“Excuse me, but do you disagree with something I’m saying?”

I don’t realize Mistress Bellafonte is speaking to me until her magic curls under my chin and tilts my head up from my textbook so I can meet her eyes.

My skin heats as the rest of the witches in the room turn in their seats and focus their attention on me.

The silence drags on.

“Well?” the instructor presses.

I swallow, then glance down at the words. I don’t know how to voice these murky thoughts of mine, so I simply read what I can of the stela.

“Jenek nedej sew meh a heftejewef. Jenek der beheh meh qa sa, seger qa herew re temef medew.” The words roll off my lips, different from English and different from whatever language I spoke with Memnon. I feel…less certain with Ancient Egyptian, despite correcting the instructor.

I exhale and translate. “I am the one who will save him from his enemies. I am the one who removes arrogance from the haughty, who silences the boisterous so he does not speak.”

It’s quiet for a long moment.

“You didn’t use your magic to read that,” she finally says.

I meet her eyes. There’s a lot of confusion in them, as well as something else, something that looks like wariness.

She blinks and clears her throat, even as the witches around me continue to stare.

“Exceptional work,” she finally says before clearing her throat again. She turns from me then and proceeds to lecture the class about the stela and the power words that could be taken from it.

I frown as I read the rest of the stone tablet. It discusses martial victories against the Nine Bows—the various enemy nations of Egypt. The words on this stela would be better used to invoke dark magic, which is rooted in violence. They shouldn’t be in this textbook.

A bloodcurdling scream cuts through my thoughts, the sound coming from somewhere outside the room.

Mistress Bellafonte pauses and gives us all a reassuring smile. “Probably just Mistress Takada looking at all the spells she must grade,” she says jokingly before peering down at her notes once more.

But another scream follows it, and this one continues on and on.

“Murder!” someone finally cries. “A witch has been murdered!”

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CHAPTER 15

“They say her eyes were gouged out and her heart was ripped from her chest,” says Charlotte, the witch sitting across from me. I sit with her, Sybil, and several other witches in our dining room, all of us eating dinner.

I make a face into my food. The details are quickly making me lose my appetite.

“I heard she was naked,” adds a witch named Raquel, and she looks as though she wants to hurl.

For the twentieth time today, my heart races. Memnon shows up last night full of ominous threats, and now a witch is dead?

It’s just a coincidence, I try to tell myself. He wants vengeance on you, not other witches.

“Poor Kate,” another witch says.

“You knew her?” Charlotte asks, raising her ice-blond brows.

Overhead, the lights in the wrought iron chandeliers flicker, making the gloomy atmosphere all the more intense.

“Mm-hmm. She was a year above me, but she’d taken a leave of absence to work for some company that needed witches. Can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t know she was coming back to school.”

“I think she did move back,” Sybil says. “I’m pretty sure I saw her moving into the house—right down the hall from you, Selene,” she says, bumping my side.

“She’s my neighbor?” I vaguely remember speaking to a few of the girls who lived on my floor, but I don’t remember anyone named Kate.

“Was,” Raquel corrects me.

There are so many wide, spooked eyes around our table. And when I glance at the other tables in the room, the witches present are tense, and their conversations are subdued. I think everyone is considering how the witch found on the coven’s property could have been them.

Another witch with wiry hair and a sharp nose sits down, dropping a massive leather journal on the table. “I want to know what her final words were,” the witch says.

My gaze moves to her shoulder, where a—is that a newt?—sits perched.

“What’s that?” Raquel nods at the book.

“It’s my own Ledger of Last Words.”

“Olga,” Sybil chastises. “Now is really not the time.”

“Actually, now is exactly the time.” Olga’s eyes get a fanatical shine to them. “And I’m in the process of getting approval to pull Kate’s final words. It could help catch the killer.”

“That’s still disturbing as shit,” says the witch at the table whose name I still don’t know.

Olga lifts a shoulder. “Never said I wasn’t disturbed.” She laughs, and some of the women at the table laugh with her until it dies away. In its wake is a tense silence, one only punctuated by the scrape of silverware.

Charlotte leans forward in her seat.

“Who do you think did it?” she whispers.

My fears expand in my chest.

It may be my fault. I released an ancient evil, and he may be preying on young witches.

I catch Sybil’s eye before I swallow my nerves and shake my head.

“No clue,” I say to Charlotte.

No one else at the table has a better answer.

It’s only after dinner, when Sybil and I go to her room to work on our first assignments, that I decide to unburden myself.

I try to not let my chin tremble as I sit there on her floor, one of my textbooks open in front of me, while my friend moves about the room, watering dozens of potted plants crammed on shelves or hanging from the ceiling.

Now that a witch is dead—a witch who lived down the hall from me—I can’t help the terror seeping into my veins.

“He found me,” I say softly, jiggling one of my legs in agitation.

Sybil pauses. “Hmm?” she says, pausing to glance over her shoulder at me.

“Memnon,” I say. “He found me.”

“Wait.” Sybil sets down her watering pail. “What?” Her shrill tone has her owl ruffling his feathers before he resettles on his perch.

“Yesterday, when I was getting ready to head back here, he found me. He was lurking in the woods around the coven.”

“Are you okay?” she says, alarmed. “Did he hurt you? Threaten you?”

I swallow and shake my head. “I’m fine. No, he didn’t hurt me. Yes, he threatened me,” I answer.

“He threatened you?” Sybil’s voice has gone shriller. “Screw the Law of Three and its consequences, I will find a curse so potent, it will shrivel his dick off.”

I laugh a little at the thought.

Sybil sits in front of me, pushing my textbook aside. “Tell me everything about what happened.”

So I do.

By the end of it, Sybil has paled. “So this guy actually thinks you’re his wife?”

I nod miserably.

“And he followed you all the way here to Henbane?”

Another nod.

I twist my hands together, chewing on my lower lip. “And now a witch is dead,” I say softly.

Realization fills Sybil’s eyes. “You think he did it.”

I scrub my face. “I don’t know. It seems awfully likely though, right? He shows up, and the next day, a witch is dead.”

Sybil shakes her head. “That…definitely doesn’t look good,” she agrees. “But it could still be a coincidence.”

I want to believe that. I really do. Otherwise, that witch’s death is on my conscience.

Sybil frowns, furrowing her brow. “Just promise me you’ll be careful, babe.”

I take a deep breath. “I promise.”

The coven buzzes with activity as classes come into full swing, and even with the recent murder still fresh, life resettles. Despite all the supernatural aspects of a witch’s life, it’s the mundane routines that move the days here.

I glance out the window from my wards class. Outside, another class is sitting on the coven’s front lawn, growing massive beanstalks in a matter of minutes.