Daughter of Chaos Read online

  For Tasha and Dave, with love and congratulations and thanks for the witchy pickup lines. I only have eye of newt for you two!

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  All the Witches in Your Town

  Earth’s Least Mortal Daughters

  One Reads of a Witch

  Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be

  Once Witchcraft Gets Started

  Life Is a Witch, and Then

  No Mortal Man Is Wise

  Death Is Always Due to Witchcraft

  Immortal Passion Breathes in Mortal Clay

  Believe in Witchcraft and Sorcery

  Mortal Eyes Cannot Distinguish

  Thou Mortal Wretch

  Best Witchcraft Is Geometry

  Witches Escape All That

  Satan’s Handmaiden, the Legendary Witch

  Sinfulness and Mortality

  One Wizard to a Hundred Witches

  Who Ever Heard of a Witch Who Really Died?

  Can a Mortal Ask

  Witches Are All Hung

  No Mortal Word Can Frame

  Dangerous Mortal Beauty

  Let Witchcraft Join with Beauty

  Aim Too High for Any Mortal Lover

  Every Tatter in Mortal Dress

  The Witch and the Victim

  Love Opened a Mortal Wound

  The Guilt of Witchery

  The Witch’s Voice Lures Spirits from the Tombs

  Witchcraft of His Wit

  The Reign of Witches Pass Over

  We Are All Mortal

  Remember Thou Art Mortal

  ’Tis Now the Very Witching Time

  To Love What Is Mortal

  Unite: For Combination Is Stronger Than Witchcraft

  Heavy Mortal Hopes

  The Witch Burning

  Ends a Mortal Woe

  Dreams No Mortal Dared to Dream

  Sneers at Witchcraft

  Find the Mortal World Enough

  I Find All the Witchcraft We Need

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Never get caught crying in school. It shows weakness.

  This is especially true in a school for witches. Yet on the night ghosts came to destroy my town, there I was in the Academy of Unseen Arts, sitting on the balcony that overlooked the statue of Satan and fighting back tears.

  I couldn’t let myself fall apart. I had a plan. My family and I intended to protect the mortals of Greendale. We had a place to keep them safe.

  Except the mortal I loved best wouldn’t come. And I didn’t blame him.

  I’d loved Harvey ever since he and I and our best friends Roz and Susie met on our first day of mortal school. He was the tallest, sweetest boy in class, and I was the smallest, bossiest girl.

  But my whole life, I’d kept a secret from him. I’d never told him that I was a witch. My family were all witches. And one day I was expected to sign my soul away to Satan and leave Harvey forever.

  When is the best time to tell the boy you love that you’re a witch?

  The best time is definitely not after you’ve brought his brother back from the dead as a soulless husk. Harvey had laid Tommy to rest himself. He’d broken up with me. Now he wouldn’t even let me protect him.

  I’d thought I could bring Tommy back to life for Harvey. I’d meant my love and my magic to be a gift. Maybe I’d thought it was a good way to show Harvey how wonderful magic could be. See? No mortal could do this. See how a witch loves you.

  I’d shown Harvey all right.

  I’d shown him a witch’s love is disaster. A witch’s love is ruin.

  I was scared of what might happen to Harvey. I was scared he’d never forgive me. And I was scared of what I might have to do to protect the town that was my home. I sat on the stone balcony and hugged my knees, curled up in a tight ball to stop myself from shaking. I couldn’t let myself tremble or falter.

  I was here on a mission.

  Just then, the red lanterns in the hall fell on the dark hair of the boy running up the steps to the balcony. He saw me on the floor and dropped the book under his arm.

  The book was bound in human skin, with a single eyeball set in the cover. The eyeball rolled mournfully up at Nick from the dust, but Nick ignored it. “Sabrina! What are you doing here?”

  I swallowed. Nick’s dark gaze flickered, tracking the movement. He had a striking face, but it was frequently difficult to read. He’d once offered to be my shoulder to cry on. I wasn’t sure how he would react if I actually took him up on that.

  “I was looking for you.”

