The Lost Witch by Paige Crutcher

Author:Paige Crutcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

Ophelia found Finola loaded up with curry and nearly flammable punch, with Brigid nowhere in sight. She’d spent the past half hour watching Thorpe read to children, reminding herself why relationships in Evermore couldn’t work. For starters, she was a witch and he was a bookseller who sympathized with the Sluagh who occasionally haunted his romance section. But most important, when they’d gotten serious, he’d begun talking of a family and marriage, and Ophelia could barely keep herself and Finola alive. She certainly didn’t have space or the inclination to add more family into the mix. Aside from Brigid. Who it appeared was missing?

“What do you mean you left her by the stage?” Ophelia asked Finola, who was precariously holding two plates and an oversized drink.

“Stop panicking and help me, will you?” Finola asked, sighing with what sounded like relief when Ophelia took the drink. She swallowed a deep gulp of the Seasons of Change punch, her mouth puckering at the terrible and marvelous concoction of wine and fruit juice and something unidentifiable that Mari McFee made every festival and should likely have been illegal. “Brigid needed space. You could tell by one look at her, her eyes were as wide as yours after you spent the night rolling with Maxwell Callahan.”

“I truly had no idea someone could do such things with his tongue,” Ophelia said, her eyes going soft before she took another sip. “Goddess, that is potent. Brigid is made of granite. Nonporous stuff, impenetrable. Still, she didn’t need to be left alone, Fin, particularly not now.”

“Do you hear that?’ Finola asked, looking up at the heavy gray clouds shifting across the sky.

Screams erupted down from where they stood, and they dropped the plates of food, the punch splattering as it fell at their feet, and they took off in a rush toward the sound. Villagers pushed past them, tearing out of the center of town and running for their doors, their eyes wild as they called to them.

“It’s the Damned,” Aine Casey said, barely coming to a stop in front of them as she tried to catch her breath. “We rushed the salting this morning, trying to get the festival set up. It had been quiet. We didn’t think. Oh gods, I can’t find Miss Overman.”

“Go,” Finola said, grabbing her hands, trying to still the shaking in them. “We’ll find Miss Overman. Get inside and usher in anyone you can.”

Aine nodded and sped off.

Ophelia and Finola ran on and came to a halt when they found Brigid and Knightly across from the stage, in front of where the children had been holding story hour. They were fighting what looked like a horde of some sort of zombie fae.

Ophelia and Finola slowed to a walk, reaching out to wiggle fingertips with each other. A ritual handshake they adopted early on and a way to beat back fear. They had been facing the monsters for so long, they’d long since learned to face their terror with a smile.

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