I sagged with relief as the water began to ripple.
“Time to start,” I said to myself, reaching for the rolled map at my side.
I opened it, laying the wrinkled paper upon the altar whilst using the four representations of the four elements as paperweights. The map of the United Kingdom was slightly scuffed from the number of times it had been used in the past few weeks. My eyes searched over the map, whilst my inner thoughts focused on Father Tomin and Arwyn and where they were hiding.
To my left side was the athame I’d stolen from the Witch Hunter’s flat earlier this morning. I didn’t think Romy would appreciate me using her nail clippers to scrape skin and blood out from my beneath nails, so I took the athame’s sharp point and carefully dug out all of Arwyn’s gore until it coated the tip of the blade.
Resting the athame, point down, in the bowl of water, I waited for a few moments until the blood had soaked and mingled in the water. Once satisfied, I took my pointer finger—once I’d held it in the stream of sage-smoke to cleanse—and swirled it clockwise in the bowl of water. Three times I did it, once for desire, the second turn for intention, and the third to solidify a habit and strengthen what I needed.
I’d studied the runes and knew them now like the lines on the back of my hand. But I still looked over to my poster, took the three runes I needed, and started tracing them into the murky water.
I started with the rune for insight, followed by the rune for revelation and finished off with the rune for need. All the while my mind was focused on the Hopkins. For extra measure I painted a final rune-mark for success.
“You better bloody work.” I lifted my finger up out of the bowl, drew it over the map and let the fat droplets fall upon themap. “Please… please…” I repeated over and over, refusing to blink in case I missed anything.
Ink smudged beneath the water which sat proudly upon the map—unmoving. I was practically holding my breath, waiting for something—anything—to happen. Finally, after what felt like hours, the droplets began to move.
My eyes widened, my breath catching as I fixated on the droplets. They gathered into a single puddle in the middle of the map. It was hard not to get my hopes up, but for the sake of the spell I decided to let them rule, fusing them in with the magic that was swirling around me.
The puddle shivered and then it split. Once, twice and then… three times.
That was the first sign that something was wrong. I got up onto my knees until I was leaning over the map from a bird’s eye view. Swift as a falling star, the three spots of water moved. One came to rest in the far north of the map somewhere near the top of Scotland. Another came to rest in the midlands, settling into a thin and obvious line atop one of the major roads that cut down from the north to the south. But it was the third droplet, an unknown third member of the Hopkins’s bloodline, that held my attention. It settled directly over the small mark for London.
“Impossible.” My hands trembled as I gripped the edge of my makeshift altar.
My mind was a storm as I ran around my room, looking for a much smaller map. I finally found it in a book. It was no larger than an A4 sized paper but showed only London as a location. I ripped it out of the book, rushing back to the altar and laying it atop the larger map. I was prepared to repeat the spell again, but there wasn’t a need. As soon as I laid the map of London down, the water seeped through the back of the map. Again, it gathered as per its own will, puddling in the centre of the page before moving slowly to its destination.
“Fuck,” I exhaled as I took in what the scrying was showing me.
The droplet had gathered atop a location I was all too familiar with.
This had to be a trick. Maybe the spell had failed? Refusing to believe what it was telling me, I took the rest of the bowl of water and tipped the entire thing over the page. It swirled around, shifting like a whirlpool before resting,again, over the location the droplet had formed over.
The White Tower.
Fuelled by my panic, every candle in the room flared hot and bright before dissipating in a gust of conjured wind. I was up and out of the room before I could think straight. My phone was in my hand, shaking fingers fumbling to locate Romy’s number. I pressed the screen three times before I finally hit the ‘dial now’ button, and it began to ring.
“Pick up, pick up, Romy, pick up.”
The phone went straight to voicemail after ringing and ringing. I tried again, already out of the flat’s front door, not bothering to lock it behind me. I was not thinking about consequences or the fact that I was the Coven’s most-wanted criminal. All I could think about was that someonerelatedto Father Tomin—or perhaps Tomin himself—was in the White Tower. Which meant Romy’s life was under threat as well as the hundreds of witches hiding behind those stone walls.
By the fifth time I tried to ring her, she answered.
Relief knocked the strength out of my legs. Romy was on the other end hissing my name as if she had a hand cupped over the phone and her mouth. “Hector.”
“You need to get out of there!” I screamed down the line. I was now on the street outside, between our home and the White Tower. A group of tourists holding extended selfie sticks looked at me like I was a madman, which I was. I was mad and panickedand practically full of desperation. Romy was all I thought about, her safety wasallthat mattered. If she hadn’t answered the phone, I would’ve clawed my way through the White Tower’s walls just to reach her.
“Why—what’s going on, Hector. Areyouokay?”
“It’s Tomin!” I shouted, even though I didn’t know if that was entirely factual. There had been three obvious marker points on the map, suggesting three people with Hopkin blood. “He’s here! He’s in the tower with you. You need to get out.”
“Shit, okay!” Romy’s voice became muffled for a moment, as if she was shouting a command at someone else out of earshot. “People are going to ask questions if I raise an alarm.”
“I don’t care about them,” I spat. “I care about you. You need to get out.”
Her silence pained me, but I had no room for guilt. I was still moving, directly towards the White Tower which was a short run away. I could see the walls of the Tower of London ahead of me, surrounded by innocent humans just going about their exploring.
“I can’t just leave our people defenceless,” Romy finally said, but those weren’t the words I wanted to hear. “If Tomin is here, we are under threat. People could get hurt.”
