“It was both of us!” she yelled, pressing her palms to my cheeks. Her hands were bloody, and the copper-penny smell made bile flood my mouth, but I reached up anyway, my fingers over hers. “It was both of us,” she said again, and then lowered her forehead to mine. “Not just you, Ellen. Not you. Us.”
It was a gift, the greatest one anyone ever could have given me, but I couldn’t see that right then. All I could see was Landon’s body on the sand and the bloody anchor that I had wielded.
“Oh God,” I said weakly. “Oh God.”
I’d killed the first man—maybe the only man—I’d ever loved.
I’d killed my baby’s father.
I’d killed the governor’s son.
Big Yellow Mama, that’s what they called Alabama’s electric chair, and I knew that’s where I’d go, my arms and legs strapped to painted wood, a steel cap on my shaved head, and my baby… mydaughter…
“Listen to me,” Lo said, her grip getting tighter like she knew where my thoughts were going. “You have to be strong a little longer. We have to get him to the water, okay?”
The water.
My eyes landed on the surging seas, and I nodded, making myself stand on trembling legs as rain and wind cocooned us both in this nightmare.
Landon was not a large man, but we were two teenage girls, one of whom was pregnant, the other maybe a hundred pounds on a good day. We tried dragging him to the water, but he was too heavy, wewere too weak, and the sand was too wet, Landon’s body sinking into it like it wanted to hold him there forever.
With a low moan, I dropped his arm and sank to the sand. “We can’t!” I shouted over the storm. “We can’t, we can’t, we can’t.”
Standing there in her David Bowie T-shirt and cutoff shorts, her hair wet and sticking to her face, Lo faced the ocean, her bloody hands on her hips.
“The storm!” she said, and when I only stared up at her in confusion, she said, “The storm. It’ll be here in just a few hours.”
“I don’t care,” I told her, but she shook her head, picking up the anchor.
“My daddy didn’t die in Hurricane Delphine, did you know that?”
“Yes, he did,” I replied, wondering if she’d lost her mind like I thought I might be doing.
“My mama killed him and let people think it was the storm,” she said, and I shook my head, the idea of Miss Beth-Anne killing anyone so impossible to believe that I was sure Lo had gone crazy.
But all I said to her was, “It won’t work, it’s not like that hurricane, it’s weak, and we’re…”
“We’re the Witches of St. Medard’s Bay,” she said, the look on her face both fierce and calm all at once. And as she stood there in the wind and rain, her red hands and her weapon—ourweapon—at her side, I almost believed she was some kind of sorceress or ancient goddess.
She turned and walked toward the surf, and I followed, wading out after her until we were up to our thighs, the waves buffeting us, our feet sliding on the sandy bottom as Lo dragged the anchor through the dark water, Landon’s blood washing away. Later, once Marie was over, the anchor would wash up onshore, but of course there was no sign of the wreckage it had wrought that night. Just another piece of storm debris.
That’s what I felt like myself, standing there in the water with Lo. Something sucked away by the tide, returned to shore battered and twisted.
I tipped my head back, rain in my face, stinging my eyes as I looked up at the black sky.
Lo’s hand found mine, our fingers intertwining, seawater and blood.
Were we witches?
I don’t know, but we sure as hell called a storm that night. What was supposed to be a Cat 1 that merely grazed us instead became a Cat 3 that roared directly over us, turning and getting stronger in a way that the meteorologists on TV the next day called “completely baffling.”
A once-in-a-lifetime storm, they said.
Sometimes I think the storm never ended.
LIZZIE
August 3, 2025
