomantic discussion, but Milla could see each tight, tense breath. She did not miss how his fingers dug into the armrest nor the glances Tobias and Rai kept sending him.

“The job,” Lou’s commanding voice jerked Milla out of her thoughts, “is threat assessment and containment.” Around the room, every witch straightened and leaned in, fully intent on Lou. Even Diego, who at one point had perched along the armrest beside Darkly, straightened, his expression more serious than Milla had ever seen.

For not the first time since getting out of jail, Horned God, yesterday , she felt every one of those seven weeks and the impassable distance time had put between her and the outside world. Looking at Diego, it was obvious he had fitted himself into the cogs and found a purpose among this coven. It was in Cyrus’s excited answer to his question and how Lou had not brushed him off but offered something useful for once. In how she had demanded Milla bring him along, yet Diego had led her through the backdoor.

In how he left her leaning against the wall to sit with the cool kids.

She crossed her arms tight over her chest, wishing she’d opted for leggings and a hoodie instead of a black keyhole halter and skinny jeans. It was hard to pout when her vibe was so on point.

“In a joint effort with the Gulf and Low Country covens,” said Lou, “Cyrus and I have been assessing the disappearances of registered witches in good standing and matching their specific locations to those where the surges occurred.”

Cyrus grabbed an e-grim from the table and fiddled with the screen. A moment later, a map of the Gulf appeared on Darkly’s television. “Casting,” he snickered. “Never gets old.”

Seven red circles, not unlike the transparent black radius representing Milla, were speckled across the territory. Corpus Christi, Texas, a small dot on the San Antonio Bay, and another near Houston. They skipped Louisiana entirely, resuming in Hattiesburg, Valdosta and Savannah in Georgia, and Lake City just under two hours away.

“The Texas rituals occurred last year on Mabon, Samhain, and Yule.” Lou named the three major sabbats at the end of the year, aligning with the autumn equinox, Halloween, and the winter solstice. Times when the veil, as humans called it, was thin. Or, as Milla thought of it, days when the world was prime for witchy shit. “Where the latter three occurred seven weeks ago”—Lou pointed to Hattiesburg—“four and three weeks ago”—Savannah and Valdosta—“and last night in Lake City.”

“And you are certain these rituals are being cast by the same witches?” Diego asked.

“Positive.” Cyrus tapped on his tablet, and an E.R.I.E. scan appeared. As on the printout she had been shown, the location was listed in the lower right: Matagorda. “At first, the Gulf Coast and Pine Curtain Covens disregarded the anomaly in the readings. Off-shore drilling and C.R.O.W. environmental efforts have resulted in false readings before, and the Gulf itself is a basin for magick.” As he spoke, two more E.R.I.E. scans appeared on the screen: A small town outside of Corpus Christi, and one near Houston. With a swipe of his finger, Cyrus layered the three. “See? Identical.”

“When the ritual was not repeated at Imbolc, the covens were happy to dismiss it as irregular readings and assumed the anomaly to be typical of the region,” said Lou. “And then, seven weeks ago, it repeated in Hattiesburg.”

Milla looked to Darkly. They had been in Hattiesburg right before this ritual, dealing with the glamoured leggings, and of course, this could be a coincidence, but witches didn’t believe in coincidences. A Dark Witch and a Death Witch in Hattiesburg, all the chaos Anaisa had caused with ICYMI and her downline. There would have been echoes, remnants of magick left behind for any witch to use.

Darkly met her eyes and gave a slow nod, confirming her fear as if he could hear her thoughts.

She wanted to sit. Wanted to curl up in a tiny ball on the floor and tuck herself away until all of this blew over. But if she was right, and Milla was getting really tired of being right, it would be a long while before she got to do so. The timing was too much of a coincidence, and witches didn’t believe in—“Wait.” She jerked straight as a thought occurred. “Then what happened when I was arrested?”

The room looked at her, each witch wearing the same question on their face.

“When you were arrested?” Lou asked, for once thrown off her consummate cool. “How is that relevant?”

“There’s was this whole thing.” She fluttered her hand in the air and stepped forward to insert herself into the conversation. “When all those Enforcers rushed out, the chatter said it was something in St. Augustine, but my demesne isn’t on this list.”

“It was a Dullahan,” Lou said. “The steward handled it.”

“And that would be?”

“The one C.R.O.W. assigned to manage the demesne in your absence.” Her gaze turned haughty, as if Milla ought to have known all of this, which … now that she thought about it, she probably should have. Constance had mentioned a steward when they were in her office, but Milla had been too distracted by Darkly’s outburst and her not-trial to catch the reference.

“Then I want to meet with this steward ,” she demanded, spitting the word like it tasted foul, “and find out what happened.”

“A Dullahan is an Irish desecrant,” Darkly said, calling Milla’s attention to him. He picked at a line in the corduroy upholstery, pointedly not looking at her. “Summoned by the Witch of the Demesne.”

“Oh, Goddess.” Rai gripped his shoulder. “Is that the headless horseman we caught outside on Connemara?”

“That would be the one.”

“But I didn’t summon anything.” Milla knocked her wrists together. “I was Waybound and in the middle of being arrested. And my desecrants tend to be Slavic . ”

“Or Spanish,” Diego added.

Darkly raised his brows slightly, lifting his chin in moderate challenge as if daring her to keep arguing. For the first time since seeing him in Constance’s office, he looked like himself. “Perhaps the demesne meant to protect its witch.”

“I—” she squeaked, staring across the room at Darkly. For a brief, fleeting instant, the dimple appeared as his mouth curved, only to vanish when Cyrus cleared his throat.

“As I was saying, once I identified your signature on the E.R.I.E., I recognized it as the anomaly we saw in the Texas rituals and again in Valdosta. We tested the theory with the Valdosta and Savannah readings, and this morning, I applied the calculations live for Lake City.” Cyrus beamed at the room, eyes sparkling. Two taps on his e-grim revealed more E.R.I.E. scans on the screen. He hard swept his finger to the left, and the multitude of lines oscillated in what Milla’s decade-old pre-calc knowledge interpreted as speed or an increasing frequency. The patterns became sharper, closer. The peaks steeper, the valleys plunging lower until—

“Tah-dah!” Cyrus threw his arm out, fingers splayed wide at the screen as he bounced his joyous expression from witch to witch.

“Tah-what?” Donmar asked.

“Tah-what?” Cyrus shook his arm at the E.R.I.E. scan, now one gray blur of mathematically impossible waveform. “Tah-Death Witch!”