  “On the floor?” Nick asked. “Did you think someone dropped me and I’d rolled away under the furnishings?”

  Quietly, I said: “I’m having a hard time.”

  I didn’t know how to tell Nick about heartbreak. Nick Scratch was the one friend I’d made in the Academy of Unseen Arts. He’d also asked me out practically as soon as we met. When I said I had a boyfriend, he’d suggested I could have two boyfriends.

  That was obviously out of the question, and Nick was clearly a playboy. If he thought a girl could have two boyfriends, who knew how many girlfriends he had? Maybe Nick had twenty girlfriends. Maybe he had a hundred.

  He’d taken rejection with an easy grace that made me like him. I figured Nick Scratch wasn’t the type to break his heart over a girl. He might be a playboy, but he was a playboy interested in the same spells and books I was fascinated by, and he listened when I had problems, offered advice, and risked getting into trouble for me.

  So he was my new, oddly flirty, unsettlingly handsome friend. But I hadn’t known him that long, and I didn’t know if I could trust him. Now I sat on the edge of the balcony, hugging my knees and feeling desperate. I didn’t know if it was safe to be desperate around Nick.

  I heard Nick walk toward me. His steps rang on the stone, echoing up to the shadowed ceiling of our school. The whole Academy was made of pentagram shapes, stretching on in the shadows. Sounds were different here, with strange depths to them. Light was different here, catching red in the students’ eyes. I was different here.

  “What’s this about, Sabrina?” Nick murmured.

  “I need help,” I whispered. “I don’t know who to ask.”

  When I looked up, Nick was kneeling beside me. We sat in the scarlet-drenched light on the edge of the stone balcony together. Nick’s gaze was intent, as though I were a riddle he was trying to work out.

  “Ask me,” said Nick Scratch. “See what I do.”

  Sabrina told him death was coming, but someone else came instead.

  The insistent knocking on the frosted glass of Harvey’s front door made him flinch, but he wouldn’t be a coward anymore. He had to stay in this house and protect his passed-out dad, who couldn’t stop drinking because the wrong son died.

  Harvey wanted desperately to be brave, like his brother would’ve been. He walked to the door, the pulse at his throat hammering harder than the fist against the glass, and opened it wide.

  “Hey, Harvey,” said the dark stranger on his doorstep. After a barely perceptible pause, he said: “Right?”

  It didn’t sound like a question. He sounded sure. Even though Harvey’d never laid eyes on this boy before.

  “Yeah,” Harvey faltered. “Who’re you?”

  The boy was moving even before he answered, striding into Harvey’s house without invitation. Harvey’d never been as self-assured in his whole life as this boy was in two steps.

  “I’m Nick Scratch,” the boy tossed over his shoulder. “Sabrina sent me. I’m a friend of hers, and your backup for the night. I’ll need you to show me every window and door in this house, so I can seal and bind them for you.”

/>   All Harvey could do was follow Nick’s lead through Harvey’s own home, demanding: “What kind of friend?”

  But Harvey already knew.

  In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge was visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Nick Scratch was the Prospect of Sabrina’s Boyfriend Upgrade Yet to Come.

  Harvey’d always known Sabrina could do better than him.

  Sabrina was so smart and beautiful, and sometimes so strange. All their lives, she’d seemed off in her own little world where Harvey couldn’t reach her. He’d had a lurking fear someone might show up who was worthy of her. Someone clever and good-looking and sophisticated and cool. Someone who could connect with her on a level Harvey wasn’t able to. Here he was, and he had magic powers.

  A guy like Nick had been Harvey’s worst nightmare for years. Now Harvey had far worse nightmares.

  Harvey still wasn’t thrilled about Nick.

  But Nick hadn’t come to mock Harvey. Nick said he’d come to help with this mysterious danger threatening their town.

  Harvey wanted to believe that he wasn’t afraid and he didn’t need magic to save him. Once the sun sank into the black and the wind through the leaves sounded like whispering ghosts, he’d begun to doubt.

  Maybe Harvey was just as useless and helpless as Sabrina believed.

