She kisses him. Despite the screaming crowd and the too-close lick of flames, despite the bruised sting of her lips and the startled blue of his eyes. His palm rises uncertainly, hovering above the line of her jaw. His lips are hesitant against hers. Agnes presses harder, teeth against skin, reminding him what she is. He burns back at her, all want and heat, fingers tangling in her hair.
It ends too soon, not a kiss so much as a promise, hope translated into flesh.
She releases his collar and August touches his bitten lips with the expression of a person who has suffered a religious revelation or a recent head injury.
“Agnes—” His voice is pleasingly hoarse.
She meets his eyes and lifts her chin in challenge. “Come find me, Mr. Lee. When it’s over.”
He touches his hand to his heart and she knows he will. Trusts it, body and blood.
Agnes grips her rowan-wood broomstick in one hand and reaches for her sister with the other. Bella’s fingers catch tight around hers. “Where’s June? There’s still the banishing to work.”
Agnes sees her. Juniper is still standing in the crowd below, looking up at Grace Wiggin as she’s finally dragged away by bitten and bleeding Inquisitors. At her feet, Gideon Hill lies dead. His wolf has curled beside him, her slender nose on his chest, her eyes closed.
Juniper should be triumphant or gleeful or at least grimly satisfied—but instead she is perfectly still, staring. There’s a bloodless terror in her face that makes the hair on Agnes’s arms prickle. She has seen her sister raging and weeping, laughing and lying and a hundred other things; she has never seen her afraid.
Juniper knows what a man looks like when he dies. He looks sick and scared and finally sorry, like a skinflint villager when the Piper comes to collect. He looks impotent, weak, unlikely ever to hurt you again.
Gideon Hill doesn’t look like that.
His face is bruised-black and his eyes are wet rubies, blood-streaked, but his expression at the very end is placid, almost bored. Just before the end he meets Juniper’s eyes—as the crowd wails and panics around them, as Wiggin’s fingers go white around the sash, her face lit with that wild, killing hate—and smiles.
His fist dangles over the raw-wood edge of the balcony. His fingers slacken as he dies and a bright ribbon flutters free: a single curl of hair, soft as feather-down.
Red as blood.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Georgie together again.
A spell to sunder a soul, requiring a death long overdue
Of all the souls James Juniper has seen this summer—four, by her accounting—Gideon Hill’s is the foulest.
It leaks like hot tar from his open mouth and pools on the balcony beneath him, wet and black. Juniper figures that’s what happens to a soul when it lingers too long, feeding on stolen shadows: it goes to rot, like a diseased organ.
His soul leaks away from his body, away from the wolf who lies with him—shouldn’t a familiar vanish, when its master dies?—and drips between the boards.
It splashes to the cobbles and runs like black water along the cracks. It’s hard to be sure through the trampling feet of the crowd, but Juniper thinks it’s heading dead north. Toward her.
She looks back to the scaffold behind her, where her sisters are silhouetted by flames. Bella and Cleo are shoulder-to-shoulder, rowan branches in their hands. August is shouting to his men, guarding the platform against the rioting crowd.
Agnes is looking down into the face of her daughter, smiling with such love that Juniper’s throat seizes. She thinks all of it—the Deeps and Avalon, the scar around her neck and the coals in her heart—might be worth it, if only Agnes and Eve make it out of this twice-damned city together.
Then Juniper thinks of the ruby curl of hair falling from the balcony. The smile on Hill’s lips as he died. The Crone’s voice saying something from the body he was stealing.
She understands that Gideon’s soul isn’t headed for her, after all. It’s headed for the scaffold, for the only truly pure thing Juniper has ever seen in the world, the only thing neither she nor her sisters could ever bring themselves to harm.
Eve.
And she understands that she only has one choice, and that it’s a losing one.
First she curses—Gideon Hill and his damn shadows, herself and her terrible choices, the world that demands such a steep price just for living—then she says the words.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, mine to yours and yours to mine.
The words Mama Mags used to bind split seams, then sisters, then her own soul. Surely they would work now, for Juniper.
Bindings usually involve ways and means, objects and complicated affinities, but Juniper has nothing but the taste of Gideon Hill’s bridle between her teeth, the scars of his collar around her throat, and her own will, which does not waver.
She reaches for his soul as it runs past her, curls her fingers into it. It twists in her hands, fighting to escape, but her will is a hammer and anvil, a stone and a sledge. She doesn’t let go. She says the words again and the shadow goes limp and cold in her hands.
Juniper fights the urge to toss it to the ground and stamp it like a roach. But she couldn’t even if she wanted to: it’s streaking up her arms, twining upward. She feels it climb her collarbone and writhe up her neck, pressing like a cold finger between her lips and pouring itself down her throat. It’s like drinking pond-slime or January mud, thick and foul and unnatural. She retches at the oily touch of his soul inside her.
A laugh rings from somewhere inside her skull, sickly familiar, and a voice whispers: I wanted you to stay with me, James Juniper, and now you always will.
He swallows her whole. The world goes black as the belly of a whale.
Bella sees the shadow reaching toward the scaffold.
She sees her sister step—stupidly, bravely, perfectly predictably—into its path. The darkness flows up her arms and slips into her mouth, stretching black tendrils up her cheeks and filling her eyes with shadows. Bella feels it through the thing between them, a suffocating, poisonous cold.
Juniper stiffens, her mouth open in a silent howl, her fingers clawing at her own chest as if a weed has taken root inside her. Bella’s scream is lost in the howling chaos of the crowd.
Only Cleo hears her. “What is it? Oh, Saints.” She sees Juniper, her spine bent in an unnatural arc, her nails digging into her own skin. Her eyes are black as graves.
Bella is aware that her own lips are moving, a breathless chant of oh no, oh no, oh no. “He’s taking her, just like he took the others.”
“She’s got a strong will, your sister. Maybe she can stop him.”
“No, she can’t.” Bella knows it, feels it through the binding between them. Her breath catches. The binding. “Not alone.”
She shoves her will toward Juniper, every scrap of fear and fury and desperate love she possesses, and prays it’s enough.
Juniper flinches. Her neck snaps toward the scaffold and her lips peel back from her teeth in a snarl that doesn’t belong to her—then it passes. Her spine unbends. Her shoulders square, familiar and stubborn. The blackness recedes from her eyes and leaves them clear silver, entirely her own.
She meets Bella’s worried gaze and gives her a tired half-smile. Bella feels a giddy rush of relief.