The Witch with No Name

The thumps of my feet on the pavement jarred up my spine. Dodging people turning to look, I followed Jenks’s fading dust. My heart seemed to stop when I turned the corner and saw Ivy crumpled in the street. Marsha and Luke were standing looking down at her, dazed. A car stopped even as I watched, and a man got out, white faced, his phone in hand.

“Call 911!” I shouted as I slid to the pavement beside Ivy. Shit. Ivy. She had to be alive. I shouldn’t have left you.

Jenks was a frantic, darting shape as he dusted the blood from a scalp wound. She’d hit her head. Her chest moved shallowly, and her legs were twisted. I was afraid to touch her, and my hands hovered over her, reminding me of Marsha standing over Luke.

Pain charm! I thought frantically as I searched my bag. Fingers fumbling, I dropped the charm over her head. I was putting a Band-Aid on a concussion, when she took a clean breath.

“Did you call 911?” I exclaimed as a pair of Meris dress shoes scuffed before us.

“No hospital.”

Her voice was soft, almost not there, and both Jenks and I looked at Ivy. She was pale, and pain pinched her still-closed eyes. That was good, right? She wasn’t unconscious, even if her eyes were closed. Damn it, I should have learned how to make a healing curse! But Al was gone and it was too late.

“Ivy.” I brushed her hair back, my fingers trembling. They came away warm and red, and my fear redoubled. She’d hit her head badly enough that Jenks’s dust wasn’t stopping it. “Ivy!” I called when her eyes didn’t open. More people were ringing us. “Look at me, damn it! Look at me! Can you move your fingers and toes?”

“I think so.”

Her eyes opened as I took her cold hand. The pupils were fully dilated, scaring me. I wasn’t sure if it was from head trauma or my fear. The circle of people around us whispered, and when a smile of satisfaction edged over her pain, panic took me. “Ivy?”

Her hand squeezed mine, and she moved her legs, wincing as she straightened them. She could move, and I remembered how to breathe.

“Marsha and Luke are gone,” Jenks whispered as he hovered by my ear.

Like I freaking cared?

She was trying to sit up, and I gingerly helped her as the heat from the stopped car bathed us. “Little fish,” Ivy said, hair coming out of the bun as she held her middle. “They weren’t after them. Oh God, I think I cracked a rib.”

“Don’t move,” I said, stiffening as a siren lifted into the air. “The ambulance is coming.”

“No hospital.” Her black eyes fixed on mine, and she went whiter still as she tried to take a deep breath. “No safe house. I’ve been marked.”

Marked? Her gaze went to the pain charm around her neck, and she gripped it tight, shocking me. She never used my magic. Avoided it. “You need a hospital,” I said, and she hissed in pain as she tried to turn her head.

“No.”

“Ivy, you were hit by a car!” Jenks had dusted her cuts until they were only a slow seep, but her eyes were dilated and she hadn’t taken her other hand off her middle.

“Cormel,” she said softly, hatred temporarily overriding her pain. “I told you Marsha and Luke weren’t worth all of this. I wasn’t supposed to walk out of that apartment alive. That charm was aimed at me, too. He wants me dead . . . so you . . . will figure out how to save the souls of the undead. The car was a last effort to salvage their plan before going back with failure.”

My heart seemed to catch, then it raced as I looked at the surrounding faces for anyone watching too closely—their eyes holding fear. Ivy moaned as she breathed in my alarm, but I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t distance myself. The lethal charm had been aimed at all three of them. If I hadn’t been there to break it, Ivy would be dead and I’d be getting a call from the second-rising morgue.

“I don’t want to become a dead thing,” she whispered, then clenched in pain. “Rachel?”

I closed my eyes. Ivy groaned, her pain doubling as my panic pulsed through her, bringing her alive even as she struggled to stave off death. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t be her scion. But I knew I would if it came to that. Cormel had grown tired of waiting for his soul. If Ivy was dead, me finding out how to return the undead their souls would move way up on my to-do list.

We had to get out of here. Even the safe houses held death, and the hospitals would only make her passing smell of antiseptic. Why had I worked so hard to save their miserable existences? I wondered as I found my bag and looped it over my head. But it hadn’t been just the undead in the balance when I’d freed the mystics last July, it had been the entire source of magic.

Jenks dropped down as I gathered my resolve. “They’re everywhere, Rache,” he whispered, his fear easy to read on his narrow, pinched features, and Ivy nodded. Surrounded by onlookers, we had a small space to breathe, but we couldn’t stay here.