She feels Agnes a hundred miles away, lit like a torch in the center of New Salem, the cobbles growing hot beneath her heels. She feels her hands steady on the glass vials, and the bright hiss of tears and milk and blood as they fall.
Burned and bound, our stolen crown—
But where is Juniper? The line between them is thin and weak, far too cold.
Bella kneels on the bare earth of Old Salem, still speaking the spell, magic burning through her. Steam rises from the soil as it boils beneath her.
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
The words feel true in her mouth, like keys sliding into invisible locks. But the heat is consuming her. She pictures her veins glowing hotter and hotter until she ignites, until she is a bonfire with a woman’s voice.
She feels Agnes burning with her, arms wrapped tight around her belly, hair rising around her in the same wind that whips dirt and dead leaves around Bella.
But she doesn’t feel Juniper. There are only two of them, and two is not enough.
The last time she worked this spell—when she was just a librarian named Beatrice who found a few words that shouldn’t exist—she had grown frightened and fallen silent. Without the words the spell suffocated like an airless fire, and the only price was a little Devil’s-fever, quickly cured.
But now she is Belladonna Eastwood, the oldest sister and the wisest, and Juniper needs her.
She circles back to the beginning of the spell in an unbroken chant. The woods dim around her, vanishing in the rising haze of heat. Her lips keep moving, desperate prayers mixing with the words.
—oh hell—Three bless and keep us—weave a circle round the throne—
Distantly, she feels cool fingers across her brow, palms cupping her face. A thumb traces her cheeks and she turns blindly toward it. If she is going to die, let it be with the sweet frost of those fingers against her lips, the taste of ink and cloves on her tongue.
There comes a point when Bella knows she should turn back. It’s like wading into the creek after a storm, the water rushing around your ankles, knowing if you take another step it will pull you under.
Bella takes another step. She goes under.
She is fire. She is pain. She is a crack in the world through which something else—magic or God or the heat of every unanswered wish and impossible dream, burning eternal on the other side of everything—pours through.
She thinks she’s probably dying.
The something-else pauses. It considers her, this dying woman kneeling in a circle of spent candles, her lips still shaping the words that are killing her.
Somewhere very far away, an owl calls.
Bella opens her eyes. Through the haze of heat and tears she sees a shape gliding through the trees, silent as smoke, blacker than the blackest night. Its eyes are a pair of embers burning nearer.
Quinn gasps, but Bella’s lips crack into a smile, because—though she is burning, though she is failing—at least she has come this far. At least she has knelt in the bones of Old Salem and watched her familiar winging toward her.
Bella draws a breath. She begins again.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
Juniper hears the words echoing down the line, tastes them gathering in her mouth. She keeps her teeth clamped tight.
The spell needs her. She feels it boiling too hot, gathering like lightning with nowhere to strike. But if she speaks, the collar around her throat will kill her.
If she doesn’t speak, the spell will kill her sisters.
Let it go, for the love of Eve, save yourselves.
They don’t let it go. Because they are fools, because they are desperate, because they will not abandon her a second time.
Juniper closes her eyes and whispers several very filthy words.
She thinks a little bitterly of all the lofty reasons she wanted to restore the Lost Way—to reclaim the power of witches for all womankind, to break the shackles of their servitude, to set this whole damn city on fire. And in the end she’s going to do it because she wants to save her dumb-shit sisters, who are only doing it to save her in turn.
