Tonight, I Blaze

Book 3: The Witches of Halstett

by Katharine J. Adams

Genres: Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

Tonight, I Blaze is the epic conclusion to The Witches of Halstett trilogy that started with the heart-stopping debut novel, Tonight, I Burn, by one of the most exciting new voices in romantasy. 

Three lives. One fate.

Penny Albright lit the match that sparked a war. Now, she holds the one that will end it. 

In defeating the Warden, she and her friends released a deadlier foe—and the Sorcerer will stop at nothing to reclaim magic and destroy witchkind. But Penny will do anything to protect the people she loves, even if it means joining forces with Malin’s morally questionable brother, Dante. 

With Alice held captive in the Sorcerer’s city, forced to spin the evil aimed at Halstett’s heart, and Malin inside Halstett, rebuilding the army to protect their walls, Penny’s only hope is to play the Sorcerer’s games—and she needs Dante to win. As the veil unravels, Penny, Malin, and Alice each fight their own demons to face the end together, side-by-side.

In this searing series conclusion, Penny must claim her fate as the witch she was always destined to be—and the only way to defeat a god might be to become one.

Release date: November 10, 2026

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 480

Sample

A witch burned tonight.

This time, it was me.

This time, I lit the match that will raze the Sorcerer’s city to the ground.

But first, I need my mind clear. The aftertaste of his blood still clings to my throat even as the floaty blankness fades from my thoughts and releases my limbs. There’s a metallic tang to it that feels like grit between my teeth and scratches when I try to swallow. It’s cold inside my own skin, colder when I realise Dante bloody Elsweather is right next to me on a hard pew in the Thorn Shrine. Silently, I steady my breathing and focus on the world reforming around me without giving myself away. The last thing I want right now is his attention on me.

We’re in the second row of seats where my cousins and I used to sit for rituals. Ella’s initials are carved into the rose-painted seat back right by Dante’s knees. He’s trapped me with my own coven’s furniture so I can’t escape, and I’m stuck staring at the dusty stone altar and the door behind it criss-crossed with thin strips of purple light from the silver-leaded windows.

Edges of memories skitter and shift out of place as I stare at that door. Thorns decorate the doorframe, carved into the stone, and the heavy wooden door is painted purple. The paint is worn around the handle, scuffed back to expose the wood grain by centuries of thorn witches’ hands, and the flowing silver swoops of my mother’s writing proclaims ELDERS ONLY on a black plaque nailed to the centre.

A memory slides together: The silver words catching the light as the purple door clicks shut. Alice vanishing into the dark behind it.

A flash of anger shoves aside the aftereffects of the ink, and my mind finally snaps clear. Memories crash back faster, a landslide of images playing out horror after horror inside my head. My friends’ lifelines pinned to my cherry tree. Dante’s smirk as he handed me over to the Sorcerer. The Sorcerer’s sliced-open wrist. Tobias’s scream.

Alice’s dark eyes staring right through me.

I cling tighter to the Grimoire, pressing it against my chest to ward off the pain of remembering. Everything inside me is screaming to find Alice, to follow her, but I don’t move a finger.

The Sorcerer led her and Toby away long before reality began to kick me in the teeth. But what followed the Sorcerer into the darkness below the shrine was a fragile shell that looked like Alice without Alice inside. Her hair shone gold as her mask in the dark, her eyes were black as midnight, but when she looked at me, there was nothing. The girl who curled around me in the quiet side of the morning, who danced her fingers over my skin and tiptoed into my bed—who walked the Warden into the Horizon to save me—would have given a sign that she saw me. Knew me.

Alice is lost inside her own skin. Whatever is happening behind the door is proof of it.

Tobias screams again, muffled by the wood, and my throat aches. The leather cover of the Grimoire heats against my sternum, basking in Tobias’s pain. Feeding on it. The Sorcerer’s spell book is as sadistic as its master; its pages swell with satisfaction and its bindings groan as Tobias’s next scream shivers through the black-flamed altar candles.

