At Eve’s name Juniper looks up, blinking scorched eyes. “Where? They’ll be watching the train station and the trolley lines, and I bet the streets are crawling. We might make it to Salem’s Sin, maybe—”
Bella cuts her off, sounding surprisingly firm despite the snot and tears. “We can go to Cleo’s in New Cairo. People are scared of the south side these days, and they have the means to hide us.” Agnes suspects it isn’t merely logic that drives Bella. Bella frowns at the clouds out the window and adds, inanely, “It’s the full moon, too.”
Juniper shakes her head. “We’ll be moving slow, and they’ll be looking for three women and a baby. It’s too far.”
Bella might have argued, but Agnes turns to August and says simply, “Help us. Please.”
She knows from the warm twist of his smile that he hears it not as a command, but as an act of blind trust, the sort of thing one comrade might ask of another as they stand back-to-back, surrounded.
His eyes catch hers and hold steady. “It’s far.” He glances at the push broom propped against the wall, slightly splintered from Juniper’s misuse. “Unless—can you—?”
Juniper’s laugh is a bitter crack. “No.”
“Well, I could get my boys to help.” He trails off, worry creasing his face. “But it’ll be rough going. Are you sure you ought to move, so soon after . . .” His eyes flick nervously to the bloodied sheets in the corner.
Agnes’s voice goes very dry. “I’ll manage, Mr. Lee.”
“Are you sure? I always heard a woman shouldn’t—”
A hawk’s scream silences him. Agnes strokes the wing of her familiar. “Do you doubt me? Truly?”
Mr. Lee rocks back, like a man in a gust of fierce wind. He looks at her—at the black river hawk perched at her side and the redheaded baby clutched to her bare breast and the scorching heat of her eyes—and nods so deeply it’s nearly a bow. “Never again,” he breathes.
He turns to leave and calls over his shoulder, “Meet me behind the hospital in half an hour.”
Bella has seen the undertakers’ carriages before—black-painted wagons with ST. CHARITY HOSPITAL written in stark white capitals on the side—but she always imagined it would be several long decades before she rode in one herself.
She also imagined she would be alone, and dead, rather than pressed beside her sisters on the floorboards, very much alive and praying the baby won’t cry as they clatter and jounce across the city.
Mr. Lee met them behind the hospital with several of his friends—scruffy, disreputable fellows who seemed well versed in mayhem—a cheap black suit, and a matched pair of carthorses that were persuaded to pull the carriage despite the smell of rot and arsenic. Mr. Lee helped them one after the other into the coach. His hand lingered around Agnes’s, his mouth half-open, but the driver hyahed and August vanished into the gloom.
Now the city passes in ghoulish flashes through the high windows: the flare of a lit torch in a bare hand; shouted curses and prayers; the stamp of feet marching in unnatural synchrony. The sour smell of wet smoke clings to her skin like grease, burying even the corpse-stink of the carriage.
A drifting flake of ash filters through the window and settles soft as snow on Bella’s cheek. She wonders what mystery or magic it once held, now lost to the flames. Her tears slide silently to her temples and trickle through her hair.
The carriage rattles over trolley tracks and missing cobbles, the street roughening beneath them. The noise shifts from angry shouts to worried voices, pitched low. The clop of hooves falls quiet and the carriage sways to a stop.
Knuckles tap twice on the roof, and the three Eastwoods—four, Bella supposes, catching the delicate curve of her niece’s cheek in the moonlight—stumble out into the night.
They’re on a street she doesn’t know, standing in the shadowed dark between two gas-lamps. Bodies move in the darkness around them, hurrying steps and hushed voices. Bella hears the snick of locks turning in latches, even the muffled thump of a hammer nailing shutters closed over a window, as New Cairo battens itself like a ship before a coming storm.
The driver tips his cap to them, addressing Agnes more than either of the others. “Mr. Lee begs you to send word to the Workingman, Misses Eastwood, once you’re settled. He assures me you have your methods.”
Agnes sweeps her stained cloak around herself and nods regally. “Thank you, sir.” She falters, suddenly more woman than witch. “And thank him, for me? Tell him—” But she doesn’t seem to know what she wants to tell him.
The driver grants her another grave tip of his hat. “I will, miss.” Then, far less formally, “Trust August to fall for the most wanted woman in New Salem.”
He flicks the reins and Juniper’s affronted mutter (“I thought I was the most wanted woman in New Salem”) is lost in the muffled clop of hooves.
Bella is blinking up at the stars, squinting through smudged spectacles at the distant street sign. “Ah—this way.” Bella walks south and her sisters follow a half-step behind her, scuttling like field mice beneath a full moon.
No one sits on stoops or plays cards on street-corners. The barrooms are dark and vacant. The only people they pass are clusters of men carrying cudgels and hammers, and long-cloaked women with hard, fearless expressions that make Bella think there are reasons the police don’t like to patrol Cairo after sundown.
She turns twice and doubles back once before she finds Nut Street. But the night market isn’t what she remembers: the stalls and rugs are being rolled away, wares packed hastily into canvas sacks and crates, dark cloaks pulled over colorful skirts. Eyes turn and catch on Bella and her sisters—three white women and two black birds and one red-haired baby—but Bella ignores them.
She finds Araminta’s shop and staggers through the door, weak-kneed and reeling. Araminta herself (Quinn’s mother, Bella thinks with a small, internal wail) sits behind the counter. “Now what’s going on—” she begins, but then she catches sight of Bella’s face. Her eyes flick to Agnes, too pale and shivering in the warm evening. “I’ll fetch her.”
The three of them stand, swaying slightly, until Quinn appears wearing a half-buttoned gentleman’s shirt over her nightdress. “Bella!” She reaches toward Bella as if she wants to hold her, but at that moment Agnes says unff and slumps sideways against a shelf of tiny wooden drawers.
Then the shop is full of low voices and reaching hands, the shuffle of feet as they hurry into the back room and make a pallet of pillows and spare quilts. They settle Agnes in the center while Araminta sings a spell against fever and another against blood loss, feet shuffling, a chalk map of stars drawn hastily on the floor. Juniper cradles Eve with her lower lip caught between her teeth, looking awkward and fierce and full of unwieldy, fresh-hatched love.
Araminta presses her palm to Agnes’s forehead as the song ends and nods once. Juniper nests beside Agnes, the baby swaddled between them, and Araminta hauls herself upright and picks her way over to Quinn and Bella. “They’ll keep for the night.”
She looks at her daughter and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Get some sleep, you two.”