3. Spalovani

three

Barefoot and in a three seasons out-of-date bikini, Milla sprinted across the loose pebble beach, barely avoiding the long-armed reach of the spalování. She darted down the narrow path through the trees, legs churning over uneven terrain, but she wasn’t fast enough. She’d never been fast enough, good enough, strong enough, and now she was going to be arrested in a Horned God-damned state park wearing nothing but her bathing suit.

Low-lying coastal shrub on her left burst into flame. Milla glanced back, spotting the spalování hot on her tail. Literally.

“How in the fuck did you find me?” She surged for the trees only to be knocked off her feet by a wall of wind rushing in from the river. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of kayaker with their arms extended and had the passing thought of, “Oh shit, a meteomantic.”

Her back hit the rocky ground, and the wind siphoned from her lungs. Milla gasped, working her mouth like a fish out of water. She scrabbled onto her hands and knees, crawling forward. She had to keep moving, had to get away, but she couldn’t breathe, and that spalování was right behind her.

Rocks and twigs dug into her palms, her knees. Her lungs screamed for air, her chest growing tighter and tighter. Twigs snapped, and leaves rustled, the spalování coming close, and in the very last second before she passed out—her Way flared to life. Heat flooded her arms, and stones crumbled to dust wherever her skin touched the ground.

“ Zem— ” Milla wheezed, sweeping her casting hand across her throat. “ Zem?ít. ”

Die .

She clawed her hand at her chin and mouth, pinching and scraping the suffocating hex away. A thin stream of oxygen filled her lungs, and she struggled to her feet, staggering as fast as her heavy legs could carry her.

She had to keep running, get under the cover of the trees, get to the wards of her hut. Ezra had set those wards. He had coated the little shack in layer after layer of look-away hexes, ensuring no one but a witch who had been there could ever find their hideaway. If she could outrun the spalování and get to her hut, she could hide and then … what?

Wait them out? Hex them all into shambling corpses and desecrate the remains? Prove to C.R.O.W. that she was exactly what they thought her to be?

Milla was a Death Witch. A thing Forbidden and Foule, but she wasn’t a murderer .

A ball of fire flew over her shoulder and crashed against a tree. The stink of burning hair and greenwood filled the air, making her gag. She pressed her speed, veering to the left, the right. Zig-zagging through the trees as more blue fire crashed against trunks and moss, setting fallen leaves to flame and melting sand to glass. Half a dozen conjured tornadoes rose, slicing Milla’s skin with shells, rocks, and fine grains of sand like the keenest blades. Blood ran warm down her arm, a leaf like a razor blade sliced across her cheek, and still she ran. Left, right, left. Cradling her right hand to her chest until her Way could no longer be restrained.

“ Zastavit! ” Flinging blind, Milla threw her arm back and sent a flash freeze hex at the flame witch.

“ Feuer .” He responded with another fireball, landing it less than three feet in front of her. She skidded to a halt, a passenger to the instincts and muscle memory trained into her by a decade under Morgen’s care. Sliding into a spin, Milla swung her wounded arm, shouting a wicked hex without thinking, her intent and desire composed by the words “don’t” and “die.”

“Moje ?epel!”

An arc of her blood spun out as a scythe. The spalování’s eyes widened, and he dropped flat to the ground, covering his head with his arms. The bald cypress behind him took the brunt of her hex, bark shearing from the trunk as a curtain of Spanish moss wafted to the ground, the gossamer strands still in the tree stained red and cut at a harsh angle.

“Oh, nonononoooo,” Milla moaned between pants, staring wide-eyed at the damage and well aware of what she’d just done in flinging that hex.

A textbook hex, Forbidden and Foule, cast in plain sight of a C.R.O.W. Enforcer.

Because what else could he be?

It was stupid, so stupid, to give in to her panic. To not stop and think for a moment. She could have siphoned off the spalování’s intent and twisted it into dreadfire, or ash, or anything but a Horned God-damned blood blade . But she hadn’t, and she didn’t, and she was fucked .

“Triple Goddess’s tits!”

Milla whirled, staggering back when she saw a stocky russet-haired witch in Enforcer blacks rushing through the trees. His buckled and multi-pocket rip-stop pants were wet to the knee and clinging to his calves. That, along with his chapped cheeks and wind-blown hair, marked him as the meteomantic in the kayak. He raised his arm, and Milla braced herself for more wind. Leaves kicked up at his feet, whirling around the witch in a dervish as palm fronds trembled and thrashed overhead. He opened his mouth to call out his intent, and the world went still.

