“SON OF A BITCH,” Shiloh choked out.
The hag dragged herself up out of the dirt, filthy and sour, and grabbed his jaw. Her fingers dug into the joint, deep enough it looked like the skin would split, and she leaned in to force stale gray smoke into his eyes. It soaked in and stained his mismatched eyes a solid dirty gray.
Shiloh recoiled, sprawled back awkwardly from his pinned foot, and spat on his dirty hand. He rubbed the mud and saliva into his eyes, his mouth shaped around an inaudible hex, and squinted through the mask. It cleared his vision enough that he was able to grab the hag when she lunged for him. His fingers dug into her throat and held her. She tried to dissolve and slip away, but she couldn’t escape. So instead, she shoved handfuls of her death into his mouth and up his nose.
For a second, Jonah hesitated as he was torn between the two men. In the end, Luke was his client of sorts, and his gran had taught him never to leave a job unfinished. He ran over and grabbed Luke under the arms to drag him back over to Deborah.
“This is on you,” Jonah accused Deborah. She shook her head and tried a dismissive, out-of-place laugh. He raised his voice over her denial. “You asked Luke for help. You asked me for help. You broke your contract with Shiloh’s father. All of this is on you, Deborah. Remember it or not, the sin is on you. And part of this world or not, you know what a sin will cost.”
She pulled her flask out again and sucked down a mouthful of whatever was in it. Her hands shook as she tried to cap it again. Her watch clicked against the metal.
“How would I not remember?” she demanded.
“Because you’re pissed?” Jonah snapped.
It felt right. Almost right. He could feel the way it nearly fit into the puzzle. The key piece. He just needed to find out exactly how it slotted into place. Before he could try, a pale, stocky figure lurched through the gate.
“Deborah! Love.” Arlene grabbed her wife’s arm in those ruined hands of hers and tried to pull her away. “I knew something was wrong. Come away. Get inside.”
“What are you—? You shouldn’t be here,” Deborah said. “You’re not well. This isn’t a good place for you to be.”
“It’s where I’m going to be,” Arlene said with flat bitterness that flared and then faded away again. “But not you. Come inside. It’s safe there.”
She tugged. Deborah started to go with her, but then pulled away.
“I can’t!” she said. “We’ve already lost two hexes. At least. If more are lost, if any of our clients realize what’s happening—”
“I don’t care,” Arlene said. “I’m only here for you. I only came back for you.”
That was it.
The whole thing slotted into place. Jonah grabbed Deborah’s arm and lifted it to look at the fancy scarred watch on her tanned wrist.
“Oh,” he said. “I got it wrong. I thought the hag was here for you. That you were hiding from it.”
Arlene let go of Deborah and stepped forward. “Shut up.”
“But it wasn’t,” Jonah said. “It was hiding from you.”
There was a beat of silence, confused on Deborah’s part and resigned on Arlene’s.
Arlene Haddon. Who’d fallen hard, Jonah was guessing, for a lawyer she’d met in Vegas.
“It wasn’t meant to come here,” Arlene said. She didn’t look at Deborah. Her expression was pleading as she met Jonah’s eyes. “She was never meant to see it. To know. That’s the point. That she could never know.”
Jonah looked down at the poppet in his hands. He lifted it to his face and sniffed the heavy cotton-wadding body of it. The doll smelled like grave mold and dirt, but mixed in with it was whiskey and gin, orange liqueur and Baileys. Years of offerings.
“And as long as she was a drunk, she never had a clue,” he said. “But she kept trying to get better, didn’t she.”
Arlene folded pale, chapped lips together. “For me,” she said. “She wanted to do it for me, and I had to stop her.”
“And all those people had to die,” Jonah said. “So she’d drink, and once she drank, she’d forget.”
“What are you both talking about?” Deborah said. “I don’t understand.”
“And you don’t have to,” Arlene said. “They’ll die, and you’ll forget.”
She pulled a kitchen knife, already bloody, out of her pajamas. Jonah tensed, the doll raised in his hands like a talisman. When he tightened his grip on the body of it, he felt the hinged structure instead. Like the poppet’s bones. Arlene dragged the knife over her skin, from the heel of her hand up along her forearm. Water and blood dripped out of the wound, and the flesh tightened visibly down around the bones. Age spots appeared, dark and coin-sized on her skin.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I love her.”
