Nineteen

All-American Breakfast

On foot it must’ve taken longer than biking, but I didn’t feel it. I beat my soles on the pavement and buildings rolled around me, skittered and crashed around my head. My shins howled, I pictured them splitting like pencils. My ribs closed on my lungs like fingers on a fist. My body moved. My head was a kinetic firestorm and I thought everything at once, I made a palimpsest of my own consciousness, I couldn’t parse anything, I just pressed forward. Sycamore Gorge was so little. Three gasps and the commercial row was gone, the residential sprawl was gone, the air cloyed with the sweet reek of thawing cornstalks and I found myself alone. More cars than usual on the road, which meant there were cars in general on the road. I sank my ring and middle fingers into my jugular. I counted the flutters. I wasn’t sure if I was having a panic attack. My stomach hurt and I wheezed a laugh, squeezed tears back, sprinted on.

Fucking sport coat wasn’t warm enough.

The long Candy Land squiggle road to our local palace of evil shaved a line through the trees. Knuckled branches bore down at my shoulders. Undergrowth vanished, left the gnarly root tangles exposed to the chill, wet air. No acid dewdrop baby leaves like had been cropping up closer to town. Nature was an ugly concrete sepia. No life, no growth, no wildness.

I hadn’t gone to the Chantry house since right before Christmas.

The sigils Madeline cut into these trees had made me so ill I’d nearly crashed and died then. They’d hurt me because they were and were not me, because they’d been carved with magic that’d flowed through my specter displaced in Madeline’s mouth. It’d been stolen. It’d fritzed me out because it was wrong. My specter was in me, now. I wasn’t sure if the sigils were still active. I didn’t know if they’d been discovered since then, slashed through, rendered useless. Madeline didn’t know about Tatum, or at least didn’t know enough that the tripwire had caught Jing’s car—could I extrapolate that she couldn’t spy with these marks anymore? Would they still make me glitch out now that my specter lived where it belonged?

I didn’t know. I had no idea. Yates had the Scratch Book so I couldn’t ask him.

I’d cover my face with the blazer if it came down to it. Fuck it.

I shivered hard and put my hands in my pockets. There was no wind. The stillness stifled me. I felt like I might smother if a breeze didn’t pick up and put a current around me soon.

Rumbling on the ground. The gravel trembled, the trees groaned and bowed away from the road, roots creaking, threatening to break. That sound made my gut drop. I slammed my palms over my ears, forced the sour back down my throat.

There was a car coming. I was so fucked.

It crept closer. A bass line thundered, disrupted my shimmering watery kidnapping flashbacks. I knew this song. This song had played at least five times at every single fucking party anybody threw two years ago. Rowdy lo-fi rap track. It’d been extremely popular for like a month and I hadn’t heard it since. When I was lacerated with tin-can shrapnel at a farm party, this song had been playing. It sounded like being catastrophically crossfaded. I’m talking damn near death’s door.

I put my hands down and turned on my heel, bewildered.

A black BMW crawled down the dirt road like an overgrown caterpillar hunter. I could’ve outpaced it. It had tinted windows, East Coast plates. I stayed still, put my legs shoulder-width apart, jerked my chin back.

I’d kill them. They could smear me into the dirt under their tires but barring that, if they got out of this car, whoever they were, I’d wreck them. I’d break something. I wanted to bolt, animal brain wanted me rocketing back in the rotten chapel’s direction deep in the tree line, my heart and gut wanted me careening head-on to the witchfinders’ estate.

My knees buckled.

I grimaced at myself. Ground my molars to dust.

The BMW eased to a halt. The passenger’s side window rolled down and a girl spilled out of it, all smiles. She dipped her elbows out of the car, stuck her whole head out the window to look at me properly. Older than me, but barely. I’d put her in her early twenties. White girl, pretty in a way that made her look uncomfortably Daisy-ish. Longer nose, maybe. Beachy ombré-streaked hair. She waved a few fingers. “Hey,” she started, then mouthed something else. I couldn’t hear her over the bass. I leaned in and she must’ve caught on—her smile cut down and she frowned with teeth, like a wolffish, her eyes enormous and smoggy, noxious gray. She twisted in her seat, kicked the driver, barked an order with her lip curled up to her nose. The driver—her brother? her boyfriend?—turned down the music. Then she looked back at me with a humph, beaming sunshine again. She rested her cheek on one fist. “Hey, cutie. Are you going to the memorial?”

I stared at her.

“Gosh, Leighton, he looks really upset.” The girl pouted her bottom lip in a cartoonish show of sympathy. “Really gruesome, isn’t it? It’s nice to see somebody who’s actually being thoughtful about poor David. It’s just awful. Like, I think about Grace and my heart just shatters. He was her baby. It feels like everybody’s forgotten about him in all the excitement, you know?”

From inside the car, voice flat: “Reason for the season.”

Holy fuck. Holy shit.

I nodded, a single jerk of my chin.

“Do you want a ride back up to the house?” The girl batted her lashes at me.