Utterly still and silent save for the rasp of Milla’s panicked breathing.

She spun in place, sand crunching beneath her bare feet. The sound echoed off the trees, magnified by the silence surrounding her. The meteomantic stood frozen a dozen feet away, encircled by leaves, twigs, and other detritus blown up from the ground. To his left, a green witch was tucked among the trees with a handful of bulbous green pods. Another witch wearing a cross-body bag, a tablet in his hand, stood beside a mind-fucking obnubilari with blood running from his ears as he covered the arrest with an illusion. And just a few feet away, the spalování lay flat on the ground, hands clasped behind his head as flame-licked eyes stared at her.

“What the …” She whipped her head around in search of more Enforcers, and the motion threw her equilibrium. The woods spun and blurred, and she wavered, the drunken effects of her Way increasing with every second.

Movement overhead pulled her attention to the trees, where a grackle flapped its wings in dramatic slow motion and then not at all. Blue-black feathers rippled like oil over water as the bird hovered in the air, its taloned feet grasping for a branch it would never reach.

Milla closed one eye, then the other, to make sense of what she was seeing while her brain utterly refused to join the party. She cocked her head at the frozen witches, and the cost of her Way slammed down like three shots of fireball on a Tuesday night, sending her from pleasantly inebriated to flat-out shithammered.

“Oh, uh oh.” Milla clamped a hand over her mouth and lurched for the nearest tree. In a half step, the world blurred, and her body seized, gripped in a sticky molasses feel. Milla lunged for the tree again. Again. Throwing her body forward only to find herself right back where she’d started, caught in a hex on the verge of vomiting her guts out and unable to break free.

Fuck .

Her eyes wheeled in her skull, nausea drawing out a sticky sweat to coat the back of her neck.

Horned God-damned chronomantics.

Milla was no stranger to the time witches, thanks to Morgen ensuring she sparred against them at any chance she got. They were rare and powerful, the only witch that could pose a true threat to a Death Witch, or so her foster mother had lectured. Twisting time and taking the cost upon themselves, their appearance couldn’t be trusted. A white-haired, crook-backed chronomantic could easily be a young, fresh Enforcer on their first assignment, while a baby-faced witch could knock the Advoccultant General himself on his ass.

And whichever witch hid in the woods was a seasoned chronomantic, that much she could tell from the layering of hexes:

One for the Enforcers frozen midstep.

One to hold the area in stasis, cast at a weaker strength, thus the length of time it took for the grackle to pause mid-flight.

One for the witch at the center of their intent. This last hex was the weakest, meant to disorient and distract the poor soul caught in their sigils.

Fortunately for the chronomantic, Milla was about three seconds of linear time away from blacking out.

Unfortunately for the chronomantic, Milla was no poor soul.

She crooked the pinky, forefinger, and thumb of her right hand, dragging through the depths of her Way and summoning intent in the ever-tightening loop of time. A step forward, a lurch back. Forward and back again. Vomit burned the back of her throat, and magick sizzled beneath her skin, growing more intense with each resetting of the loop. The timing of this was precious. She had to cast her intent in the space between a step lest the hex got caught in a twist of time.

Another lurching step, another stomach-churning reset. And another, another, and—

“ Zem?ít. ”

Die .

The word left her lips too late, caught in the loop as a useless hex spinning out into the wood. Milla suffered through another round, brows drawn together and bile coating her tongue. She willed her fingers to pinch, to take hold and kill the magick working against her.

“None of that, now.” A trio of voices in baritone harmony murmured beside her ear.

The sensation of leather tassels dragged down her spine. She staggered forward as the looping hex dissipated, making it one step. Two.

Her gut cramped, vomit surged, and Milla hunched forward with a groan to empty her stomach on the forest floor. She spat, plumes of green smoke rising as acid burned through the leaves and bracken, and scanned the woods for the source of that voice. Those voices .

A blur distorted the narrow space between an ancient oak and the knotted trunk of a bald cypress, vanishing as quickly as she spotted it.

“Oh, Goddess.” Her stomach plummeted, bile drying on her tongue and charring the flesh. She held her left hand out in a weak defensive ward. “Three hexes,” she slurred. Horned God, had she gotten the count wrong? She was drunker than a skunk and running for her life. Mistakes were common in high-stakes situations like fleeing for her life . “One for the Enforcers in the wood.” She directed her ward at the still frozen spalování, heart thudding like a bass drum beneath the roar of blood in her ears. “One to hold the surroundings.” Her eyes lifted to the grackle, hovering on a phantom wind, talons extended in their reach for a branch. “One to hold the witch at the center.”

