VenCo(2)

“Once she is brought in, this sixth witch?” The Crone paused. She hated being the one to deliver hard news. But the stars were complicated, and having the right kind of eyes to read them? That was an inherited skill. “She will have seventeen days from the moment we find her.”

“Seventeen days? Are you fucking kidding me?” The Maiden raised her voice. “That’s not enough time to get a decent reservation, let alone find a whole-ass witch!”

The Crone sneered. “Perhaps you need better foresight. You are a member of the Oracle, n’es tu pas?”

The Mother sighed, then told the Crone, “Make sure you let the Salem leader know the time frame, please.”

“You know what, fuck the rules.” The Maiden was agitated. She liked to win, and the stakes had never been higher. Plagues, wars, the climate crisis—no, things had to change, and now, before it was too late. “The spell wears out soon, and they have seventeen days to complete the circle. We need to step in ourselves.”

“That’s not up to us, is it?” The Mother reached over and patted the Maiden’s shoulder. As a Watcher, the Mother was their oversight, their protector, keeping them on track. “We keep the network engaged, place our women in the right positions, tend to the coffers, but we do not step in. We are not coven witches and don’t have that power.”

The women grew quiet, watching the flames, which flickered on their faces so that they looked very old and infinitely young at the same time. This could be a messy business, and being as powerful as they were, representatives of their kind, heading a massive enterprise but still being powerless where coven business was concerned? That was a delicate balance, if only for their egos.

“The spell is clear—one witch finds the next. There’s nothing we can do,” the Mother continued. “Whoever this sixth is, she had better be ready.”

“Seventeen days? She’d better be a fucking mage,” the Maiden added. “Have they located her yet?”

“Non.” The Crone rubbed her temples. “But my headaches are back, so she’s close.”

The Maiden rolled her eyes. Enough with this headache bullshit already. “We’re always a couple of Advil away from being helpless . . .”

“And how are you helping?” the Crone snapped.

“I’m working out the plan, getting my people ready,” she shot back. Then she turned to the Mother. “And you? What’s the update?”

“I am keeping an eye on our friend in the desert,” she answered. “The whole reason we relocated here. And let me tell you, that asshole has a particularly disturbing appetite. I feel like I should be paying a subscription fee to watch him.”

“Any creature who has believed itself into immortality is not to be taken lightly,” the Crone said. “So step carefully. And don’t get too close. Should we share news of him yet?”

“Not yet,” the Mother replied. “He is quiet. We don’t need to deal with the panic that knowledge of his existence would cause. Especially now.” She turned to the Maiden, the most reactive of the three. “Is that clear?”

The Maiden gave her a quick salute. “Yes, sir. Since we placed a local Tender in his household as a maid, I feel better. We know his comings and goings.”

The Mother and the Crone nodded their approval. Since they answered only to one another, it was important they all agreed.

The Maiden’s legs bounced with nerves. The clock was ticking. “I’m serious—this sixth one? She better be ready to roll when she’s found. She better be some kind of living-at-Hogwarts, spell-work-in-her-sleep legacy witch.”

“Have faith,” the Mother said. “She will be exceptional.”





1

The Legacy of Lucky St. James




Before she moved into the attic of her grandmother’s apartment in the dilapidated East End of Toronto, Lucky slept in a queen-sized canopy bed scavenged from the trash.

It was what her mother called “a real score.”

“Holy shit, Luck. Would you look at this?”

Hauled out of bed early on garbage day to help Arnya do her rounds, Lucky dragged her worn tennis shoes across the sidewalk, grumbling. At seven, she was old enough to feel embarrassed by her still-inebriated mother’s “treasure hunts.”

“Hurry up, come check this out.”

Her mother was standing at the end of someone’s lawn, staring at a carved mass of curlicued oak coated in glossy varnish—the headboard and footboard of an enormous bed, propped against a small tree.

“Wow,” Lucky said. “Is that a bed?”

“Hells yes, that’s a bed. That’s a beautiful bed. A bed for a princess. No, a bed for a couple of queens. C’mon, Lucky, we have to grab this before some vulture does.”

“And we’re not vultures?” Lucky was genuinely curious.

“No, we’re bargain hunters. There’s a difference.”

“What is the difference?” Lucky asked.

Arnya sighed, thinking. “Well, vultures grab up shit all frantic-like. We grab up shit with style.” She snapped her fingers, then made them into guns and pointed at Lucky.

Even with two of them, it was hard to wrestle the weighty pieces to the sidewalk. Then they spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out how to load them onto their borrowed shopping cart.