Agnes cranes her neck upward. “Warn them for me, Pan. Tell them to stay away.” She feels the hot spark of his eyes on her. “Please.” He shrieks back to her, a shivering, wild sound entirely out of place in the civilized sprawl of New Salem.
Agnes runs.
Bella thinks at first it’s a roll of thunder cracking over the city, out of season, or perhaps a distant earthquake. Some vast, shattering thing, blind and angry.
Then she realizes it’s her sister’s heart splitting in two.
The spell of warding dies on her lips. “Three bless and keep me,” she whispers.
Miss Araminta Wells and another pair of women look over at her, harassed. “Thought we were working these wards together,” Araminta drawls.
They’re standing at the north end of Nut Street, their fingers crusted with salt, their pockets weighted with thistle and chalk. The canniest and cleverest members of the Daughters of Tituba have gathered to work what wards they can while others ferry the youngest and oldest occupants of New Cairo into the tunnels, blindfolded. Bella provided them with all the words and ways she could and a list of addresses and households willing to shelter them until Hill’s raid was over.
Araminta held the list, running her thumb over the names in tidy writing: Miss Florentine Lee, 201 Spinner’s Row, Room No. 44 (3 persons). Mr. Henry Blackwell, 186 St. Jerome St. (15 persons).
“I keep waiting for you to disappoint me,” she said querulously, before bustling off to gather supplies from her cellar.
“That’s more or less a declaration of love, from my mother,” Cleo sighed at her elbow.
Now Araminta glowers as she watches Bella. “What is it? Who is it?” She bites hard into the words, like a woman used to bad news and dark portents.
“It’s Agnes.” But Bella thinks: It’s Eve. Surely nothing else could crack her sister’s heart like that. Bella catches the worried O of Cleo’s mouth, but she can’t seem to focus on anything except the splitting of her sister’s heart. “I’m sorry. I said I would stay but I have to go.”
“Go, child,” Araminta tells her. “We’ll finish without you.” Her mouth works for another second, as if there’s something unpleasant caught in her teeth. “And call on the Daughters, if you have need of us.” She touches her breast pocket and Bella hears the crinkle of folded paper.
She wheels to Cleo and presses her hand once, too hard. “Meet me tonight. Back at South Sybil.”
If Cleo answers, it’s lost in the frantic thump of her feet and the mutter of spells as Bella runs.
She follows the echo of Agnes’s fury north out of New Cairo. At Second Street she grabs the rail of a passing trolley and steps aboard, glaring with such ferocity that the conductor elects to look the other way.
The city whitens around her. Police stroll past, batons swinging jauntily, and Inquisitors strut in their still-fresh uniforms. None of them notice a hunched, white-haired woman clinging to the trolley as it jangles past, or the flitting shadow of an owl’s wing above them.
Bella sees the dome of City Hall ahead and tastes the sour bite of fear in her throat. Why would Agnes be at the square? Why would she leave the safety of their circled wards?
She hops down from the trolley and stumbles against a plain-looking woman pushing a frilly pram, limping on every other step. It’s only after the woman hisses in her ear, “Saints, Bell, you look older than Mags,” that she realizes the pram is empty.
“June! Did you feel it? Do you know what’s happening?”
Juniper’s face is blotched and pale beneath her disguise. “Something bad. She’s running this way, seems like, but Lord knows why.”
A bird swoops suddenly between them, a ragged snatch of midnight. Bella lifts her arm and feels the bite of talons before she realizes the bird does not belong to her. “Pan? What are you doing here? Where’s Agnes? Someone will see!”
He ignores her, eyes red and reproachful. He opens his beak and a human voice echoes out of it. “Stay away. Please. Stay away.”
The voice belongs, quite unmistakably and impossibly, to their sister.
Pan closes his beak and vanishes in a swirl of ash and smoke, leaving the two of them surrounded by mutters and staring eyes. Bella wipes a smudge of char from her spectacles. “I didn’t know they could do that.”
Voices and running steps rise around them. Juniper grabs her sleeve and hauls her into an alley. “What do we do?”
Bella snorts, half-hysterical. “Didn’t you listen to any of my witch-tales?” Juniper marches her onward, whispering words and spitting over her shoulder. It hisses on the cobblestones and rises like steam behind them, obscuring their escape.
“In the stories, it’s generally best to do whatever the hell the talking animal tells you.”
May the Devil take you down
And break your golden crown.
A mortal curse, requiring hemlock & hate
The mayor’s office is all oiled leather and oak paneling. The walls are lined with paintings in gilt frames, displaying the usual association of horses and Saints and men in powdered wigs. An especially noble-looking Saint George of Hyll does battle with a dragon the color of hellfire, hounds baying at his side.
A dark-stained desk hulks in the middle of the room. On its surface, between neat stacks of papers and the dark shine of an inkwell, lies a mockingbird. A clawed shadow is cast across it, pinning its wings at precise and hideous angles. Its ribcage throbs in panic.
Agnes Amaranth looks away, swallowing hard. Pan croons on her shoulder.
Mr. Gideon Hill stands at the tall window, watching the scurry and bustle of the street below with his hand resting on the iron collar of the dog at his side. The five o’clock slant of the light draws deep shadows behind them.
The dog faces Agnes first, its tail giving the faintest, cowardly wave. Mr. Hill turns to Agnes with a mannered smile, as if she is a necessary but tiresome guest. “Ah, Miss Agnes Eastwood, I presume.” Agnes’s disguise is a careless one: the windswept braid over her shoulder is already threaded with sleek black and her eyes are boiling back to silver. “But surely Miss Tattershall ought to have shown you in?”
“The receptionist?”
“Yes.”
Agnes shrugs without looking away from him. “She’s sleeping.” Her head had knocked against her desk with a hollow, split-melon sound, but her eyes remained peacefully closed. Agnes supposes it was possible that she overdid it—Bella mentioned princesses who slept for centuries and dozing gentlemen who missed entire wars—but she finds she doesn’t much care.
“How generous of you.” Hill does not appear in the least relieved about Miss Tattershall’s fate. His gaze on her is—strange. Almost wary, as if he is waiting for her to produce a pistol or a spell from her skirt pockets.
Her pockets are empty except for the weak remnants of her witching: the crumbled dust of herbs, a few sweat-damp matches, the waxen stub of a candle.
“My daughter, Mr. Hill. Where is she?” She wonders if he hears the shake in her voice, and whether he mistakes it for fear.
Hill strolls to the dark island of his desk and sits, dog padding meekly behind him. It folds itself beneath his chair, looking at her with sorry black eyes, while its master steeples his hands above the mockingbird. It writhes, desperate, trapped.