Quinn ducks her head and heads up a narrow flight of stairs and Bella watches her go with a silent sinking in her heart.
Halfway up, Quinn turns. She meets Bella’s eyes and extends her hand, palm up. An invitation, a question, a challenge. Bella hears Juniper’s voice: Are you such a coward?
Bella isn’t.
Quinn’s hand is warm and dry. She leads Bella up the stairs to a room she recognizes. There’s the bed with its saffron quilt, gone gray in the gloom. There’s the pillow where Bella woke with the memory of warmth beside her.
Quinn sits on the foot of the bed and slides the gentleman’s shirt from her shoulders. Her arms beneath it are bare and long, velveteen in the dark, her nightdress ghostly white. She looks like a living Saint, the street-lamp painting a glowing halo behind her head.
Bella thinks she should probably leave.
(Bella does not want to leave.)
Quinn smooths the quilt beneath her, a gentle invitation. Bella doesn’t move or speak, as if her body is a fractious animal that will betray her given the slightest loosening of the reins.
“You can leave if you like.” Quinn’s voice is carefully neutral. “There’s room beside your sisters.”
“No, thank you,” Bella breathes.
The white flash of Quinn’s teeth in the dark. Her chin tilts in a come here flick, and this invitation is less gentle, warmer and sweeter and far more dangerous.
Bella makes an inarticulate sound, swallows, and tries again. “Mr. Quinn—”
“Does not live at this address, nor has he ever.” Bella blinks several times and Quinn explains gently, “The two of us grew up together, and understood very young that neither of us was interested in . . . the usual arrangement. He lives in Baltimore with a very nice gentleman friend and a spoiled dog named Lord Byron.”
“I . . . oh.” Bella has not previously imagined any arrangements other than the usual one; she feels simultaneously too young and too old, terribly naive.
She looks again at the space beside Quinn. She sits.
“It’s gone, you know.” Bella’s voice is hoarse from swallowed smoke. “All of it. The hoarded magic of witches, lost in a single night. It would have been safe if we’d just left it hidden where the Last Three put it, but we didn’t. I didn’t. And now it’s gone and all our hope with it.”
Bella thinks of all the women who followed them down this dangerous rabbit hole, all the Sisters hoping for the ways and words to change the bitter stories they were handed. “What have I done?” It comes out tear-thick, warbling.
“What have we done, I think you mean,” Quinn says dryly. “Who found the spell in Old Salem, again?”
“You did, of course, I didn’t mean—”
“So is it my fault, as well?”
“No!”
“And who got herself locked in jail and needed saving in the first place? And who had the baby early and kept you all distracted at the worst possible moment? Is it your sisters’ fault, too?” Quinn shakes her head. “If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”
“I . . . suppose.”
Quinn turns sideways on the bed, facing Bella. “But let’s look at what you’ve done, Belladonna Eastwood. You called back the Lost Way of Avalon and spread its secrets around half the city. You saved both your sisters’ lives. You stood for something. You lost something. But . . .” Quinn’s hands rise to either side of Bella’s face to slide her spectacles from her temples. Bella finds it necessary to remind her heart to keep beating and her lungs to keep pumping. “You gained something, too, I think.”
Quinn is close enough now that Bella can feel the heat of her skin, see the black swell of her pupils.
Bella wants very badly to kiss her.
The thought arrives without parentheses, a wild rush of wanting that Bella knows better than to give in to. She’ll be punished, afterward, bruised or beaten or locked up until she learns to forget again. Except—and she doesn’t know why this simple arithmetic has never occurred to her—isn’t she already being punished, in her loneliness? And if it hurts either way, surely she should at least enjoy the sin for which she suffers.
Bella looks down at her own hands, steady as stones. She feels the even beat of her heart. They taught her to be afraid, but somewhere along the way she lost the trick of it.
She lifts her hand to Quinn’s cheek, cups her palm around the curve of her jaw. Quinn holds very still, barely breathing.
“May I kiss you, Cleo?” She does not stutter.
Quinn exhales profanities.
“Is that a ye—” The end of Bella’s question is lost, stolen along with her breath.
It isn’t so much a kiss as a conflagration: of need and want long deferred, of lost hope and the wild abandon of two bodies colliding while the world burns around them.
Somewhere in the urgent fumble of buttons and clasps and the rushing rhythm of their breath, the touch of starlight on skin and the secret taste of salt, a treacherous thought occurs to Bella: that she would burn Avalon seven times over as long as it led her here, to this room and this saffron-yellow bed.
Afterward, when they lie together like a pair of clasped hands, one fitted perfectly beside the other, Bella lies awake. She resists the soft tug of sleep for as long as she can, because the sooner she sleeps the sooner dawn will arrive with all its hard truths. Already she feels the weight of the world hovering above them, waiting to settle.
“Cleo?” Her name tastes like cloves on Bella’s tongue. “Tell me a story?”
And Cleo does.
his is the story of how Aunt Nancy stole all the words for her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Aunt Nancy was an old, old woman—or perhaps she was a young woman, or a spider, or a hare, or all four at once—with clouds of cobweb for hair and shining black buttons for eyes, when her littlest great-granddaughter cried that she wanted to learn her letters.
Now Aunt Nancy would do anything for her grandchildren, so she went to the man in the big house and asked if he would please teach her to write. The man laughed at her, this little old woman with her cobwebbed hair. There was even a little black spider dangling beside her ear, watching him with tiny red eyes. In the end the man swore he would teach her to read and write if she brought him the smile of a coyote and the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake and the cry of a spider.
Aunt Nancy smiled and thanked him very prettily and he laughed again, because she was so old and foolish that she didn’t even know an impossible task when she heard one.
She hobbled back to her cabin in the woods. She sat on the porch and looked at the stars and sang a little song:
Cottontail and sly-fox
Terrapin and titmouse,
Come one, come all,
To your Aunt Nancy’s house.
And all the animals of the farm and forest began to creep forward as she sang, because Aunt Nancy knew plenty of words and ways already.
The next day Aunt Nancy returned to the big house with the smile of a coyote, the teeth of a hen, the tears of a snake, and the cry of a spider. But the man spurned her payment, claiming it was a trick or a ploy, that she was a witch and he would see her burned at the stake before he taught her a single letter. He ordered her to leave, and Aunt Nancy left.