Juniper’s fingernails cut crescents into her palms. “How did you know about the graveyard? Who blabbed?”
Hill makes a soft, pitying sound. “No one, James.”
He holds a hand in front of his lantern. It casts a five-fingered shadow against the scummed water between them, perfectly ordinary, until the edges ripple outward. The fingertips lengthen like claws or roots. His dog whines at his heels and he gives her a sharp, vicious kick.
Juniper stares at the shadow with the rising, queasy sense that she got it all terribly wrong. There is indeed a witch running loose in New Salem—the kind who deals in shadow and sin, in ways and words so wicked even Mama Mags wouldn’t have touched them with a ten-foot pole—but it sure as hell isn’t Miss Grace Wiggin.
It’s the man standing with her in the prison cell, smiling his not-right smile, looking nothing at all like the stoop-shouldered bureaucrat Juniper met at the beginning of the summer. His hair is still thinning and his eyes are still pink-rimmed and too wet, but it’s like his body is a house with a new owner. Everything is subtly rearranged: his limbs move differently in their sockets and his muscles are pinned differently to his bones. The only thing that remains unchanged is the furtive flick of his eyes.
Hill smiles at her again, flexing the fingers of his shadow-hand. “Everything casts a shadow, Miss Eastwood, and every shadow is mine. There are no secrets in this city.”
His hand remains still, fingers splayed, but its shadow twines itself into a shape Juniper recognizes: three circles, interwoven. The lines are uneven, interrupted by bulges that might be the heads of snakes as they swallow their tails.
“The signature you left at your greatest works, I believe.” His voice is softer now. “Not many people know it, these days. Tell me: where did you find it?”
Juniper gives him the sullen shrug that used to drive her daddy to drink. “Thought you knew everything.”
“There were certain warded places, certain materials I couldn’t . . . I’m a busy man. I can’t watch everything.”
Salt to keep things out. She grins at him. “Guess there’s one secret in this city, then.”
“Did someone teach it to you? Was it written somewhere?” The furtive thing in his eyes is writhing right beneath the surface, a grub beneath the soil. “What else have you found?”
“Maybe we found an ancient scroll. Maybe a fairy told it to us. Maybe we’re the secret great-great-granddaughters of the Last Three themselves.”
The flesh of his face goes taut, the sick smile stretching into a grimace. “The Three died screaming, along with their daughters. Tell me the truth, child.”
Juniper leans forward and spits in the water between them. It lands with a satisfying spatter of scum and snot.
He dabs at his pant leg, sighing a little. Juniper doesn’t see the shadow until it seizes her.
His shadow-hand oozes up her leg like a liquid spider. She swears and scrubs at it but her fingers pass through it as if it isn’t there. It scuttles up her belly and across her chest, wraps cold fingers around her throat. Dull heat gathers in her collar, mounting as the shadow-hands tighten.
Hill watches her gasp and claw at her throat. “Clever things, these collars. They dampen magic, but they don’t actually prevent its presence—they merely react to it. An invention of Saint Glennwald Hale, in the sixteen-hundreds.”
Her blisters hiss and pop against the hot metal. A scream gathers in her throat, but she meets Hill’s eyes and clamps her jaw against it.
He gives another short sigh, as if this is all rather tiresome and distasteful, and Juniper feels the oily creep of his shadow climbing higher. It moves up her neck and slides chill fingers between her lips, prying apart her teeth and oozing like oil down her throat. She gags.
“For the last time, girl: Where did you see their sign? What else have you found?”
The shadow slides deeper, questing and clawing, and she feels words pulled from her, rising like vomit in her throat. “We saw it on the tower door.”
“On Alban Eilir?” Juniper stares up at him, bewildered, gagging on shadows, and he amends, “The equinox. The tower on the equinox?”
“Yes.” The word is stolen from her, pulled out between reluctant teeth.
“You and your sisters are the ones who called it, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“And you have been trying to find the necessary means to make a second attempt?”
“Yes.”
“And have you succeeded?” Juniper hears the shift in his voice, catches the pale grub of fear in his eyes, and understands that this question is the one he wants answered more than any other, the real reason she’s locked in the Deeps with a shadow-hand between her teeth.
She fights as the confession is dragged out of her, feels the edges of the word slicing the soft meat of her throat. It leaves her lips with a splutter of blood. “No.”
She can almost see the tension unwind from Hill’s frame. The shadow retreats, coiling like a snake from her mouth, leaving Juniper to retch helplessly into the water below. It’s not just the black taste of the shadow in her mouth—it’s the invasion of it, the queasy betrayal of her own body. Even on his worst days her daddy could only touch the flesh-and-blood of her; her will remained her own.
Somewhere above her Hill is straightening his cuffs, wrapping the dog-leash neatly around his palm. “So I suspected. But some of your spells have been . . . substantial, and I wondered if somehow—but no.”
She feels his hand on her cheek, chill and damp, and lacks even the energy to spin and bite it.
“Thank you, Miss Eastwood. You’ve quite put my mind at ease.” He wades back to the cell door with his dog picking her way delicately behind him. They pass like ghosts through the iron.
“What are you?” Juniper wishes her voice didn’t shake as she spoke, that there wasn’t acid sick drying on her shift.
The warm glow of his lantern is already spiraling back up the steps. He calls back, “Merely a man, Miss Eastwood. And perhaps—if you and your sisters keep stirring up trouble—a mayor. We’ll see in November.”
Juniper curls around herself in the center of the iron bed-frame trying to tuck her bare flesh away from the shadows. She dreams herself home again, but this time she is running endlessly down the rutted clay of the drive, calling after her sisters. They do not answer.
Agnes is not dreaming. She is awake, pacing again, when she hears the second knock on her door.
She already knows who it is. She felt her sister coming nearer through the line between them, like a fish reeled in to shore, and only Bella is capable of tapping quite that timidly at a door.
But when she opens the door she finds two women standing in the hall: Bella, accompanied by the woman she still insists on referring to as Miss Quinn, although the rest of the Sisters have called her Cleo for weeks now.
Cleo hurries across the threshold as if she doesn’t like to be out in the open. Bella follows after her, sliding the lock behind them.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Agnes observes. She adds, half against her will, “I heard the police were hassling women walking the streets at night.”
Bella waves this concern away. “Oh, we weren’t on the streets. And we’re in something of a hurry. We’re taking the earliest train north in the morning, and I needed to give this to you before we depart.” She withdraws a glass vial from her sleeve and extends it to Agnes.