You can bewitch someone by pointing any sharp stick or cane at him.

Could the face have been a shape-shiftin trick of the shadows? I propped up on one arm, craned my neck so’s to see into the branches, but it, whatever it were, had vanished.

I were scairt—scairt so deep inside—but I needed to stay, needed to finish what I started.

The stars faded, and the first gray light of dawn sifted through the leaves and onto Zenobia. She needed buryin, and soon. My achin body wanted to stay restin, but my head told me it were time to get up and take care of my friend.

I reached into my pocket and felt for my lucky buckeye. “I should’ve give this to you, Zenobia,” I said to nobody. “Don’t know how I’m goin to do this to you, girl. Bury you here, for forever.” Tears trickled down my face. There weren’t no shirkin this job. She needed to be brushed clean and set to rights like I did my grandpa in his pine box. She’d be laid out, hands folded over her chest. Then, the flat stones set onto her eyes, and a bunch of wildflowers tucked into her hands to keep her company. I dropped to my knees, straightened her raggedy skirt and her bent leg careful, so as not to hurt her. But how could I hurt her any more than she were? I reached under her body to straighten her arm and tugged it.

“Aiiieeeee! Aiiieeeeeeeeee!”

I dropped Zenobia’s arm and tripped backward over a root just as somethin heavy—heavy and big—tumbled from the tree and landed half on me. When I fell against Zenobia’s body, my screamin tailed onto the other screamin sound. Sure as thunder after lightnin, I knowed the haints was goin to put me in that grave with her.

I laid there twined in a jumble of black and brown arms and legs—like snakes in a rock pile. “Lark, you be killin me,” a familiar voice cried.

“How can I be killin you if you dead?” I asked, lookin down into Zenobia’s wide golden eyes.

One long black leg worked its way out of the tangle, and a big hand pushed against me. I looked back and watched the gunpowder-black slave with the scarred face strugglin to stand. Last time I seen him he were hog-tied onto another boy.

I raised up, felt at myself to make sure all the pieces was still there, and started to move off Zenobia, and she cried out again.

“I’m hurtin, hurtin bad,” she said.

“You be hurtin with no skin on your back if you don’t keep quiet,” the runaway boy said. “You scairt me right off that branch when you come back from the dead.”

“She’s hurt bad,” I said. “We need to help her.”

“I know what happen to me when I try to help someone besides my own self,” the boy said. “Look what helpin you done for me.”

I looked at his bloodied legs and arms, and my stomach turned.

“Sorry,” I said, my head bent. When I looked up, I could see my Hannah doll’s head pokin out of his shirt.

This weren’t no time for us to talk about what had happened to him or how he’d gotten away from them slave catchers. We needed to get away afore the sun come up over the hills.

“I gotta move you, trouble girl,” I said, “but you cain’t make a sound. I’ll be as easy as I can, but if you scream again, after all that noise we made, well, our luck is about played out.”

Zenobia looked at me and nodded.

The boy stood behind me and dropped to his knees, his face all twisted with hate. He looked at me like he’d tasted spoilt meat. He jumped down into the grave hole and crawled back out with the long diggin stick tight in his fist. Were he so mad at me from the trouble I’d caused him?

I watched him get up and walk toward me, the stick pointin steady at me all the time. I knowed what he were doin and turned my head so as not to be caught in his witch trickery. I glanced back at him again, takin care not to look at the stick. He come closer. It took all of everythin I had inside me to turn my back on him. If he were goin to end my days, I wanted helpin Zenobia to be the last thing I done on earth.