“Get a hold of yourself, woman.” Cleo’s voice is rough but her fingers on Bella’s face are soft. “Did you find what you needed?”
“Oh, Cleo, we saw them. We spoke to them! The Three themselves! I need a pen.” Bella’s fingertips fizz with the need to write it all down, to decant the marvels and curiosities of the last hour into the safety of ink and paper. She looks a little wildly into the shadows, as if an ink-pen might materialize. “Where are we?”
“The Mother Bethel Church in New Cairo. We warded it as best we could, but we shouldn’t linger.”
“We?”
Quinn lifts her wand-light and other faces swim out of the darkness, lining the pews: the Hull sisters with their hoods pulled high; Jennie Lind looking grim, one eye blacked; Yulia and her daughters sitting next to Annie Flynn; a scrawny, raw-boned girl who stares at Agnes with some combination of resentment and gratitude; a half-dozen others, their shoulders squared and their eyes steady.
The Sisters of Avalon. Their sisters, still.
Juniper is grinning, hard and fierce. Agnes is staring around at them, white-faced. “What are you all doing here?”
Yulia ticks her chin at Cleo. “She called. Said you three were doing something very stupid.” Yulia’s voice goes gruff. “Said they took your baby girl.”
Agnes swallows several times.
“You will get her back now?”
Agnes nods once, her eyes like hot steel.
Yulia grunts. Bella waits for the Sisters to ask questions, like how? or with what army? But they merely sit and wait. Bella fights an embarrassing impulse to cry.
She is rescued by Cleo tapping her gently on the shoulder. “You spoke to them?”
“Yes. That is, their spirits. They invented a binding that breached the usual corporeal bounds of the soul. They tied themselves to the library—or to witchcraft itself, I suppose. And I was right about rhymes as vehicles for the preservation of spells during the purge. They told us—”
“They told us Gideon Hill is an immortal and a witch,” Juniper interrupts, perhaps wisely. “In addition to being a pain in our asses. And they told us how to kill him.” She slouches into a pew across from Yulia, crossing her staff over her lap. “The only trouble will be catching him with his guard down and getting rid of those damn shadows of his.” Her gaze lands on the burning light at the end of Cleo’s wand. Her eyes narrow in speculation. “Huh.”
Bella shakes her head. “That’s just a housewife’s spell to shed light. I’m not sure it could do anything but annoy him.”
“But what if there were more of us? And what if he didn’t see it coming? If we could catch him at some kind of public speech, maybe, or a parade. He’s bound to hold one eventually, man like him.”
Agnes’s voice slides across Juniper’s, thin and tired. “We have until tomorrow at sundown.”
Bella and Juniper stare at her.
“Hill made a deal with me.” Agnes swallows. “I’m supposed to betray you to him by tomorrow at sundown if I want Eve back alive and well.” She speaks her daughter’s name carefully, as if it’s broken glass or bent nails in her mouth, likely to cut her.
“Oh.” Juniper scrubs her palms over her face. “And what did you say?”
Agnes swallows, throat tensing in the long shadows of the wand-light. “I said yes.”
Juniper nods, unbothered. “Good girl. Doesn’t give us long to plan, though. Any of you know a way to get the mayor out in public, surrounded by our people? Jennie? Inez?” A pair of lines appear between her brows. “Where’s Inez?”
Jennie answers her, voice shaking very slightly. “They got her yesterday. Electa, too. We were trying to get food to the girls in the Deeps, but the shadows held them fast. I tried to stay with them, to help, but Inez told me to run. She was . . . forceful.” Jennie touches the swollen edge of the bruise around her eye.
Juniper doesn’t say anything, but the lines between her brows deepen. Her shoulders bow, as if a heavy weight has settled over them. It occurs to Bella that she doesn’t look much like the wounded, wild seventeen-year-old who came staggering into the city six months ago; there’s a gravity to her features, a weight to her limbs. As if she has seen the price of her wildness and is no longer certain she wants to pay it.
Bella feels the heat of Cleo’s fingers on her shoulder and wishes for a wild second the two of them could run. Could leave the city, the country, the world itself.
From the corner of her eye, Bella sees Juniper’s shoulders unbow. Her eyes kindle. It’s an unsettling expression, familiar to Bella as the light that generally precedes something dangerous or illegal.
“You know,” Juniper observes to the gathered women, “there’s nothing more public than a good old-fashioned witch-burning. And it’s nearly the equinox.”
Her tone is conversational, almost airy, but Bella feels the cold slither of premonition in her stomach. She can sense the edges of Juniper’s idea through the thing between them, formless but terrifying.
Agnes gives their sister a quelling, don’t-even-think-about-it frown that tells Bella she feels it, too. “So?”
“So.” Juniper stands and strolls down the aisle, staff clacking. She spins on her heels to face them and spreads her arms wide, like some ancient priestess offering a bloody-handed blessing. “Let’s give this city what it wants.”
Rain, rain go away
Come again another day.
A spell to delay a coming storm, requiring mere luck
Beatrice Belladonna never understood how brief a single day could be until it was her last. It’s as if the hours sprouted wings in the night.
She is crouched in the dim, dust-specked attic of an abandoned house on Sixth Street, surrounded by a small ocean of books and papers, hastily scrawled notes and half-written spells for rust and sleep and sunlight, for changeling children and flying brooms. Candle-stubs puddle precariously close to piles of poorly folded cloaks in a dozen shades of charcoal and ink, still smelling of summer. In the middle of this mess Bella sits in a ring of salt, fingers cramped around a pen and sleeves rolled to the wrist, trying to ignore the feathered passing of the hours.
Her battered black-leather notebook is propped against a mug of cold coffee, the pages dog-eared and marked. It occurs to Bella that if their plans go awry, it might be the only surviving record of events that isn’t skewed by Gideon Hill’s propagandizing. It isn’t much—part memoir, part grimoire, interspersed with rhymes and witch-tales, a scrapbooked record of their summer—but her fingers trail lovingly over the cover.
She flips to the first page, where a nameplate is pasted neatly in the center:
Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood
Assistant Librarian
Salem College Library
She blots out two-thirds of the nameplate and adds four lines above it:
Our Own Stories
Being the Entirely True Tale of the Sisters Eastwood in
the Summer of 1893
By
Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood
Assistant Librarian
Salem College Library
Avalon
She can’t quite bring herself to cross out the word librarian. It was her home and refuge, the thing she became once she was no longer her father’s daughter or her sisters’ keeper. She thinks of herself now as a librarian awkwardly bereft of a library, obliged to build her own.