“Oh, fine. If you want to kill the vibe,” he grumbles.
I give him my arm back, and he moves up to slice along my forearm.
“Fuck,” I hiss, taking my arm back and standing to my full height. I let the blood stream down my arm and drip down my fingers to the grass. I am literally a walking horror story. Remind me to watch a Pixar movie when I get home.
Matthias situates himself and then closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath before he begins to chant in Latin. When he finishes the chant, he stands and begins to circle me, staying on the outside of the barrier. He tosses a mixture of belladonna, cardamom, and amber blood at my feet as he says the chant again. A rush of air that I’m not sure is the wind or something more whooshes past me. The circle around me glows a dim red for such a quick moment that I think my eyes are playing tricks on me. Matthias sits back down and says the chant a third time.
When it’s over, he looks at me, eyes soft.
“Is that it?” I ask carefully.
He shrugs, glancing behind me. “That was the whole ritual. Do you feel anything?”
I look around, searching for Kit. I expected him to appear in the circle with me. I expected him to be here. Where is he? Why is he not here?
My shoulders fall with my heart. “I’m woozy, but that might be because of the amount of blood involved in this. I don’t know. My soul wasn’t the one that needed restoring.” I sigh, my breath breaking in the middle. “I don’t think it worked.” I feel like the world is collapsing beneath my feet. I clear my throat. “Thanks for trying. This was a long shot anyway.”
Matthias cocks his head sympathetically. “Don’t give up. We can try again in a couple of days. I can get some fresh belladonna? Maybe my stuff was expired.”
I blink rapidly, containing my hurt. “Yeah, yeah. You’re right. Let’s try again—somewhere closer to my place, since that’s where we spent so much time? And if that doesn’t work…we go to Sacramento?”
“Yes, of course. This is all trial and error, Lace. We’ll figure it out.”
I look down at my still-bleeding arm. “Do you have a bandage?”
He hands over an alcohol wipe and a large Band-Aid. “If my coven can get their act together, they can assist. The more power, the better—we’re not just restoring his soul, we’re creating a brand-new body. We’ll try again and again until this works.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath, attempting to restore my hope. “Yeah, the more the merrier.”
“If that doesn’t work, we’ll book a flight to Sacramento.”
Four days later,Matthias and I are in a different cemetery. This time, we are joined by two members of his coven, Jillian and Taylor. Jillian decided to portray a stereotype and dress in a black lacy dress and knee-high, lace-up boots, with dark hair cut in a choppy shoulder-length style and deep-purple lipstick matching her nails. Taylor, on the other hand, is wearing light jeans with a cable knit white sweater and white sneakers, light stubble on their face, and light-brown hair cut short, tucked behind their ears.
While Matthias and Taylor bless the area, Jillian says to me, “You know, I used to hook up with this guy who was a legacy witch, and he flat-out denied the existence of demons. Iknewthey were real.”
I cock my head at her. “What’s a legacy witch?”
“Someone who comes from a family of witches—their power is inherited. Matthias, Taylor, and I are what they like to call ‘ingredient’ or ‘impure’ witches. We prefer the term naturalist witches. We don’t come from power, but we find it by using the elements of the earth.”
“Huh.”
“The third type of witch is one who serves a demonic master—which this guy said wasn’t real. He believed that any witch who was claiming to serve a demon either wasn’t a witch or was a naturalist witch off their meds.”
I nod, attempting to come off as less numb than I feel. “I didn’t know there were so many layers to the witch community.”
Matthias and Taylor join us then. Taylor says, “It’s because most legacy witch families live in richer areas or big cities, Greenwich, Chicago, San Francisco, whatever. Most prefer not to associate with witches they deem inferior to themselves.” They gesture around. “Like us.”
Matthias shakes his head. “I’ve told them if they want to complain about the witch community, they need to talk to my cousin. Cassia has a list of complaints. Now, are we ready to get this going?”
“Almost,” Taylor muses, crossing their arms. “So, like, we’re not putting this soul into a dead body, we’re making a new one?”
Matthias nods. “From what I understand, we’re calling on the elements to form a body around where the largest trace of his soul is—so in theory, Lacy’s blood, because of the whole sharing of her body thing. This body should be an imprint of the last one the pure soul lived in.”
Jillian asks, “What if the body becomes an imprint of the last body his soul lived in as a demon? What if we create a twin of Lacy?”
I open my mouth then close it. I hadn’t thought of that. No, no way that will happen. “I wasn’t the last person he possessed, so it wouldn’t be me—but it’s supposed to behishuman body.”
Jillian looks unconvinced but nods anyway as I find my place in the circle. Matthias follows the same steps as last time, cutting my arm just below the wound from before, earning a sharp hiss from me. If this doesn’t work this time, I’ll have to switch tothe other arm. All three of them are spreading the mixed ingredients around me as I cross my fingers. It has to work this time.Please, I beg the universe.Please.