Again, another nod. I kept my jaws glued together. I did not breathe.

“Hop in,” she said with a wink. She slipped back into her seat, slung one foot up on the dashboard. She wore red-bottomed heels.

I moved mechanically. Whatever ancestral knowledge with which my body was endowed shrieked in lurid detail in the back of my head about how terrible of an idea it was, willfully putting myself in a situation like this, in the back of a witchfinder’s car on the way to a witchfinder’s house for a memorial party.

But they thought I was one of them.

I was not about to out myself as being otherwise.

I heaved the car door open, shut it behind me. I crawled to the middle seat. It had a heavy leather plastic musk to it, smelled new and expensive and disgusting. Plush cushions, suspiciously clean. My stomach roiled. Electricity shot up and down my arms and I felt the hysteria bubble in the back of my throat. I hated cars. I hated the backs of cars, I hated cars on dirt roads, I hated this dirt road, I hated witchfinders, I hated them, I hated them. I felt like I was dying. I was dying. I blinked back tears and sat perfectly still, with mimic spell stiffness.

“Jesus, didn’t need to slam it,” said the boy, who looked, to my mind, like someone had superimposed Abel Chantry’s face onto Tatum Jenkins’ face and given the outcome screaming ginger hair for spice. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, sniffed. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I hate you, you’re such an asshole,” the girl snapped. She looked back at me, rocked her cheek against the edge of her seat. “Don’t mind Leighton. He’s being crabby for no reason. I’m McKenna, McKenna Bailey—are you local Brethren?”

I jerked my chin down. There was a metal screeching sound in my head.

It was really bothering me that I couldn’t tell if they were siblings or a couple.

The meaty ginger, Leighton—he did not look impressed. He wore a baseball cap, and he took one hand off the wheel, put it on the brim. “Who are you with?”

“This isn’t a fucking frat party, a child has fucking died. Let the poor guy be pensive.”

“Are you gonna suck his cock right here, or should I pull off into the trees or something?”

“I hate you,” she said, grinning again. She shoved Leighton so hard the car swerved.

I stared straight ahead and did not throw up. Improv camp memories spasmed inside me. Scene: I was in the car with witchfinders of some relation named Leighton and McKenna on my way to a memorial for an evil kid whom I had a hand in manslaughtering. Character: I was a morose witchfinder cis boy and McKenna wanted—McKenna was making passes at me. I was a hot sad villain on the way to a villain jamboree.

Thank god this sport coat was too big for me.

“Did you know David?” McKenna reached back, put a hand on my knee. “I never met him, but you know, I’ve heard he was such a little rascal. Like the most adorable little boy in the whole state.”

“David was a fucking dickhead,” Leighton said.

“I will literally strangle you,” McKenna said. “Oh my god, he was a kid!”

“I was on a hunting trip with the Chantrys and the Shaws two years back,” Leighton said. “Stag hunting for haruspicy. One of the first times David had ever been out. You know what he did, McKenna? He fucked up and shot a squirrel. It would’ve been fine, you know, a teachable moment about not dicking around with guns or at least not being wasteful, but before we could show him how to make the incisions and read with it, he fucking stomped it. He stomped a squirrel he shot because he was pissed that he shot it. Serial killer shit. Brutal.”

“Oh, whatever.” McKenna yawned. She glanced at me. “The mood is pretty grim inside, just a heads-up. Elias has been crying all day. Abel’s stepped up, he’s doing most of Elias’ duties around hosting and looking after Grace and Levi. I mean I suppose I get it, but it’s a little—it’s a little off, don’t you think? If you ask me, he ought to be thinking about his family and our community. Showing a little strength. How is he supposed to be Grace’s rock if he’s blubbering on and on like that? It’s emasculating.”

At the tip of my tongue: Is it gay to mourn your child?

Could they drive even slightly fucking faster?

“Abel’s having the time of his life if you ask me. Think he’s gonna give us a sermon?” Leighton grimaced. “His ego was bad enough before all this. He’s gonna be insufferable.”

I made a sound in my throat.

Leighton flicked his eyes up at me. Apparently, that was the right sound to have made. He sucked his teeth, turned the volume up a little. “Kennie, roll for him.”

She patted her hair and pulled a grinder from the glove box.

“Pass,” I said as low in my voice as I could. It came out all gravel. I grimaced, covered my mouth.

Leighton and McKenna looked at each other.

Both of them looked back at me.

Barely above a whisper: “It’s inappropriate.”

“Aw.” She chunked the grinder back and slammed the compartment shut.

Leighton shook his head. “Suit yourself. You’ve got something on your forehead, by the way. Just so you know.” He smoothed his hand over the wheel, and the Chantry family plantation rose from the earth before us.

My dread spiked before I even got a proper look at it.

The space between me and the manor was absolutely caked with cars. Cars parked on the lawn in rows before a festival, cars that cost more than the impossible tuition gate between myself and higher education. The driveway was congested to the point where I thought it must’ve been a mirage, that my trauma had unwound my ability to perceive numbers and that I was being compelled by extravagant hallucinations. No. Leighton wove through them, swore about what he’d do if he scraped his paint job. They were real. I wasn’t sure how many—maybe seventy-five vehicles?