Haddon blood on Haddon soil. Jonah had been wrong. It hadn’t been sour earth. Someone had hated the Haddon patriarch enough to curse his blood and his works. The splatter of Arlene’s blood was enough to piss that old, lazy hex off.
The ground rippled under their feet. Gravestones cracked or sunk into the ground. Dull red mud bubbled up from the cracks like blood, viscous and full of Jerusalem's secrets as the Haddon ground spat out generations of hex-boxes.
Wood and metal. Wrapped in silk or sealed with red wax.
Some of them cracked open as they rolled over the ground, and old, fermented spells spilled out like gas.
“No!” Deborah blurted. She grabbed Arlene’s arm and tried to wad her sleeve up into a makeshift bandage for the cut. “What are you doing? This will ruin us. It could ruin everyone!”
Something that congealed into an unnaturally orange snake, mouth sealed and eyes drops of liquid poison. A girl’s voice caught midway through a song, plaintive and with an old, heavy Dutchy accent. Shadows that cut through Jonah like fear turned into a weapon, his heart squeezed tight and panicky in his chest.
He glanced around desperately as he tried to think through the fear.
Shiloh was down, tears on his face as the shadow of a beautiful woman in a hippy dress pressed her hand over his mouth and pinched his nose shut. He’d left the hag injured, knots of matted hair torn out of her head, and her substance somehow shrunken. She dragged herself over the ground on limbs that had lost their skin of glamor and were just leather-sinew tendons and sun-bleached bones and on top of Luke.
Shadows crawled in from the graveyard walls and slid out from behind the few headstones still standing. They were full of whispers, promises and threats. Both would end up being the same thing if you listened. They always did.
Temptation itched in his back teeth and made his fingers twitch. All he needed was one hex. Not even a real hex. There was enough spilled-over magic here that he could just siphon some off, no sacrifice required. Would that even count?
Jonah wanted to buy into that. He wanted to, but it just hadn’t sealed the deal. All that fast talk and rationalization couldn’t quite paper over the black hole where he’d buried his last week in Babylon.
The secrets.
The death.
The sound of nails driven into wood, one after the other, and the ache in his hand when he finally put the hammer down.
If he wanted a hex, it was under there. All he’d have to do was let it all back out again.
He reached for it, but snatched himself back as if it was hot. Maybe it would be the right thing to do, the moral choice to sacrifice himself for the others, but he wasn’t a moral man. Not enough.
Jonah squeezed the doll again, and… maybe. He hesitated as he wondered if he could trust his instincts. He’d gotten it wrong twice. Third time wouldn’t be the charm. He took a tuft of the dry, dyed blond hair stitched into the doll’s scalp and pulled it.
It came loose in his hands, dead and rough, and Deborah flinched and reached up to swat something away from her head. Arlene wrenched away from her and lunged at Jonah, the knife gripped clumsily in uncooperative fingers. She slashed with it, a long, low swipe that would have opened his stomach from hip to hip.
Jonah got the doll between them, and Arlene’s face twisted in mute horror as she cut it open. Cigarette butts, the ends stained with bright red lipstick and crumpled with age, fell out, along with the blackened, alcohol-soaked stuffing. At the same time, Deborah cried out and clutched her stomach. Her legs threatened to give way under her, and she staggered backward into the wall.
“What?” she whimpered.
“You’re dead,” Jonah told her. “Have been for a while. You have to remember, Deborah. That’s the only way to get away from this.”
She pressed her hand to her chest. “I feel sick,” she said and retched. “What’s wrong with me?”
The bones were hotel bar miniature bottles. Jonah pulled them out and tossed them away.
“It was after the conference,” he said. “You’d met Arlene that night and, what, made her some promises?”
Arlene dropped the knife and threw herself at Deborah. She was too weak to keep her wife on her feet, and they both slumped to the ground.
“And she kept them,” Arlene said as she stroked Deborah’s face. “Debbie never lied to me.”
“Shame you can’t say the same,” Jonah said. There were wadded-up panties in the doll as well, stained yellow with either puke or piss. He tossed them aside with a grimace of distaste. “You’d drunk too much, and… what happened, Arlene? Did she have a seizure? And you were a Haddon girl. Even if you couldn’t lay a hex to save her yourself, you knew where to find someone. You knew what to offer them.”
Arlene shook her head and pulled Deborah closer.
The torn-up rags of a pillow had been used to shape the head. It was definitely puke dried into that.
“It’ll kill you,” she said. “Then him. She’ll forget this. You can’t stop it. I made it with love. Your shit little spells can’t touch it.”