Dante shifts beside me, moving the pressure on his kneecaps to a new spot, and heat flares in my wrist. The black rose binding his loyalty to me burns as he checks to see if I’m conscious yet, and I ignore it, not quite ready to deal with his brand of scheming. I need Dante’s help, but I’m still pissed off at the wedge he tried to drive between Malin and me. I’m even more pissed off that he dragged my Gilded friends into the Spine with us. They’d be safer in the Colligerate.

It should be Malin facing the Sorcerer beside me, and instead, I stepped into the flames with Dante. But the minute Tobias crashed through the doors at the ascension ball, broken and bleeding, our timeline twisted. With Alice aimed at Halstett, poised to tear down the walls that once caged her, and Malin’s throne unstable, his grip on the council slipping, this felt like the only choice. Halstett needed Malin, Alice needed me. It seemed so simple.

But in the shadowy pews of the temple to Death that I used to call home, so far away from Malin and my sisters, it feels messier. Tonight, the insufferable Dante Elsweather handed over everything the Sorcerer needs to restore his power. The missing piece of the Sorcerer’s magic is in my chest, the knife to cut it free is in his hands, and the four witches bound to the blade are nailed to the tree outside.

I shiver and silently shake myself out of second-guessing Dante’s motives. There’s no turning around, no slipping quietly home to Halstett. Doubt is the mental equivalent of looking back, and I’ve seen what happens when we look back. I watched Malin turn back for me and saw the ancient magic take hold. His limbs elongated, deforming and transforming, twisting him into the same fog-wraiths I’ve trained to fight. My breath catches at the memory, and I close my eyes, forcing myself to remember Malin as I last saw him instead.

It’s almost worse.

The stern set of his jaw as he watched me burn. The steel in his gaze hiding his hurt. The quiet shape of my name on his lips as he whispered goodbye.

Penny.

I hold my name tight and blink away tears. I can’t cry. Not here. I’m stronger than this.

Tobias’s next scream deepens into a tortured groan, and the Grimoire ripples with delight. Its magic tugs at mine, begging to be set free, and my fingers itch to unlock the cover, my eyes ache to read the spells inside. It would be so easy to open it. We have both keys. One is hung on a chain round Dante’s neck and tucked inside the neck of his black cotton shirt, and the rose pin is clasped to the inside of my skirt pocket. Opening the Grimoire is the worst idea I’ve had today, and I came here voluntarily, so it has competition.

I risk a glance up at Dante, and my stomach drops when I find him silently watching me.

Black eyes ringed with silver turn hard as if he knows what I’m thinking. The bastard probably does. “Don’t,” he mutters and inclines his chin to where my fingers are sliding disobediently toward the pocket with the rose pin. “Those spells serve him, not us.” Without taking his eyes off me, Dante folds his arms, forearms flexing. Whichever side Dante’s really on, it sure as hell doesn’t feel like mine. He told me to trust him… He’s as trustworthy as Grandmother, and she betrayed witchkind to protect her own interests.

My nails indent the Grimoire’s leather, and the cover flexes a protest. This is the worst. Waiting. Not knowing… Tobias’s screams gripping my gut and turning it inside out, and I can’t do anything to stop it.

I scowl at the altar where Grandmother offered our blood to the veil. Smooth, dark stone shines in the low light and the bowl carved into the top is filled with shadows. Twists of silver roses circle the depression with thorns sharp enough to pierce skin. The points are tarnished with a darkened sheen as if they remember the taste of witch blood.

As if they remember the taste of my blood. Last time I was here, I was only a child, but my blood has run into that altar. We only pricked our fingers on feast days, my cousins and sisters and me. We’d watch the blood draw a slow line along the briars and trickle into the hole at the bottom and wonder afterward where it went. Now, I think I know. Malin opened a gate between Life and Death beneath the Colligerate and marked it with our blood. According to his map, there’s another gate beneath this shrine.

