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She couldn’t have even conceived of the possibility. The idea that her father—formidable as a shark, strong as an ox, with powerful hands that struck and restrained—could be brought down by a fifteen-year-old girl was paradoxical by nature.

Miss Obedience was still too young to understand that brawn was no match for the raw potential of a witch; a strength born of the mind, cultivated in the spirit.

Raised in a society where she was seen as little more than a servant to be used at the whim of a man, she hadn’t realized she possessed any power at all; until the rather memorable moment she snapped her father’s neck.

But that was far from the first tragedy to befall the Birds.

Misfortune had struck the family the previous year, in the summer of 1804, when two of the beautiful daughters were reclaimed by God. The first to fall was Temperance, the eldest, to an infection of the brain. The second, the ever polite and delicate Chastity, passed not a month later from fever.

That left only Obedience, the youngest, and Modesty, the second youngest by just thirteen months and the gentlest soul amongst them.

After the deaths of their sisters, Obedience and Modesty were rarely seen without the company of the other. They clung to one another like lifeboats on the open sea, their surviving sister acting as a constant companion and refuge from their father, whose anger had only intensified after the deaths of his eldest daughters, and from their mother, who had all but retreated into the recesses of her own mind.

And then things took an even darker turn: a mysterious trio of deaths that utterly confounded the townsfolk.

Obedience would never forget the hazy August morning she awoke to find her beloved sister on the kitchen floor, blood pooling from the center of her chest, her eyes a depthless void—in the arms of their mother.

Their mother, who was stroking Modesty’s flaxen hair with one shaky hand, while the other was wrapped tightly around a blood-soaked knife.

Weeping, she hugged Modesty to her chest, her tear-streaked eyes meeting her youngest daughter’s. “I did it to save her.” Her voice was as dead as the limp girl in her arms, and yet full of conviction.

And then she plunged the knife into her own heart, her blood seeping like beet juice across the lye-bleached pine.

For a long while, Obedience stood as still as stone. And then her limbs began to quake. She sagged against the nearest wall, a hand clutched to her heart, which felt as though it were being ripped from her chest. The pain was nearly suffocating.

Her gaze landed on the knife. One movement and it could all be over. The overwhelming fear, the sorrow; all gone in an instant.

And then she heard the footsteps, turned to see her father’s tall, foreboding figure standing in the doorway.

She was never sure if he’d lived long enough to see his wife and daughter’s blood-stained bodies.

In that moment, rage like Obedience had never known blazed within her like an inferno. Her mother had killed Modesty to protect her from him. Then she’d killed herself to be free from his torment.

Obedience screamed and leapt forward, her hands outstretched and aimed at her father’s throat.

She heard the snap before she even touched his skin, and a second later, his twisted body fell on top of the corpses of his wife and second youngest child.

Chest heaving in panicked confusion, Obedience knelt down and shoved her father off of her mother and sister. Delicately, reverently, she stroked a soft hand down her sister’s cheek. Her throat clogged with tears as she began to hum a lullaby her mother used to sing to them when they were small.

A strange tingling sensation shot through Obedience’s fingers from the place where they caressed her sister’s cheek, ricocheting up her arm and into her heart. Obedience gasped, ripping her hand away. The sensation thrummed through her chest like a second pulse, and she searched the sparse room, seeking an object to deposit the energy into.

For she realized instinctively what this was: Modesty’s energy, her soul, was currently commingling with Obedience’s own. As surely as she knew the sun would set and the moon would rise, she understood that she must find a home for her sister’s soul, a place for it to live until Obedience could determine how to bring her beloved Modesty back to her.

At last, she spotted the decorative glass orb that hung above the kitchen window to fend off evil spirits. A witch ball. It would have to do.

Scraping a chair over to the window, Obedience balanced on the caned seat and plucked the ornament off its hook. She cupped her hands around the cool, smooth glass and let out a long sigh of relief as the energy pulsed through her fingertips, permeating the glass and coming to rest at the center of the orb, silent and invisible but undeniably there.

She wrapped the ball up carefully in her best dress and went in search of something she could use to carry it. Eventually, she decided her mother’s velvet-lined beaded reticule would do nicely.

At the back of the rosewood armoire, Obedience found a carpet bag stuffed behind her eldest sisters’ old frocks. It was locked, the key nowhere in sight, and its heft told her it was already filled. She wondered if her mother had been planning on leaving them. No matter—with any luck, the bag would at the very least contain a change of clothes.

Obedience slipped out of her blood-stained dress and reached for her cloak, before deciding to take her mother’s instead. She was pleased to discover that her mother had sewn invisible pockets inside the wool cloak. These Obedience stuffed with as much food as she could carry as well as all the banknotes and coins she could scavenge.

She didn’t look back as she closed the door for the final time.

18

The full moon shone bright above them, illuminating the snowy street with a bluish glow as Gabriel and Blair set out from the church on the fifteen-minute walk home.