Milla spun slowly, arm still outstretched, scanning the woods for that tell-tale blur.

“And one for me.” The disjointed trio of voices whirred around Milla in stereo. Empty space warbled with heat snakes, smudging her view of the woods beyond like water running down a pane of glass. For the briefest instant, she caught features behind the mirage: a nose, a mouth. Eyes peering at her from behind a chronomantic camouflage. They coalesced into the smudged recollection of a face as the rest of the heat snakes fell away, revealing a witch of medium height, medium build. His fingers twitched and danced at his side while the rest of him remained still, the blurred lines of his face obscuring his identity.

He cocked his head, studying Milla, and she pinched her fingers together.

“ Zem —”

“ Stasi .” He clawed his casting hand, sweeping it between them. Color leached from his blurred features and the air around Milla sizzled with magic. The chrono-hex slapped against her bare legs and torso, crawling up her body and suffocating her in a pocket of time, save for the twitch of her left pinky finger. Her eyes bugged, and Milla choked on the scream trapped at the base of her throat.

“Look at you.” The witch skittered forward, his movements jerky and disconnected as though someone had edited out every other frame. “Still fighting, even at the last.”

The ink splotches that made up his eyes studied the scarred surface of her palm and the twitch of her little finger. He moved along the line of her arm and brought his featureless face close, snatching her sunglasses and tossing them into the woods.

He brought his hand beside Milla’s face; fingers splayed as if he intended to cup her cheek. The proximity curdled the bile in her belly, and a tear slipped free, curving around her cheek to dangle from her jaw. The witch held there, two smudges of coal above the rise of a nose trawling her face and settling on her eyes. Every fine hair on her body rose, anticipating the touch of his hand.

A touch that never came.

“Yes, yes. I see now.” The reddish-brown slash of his mouth widened into a grin. He curled his hand into a fist and swung out of sight, though Milla could feel his presence lurking in her periphery. Unseen, unknown, but there all the same. A gentle exhalation against her ear had every muscle in her body twisting in dread. “We are going to have such fun together, magissa.”

Another tear joined the first, Milla’s eyes burning with the need to close. He laughed, a tiny huff that crashed against her neck, and the world resumed its natural spin.

The pressure holding her body peeled away like a thin layer of dried glue stripped from her palm. Pinpricks exploded in her hands and feet, and she gasped, lurching forward as her body caught up with the relentless march of time. The grackle whistled and trilled its displeasure, wings flapping wildly as it gained the branch. Clouds roiled and churned before settling into the spin of the earth, and the witches in the wood moved at once.

“Oh, Goddess.” Milla spun, dizziness overtaking sense. She thrust her left arm at the witches in the woods, locking her elbow and calling on her Way. “Where is he?”

“Secure the target!” The meteomantic barked, throwing out an arm and clenching his fist. Again, air siphoned from her lungs, the muscles in her chest seized, and she clasped hands at her throat, clawing at her skin in a futile effort to breathe. All the while spinning in a frantic circle and searching the woods, working her mouth in a silent question: Where is he? Where did he go?

“Nicely cast,” a deeper voice, rich and rolling like the steppes, boomed. Someone grabbed her arms, jerking them behind her back and manacling her wrists in one meaty hand while the other gripped the back of her neck. Their palm was a coarse, leathery warmth against Milla’s clammy sweat, gloved for protection. She half expected them to jerk away at the onset of rot eating through the hide, but the warmth of their hand rose to a tingling burn.

Milla jerked as her neck and wrists began to sizzle, belatedly realizing that they’d coated their gloves in salt. Blisters rose, and she eked out a whimper, cinching her eyes against the pain.

They squeezed her neck, tipping her head forward. “Secured.”

The meteomantic released his fist-hold on the air. A whistle of wind ribboned between her teeth and then she was wheezing and gasping, scanning the woods for that witch . “Where—where is he?”

“Where is who?” The meteomantic scowled. Deeper in the wood, the witch with the cross-body bag pocketed his tablet, and further away, the spalování pushed to his feet, brushing leaves and pebbles from his chest and legs. Behind them, the green witch tucked her pods away and turned in the direction of the parking lot. She patted the obnubilari on the shoulder as she passed by, circling a finger in a gesture for him to wrap it up. Five. Five witches plus the one at her back, easily twice the size of the chronomantic, so where?

