Her familiar does not answer, regarding her with that red gaze. It lifts one foot, and Bella notices for the first time the thing clutched in its obsidian claws: a jagged, charred stone.
It uncurls its talons and the stone rolls toward Bella. Behind her Quinn makes a small, weary sound, like a woman who has seen quite enough strange and uncanny things for one evening and hopes they will soon desist.
Bella takes the stone. The owl watches her. “Th-thank you?” Bella offers. She doesn’t know if normal owls possess the ability to blink at one in a manner both disappointed and long-suffering, but this one apparently does.
It loses patience with her and launches itself abruptly skyward. Bella struggles upright. “Wait! Come back, I’m sorry!”
But it doesn’t leave. It merely sweeps in a low circle above them, wings angled. Three times it circles—Bella thinks of the Sign of the Three and the resonance of form, the repetition of drawn circles in folklore—before it cuts back toward Bella with talons outstretched. She braces for the blow, but the claws rest lightly on her shoulder. The owl weighs no more than the idea of an owl, a suggestion of bone and feather.
It calls, low and plaintive. Bella digs the point of her stone into the dark earth and drags it in a wide circle, whispering the words once more.Weave a circle round the throne. The circle begins to emit a soft, pearled light, like foxfire. Quinn makes her weary sound again.
Bella takes her hand and draws it earthward. She presses their palms against the night-cool earth, one beside the other, and Old Salem vanishes.
They leave nothing behind them but pooled wax and burned earth, and the faint, sweet smell of roses.
Agnes is not dead, and neither is her daughter.
She kneels in the place that was St. George’s Square. But now the street-lamps glimmer weakly through a forest of twisted trees, impossibly far away. Stars wheel in wild patterns above her, nearer and brighter than Agnes has ever seen them in New Salem. The sky is broken by an immense blackness, a stone tower overgrown with ivy and climbing roses, its door marked with three winding circles.
Agnes is looking up at the tower, touching her belly and thinking dreamily,Happy birthday, baby girl, when two women appear in the place that was once St. George’s Square. If Agnes had not recently seen an entire tower appear from thin air, sliding into reality like a fish reeled from sea to air, she might have found this quite shocking.
“Bella!” She is standing beside Cleopatra Quinn at the tower door, their palms pressed to the woven circles. “How did you—is that anowl?” A tall shadow perches on her oldest sister’s shoulder, regarding Agnes with hot-ember eyes.
“Yes, I think so,” Bella burbles. Her own eyes are feverish and over-bright, spinning in a manner that causes Agnes some concern. “Strix varia, I suspect, though with the coloring it’s difficult to be sure. Ovid thought them vampires and ill omens, the silly man—just look how handsome he is!” Bella pauses in this delirium to draw a finger down her owl’s breast. A thought seems to strike her. She wheels, looking up at the vastness of the tower, then back to Quinn and Agnes. “Do you feel anything? Any particular power awakening?”
A small, uncertain silence falls as the three of them wait for some mysterious and ancient magic to flood their veins, filling them with the lost majesty of their fore-mothers.
“I don’t think so,” says Agnes.
“No,” says Cleo.
“Neither do I. Well, perhaps there’s some ritual or key inside—a series of clues which reveal a secret chamber, like one of Miss Doyle’s mysteries! Or perhaps if we read the inscription aloud—” Bella bends closer to the door, where words are written in foreign-looking script. “Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.”
Nothing happens.
Before Bella can try anything else, a fourth woman appears at the tower door. Her shift hangs in ash-streaked tatters, clinging to damp flesh, revealing the dark blooms of bruises. Her head is bowed, face hidden by a black tangle of hair. Her breath is a wet rattle.
The woman straightens. As she turns, Agnes sees the red ruin of her throat, a mess of bloody pink and dead white that she can’t look at very long.
Juniper is beaming at them, lips cracked, teeth bloody. Her eyes are a deep gray-green, like the shadows of summer leaves, softer and sweeter than Agnes has ever seen them—until they land on the creature perched on Bella’s shoulder.
“Oh,horseshit.” Juniper’s voice is somehow both wet and scorched, terrible to hear. “How come you get one before me?”
Then, with a strange, boneless grace, she collapses.
Bella is not dead. But, but she thinks her sister might be.
Agnes reaches her first. “June? June, baby?Helpme, damn you! Get her inside!” It takes Bella a long moment to realize Agnes is addressing her, and another to crouch down beside her sister’s broken-doll body. She hesitates to touch her—she’s an open wound, a collection of bruises and burns and abuses—but between them Bella and Agnes haul her awkwardly upright.
Quinn pulls hard on the iron ring of the tower door. It opens easily, as if some tidy caretaker has kept its hinges oiled all these centuries.
Bella and Agnes lay their sister on the cool flagstone floor with her hair haloed around her and her throat gaping like a second mouth.
Bella looks a little wildly into the shadows, hoping for a glowing chalice or an ivory wand or perhaps a magical potion labeledDrink me!
There is nothing. Only soft darkness cut with silver shafts of moonlight, and a faint, dry smell that makes Bella’s heart lift inexplicably in her chest.
Agnes’s voice is hesitant, swallowed by the vast dark above them. “Someone will see, soon, and then they’ll come for us. What do we do?”
