Agnes braids a rope of hair for herself and climbs back over the cemetery gate. She runs alone through the quiet streets, her feet weightless and silent. She thinks of the Hanged Woman lying flat on Madame Zina’s tabletop, of Juniper disappearing beneath a wave of knuckles and boots.
She slows, staring down at the palm where her sister’s blood is cracking and flaking. Don’t leave me, Juniper begged her. Take care of them, her mother told her.
But hadn’t that been her mother’s job, first? She failed her daughters; Agnes will not fail her own.
She closes her fist and keeps running.
Beatrice is aware that she isn’t going to make it. It’s too dark and the graveyard is too full of humps and hollows and tilted stones, and she can’t see through the blur of tears in her eyes.
She hears the pound of footsteps behind her, the rush of heavy breathing.
She dodges behind a marble mausoleum and presses herself against the door, the iron rings digging into the soft meat of her back. It isn’t much of a hiding place—any second now an officer is going to stumble around the corner and see the shine of her spectacles in the moonlight, and she’s going to burn beside her sister for a crime she didn’t commit.
Behind her, the door gives way. It caves inward and hands reach out to pull her inside. She has time to think, calmly, that this must be a fear-induced hallucination, because it’s only in story-papers that the dead come alive on the full moon and pull sinners down into their graves—
Before a warm, dry hand presses over her mouth. It smells of cloves and ink.
“Stay quiet. And stop biting me, woman.”
Juniper knows better than to bait a mad dog or a drunk, and she knows from the glassy-eyed faces of the police officers that they’re a little of both. But she also knows there are times when every choice is a losing one, when you just have to go in swinging and hope you make it out alive.
She keeps her staff swiping and her legs kicking, tangling the officers in the long sweep of her robes as she flails. She chants A tangled web she weaves in a breathless whisper, crushing the cobweb in her skirt pocket and reveling in the yelping and swearing of men who have just felt spider-silk gumming across their eyes and mouths.
One of them shouts, “It’s her! The witch! She got me once before—” and something cracks across her spine hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. A fist smashes against her ear with a hollow-melon sound and she finds herself facedown in the dirt.
She smiles into the ashes. Run, girls.
Boots and batons land in a panicky hail across her body, blending together into a single pulsing pain. She hears a terrible splintering sound and worries for a moment that it’s bone before the shattered pieces of her red-cedar staff fall before her.
“Oh, that’s enough of that, isn’t it?” She hears the smile in Hill’s voice.
Juniper opens streaming eyes to see his face queerly doubled above her, pale and grayish against the night. She grins up at him, knowing from the copper taste in her mouth that her teeth are slimed with blood. She makes a sideways hat-sweeping gesture from the ground. “Fancy seeing you again, Mr. Hill.”
It might have passed as nonchalant and unbothered, except she has to swallow hard against the bile rising in her throat. She closes her eyes against the red flare of pain.
She feels silken fingertips beneath her chin, pressing upward, and opens her eyes to see Hill smiling down at her. His expression seems—wrong. Pleasant, relaxed, nothing like a cringing bureaucrat out hunting witches past midnight. “Oh, Miss Eastwood, what a delight you are.”
It’s the sincerity in his voice that does it, slicing through her defiance and making her feel, for the first time, truly afraid.
Hill lifts his eyes to the men gathered around him, panting and bruised, one of them holding the halves of her staff with a blackening eye and an aggrieved expression. “Take this one to the Deeps, boys.”
May she snatch me through the doors of Hell
And take me down with her to dwell.
A spell for opening certain doors, requiring stars & scars
Standing in the stale dark of a tomb, surrounded by the muffled stamp of boots and held tight against the woman she is reasonably sure is her enemy, Beatrice Belladonna thinks of several questions she would like to ask. What are you doing here? seems like a logical starting place, or maybe Why did you betray us?
Instead she says something like grrrg, because Miss Cleopatra Quinn’s hand is still clamped around her jaw. She wriggles and Quinn relents very slightly, lifting her palm a cautious inch away from Beatrice’s lips.
“Cle—Miss Quinn!” she hisses. “What—how—are there coffins in here?”
Beatrice can’t see Quinn’s expression because her back is pressed against her chest and also because the tomb is the lightless black of the space between stars. The air feels thick and sour on her skin. A stale breeze exhales from somewhere.
“No.”
“What are you—”
Quinn cuts her off with a low rasp in her ear. “Not here.”
Beatrice doesn’t understand where else they might find opportunity to talk, as the cemetery is full of baton-wielding witch-hunters and the sun will be rising soon. She imagines spending an entire day in the tomb, a grown woman reduced to a little girl locked in the dark again. Panic claws up her throat.
“Listen, I c-can’t stay in here. I have to get out.” That wind blows again, damp as breath on her neck.
Quinn’s arms unwrap from her chest. One palm rests lightly on her shoulder. “Hold on.” Beatrice hears the shush of fabric and the snick of a struck match before her eyes sting with sudden light. Quinn touches the match to the narrow tip of a wooden wand. She whispers the words and the wand glows a rich, tiger’s-eye gold. Her face emerges from the blackness like a fire-lit dream, all dark hollows and honeyed planes, the witch-light burning in her eyes.
The light spreads, filling every cobwebbed corner of the mausoleum, and Beatrice discovers why she felt a breeze blowing inside a stone tomb.
“Stairs?” Her voice is an octave higher than she’d like it to be.
Quinn holds a finger to her lips and turns back to the door. She sings a short hymn and presses her wrist—the scarred wrist, pocked with white slashes and circles—against the aged wood. Heat flares, driving back the damp chill of the tomb. A lock creaks into place.
Then Quinn takes Beatrice’s hand in hers and pulls her down the narrow steps and into the long, serpentine tunnel that runs beneath the New Salem cemetery.
For a long time after they descend, Beatrice hears nothing except the nervous pant of her own breath and the shush of her skirts along the dirt, and sometimes the scuttle of some many-legged creature dodging Quinn’s wand-light. Several times she knocks her head on the sloping ceiling or scrapes an elbow along the wall, but no dirt shakes loose. The tunnel walls feel smooth and unyielding, as if they were carved from granite rather than clay and root-riddled soil. There are no struts or beams, no wooden trusses beneath her trailing fingers. Beatrice grew up in Crow County; she knows enough about mineshafts and cave-ins to understand that this is impossible.
“What is this place?” Her own voice sounds over-loud, shouting back at her from the too-close walls.