That was her mistake. Her only mistake. It was never love. Oh, people said it was, swore to it, but when it came to the crunch, it was something else. Love went to church. Everything else was the hex-doctor’s business.
“Kill him!” Arlene yelled. She flung her arm out and splashed him with her blood. “Kill him first.”
The hag looked up, her mouth hung open and still drooling booze, and without the full head of filthy matted tangles, the resemblance to Deborah was clear. She dropped Luke to the ground and stuttered across the space between them. She flickered in and out of existence with each step.
“I’m sorry,” Jonah said, “but I’m not laying hexes anymore.”
He stuck his finger down his throat until his teeth scraped his knuckles, and he gagged. Hour-old bitter black coffee spewed up from his stomach and into the emptied-out body of the doll. He sucked the puke off his teeth and spat the last of it in. Then he pulled a handful of salt sachets out of his pocket—some pepper in there too, but he didn’t have time to sort—and stuffed them in with the rest of it.
The hag picked him up and threw him across the graveyard. He hit something that knocked the wind out of him, but he managed to hold on to the doll. It squished foully between his fingers as he got his elbow under him and tried to prop himself up.
He’d landed next to Isiah’s empty little grave. The coffin was smashed open; dirt splattered over the stained wood and sad little lacework blanket inside.
The hag coalesced out of the shadows and landed on his chest. Bony knees dug in under its sternum, and it hunched over him. Its mouth opened, the gash of bright lipstick widening as the cheeks split in raw fissures. Dark, clotted liquid frothed on the back of its tongue and oozed between its teeth. Drops of it splattered on Jonah’s face as it leaned over him.
It didn’t smell like grandad’s whiskey anymore. Cider. The same smell as the apples from the car.
Jonah reached into the grave and wrenched a strip of the lid free. He swung it like a bat and drove the end of the nail into the hag’s face. It pierced through its cheek and came out under the empty socket of an eye. The ground might not be hallowed anymore, but the nail was still an iron nail that had been prayed on. The hag’s makeshift flesh bubbled and dissolved in wet, shredded holes around the metal.
It screamed, and Jonah shoved the puke-soaked poppet into its mouth, as far back as it would go.
Some things weren’t meant to come that close. The magic that made the hag, contaminated by Jonah’s addition, pulled the rules that held it together apart. It threw him backward and pinballed around the graveyard as it tore chunks out of itself. Cigarette butts and old bottle caps, gouts of boozy cider blood, and stained bits of old lace littered the ground for a few seconds before they melted into the curse-rucked-up ground. It pulled up chunks of the spilled hexes and tried to patch itself with them, shoved death into holes and bad luck into its mouth.
Some of the patches filled in with something that wasn’t a monster.
Shiloh sucked in a ragged breath as the ghost who’d pinned him down was strung out into threads of long blond hair.
For a second, at the end, it looked just like Deborah. Younger. Clearer eyed.
The hag looked around at Deborah for a second, her face beautiful and still. Deborah smiled slowly at it and was, just for a moment, beautiful too. Then the hag rotted, ten years of decay in seconds, and came apart.
In Arlene’s arms, Deborah sighed deeply. And that was it.
The torn pieces of curses faded down into the dirt or slunk away into the dark. Shiloh coughed and swore, vicious and precise, as he dragged himself up. And Arlene wailed as she clutched the body of her wife.
Jonah lay there for a second, then rolled over. He pushed himself up onto his knees and flinched as his hand touched something hard-edged and sharp. One of the hex-boxes, still locked and sealed. His fingers brushed over the metal tag screwed to the lid.
“Are you OK?” Luke asked, his voice raw and the stink of booze eye-watering as it spilled off him. Sweaty hands gripped Jonah’s shoulders. “Is it over?”
“Close as it gets,” Jonah said as he let Luke help him up. He looked over the graveyard to where Shiloh had dragged himself out of the mud, filthy and pale. There was blood around his mouth and nose and rage on his face as he looked at Arlene. “For you. At least until the Crows call in their debt.”
Beams of light flickered through the dark as people headed toward them from the farm. Jonah brushed himself down and straightened up so he could stand under his own steam. Apparently he’d lied. The night wasn’t quite over yet.
Shiloh stalked over and dragged Arlene to her feet, away from the corpse.
“Wipe your tears,” he said flatly as he marched her over to the gate. “And make our excuses.”
And that was it.