Our blood was spilled to feed Grandmother’s secret gateway in the veil, and she still burned her coven so we could cross into Death. She burned herself rather than use it. It’s a whole new level of masochism that justifies the sentence Malin’s court passed—that I passed.

I frown, and my mask tugs at my skin. Dante’s interest prickles against my shoulders. He takes up far too much space in the narrow pew, knees wide, elbows propped on top of them. He’s alert, watching me carefully. Between our questionable alliance and Tobias’s quietening screams, both of us are uneasy.

A scream and a roar of anger and pain rattles the dust on the altar. Dante’s fist clenches against his temple as if not helping Tobias is as traumatic for him as it is for me. It was easier, the first hour we were sitting here. The Sorcerer’s ink-blood left me in the same blank state as being gilded did, but it’s worn off so much faster.

Toby’s next scream shakes away the last of it, and with my mind finally clear, I sense Malin through our shared lifeline again. His magic ebbs and flows beside mine, a second heartbeat pulsing out of time with my own. The sensation swells, jarring and prickly until it finds a steady rhythm, and his power knits into mine as if we’re in different rooms, not divided by the deserts of Death. His strength runs through me, and I lean on him a little, careful to hide my emotions. If he thinks I’m in danger, he’ll come after me. And he’s needed elsewhere.

I dig my nail into a groove on the Grimoire’s spine, and it rustles its pages like a snarl. Magic spikes into my fingers, reaching for Malin’s magic, pulling on mine, and I shove the whole book at Dante, suddenly overwhelmed. “Will you take it?” I hiss at him under my breath. “Please! It’s making me want to crawl out of my skin.”

“Suck it up, buttercup,” Dante replies. “Start playing swapsies with grimoires and the Sorcerer will suspect we’re playing games.”

“You think he doesn’t suspect us already?” I whisper back. Sarcasm isn’t helpful, but the superiority in Dante’s tone prods a nerve.

Dante huffs his irritation. “For your sake, I hope not.”

“For my sake?” I raise an eyebrow. “Your position seems more tenuous than mine.” Tobias screams again, and my blood chills. My raised brow falls as I turn pleading eyes up at Dante. “Holy Dark Mother, make it stop.”

My words sparkle against the edge of the Grimoire’s pages, and Dante snaps, “Shut up.” He leans closer until his arm presses into my shoulder. I hate that it reassures me. “The last person who spoke her name in the Sorcerer’s presence spent the next decade hanging from a very elaborate chandelier suspended by his own lower intestines. Alive.”

“For the whole decade?” I whisper and wince when he nods grimly.

I don’t want to imagine what that looks like, but my mind insists on drawing pictures as Dante continues. “Seriously, Penny. Don’t piss him off.” He glances at the rose marked on my wrist, the one that grew in Death’s library the night my crystal cracked and the book sprites bound Dante Elsweather to me with tiny shadow hands and a brutally sharp spike, and his top lip twitches with regret. “If the Sorcerer discovers which side I’m on, he’ll skin me alive. If I can’t protect you, Malin will come for you, and the second he steps foot in the Spine, everything ends. We’ll fall into the same hole as Alice, and all of witchkind will fall with us.”

I frown up at Dante, trying to work out whether he regrets walking into the fire at my side more than the oath he made to protect me. He’s so similar to his brother, the same dark hair and eyes as Malin, same broad shoulders and chiselled arms, but he’s colder, harder, and more rigid, and there’s a fishhook scar curved across the angle of his jaw. Death was kinder to Malin than Life was for Dante. “Alice isn’t in a hole,” I tell him.

The scar crinkles as he rubs his temple exactly like Malin does when he’s trying to think and the world won’t shut up. “My brother gilded you,” Dante says. “You know the nature of the hole Alice is buried in.”

