Mary took a shuddering breath. Edwina knew what was coming next. They’d talked about their natural-born eccentricities all their lives, pulling at threads of common sense to figure out how and why the magic in them worked as it did. They yearned to understand the odd compulsions that made them aberrations in a world full of mortals, yet they were also desperate to learn how to live among their own kind as the beings they were born to be.
Most witches discovered a vocation they excelled at. Their magic bent toward a certain talent that they cultivated into a profession or way of life. Their mother had worked a loom, weaving strands of magic into the fabrics she made. Sometimes the threads wove together to provide protection, or sometimes the weft and weave interlocked to create an aura of glamour, depending on what the wearer required. Their father earned a decent living as a scribe, writing legal documents with an enchanted fountain pen that responded to him and no one else. His handwritten letters were often remarked upon as being as uniform and neat as if they’d been done on a printing press. Many a city witch, they’d discovered, used their talents to cook or distill or brew, or even take up private detecting, but the sisters had yet to find another witch who could spot a dropped coin in a gutter from twenty feet away or remove a man’s memories and turn the glowing light into an orb to adorn a jewelry box. In so many respects, she and Mary were congenital anomalies, even among witches.
“It’s the lights,” Mary confessed. “I can’t help but notice them in the dark.”
“I know.” Edwina patted her sister’s cold fingers, noticing the nail beds had a ghostly pale cast to them like crescent moons.
“The lights glow so bright sometimes. They leave a trail as they float away from the body. And if there’s been rain during the night, they’re as tempting as chasing fairy lights.”
Edwina nodded, knowing the attraction her sister felt for such things. Even so, she had to ask the difficult question. “That man, the one who owned the memory I gave to Mr. Cameron, that man died very recently, didn’t he? Did you follow his corpse lights at night?”
Mary pulled her hand away and folded it in her lap with the other. “The police took him to the morgue.”
“And you followed?”
Mary paused, then shook her head. “I found him before they did. His eyes were still open, but they’d gone flat. He was a rumpot, that one, but his memories were crisp and sharp, rising like blue flames.” She pressed a finger under her nose as if she could still smell the alcohol on the man.
“Do you know how he died?”
“Murdered, I expect. There was a lot of blood.”
The attraction to death was always the same. For Mary, certainly, but for those who accused her as well. Death was the ultimate fascination. The finality of a person’s life confounded the ego. How could a body and mind that walked, talked, and had brilliant, witty thoughts suddenly cease to be? How could a body shrug off its mortal coil and become common carrion simply because the blood stopped pumping through the veins? How could the mind and all its memories become mere wisps of nothingness floating in the ether because the spark of thought no longer flared bright inside the cranium? The mystery of human death was too grand to be regarded as anything less than sacred by those facing their own mortality. Which put Mary Blackwood’s ill-born nature at direct odds with most of humanity and their regard for the sanctity of death. She, who was attracted to the very essence of death, had an unhealthy and suspicious relationship with the unholy. Look such a creature in the eye too long and one invited ruin.
“Have I got myself into a pickle again?”
“Yes, dear, I’m afraid you might have.”
A more piercing question begged to be asked about what else she might have seen, but Edwina held her tongue. Never ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to; that’s what their mother had always said. Though she sometimes wondered if their mother hadn’t disappeared because the dam of unasked questions had grown too heavy to hold back any longer. There were days the weight felt like a storm surge against a beaten wall, even for a sister who understood almost everything about her twin.
Mary pressed her finger into the crumbs the bread had left on the table. “We’re alike in so many ways, yet I’m the one who’s always making a mess of things.” She put the crumbs in her mouth, then brushed her hands together, fiddling away the rest before reaching for her shawl. With a flourish, she swung the wrap around her shoulders so that the hues of indigo, copper, lavender, and iridescent green woven into the threads showed in the black wool. “Could we go to the tower tonight?” she asked. “Visit the castle on the river?”