Where did he go .

She fixated on the missing chronomantic, ignoring the pain of salt-burned skin to cling to what she thought to be true. Because he’d been there, holding Milla in a pocket of time while he examined her scars and eyes, and now he was nowhere.

Where is he? Where did he go? Where is he?

“Down you go.” The Enforcer at her back nudged her legs with his boot. Her knees all but buckled, the grip on her wrists the only thing keeping Milla from crumpling as he guided her down. “Easy, now.”

“Where did he go?” She pleaded, tongue thick and head growing foggier by the minute. She craned her neck, needing to see his face. Needing to be sure . Tall and broad, the Enforcer had the distinctive look of the Eastern Plains. With his accent, cropped dark hair, and hooded hazel eyes, sober Milla would have placed him as a witch from the Caucasus. Or maybe the Urals.

All drunk Milla knew was: this fucker is huuuuuge.

“Why do they always run?” The spalování strode into the clearing. Wavy blonde hair fell loose over his forehead, tousled from their brief scuffle. He stopped several feet away, eyeing Milla as he brushed sand off with one hand, dousing his flames with the other.

“Desperation makes fools of us all.” The witch with the cross-body bag shoved his tablet in Milla’s face, sneering at her as the device screeched its alarm. “Would you look at that? Her signature is identical to the one from St. Augustine.” He punched the screen with a finger, narrowing his wide brown eyes, and slid the device into his pocket. “That makes it easier, at least. You good, Donmar?”

The witch behind her grunted in reply, adjusting the grip on Milla’s wrists to ease the pressure on newly risen salt blisters. “Until she gets here, Cyrus, thank you.”

“The sooner we’re through with this business, the better.” Cyrus shielded his eyes, scanning the woods. He scuffed the ground with a boot, kicking dust, grit, and dead leaves into Milla’s face. She sneezed and coughed, silently cursing the witch.

“Have somewhere to be?” Donmar rumbled in his rich accent.

“Yes, actually. I would very much like to be anywhere he is not,” Cyrus muttered, adjusting his cross-body bag. Donmar chuckled, earning a scowl from the hippocromantic. “Oh, like you are not scared of him when he gets all”— he rolled his eyes and waved a hand in front of his face, fingers splayed —“you know.”

“Better than most.”

“Are y’all talkin’ ‘bout the chronoman- hic -tic?” Milla asked, straining to catch any extra footstep or stilted, shuttered breath. Anything to tell her where the creepy witch had gone.

Cyrus stared blankly down at her, then shared a look with Donmar. “Is she drunk?”

“Drunk?” A tanned face dropped next to Milla’s, assessing her state. She pasted on a watery grin, wincing as his movement aggravated her wrists. “ Oh sheshesin .” A smile twitched, and Donmar straightened out of view. Clearing his throat to hide laughter, he eased the manacle of his fingers. “Hang on, little witch, any minute now, and this will all be—”

A burst of light like a camera flash silenced the large witch. Shadows stretched long, thinning and burning out altogether as the light grew brighter and brighter. Milla slammed her eyelids closed before the caustic white burned her blind. A beat of silence followed, the heart of the world bottoming out and thrumming with a low wummmm as it swelled back into being.

“—over.” Donmar finished. “Ah, my wife is here.” A smile entered his tone. “It took you long enough.”

“The entire park is warded; my E.R.I.E. could barely get a fix on your location.” A lilting, musical voice rose over the ringing in Milla’s ears. “You should get going, Agent Sterne. He was in a temper when I left, and there’s no telling how quickly he’ll get here.”

“Oh, Goddess.” Milla knew that voice and that practiced calm as well as she knew Darkly’s pained expression whenever he heard it.

“Of course.” The spalování, Agent Sterne, cast one last inscrutable look at Milla before vanishing from her limited field of vision.

“She lobbed a blood blade hex,” Cyrus supplied.

“It didn’t hit him,” Milla protested.

“Horned God, witch, keep your mouth shut.” The new witch snapped at her, then exhaled. “Right, then. Let’s get this going, the sooner we can get her out of here, the better.” Clearing her throat, she pivoted, steel-toed boots landing directly in front of Milla. “Ludmilla Saxana Probuditna, by the authority granted to me, Luminescence Fiona Simmons, Senior Aural Insurance Investigator, Enforcers Division—” Milla snorted. All panic and fright forgotten for utter disbelief.

Luminescence Fiona Simmons was arresting her.

Lou.

Darkly’s sister .