I nudge my elbow into his ribs for the dig at Malin. “There’s a mind-achingly empty hole behind the gilding, but I’m telling you, Alice isn’t here.”

We both fall quiet as Tobias screams again. Lower now. A softer moan at the end. Dante digs his thumb into his temple so hard he might draw blood. “Alice is right there,” he says through gritted teeth, carefully enunciating each word. “Surely you hear that.”

“That’s not Alice. Alice would never hurt Toby,” I reply flatly. The alternative, that Alice is actually hurting Toby, is unthinkable. Impossible.

“And yet, there she is, hurting Toby,” Dante mocks, but there’s a strain to his teasing, and he tacks a reassurance onto the end of it. “Toby knew this would happen. He knew exactly how deep the Sorcerer buried Alice. He’ll likely bury you beside her.”

“If he buries me that deep…” I shake my head and blow out a quiet breath. “I won’t be able to help anyone from down there.”

“You can’t find Alice if you’re not in the same place she is,” Dante says with a swift glance at the door. Tobias has fallen horribly silent, and his last moan seems to hang heavy on the dust-moted air. “I’ll make sure you get a chance to breathe.” Dante sees the doubt in my eyes; I see the urge to shake me in his. He rolls one shoulder and shoves up his shirtsleeve, baring the black rose wound between the silver triangles banding his wrist. It’s grown scarlet thorns since I last saw it—or maybe I’m remembering wrong. The night it was made, I wasn’t at my sharpest and my memories of the details are hazy.

Dante watches me as he rolls his cuff back down. “I’ve made two blood promises in my life, Penny. Both were to keep you safe. I swore to Malin that I had your back, and I swore to those obnoxious book sprites that I’d catch you when you fell. So stop worrying about shit you can’t change and start worrying about what you have to do next.”

“Which is?” I ask. He’s hinted at what waits in the Spine, but I’m not a fan of surprises or guessing games. I need to hear it.

He checks my eyes in response, a careful assessment of my irises. I have no idea what he’s looking for or what he finds there that apparently reassures him that, this time, it’s safe to reply. “Walk up the mountain for a start. It’s a two-day hike over rough terrain. There’s another parade of souls incoming tonight, and they don’t make pleasant company.”

“Worse than you?” I ask under my breath.

Dante stares at me, and for half a heartbeat, he almost looks offended. “If you keep hating me, you’ll get us both killed,” he says stiffly and nods at the altar. “In about three minutes, we’re walking through that door, and one step wrong will cut witchkind off at the knees. You trusted me enough back in Halstett or we wouldn’t be here. What changed?”

I can’t believe he has to ask. “You dragged my friends into it, that’s what changed! Gail, Bea, Sybil, and Evelyn are nailed to my tree. What possessed you, Dante? Whose side are you on?” I bite my bottom lip, hoping his answer is better than my guess. If he means to use them to manipulate me, I’ll kill him.

“This was the only hope they had,” Dante says bluntly. “Because there was none left in Halstett. Their lifelines are snarled into the Sorcerer’s power, their magic bound to the knife. What worked to free the other Gilded nearly killed them. They were dying in front of us, you saw them, Penny. The Colligerate offered nothing but pain and death.”

“If you’d let me near them… maybe I…” I stutter into silence and huff in frustration, unsure where that sentence ends.

“You hurt Bea and yourself when you tried,” Dante fires back. “It was the Spine or Death. The Sorcerer intends to use the knife—and he needs them to do it, but they can’t work the magic without their own free will. He’ll undo their gildings. Once they’re free, we’ll get them out.”

“How?” I whisper.

Dante gives me a one-shouldered shrug. “I’ve not got that far, yet.”

A tiny click behind the altar silences my next question. A key slides into the lock in the door. Dante stiffens beside me, alert beneath a facade of calm, and he drops his voice to a hiss. “Find Alice, avoid the Sorcerer’s ink as best you can, and don’t let on that I’m on your side, or he’ll put me under too and the next screams you hear will be mine.”

