“But not you?”
“It was my home.” He smiled. “I was content until Temperance reached her sixth birthday, and I realized…” He hesitated as he looked up at Olivia. At her nod of encouragement, he drew in a quiet breath and continued, “She had dreams like mine. We… we would see things before they happened.”
“Precognition,” Olivia replied. “It’s a very common gift. It can range from having a vague feeling of something good or bad happening to full-on visions.”
“You accept it so easily.” He marveled at her response. “But where I came from, something like that would mean that you were in league with the devil. I taught Temperance to hide her ability from others, as I had learned to hide mine, but a fever had gripped Salem. Although the worst was still yet to come, the accusations of witchcraft were everywhere. No one was safe. I tried to keep us isolated at the farm so we would not be discovered. But everything changed when Temperance fell ill with a fever.”
“She died?” Olivia asked softly.
Theo nodded, the pain still as fresh as the day it happened. “Logan changed. His grief was so raw, so angry. Losing her was like losing our mother all over again. We’d had to leave her at home with our father while we went to trade at market. It was late in the year, and we were caught in a sudden storm. We were days late, and by the time we returned home, she was already gone. I blamed myself for leaving her. Logan blamed the world. He’d begun to associate with a young cleric named Nathaniel Boothe. It was he who first suggested to Logan that Temperance’s illness was not of natural causes. Of course, Logan didn’t take much convincing. He was looking for someone, something, to blame for the loss of our sister.”
“I’ve never heard of a Nathaniel Boothe,” Olivia said.
“Then there seem to be several gaps in your history.” Theo glowered. “I never trusted Nathaniel. There was something about him that made me uneasy. He was always there in the background, always whispering in Logan’s ear. He had too much influence over Logan. It was his suggestion that my brother be appointed as a Witchfinder, and he fueled his rage and hate at every opportunity. I tried to talk to him, help him see, but with every day that passed, he became less my brother and more a tool of Nathaniel’s righteous campaign against the devil.”
“How did you end up as a Witchfinder?” Olivia asked. “As someone with abilities, you must’ve had some sympathy for those women, must’ve known they were innocent.”
“I didn’t know what to think at first. I was just trying to save my brother from Nathaniel’s influence. It was Logan’s idea—or Nathaniel’s, I don’t know which—to name me as a Witchfinder as he had been. The court passed my appointment without my knowledge. I believe that was Nathaniel’s doing as he had an undue amount of influence over them. After that, I was trapped. If I refused, they would name me witch, and I would hang the same as the others. I thought maybe that if I was with my brother, I could somehow exercise some kind of restraint over him. That maybe I could make him see reason. I thought that if I could just reach him, if I could make him deal with his grief…” Theo sighed. “But the only way he would let me get close to him was if he believed I shared his convictions, if I took the vow.”
“You did it to save your brother.”
“For all the good it did me.” Theo shook his head miserably. “He was too far gone. If it hadn’t been for Nathaniel, I might have been able to, but it was almost as if Nathaniel had him in his thrall.”
“What happened, Theo?” she asked softly.
“Terrible things.” He closed his eyes as if to shut out the horrors he had witnessed. His jaw tensed as he continued. “During the time I spent in Salem town as a Witchfinder, the things I saw, the things I did, I will never forgive myself for. It was then that I realized I could not save my brother, but if I was ever going to be able to live with myself, I had to walk away. I left Salem and returned to our farm where I remained until the night he sent Bridget and Hester West to be held prisoner in our barn.”
“Why would he do that?” Olivia wondered aloud.
“At the time, I hadn’t spoken to my brother in months. When I asked why the children had been brought to the farm, I was told Nathaniel himself wanted to question them. That in itself was strange. Nathaniel was never directly involved. He preferred to remain in the background, manipulating others. But I just couldn’t understand what they could possibly know. They were so young, barely as old as Temperance had been when she passed. I asked the children outright if they knew what Nathaniel could possibly want with them, and Hester told me that they had killed her mother, that Nathaniel was searching for something and he believed they knew where it was.”
“What was it?”
“I’m not sure,” Theo mused. “But Hester referred to it as Infernum.”
“Infernum?”
“Have you heard of it?” Theo asked. “Do you know what it is?”
“I have no idea.” Olivia’s brow creased thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard of it. I mean, Infernum is the Latin word for Hell, but I’ve never heard the term used for an object. Maybe there’s something in Hester’s journals. I haven’t finished reading them all yet.”
“What about you?” Theo took a pull of his beer, which was now flat and warm.
“What about me?” Olivia repeated with a sigh and stared into the flames. “I lived in town with my mom and dad, in a little house with a blue front door. I had a dog named Truman. My Nana Alice and her twin sister Aunt Evie lived in this house. We’d come to visit, and I’d play in the woods with my dog and Jake and his sister Louisa. My father was a teacher, and my mother, well, she was just my mom. We were a normal, happy family. At least, I thought we were.”
She closed her eyes briefly, not wanting to relive the memories. Unfortunately, her recollections from that night were distorted, fleeting. She found that the more she tried to hold onto them, the more the details kept slipping away. All she could remember was her grandmother dead on the floor in a pool of blood and her father as he sank the knife into her mother’s chest.
And then fire... so much fire.
“Mom and Dad were fighting. Their voices had carried up the stairs, and the noise woke me. I wasn’t sure what was happening at first—they never raised their voices to me or each other. Even knowing I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed I snuck down the stairs to see what was happening. Nana was already dead, Mom and Dad were fighting, and there was a knife.”
“He killed her?” Theo drew in a sharp breath.
She nodded slowly. “Then he burned the house to the ground and took me and ran.”
“My God,” Theo breathed out.
“We were on the run for days, and my memories of that time are... fragmented. Anyway, the police finally caught up with us in Philadelphia, and my dad was arrested.”
