Witches of the Deep (The Memento Mori Witch Trilogy Book 3) by C.N. Crawford

were all around.
    She hid her face in her hands. Tobias’s arm was around her shoulders again, warm and smelling of cedar, but she shivered as though it were winter.
    The Purgators should have killed Danny. It made sense for him to die. But of course, the police hadn’t shot Josephine Forzese because she was acting erratically. The witch hunters had murdered her as revenge.
    An unwelcome image crept into her mind of the smug look Mrs. Ranulf’s face had taken on over the dinner table—the Purgator Queen crushing her napkin in her fingers until her knuckles turned white.
    Fiona’s swell of rage felt strong enough to make the rocky earth tremble. A second vision flashed—her own hand, wielding a knife that would cut the smug flesh right off Mrs. Ranulf’s face. The thought of jamming a knife into Mrs. Ranulf’s beautiful cheeks brought her a brief twinge of pleasure. There was no point in fighting it.
    Fiona was a monster, too.
    Her stomach clenched as the voice in the depths of her mind resumed its chorus: Monster… monster… monster…

10

Jack
    H e opened his eyes to the dull glow of cold morning light, a warped window by his face. Where in the hells was he? A bed’s canopy hung over him, earthy-brown and dusty. When he tried to move his arms, pain lacerated him. He was trapped in his own shattered body.
    To his right, a clock stood on a bedside table. The hands didn’t move.
    Please, gods, don’t leave me alone with my own thoughts. He tried to take in the room: the bitter smell of foxglove, an embroidered blanket. Through the window, willow branches sagged; a mourning dove cooed.
    Why wasn’t he dead, suffering in Druloch’s hell? That was supposed to be his sentence. After death, his soul was condemned to one of the shadow god’s hells: nothing but unending torment and the gnawing void.
    But he wasn’t in Druloch’s hell. His entire body shrieked with pain, but he was reasonably certain that hell did not look like an old woman’s bedroom.
    The last thing he remembered was the Fury tearing into his abdomen while the Purgators’ temple blazed around him. How could he be alive? A spark of hope ignited. Maybe Fiona had saved him. Maybe she’d changed her mind.
    He coughed, and pain wracked his chest. No, she had run from the building. He remembered that much. She’d left him there to die. Did he really mean so little to her? When she’d danced with him at the Purgator ball, her body had hummed with desire. If she hadn’t been lying to herself, she’d have run off with him then and there.
    He’d have taken her home to New England. They’d have slept in a field under a giant beech by the old North Bridge, waking to mist rising from the tall grass. She’d have stood by his side when he rewrote the world, and he would have fashioned her a towering palace in the center of the city.
    Or maybe a butter-yellow house in the woods. Tea, wool sweaters, hot hands under blankets, her head on his chest while he read books.
    That was his other life. The phantom life that should have been, but wasn’t.
    He was delirious. Why did Fiona so preoccupy his thoughts? That March day, in the cemetery, they’d lingered by a linden tree. Standing over John Winthrop’s dusty bones, she’d promised to sweep the monsters away. Then there was their first kiss—outside the school, the remnants from his army’s attack still smeared on the pavement. She hadn’t yet known he was a monster, and their future together had bloomed before him like pear blossoms.
    But when she’d found him in the woods with blood running down his chin—that was when the rot had set in.
    Did she really think Tobias would be any different? Once the Tatter boy learned his fate, he’d go to any lengths to escape a sentence of eternal torment. At least, he would if he had any sense.
    Jack swallowed, his throat raw. He could dream of a gleaming future all he wanted, but the sad reality was that she wasn’t here. Wherever “here” was.
    Even worse,