14 | seeing ghosts (part one)

FERVENT, HEATED AIR GRAZES THE exposed skin of my arms as I sway through the house, a Coca-cola mixer in hand; half-sloshed with rum that still lingers on my lips as the crowds part for me to weave my way through.

Tonight's King City Saturday Night trembles throughout the house, shaking the walls of the Montenero mansion. Everywhere I look, there's someone with a half-smile edging onto their lips, and eyes washed over like glass beads on iced drinks, snagged from the cooler that threatens to hit the ground at every moment.

The Witches are sprawled across various arrangements of sofa cushions and bean-bags, their usual easy charms dominated by the inexorable taint of alcohol. I let myself crash down beside an inebriated Rebel, her gold-dusted legs disappearing into the darkness and the entangled mess of discarded cans and glass bottles.

In charge of liquor tonight, Everly Reach is in her zone, wiping her mouth after each vodka-lemonade with practised fluency. Half-vodka and half a grim lemon mixture concocted in the throes of intoxication, I can only imagine the headache hammering at her skull like rapid gunfire with each time she brings another sip from her red cup to her matching lips, but her saccharine smile simpers easily through it, as if not affected in the slightest.

The blast of music digests all else, a bombardment of artillery. Roaring gyrations, snaking under exposed skin―guests nearing a few hundred and trickling across the first couple of floors, shirts discarded in favour of each other and alcohol's cloud-like cradle.

Legs crossed into Rebel's, I hug a cumbersome bottle of WKD to my chest, nursing it with avid dexterity. The taste lingers on my lips, fire sprouting across my veins like they've been doused in petroleum and left to burn.

"Hey, can someone pass me another drink?" Rebel yells over the music, sucking the dregs from her tequila slammer, which is now alarmingly empty. I nod, beginning to suspend myself across the circle for the amber-glass bottle I've seen her been eyeing for half an hour, but before I can, a pale set of fingers curls around the neck of the bottle, pressing it into Rebel's hands. "Cheers, Isla."

Isla. The fair-skinned, red-haired firster, who, even now, simpers at Rebel as though she clasps the stars―blazing prisms of light though they are―in her hands and places them in the sky herself, each and every night. The girl's eyes are still bright, her smile untainted, and in the life of a Witch, she will either thrive or crumble. Maybe Rebel will destroy her before she ever truly knows what it means to be a Witch.

Witchood is not one sweet game, as Isla Everdeen will find. To be a Witch is to have poison in your blood and snake venom on your tongue; to have anger and ice and indifference coursing through your veins. To be a Witch is to scream your name to the world, to have electricity shoot through your fingers, to be the pearl in the world's oyster and know, no matter what, you will be immortalised as the kind of person no one can handle. To be a Witch is to know you're made of stardust, of dying planets and supernovas, and that there is no obliteration without burning at the stake, first.

If Rebel won't carve that into her like she will imprint the reverence of her majesty, then I will have to: by chiselling wood and diamond-sharp knives and fangs dripping with blood.

She is a girl with too much softness and too much ignorance, because when she ignores me―pushes me aside, tries to take my place―she is incurring the displeasure of a Witch, and that is something that can never be forgiven.

I swish another mouthful of liquor around my mouth, and tart sweetness explodes on my tongue. Inflamed by the burn of a shot of Rebel's tequila, my throat sears in agony, but I swallow it down with ease. My gaze is flat on Isla's the whole time, smirking at the redness bleeding into her cheeks and colouring the glass with a soft pink tinge, the liquid inside brimming to the neck―near-full.

She blinks at me back, and suddenly it seems pointless that we are both so flammable; so intoxicated and prone to ignite. I break away from her earth-shattering stare, murmuring I need the bathroom to Rebel before climbing to my feet.

Crowds compress and expand around me, waters not breaking for me to fight my way through, bursting onto the plush-carpeted stairs, the ceiling unsteady above my head. The air here is cooler, sweeter, and with each step, the party begins to die beneath me, distancing myself from its sweltering claustrophobia.

I have never been this far into the Montenero mansion: the walls here are snow-white and the carpets are untouched and unstained by the chaos below. The rumours say this is Rebel's domain; her room is behind a wreath of precious gems, and inside is every luxury imaginable to any wandering mind. She's never invited me up; never even let me see a picture, but I can only envision that it's the kind of place you would never want to leave.

My fingers trail along the walls, plaster ice-cold beneath my touch. Behind each door I pass could be a whole new unexplored world, exciting and enticing and flavoursome on the tongue.

The last door seems most promising and I rattle at the handle for a bit, judging its vacancy. When no raucous shout erupts to challenge me, I take it as consent, twisting the doorknob and edging my body inside, the door clicking shut behind me.

One slam of the light-switch later, and even though my heart trembles in my chest, nothing distracts me from the fact that this is not a bathroom.

The light fixture overhead barely begins to pervade the thick shadow swamping the cramped expanse of the room. Instead, eerie light glows: haunting highlights against washed-out faces. A thousand images of the same girl in blooms of blushed roses; a thousand once-living, once-breathing girls, whited out like ghosts.

She has Rebel's glassy desert eyes and endless mane of dark ringlets, but Rebel's sharp looks and angular features have melted back into childhood, into a girl that stares at the camera with wide-eyed innocence and smiles untouched by pain. An unnameable Montenero sister who does not yet know what it means to be a Witch, and, by the looks of it, never did.

A thousand photos of the same girl, and none of them seem to have passed nine years-old.

I don't notice my fist clenched at my side until the nails digging into my palms draw blood.

A bite down on my lip, and I'm blinded.

Do I even know Rebel Montenero at all?

☆☆☆