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Maisie uncurled herself from the middle of the table and pressed her snout against Eilidh’s face, making a low, mournful sound.
“I know, Mais,” Eilidh murmured, her voice thick with emotion. Gabi wanted to look away, uncomfortable with their emotion, their familial intimacy.
“You two stay here,” Gabi said, rising and ready to be done with this. “Gus, Victoriya, Salma.” She met their eyes one by one and prayed this worked. She needed a lead, a hint, a direction. “Let’s get this over with, and then you can…” She meant to say do what was more important, spend time comforting their coven member, their friend, but she didn’t know how to word it without sounding heartless and cold.
She turned on her heel and led them back into the hallway to the external door at the far back. “The morgue’s through the garden,” she explained without looking back.
Garden was possibly not the best word for it, as it implied grass. The outside space was a weed-infested square of paving stones with a cinder block shed interrupting the fence between the Pride House and the butcher’s opposite. The shed didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was better than the equipment Gabi had used in training. She stopped in front of the door and faced the three witches, Salma anxious but composed, Gus slouchy and terrified, and Victoriya ramrod straight and scowling, likely to cover up her unease.
“You don’t have to look at the body,” Gabi told them. “Earlier, when I first found her, I sensed something wrong around her with my environmental magic. Something sharp and chemical, like nothing I’ve felt before. I want to know three things—if you sense it too, if you recognise it, and if you can sense the presence of a witch, fae, or elf near Freya. Anything you can tell me will help.”
“Help you get Joy out?” Gus confirmed, flicking brown hair out of his face, his eyes wide fixed on the morgue door. “Or help you send her down?”
Gabi stilled.
Everything inside her shut off; she couldn’t explain it. Her fears, right there in the open, thrown back at her. What if she found something and Paulina took it to mean that Joy had committed the murder? What if Gabi failed so monumentally that Joy lost the rest of her life, her existence spent locked away?
She met Gus’s eyes—scared and distrusting—but didn’t know what to say.
Victoriya made a sound in the back of her throat, kicking a shrub with a heavy black boot. “Do you idiots never listen when Joy speaks? Or maybe it’s just me she Skypes when she wants girl talk.” She snorted. “Pride here is Joy’s ex. And judging by how wound tight she is, she still has feelings for Joy.” Victoriya’s sharp eyes met Gabi’s, wry and knowing. “Am I wrong?”
“Joy is my ex-girlfriend,” Gabi admitted. And suddenly, as if they’d been handed to her, she found the right words. She met Gus’s assessing stare and said, “I’m not going to help Paulina frame Joy for this. I’m not gonna let anyone suffer for this crime except the murderer who committed it. I need your help—to free Joy. Do I have it?”
The wariness left Gus gradually. “Of course,” he said, shrugging and plaintive. “She’s my best friend.”
Victoriya raised an eyebrow, her leather jacket creaking as she spun towards him. “Rude.”
“One of,” Gus clarified, a smirk in the corner of his mouth, giving life to his face for the first time. “She’sone ofmy best friends, of which I have more than one.”
Victoriya didn’t look at him, her nose in the air, sulking. Gabi almost smiled but all at once the gravity of their situation came back to her. Urgency crushed her chest like an anvil. “Ready?”
They nodded.
Gabi unlocked the morgue door, leading the three witches into the icy room. When everyone was inside, she clicked on her tape recorder and rolled Freya’s drawer from inside the refrigerator—but left the sheet covering her body. Gabi wasn’t surprised to find everyone hovering right by the door, even Victoriya’s face pale. Salma was the first to venture a step nearer, a long minute later, but only with her strand of ivy wrapped around her hand like a touchstone, a comfort blanket.
“It feels green,” Salma said, a distracted, faraway look on her face. “And black.”
“Old,” Victoriya added. Gabi didn’t know what to make ofgreen and black and old.
“Life,” Gus said, his eyes distant, unfocused. “Or death maybe. An arcane witch?”
The only non-elemental witch known to exist, or at least the only one Gabi knew of. Unlike witches bonded to the elements, arcane witches were bound to the dead—to spirits and bones and dying things. Originally elemental, their magic changed when they witnessed a death by witchcraft or committed the dark act themselves. There were two in Agedale that Gabi knew of, and unlike the arcane witches in scary bedtime stories, they used animal bones and dying plants to work their witchcraft. But that might explain what Gabi had sensed on Freya’s body…
“No,” Victoriya and Salma said together, effectively ruling out that theory.
“What then?” Gus asked with a huff, crossing his arms over his scrawny chest. “Because this is freaking me out, guys.”
Victoriya took the last few steps at a determined rush, standing as close to the body as Gabi was. Her beautiful face was so stark that she looked like a different person. “This bitch is old. We shouldn’t mess with her.”
“Her?” Gabi latched onto the detail, watching Victoriya like a hawk. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” the witches answered at once. It was disconcerting, but Gabi supposed that was what came of being a small, close-knit coven. You knew each other as well as you knew yourself.
“You said she was old. How old?” Gabi pressed. “Is she elderly? Can you tell me her ethnicity, her appearance?”
“It’s only a sense,” Salma explained in a low, smooth voice. “We can sense it’s a woman, that she’s old—older than a human life—but we can’tseeher. She’s … she’s angry and patient and fair.”
“None of it makes sense,” Victoriya agreed at a hiss.
