And if he is not invincible—if he can bleed and break and die like any other man—then he should never have touched a single hair on her daughter’s head.
Juniper feels her sister drawing closer like a gathering storm. Bella and Cleo wait with her, huddled together in the half-dark of the South Sybil boarding house, their eyes meeting sometimes then falling away. The room is silent except for the occasional rustle of skirts, the brush of feathers in the shadows.
Footsteps ring like mallets on the stairs. The door scrapes.
Agnes steps into the room looking fifty years older and a hundred years meaner. Blood crusts her fingertips and bruises shadow her wrists. Milk weeps down her blouse, and the sight of those stains is a knife between Juniper’s ribs.
Pan trills on Agnes’s shoulder, low and mournful, and Strix answers.
“What happened? Where’s Eve?” Juniper’s voice cracks over the name: Eve, who is ruby-red innocence, who is tiny and furious and perfect in some way that Juniper doesn’t understand but wants fiercely to protect. Who might still be safe with her mother if it wasn’t for Juniper and her troublemaking.
Agnes doesn’t appear to have heard her. “We’ll need more candles. I have three, I think. Maybe matches will do. And maiden’s blood, crone’s tears—Lord knows I’ve got the milk.” She scurries around the room as she speaks, rattling through drawers.
Juniper’s eyes meet Bella’s. Cleo asks, gently, “Agnes? Why do you need candles?”
Agnes finds a handful of candle-stubs in a crate beneath her bed and arranges them in a hurried circle, muttering to herself. She looks perfectly deranged.
“Agnes.” Bella’s voice is even gentler than Cleo’s. “What are you doing?”
But Juniper already knows. So does Bella, judging by the tremble of her fingers. “She’s calling back the Lost Way of Avalon. Again.”
Agnes doesn’t pause, doesn’t even look up.
“Butwhy?” Bella sounds very close to tears.
“Because I’d like to talk with the Last Three.”
A small silence follows this announcement. Even Cleo’s mouth hangs open, her journalist’s composure overcome at last. Juniper says, as casually as she can, “Sure. The thing is, though—and I don’t want to upset you—the Last Three are dead.”
Agnes makes a faint noise of irritation at such nitpicking.
“Realdead. Exceptionally dead. There are legends and stories about how dead they are. You might’ve heard some of them.”
“I have, yes,” Agnes acknowledges. “Still.”
This is apparently too much for Bella, who wails, “What’s wrong with you, Agnes? There’s nothing left.”
Agnes still doesn’t look up. “What about Yulia’s story? What about the witch who bound her heart to a needle or an egg or whatever it was, and lived forever?”
“A fable. Amyth.”
“And how many of our spells came from fables? What if it’s more than a myth?”
Bella looks as if she’s considered actually tearing her hair in frustration. “It isn’t possible.”
Agnes raises her head from her candle-circle and meets their eyes. She should look like a grief-struck madwoman, broken and hopeless, but instead she looks like an angel cast down from Heaven struggling back to her feet with blood on her teeth, ready to make war with God himself.
“I do not,” she says, very clearly, “give a shit.”
She withdraws a rust-smeared shard of glass from her pocket and hands it to Juniper. Her eyes saypleaseand Juniper can’t refuse her. She slices the glass across her open palm, cutting deep, and opens her hand to let her blood drip onto the warped floorboards of South Sybil.
Red sky at night, witch’s delight.
Red sky at morning, witch’s warning.
A spell for storms, requiring red cloth & wet earth
Beatrice Belladonna catches her sister’s hand in hers before her blood falls. “Saints,think,” she hisses. “What happens if you materialize a tower on top of a boarding house?”
