Bereft: Foretold

36 | A Coven's Ire

Saule was beginning to regret coming to Itheria. She was beginning to regret meeting Sara Gaspard and the Sin of Pride—and she was definitely regretting getting into the damn car.

"Break my branch," she wheezed into the worried cuff of her sleeve, trying to fit onto the seat with the three other women she shared it with. Two wore the gauzy traditional masks of alchemists, and the third had twin sets of bloody fingerprints streaked across her cheeks marking her as a priestess. Across from her, the woman on the opposing seat next to the Mistress had a single streak of blood across the crest of her brow and along the bridge of her nose. That marked her as a sorceress. 

The interior of the town car smelled like sweat and smoke and upturned earth. Mistress Stavros sat casually flipping through her grimoire while the others snuck furtive peeks at their phones. Bram was crammed into the space between Saule and the Mistress, and though the Baba Yaga witch would have thought the woman would tell her to leave her dog behind, Stavros had been more than happy to bring Bram along. 

The dull chime of glass rattling against itself brought Saule's eye to the crate buckled to the seat at Mistress Stavros's other side. In the paltry dark of the early evening, the blue light wavering from inside the transparent jugs looked nuclear, and the witch couldn't look away from the rills of flames spinning inside the thick glass. 

The crate was half empty.

Uncomfortable, Saule curled her fingers through Bram's feathers and scratched his skin, appreciating the familiar thump of his tail against her leg. She couldn't stop staring at those jugs and remembering what came gushing out of them when their seals were broken.

They were on their way to their third destination, and Saule hoped it was also their final stop. She'd give her left arm and what was left of her singed eyebrows for this to be the last stop.

"Pit-embers are beautiful in a way, aren't they?" Stavros asked as she smiled at Saule and the Baba Yaga witch swallowed her unease. "So rare and difficult to find, so exquisite in the raw power they house, each spark can burn for centuries on the mana infused into its combustion. Have you seen them before, young necromancer? Do you know of them?" 

Saule had seen them before, just once. When she'd been little, Ona, her mother, and she had gone to a coven-sister's house warming party. The house had belonged to one of the older sisters who'd passed on earlier that year, and it was located across the aqueduct in Greenwood—which, back then, had just been a bunch of fallow carrot fields, adobe farm houses, and the bare bones of future tract complexes. Saule couldn't remember much about the house itself, but did remember being shooed into a playroom with the rest of the coven-sisters that were around her and Ona's ages. 

In the aftermath, no one was sure who exactly had been the one to find it stashed in the attic, only that the tiny amber bottle had been brought downstairs into the living room. The younger witches thought the green light filtered through the colored glass was pretty, that it was just some enchanted lantern forgotten when the estate had been cleared out. One of the older priestesses had recognized it for what it was and had tried to grab it from the woman holding it. The bottle had fallen, and cracked.

It was a miracle so many of them made it out before the house blew.

"No," Saule lied, voice scratching the inside of her throat. "I've never seen them before tonight."

"Surprising." The Mistress picked up a jug and Saule fought the urge to leap out the car window. Bram picked up on her agitation and growled softly into the floor runner. "We pay handsomely to buy our stock from the warlocks who aren't kept under Blue Fire's heel—not that we have much call to use it. You see, they harvest it from the bits of souls that give fractus their forms. You know the fractus? Baby demons, basically." Stavros smiled again, nails tapping the jug.