  “What’s happening, exactly?”

  “The spirits of thirteen dead witches are trying to kill everyone in town,” Nick announced, as though that was a normal and reasonable thing to say. “Sealed doors and banishing spells might hold them off for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Probably not long enough,” Nick said coolly.

  “Great,” Harvey murmured.

  He was annoyed and jealous that night, but he was also deeply relieved to see Nick. He trailed after Nick, showing him the entrances to the house. The sealing spells took a while. They sniped at each other, and Tommy was dead and Sabrina was gone, but Harvey finally had someone to talk to again.

  Then silhouettes flickered behind the mist-gray glass of the door, women with snarled hair. Every door, every pane of glass in the windows, rattled like bones in a box.

  Harvey aimed his rifle at the front door. “You going to do something here?”

  “I’m doing it, farm boy,” Nick sneered. “Not that you deserve it. You’re a witch-hunter, aren’t you?”

  Harvey didn’t know what to say. Sabrina’d told him he was a witch-hunter, and a lot of things had fallen into place. Did he have a choice about whether he was a witch-hunter? Did Sabrina have a choice about whether she was a witch?

  Maybe not.

  Nick’s hands were crossed before him, in an attitude almost resembling prayer. He was murmuring what Harvey presumed was a banishing spell. Harvey couldn’t make out the words, but every syllable made the hair on the back of Harvey’s neck stand up.

  Something was emanating from Nick, like heat or light issuing from a fire, but it wasn’t bright or warm.

  It was magic.

  Once Nick’s spells were cast, quiet fell between them. In the silence, Harvey could hear evil draw near. The winds rose, from a mutter outside the windowpanes to a faraway scream that was growing closer. The deep shadows cast against the pale porch light loomed large.

  And none of this was Nick’s problem. This boy hadn’t come to make Harvey feel better. This boy hadn’t come for him at all.

  Trying not to show how scared he was, Harvey said: “You sealed the place, right? You kept your promise to Sabrina. You can go.”

  When he managed to tear his gaze away from the windows brimming with darkness, he saw Nick watching him. Nick’s eyes were almost as dark and opaque as the night beyond the glass.

  Almost.

  “No,” Nick answered slowly. “I’ll stay.”

  Nick helped Harvey stack more furniture up against his front door and sat beside him on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, their backs set against that frail barricade as the doorknobs and windows rattled and the wind shrieked and the dead came. It was pathetic, but Harvey was painfully glad Nick was there.

  At the moment Harvey thought the ghosts would break through, the rattling ceased. The world and the dead went quiet. Harvey and Nick exchanged a look and began to take down the barricade. Once the door was clear, Nick moved toward it, but Harvey pushed in front of him. He wouldn’t allow Nick to go first. He couldn’t watch anyone else die.

  Nick wore a disconcerted expression.

  “What?” Harvey snapped.

  Nick sneered. “Nothing. You’re a funny kind of witch-hunter, aren’t you?”

  He let Harvey go ahead. Harvey opened the door, Nick peering over his shoulder, and aimed his gun at empty night. The ghosts were gone, and Nick said Sabrina had saved the town somehow, in a way Nick understood but Harvey didn’t.

  Standing on the threshold of his home, Harvey asked Nick awkwardly: “Why’d you show up here?”

  Nick looked outside as if the answer was lost in the whispering darkness. “She asked me. So I came.”

  There was something bleak in the way he spoke. Harvey felt bad for Nick suddenly, the way he did for hurt animals and strays, even though that made no sense.

  “No, but …” Harvey bit his lip and forced his voice to be gentle, because everything about this night was harsh and chilling. There must be some gentleness left in the world, even if he had to make it himself. “Why?”

  Nick’s head turned. He stared up at Harvey, face briefly puzzled as if a soft voice was a foreign language to him. Harvey swallowed.

  “Are you—are you guys … ?”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence. Just tell me the worst, he wanted to say. Put a seal on my misery, the way you sealed the windows and doors. I knew as soon as I saw you. I knew as soon as you said why you’d come.

  Nick said: “She loves you, mortal.”

