Beatrice runs.
Agnes should have started running as soon as she heard the first scuff of cloak on stone, as soon as she understood they’d walked into a trap.
She stayed. While Juniper flung herself at Gideon Hill, while Bella stood there like a damn statue, while her little sister’s blood turned thick and gelid in her palm.
The last time Juniper got herself in trouble, Agnes had rushed to save her without a second thought. But this time the men are wearing badges on their chests. This time Agnes will wind up in a jail cell, and she knows what happens to women who go to jail with babies in their bellies: they lose them. Either before birth, from rough treatment and poor food, or after it, when some flint-faced doctor rips the baby from their bodies and takes her away, still squalling. Agnes’s daughter would end up in the New Salem Home for Lost Angels. If she isn’t over-lain or shipped out west, Agnes might see her sometimes playing in the alleys, pox-scarred and undersized, with bitter black stones for eyes.
No. Not for anything. Not for the vote or the Sisters or even her own true-blood sisters.
She gives Bella a good shove and runs without looking back, one arm wrapped tight around her belly. Hands reach for her and she twists away from them. They tangle in her long cloak and she scrabbles for the clasp, sending it winging free behind her.
Each footfall is a slap against her stomach, jarring her hips. Her hair clings sweaty and tangled against her neck. She dodges behind a white pillar of stone and doubles over, heaving, choking back coughs.
There are boot-steps and raised voices behind her, growing nearer.
She fumbles a candle-stub from her pocket and draws a shaky, desperate X of wax on the stone. It’s men’s magic—“good for a quick getaway,” Mr. Lee had said, smiling his crooked smile. She gave him an arch look. “And are you often in need of getaways, Mr. Lee?”
“Oh, weekly, Miss Eastwood.”
Across the room, Juniper made ablechsound.
Now Agnes pants the string of Latin he taught them. Lightness fills her, as if her bones are hollowing out. A black twist of hair unpeels from her neck and floats lazily upward, as if gravity has briefly forgotten its business.
She runs again. This time she’s a thrown stone skipped across a pond, a gull skimming above the waves, there and gone again. The sounds of pursuit fade behind her.
Agnes braids a rope of hair for herself and climbs back over the cemetery gate. She runs alone through the quiet streets, her feet weightless and silent. She thinks of the Hanged Woman lying flat on Madame Zina’s tabletop, of Juniper disappearing beneath a wave of knuckles and boots.
She slows, staring down at the palm where her sister’s blood is cracking and flaking.Don’t leave me, Juniper begged her.Take care of them, her mother told her.
But hadn’t that been her mother’s job, first? She failed her daughters; Agnes will not fail her own.
She closes her fist and keeps running.
Beatrice is aware that she isn’t going to make it. It’s too dark and the graveyard is too full of humps and hollows and tilted stones, and she can’t see through the blur of tears in her eyes.
She hears the pound of footsteps behind her, the rush of heavy breathing.
She dodges behind a marble mausoleum and presses herself against the door, the iron rings digging into the soft meat of her back. It isn’t much of a hiding place—any second now an officer is going to stumble around the corner and see the shine of her spectacles in the moonlight, and she’s going to burn beside her sister for a crime she didn’t commit.
Behind her, the door gives way. It caves inward and hands reach out to pull her inside. She has time to think, calmly, that this must be a fear-induced hallucination, because it’s only in story-papers that the dead come alive on the full moon and pull sinners down into their graves—
Before a warm, dry hand presses over her mouth. It smells of cloves and ink.
“Stay quiet. And stop biting me, woman.”
Juniper knows better than to bait a mad dog or a drunk, and she knows from the glassy-eyed faces of the police officers that they’re a little of both. But she also knows there are times when every choice is a losing one, when you just have to go in swinging and hope you make it out alive.
She keeps her staff swiping and her legs kicking, tangling the officers in the long sweep of her robes as she flails. She chantsA tangled web she weavesin a breathless whisper, crushing the cobweb in her skirt pocket and reveling in the yelping and swearing of men who have just felt spider-silk gumming across their eyes and mouths.
One of them shouts, “It’s her! The witch! She got me once before—” and something cracks across her spine hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. A fist smashes against her ear with a hollow-melon sound and she finds herself facedown in the dirt.
She smiles into the ashes.Run, girls.
Boots and batons land in a panicky hail across her body, blending together into a single pulsing pain. She hears a terrible splintering sound and worries for a moment that it’s bone before the shattered pieces of her red-cedar staff fall before her.
“Oh, that’s enough of that, isn’t it?” She hears the smile in Hill’s voice.
Juniper opens streaming eyes to see his face queerly doubled above her, pale and grayish against the night. She grins up at him, knowing from the copper taste in her mouth that her teeth are slimed with blood. She makes a sideways hat-sweeping gesture from the ground. “Fancy seeing you again, Mr. Hill.”
