Page 1

Prologue

The ribbon is cutting into my skin, black satin wound around each finger until my hands feel numb and swollen with pressure. The air smells dry and nutty; it's warm but not comforting, because beneath it lingers something heavier: the heavy scent of stagnant water and damp rock. I breathe carefully through my mouth, trying not to gag.

I want this, I remind myself.

No.

I need this.

Want has nothing to do with it.

I can barely make out my surroundings. This is my home, I know it is, but in the darkness everything feels strange and unfamiliar. A few solitary candles burn, the light flickering on the edges of the room, giving everything shadow rather than shape. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

But the witch insisted.

A witch. That’s all I can see her as right now; all I can think of her as. She’s cloaked and hooded, her pale hands stirring a pot anticlockwise while incomprehensible whispers slip from her lips. She looks so stereotypically witchlike that I almost want to laugh, because the transformation she’s managed in just a few short hours feels, annoyingly enough, like actual magic.

Before the ritual, she’d come bounding in, a beautiful mass of energy giving off strong vibes of youth and vitality. She was friendly and chatty, with two Aldi carrier bags swinging from one hand and a Starbucks matcha latte in the other. When she spoke, her voice was lilting and kind. “Are we doing it in here?” she’d asked easily, and then for a time she’d bopped around the room setting up, Apple Beats over her ears, nails painted an electric blue, with ripped jeans tucked into a pair of oversized boots. She looked less like a witch than the sort of Gen Z hipster I’d avoid making eye contact with on the Tube.

Then she lit the first candle, and things . . . began to change.

She washed her hands first, again and again in a mix of seawater and hyssop, sharp enough to sting my eyes with the salt and spicy mint. When I next looked at her hands, they seemed decades older — her skin wrinkled, the blue of her nail polish gone, replaced by the blue of veins now showing beneath paper-thin skin. The jeans and hoodie disappeared too, replaced by a coarse black gown beneath a charcoal-grey cloak, a single pendant resting against her throat.

“Your hands,” I stuttered, and she looked down, completely unsurprised.

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “This spell required a drop of my life force.”

“Blood magic,” I whispered, unease running through me. “Will they . . . change back?”

“I sure as hell hope so. I’ve got a manicure tomorrow at three and then a date at seven.”

She handed me a wooden cup brimming with a thick, cloying liquid. “Are you sure about this?” she asked, not for the first time.

I closed my eyes.

Because no.

I wasn’t sure.

For one brief, ridiculous moment, I thought about saying so. I remembered hands against my skin, a voice soft in my ear, hair slipping through my fingers. Something inside me faltered and in that heartbeat of time, my own heart skipped a treacherous beat.

Then reality slid back in, cold and awful.

“Is it done?” I asked instead. “Did he . . . ?”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah. It’s done.”

I swallowed. “Is he okay?”

She shrugged. “I did no harm, if that’s what you mean.”

Nausea rolled through me. Blindly, I reached for the cup and drank greedily.

“I guess that means you’re sure,” the witch remarked drily, before turning back to her Aldi bags.

Now, through heavy-lidded eyes, I watch her work.

“What’s in that?” I ask, nodding towards the — well, I guess cauldron would technically be the right word.