I grin wickedly, and Dante’s teeth snap shut, cutting off his retort as the door swings open wide.

Hatred flashes across Dante’s eyes as his father fills the doorway. He recovers lightning fast, his features smoothing into arrogance as the Warden sweeps into the Thorn Shrine pulling someone behind him. I watch his entrance from under my lashes.

There’s no limp to the Warden’s step now, no snarled scar oozing black pus down his thigh. No humanity in his face. The skull mask has melded into his features, a viscous layer of metal in place of his skin. Even his eyelids are gold and his lashes and brows. A permanent, immovable thing. He wears a plain white shirt and a long leather jacket that brushes the tops of his shining black boots. The smile on his golden lips is hauntingly vacant—like Alice’s.

This isn’t the man who tore my world apart; it’s a man gutted and scooped out of his skin, leaving an animated shell with no person inside. A fate fit for the monstrous creator of a Gilded army, but it’s curiously dissatisfying to see him so changed, his wounds healed and his soul destroyed.

I fight the urge to glance at Dante, fix my eyes on my lap and stare at my hands, but primroses drift on the dusty shrine air, and my heart skips. Alice steps out from behind the Warden, and my whole chest clenches until I have to bite my lip to stop myself crying out. Holy Dark Mother, I forgot how I missed her. I’ve spent so long surviving her absence by hiding it, containing it, that seeing her now, so frail and broken and absent inside her own skin, it hits me all at once in a wave of need that threatens to fold me into smaller and smaller pieces until every crease is sharp and sore.

Her hair falls, pale and straight, around her shoulders, slices of light from the window criss-crossing it with spun-silver lines, and her hands and wrists and forearms are all wound about with gold lines that shift and flex across her skin, forming swirls of writing in a language I don’t recognise. Condensation mists her butterfly mask as if she’s just stepped inside out of the cold—and blood clings to her fingers like gloves of scarlet lace.

“Alice,” I whisper and clutch the Grimoire harder against my chest to stop myself saying more. Magic squeezes out of the pages, prickling my skin and digging into my blood in protest.

Alice blinks at me, and darkness stares back. A void. Like Bea and Sybil and Evelyn. Horror shivers through my nerves like ice aching against a sensitive tooth. I want to scream until the light reignites inside her. Alice is gone and nothing is left behind—but it’s not nothing either. There’s an awareness there, sharp intelligence reading each tiny twitch of my features.

Bea’s eyes weren’t hers when I tried to help her in the amphitheatre. When I healed the damage left behind after Bea, Evelyn, and Sybil resisted the Warden’s gilding, a void filled the place where my friends should have been. A space full of nothing.

Maybe that nothing has refilled inside Alice with something—someone—that isn’t her.

The idea is horrifying. I cling to the Grimoire as if it might anchor me to my seat. I want to wrap Alice in my arms and hold her close, shield her so no one can hurt her again. I want her to hold me and tell me the future isn’t as dark as it seems—but Tobias’s blood drips from her fingers and each drop hitting the shrine floor makes my stomach knot tighter. Gore stains her primrose yellow dress and splatters red freckles up one pale cheek.

A chill crawls down my spine as Tobias staggers into the shrine. He lurches sideways, smearing a bloody handprint across the altar, and braces himself against the cool stone. A thin line of blood begins to spiral from his hand, following the line of thorns carved into the marble.

I stare at him helplessly, silently begging him to look up so I can reassure him he’s not alone, that as soon as I get the chance, I’ll heal his wounds. His tunic is dark with sweat and stuck to his back, the collar flecked with blood, his skin is sickly pale, and his breath is too shallow and too fast. He doesn’t look at me, but Alice does. Her icy gaze bores into mine as if she’s reading my thoughts in my pupils, and I look away as the Warden gives her a gruesome smile.