  Sabrina had told Harvey she loved him, but she’d been lying to him their whole lives. Maybe she’d never meant any of it. Magic was real and his brother was dead and the whole world was broken. The idea of Sabrina’s love, the most fragile and beautiful thing in Harvey’s life, had been shattered too. Hearing this strange boy say Sabrina loved him made Harvey feel as if it was true.

  She loves you. Nick’s voice was steady and sure. Harvey repeated those words to himself in the hollows of his sleepless, lightless nights, when he felt utterly alone.

  There was one person alive who loved him.

  Nick hadn’t needed to say it, any more than Nick had to stay. But he had.

  It’s a question of luck, Sabrina,” my aunt Zelda told me, on an icy morning two days after Yule. “More specifically, I feel—and I hope we can all agree—that this family had more than their share of bad luck in the past year. What with the constant home invasions by demons, the truly embarrassing dinner parties, and the evil ghosts who tried to kill everyone in town. Several of us also made deeply irresponsible decisions, but I’m not pointing any fingers.”

  I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. “You are actually pointing right at me.”

  Aunt Zelda was pointing her cigarette holder at me, the wickedly sharp prongs glittering. I gestured to it.

  “But not with a finger,” Aunt Zelda said dismissively. “Of course I was pointing at you. Has anyone else in the family attempted forbidden necromancy in the last year?”

  She swept the turquoise cabinets of the kitchen, and the faces of our family gathering, with a ferocious glare. The kitchen cabinets were innocent of necromancy. So was my aunt Hilda, who was standing at the stove and stirring rosemary and lavender into a potion as she sang a little song to herself.

  I was less sure about my cousin Ambrose, who was sitting sideways on a bench and stuffing his face with cereal. He gave us a cheerful smile.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said between mouthfuls. “I’m innocent as Cain.”

  Aunt Zelda’s face suggested her last nerve was fraying. My aunt had taken the baby she was looking after to a wi
tch in the woods yesterday. I was sure that was why she was sitting so stiffly, her back broomstick-straight.

  I got up and put my arms around Aunt Zelda’s neck, hugging her from behind. Aunt Zelda touched my arm lightly, affectionately. With the cigarette holder.

  “I don’t see what the big deal about New Year’s is,” I told her. “You say it’s a mortal holiday.”

  “The membrane between the worlds is thin during the time between Yule and Epiphany,” said Aunt Zelda. “The spirits are listening, and the weight of so many mortals believing that their luck will turn with the turn of the year exerts a certain pressure on the world. At this time of year, bad luck can be caught like an infection. I have big plans for our future. It’s vital for our family’s fortunes that we all perform the correct rituals, and none of us make any mistakes in the next few days. We might attract a bad-luck spirit to follow us through the whole year like a starving wolf on our heels.”

  Her voice cut through the warm potion-laced mist of the kitchen like a prophecy of doom.

  “It’s your relentless optimism I love most, Aunt Z,” said Ambrose at last.

  “Membrane’s a horrible word,” I remarked. “Let’s not say membrane.”

  Aunt Zelda gave Aunt Hilda an accusing look. She blamed Hilda for me and Ambrose growing up irreverent and impossible.

  “The traditions for luck are fun, my love,” Aunt Hilda told me coaxingly. “If you leave coins on the windowsill on New Year’s Eve, you’ll have good luck all year round. If you hang lemons in the doorway, that’ll ward off bad luck and evil spirits. Don’t break mirrors or glass, lest your year be a wreck. Keep an acorn in your pocket always. Don’t say goodbye to a friend on a bridge, or you’ll never see them again. ’Ware a cat’s cry, and hope a frog hops over your threshold. And they say that the new year is the best time to begin a new love.”

  Aunt Hilda went faint pink. She’d been talking a lot about Dr. Cerberus, the guy who owned the bookstore she worked at. I was sure Aunt Zelda disapproved. She believed mortals and witches should never mingle, but my mother was a mortal and my father was a warlock. Even though Harvey and I had broken up, I was certain love between a mortal and a witch was possible.