He turns to me and the smile widens into a cold grin of white shining teeth, gold lips pulled back and stretched tight. He holds out a hand, palm up for me to take. “He’ll see you now, Penelope.” His voice is gravel. It sounds as if he died and rigor mortis set in before he was revived. As if his throat lost its elasticity.

Dante shoves out of the pew, unfolding his limbs as he slides elegantly out of the too-small space.

“Not you,” the Warden says, gravestone cold. “She’s to go alone.”

“Not a chance,” Dante replies steadily. “Penelope is my spoils. I brought her in. The reward for her capture is mine, and I will claim it.”

The Warden opens his mouth to argue, but the Sorcerer’s everywhere voice slides down the walls and pools around us, rushing to fill our ears until each word vibrates inside our skulls. “Bring her to me, Dante Elsweather.”

At his order, Alice gives a tiny shiver. Her eyelids flicker and her bottom lip trembles the smallest amount. It’s barely a movement, but it’s the first sign that Alice might still be herself. My fingers twitch toward her, and Dante clamps a hand around the top of my arm, forcing me to clamber out from between the pews.

“Behave,” he snarls at me.

I came here voluntarily, I remind myself, I chose to leave Halstett. Fighting Dante will undo everything. I make my arm limp as he marches me behind the altar, but fear of what waits on the other side of the door makes me wriggle in Dante’s hold and try to twist away.

I saw the Sorcerer when we arrived in the village, his inhumanity on full display as he towered over me where we stood beneath the naked winter branches of my cherry tree. He called me daughter as if he meant it—as if it meant something. As if he knew something I did not. His midnight-blue limbs were scattered with an oil-slick sheen of sparks, and tiny dots of light speckled his nose and cheeks like a mask made of terrifying stars. His white orb eyes have haunted me since I first saw them on the ninth floor of the library.

I bite my lip as Dante shoves open the purple door behind the altar, then follow him underground.

I was never allowed beneath the shrine as a child, and unlike the ruins of the rest of the village, the scent here is unfamiliar, musty and metallic like Grandmother’s magic mixed with gilding gold.

Black flames in iron sconces brighten to silver as we pass. They drip shadows down plastered walls and catch on the rough steps. Centuries of witch feet have not smoothed these stone steps as they have those at the shrine entrance, but age has still crumbled the plaster on the walls, and beneath the silvery paint it’s bubbled and brittle. Dante pulls me closer as we step into a huge room that echoes our exhales and amplifies my heartbeat in my ears.

I inhale the smell of books, of paper and ink, and blink in surprise. We’re standing in the entry to a library. Shadows lap at my ankles and gather in the alcoves. Magic prickles against my skin, a wrongness to it with jagged edges like the gate beneath Halstett—like a rent in the veil that shouldn’t be there. This dark conceals an old magic, more deadly than the ninth floor of the library, more ancient than Malin’s library in Death.

Near the door the shelves are magically lit with a pale purple glow, illuminating artefacts set neatly on black lacquered wood. A golden chalice shimmers in the lilac light beside a shard of obsidian the length of my forearm, a pearl-tipped spear glistens as if it was just pulled from a river, and a shield of palest blue glass emits an icy mist as if it’s colder than the rest of the room. Every item is labelled in my grandmother’s perfectly uniform writing.

A low glass cabinet stands in the centre of the room. Inside, beneath years of undisturbed dust, a rainbow of witch crystals lie on black silk padding, the facets chipped and flawed, their hearts dull and empty. I’ve never seen a crystal without sparkling mists of life swirling inside, but these are cold and still with no lifelines attached. No witch can survive without their crystal. But no crystal should exist without its witch either.

When I glance to Dante, he seems as disconcerted as me. “They’re dead,” he confirms uneasily and the echo of his voice trickles down the walls.

“But what happened to them?” I murmur back, careful not to disturb the quiet.

“Whatever it was, happened long ago.” Dante steps closer to the case, drawn by the rows of knives glinting beside the crystals. Twenty-seven iterations of the Sorcerer’s knife answer some of my questions. They rest on black velvet behind the glass, each twisted somehow, a wrong marking, a missing crystal, a chip in the blade. One is split into five pieces, the shattered edges black with blood, and when I check the crystals in the case, five are stained with the same black blood. A thorn witch was trying to make the Sorcerer’s knife long before we finally forged it. A Thorn Queen with access to the shrine.

He leans closer to inspect each blade carefully through the glass. No two are forged the same, and each bears the marks of a different mistake. All are absent a lifeline to bind them together and make them whole.

When we forged the new knife, my father gave up his lifeline to bind the magic into the metal—saved my lifeline from the same fate. My father died for the Sorcerer’s knife, and the Resistance’s history of failed forgings and witch deaths suggest every blade in the display claimed a life with its failings too. How many witches were lost to the Sorcerer’s knife before our village fell?

Were these knives forged to aid the Sorcerer? Did my ancestors create them or hide them to keep them from the Sorcerer’s hands?

“Grandmother?” I whisper to Dante. “This is her work.”

Dante nods stiffly. “Maybe.”

“Who else?” I ask him.

“It could have been any of your ancestors,” he replies logically.

“Maybe they were working against him,” I whisper. I wish I could believe that, but at least one thorn witch was working on his side. My black crystal told the truth of the Sorcerer’s magic hidden inside me even if my grandmother didn’t. Whatever my ancestors’ intentions, she handed me over in the end and the knife was forged all the same.

I scowl and don’t fight Dante when he pulls me away from the glass and back into his side. Below the glass-housed crystals and knives, the bottom of the cabinet is a caged bookcase, the kind designed to keep grimoires safely locked away. The lock is broken, smashed into pieces of iron on the floor, and all the grimoires are gone. I wonder if any survived the aftermath of the Warden’s book bonfires and landed on Halstett’s library shelves. How many burned alongside our witches when the thorn village fell?

A scan of the rest of the shelves confirms that whoever raided our shrine was more interested in magic than wiping clean history. The Thorn Coven’s legacy survived the fires, bound in leather and neatly colour-coded, even if the witches did not. Purple journals with silver leaf down the spines hold a personal record of each Thorn Queen’s reign, and green shiny covers stamped with the year in thick black print contain official reports of every coven-sanctioned walk in Death.

Our personal records survived too. Thousands of black, butter-soft tomes line the walls around us, each spine brightly decorated by the witch who owned it; prettily painted flowers, doodles of lines and swirls, hearts and stars and little drawings of bees and butterflies. Each repair of the veil, each frayed thread and fog-wraith sighting and unusual shift in the sand was jotted in those books alongside secret recipes for lemon meringue pie, witchling births, weddings and deaths, quilt patterns and pressed flowers and funny little anecdotes of family life.

I remember those books being written in. Grandmother’s purple journal was kept on her desk in her office beside the shrine, and a black book sat on the bookcase in every thorn witch’s front room. My father had one, Mother too. Ella burned Mother’s once after we heard our parents arguing late at night—that was the only time I ever saw Mother lose her temper with one of us and the first time I saw Ella cry.

It’s mesmerising, the possibilities in their pages, the secrets that might be hidden in their words. I might finally find answers in the archives of my ancestors.

I’m jarred back to reality by Dante’s huge hand tightening on my shoulder. He murmurs close to my ear, “We’re being watched.”

I follow the line of his nod. A single book sprite loiters in the shadows close to the purple journals. Their eyes are horribly despondent and there’s a dullness to their greenish glow. Every book sprite I’ve met has been vivid and bright, vitally alive, but this one seems watery and insubstantial, as if they aren’t really here. I need to narrow my eyes until I’m half-looking through my lashes to see the outline of them sitting criss-crossed on top of a book with golden capital letters down the spine: Tales of the Time Before.

They catch me watching and prop their elbows on their knees, rest their chin on their hands, and