Witchfinders were into tradition, weren’t they?

Was there a whole family with each car?

Leighton parked between two Range Rovers. He climbed out, closed his door with a deliberate gentleness that I thought might’ve been passive aggression. He gestured at McKenna and me to follow him.

McKenna winked at me before she climbed out.

I got the fuck out of there and did not follow them up to the porch.

I peeled around the side.

The ground felt unsteady underfoot. I stumbled forward, and my knees went to jelly. It felt like stepping too suddenly would bust through the surface tension and I’d hurtle down toward the core of the earth. I made my way through the cars. I kept my head down, hunched my shoulders. The cars stretched all the way around the house’s flank. They kept fucking going. I felt like I was wading through a herd of sleeping cattle. If I made a sound, they’d wake up and stampede me. I needed to focus. My inclination was that Jing’s mimic would be in that room in the basement, the one where the specters had been stashed. I’d check there first.

I rounded the corner.

A few dudes were grilling—grilling!—in the backyard. They didn’t look up at me when I stomped by, laughed together, nodded exuberantly at each other’s jokes.

The back door had been propped open with a little wooden wedge.

Inside, four men lounged around a metal table. Their shadows looked bruisy on the sunflower wallpaper, their complexions ghoulish in the mildew-tinted overhead light. Faintly, I heard music—Frank Sinatra, maybe, or somebody who might as well have been Frank Sinatra. “Love and Marriage.” I took a step inside. My chin trembled. I pressed myself against the wall, edged along as quietly as I could muster.

The men ignored me. One of them whistled along.

A doe lay on its back on the table. Still, so dead, I told myself. Its fur was the color of Daisy’s hair. One man held her front hooves in one hand, held a glass of wine in the other. The man nearest the door tossed a bowie knife in the air and caught it, waggled his eyebrows at his boys, who made sounds like, Haha, very cool, asshole.

I stepped out of the room just as I heard him cut her open.

Before I shut the door, one of the men said to me: “The luncheon starts in a half an hour, heads up. Abel pushed the timeline forward.”

“Got it,” I said.

“Are you—are you Nash’s kid?” There was a wet sound as the deer’s guts slopped on the floor. “Pardon me, but I’m not sure I recall your name.”

I shut the door behind me before I could think of an answer. Bile hit my teeth. I swallowed hard. It was dark. This was the frat house sprawl, I knew that much. I remembered. I could smell it. I moved before my eyes adjusted, darted through the dark, made for that skinny, body-stained hallway. I reached a hand in front of me, pawed around the air for a vertical surface. I kicked a table, crunched a bottle, stomped something slippery that might’ve been fabric. The air here was animal sour, mired with processed-snack rot and expensive cologne, sloshed liquor, the ambient sweet dankness of weed. It burned my eyes.

I brushed something cold with the back of my hand.

It was a metal curve. Clammy, solid, fluted pointlessly. A little exploratory fondling and it occurred to me that it was a sconce. I was in the hallway with the shitty corrugated flower sconces. I crept farther down, felt along the wall with the pads of my fingers.

The texture under my hands went from powdery to lacquered.

I felt lower, found the doorknob.

One jiggle and the door swung wide, compelled to fly from my fist by some unseen force. It smacked the opposing wall. I jumped, whirled around once, but the darkness was unbroken. The music played faintly, near indiscernibly, just loud enough to make the shadows lilt. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me. The darkness was absolute here. It pressed on my nose and mouth. I pawed around the wall for a switch and I found one.

Dingy fluorescence bathed the room in sallow, skim-milk light.

The witch profiles I’d taken down from the twine had been replaced. The candids clustered to each string shone with glossy newness, had an astringent smell. I beheld for a moment with a smile on my mouth—I recognized faces, now, I’d seen these people at dinner, seen them lounging in hallways and smoking and laughing. I saw Inanna under a different name, a person who might’ve been Andy in another life. I saw Dominick. I saw my fathers. Jacques, Pearl, Maurice, and Jupiter. A teacher I’d had in middle school. People I’d knocked shoulders with in the hallway of the Delacroix. I’d torn all this down. I’d ruined their progress. I’d protected witches from witchfinders, we’d done this, Shiloh and I, at great personal risk.

I hadn’t done anything.

Hadn’t prevented jack shit.

I grinned wider, clapped my hands over my stomach. The futility rocked me. My face split. My head swam off my shoulders, my blood gushed so fast I thought it’d kill me. I stood there, petrified and hysterical, clutching myself, grinding my heart between my teeth. What good was my rage, then? I’d torn this room open with it. I’d torn open Tatum’s face with it. The line was restrung with pictures and Jing was thrashing in the arms of our girls because if she didn’t, she’d be here. Here.

I peeled my eyes off the pictures. I took a few steps deeper into the room.

That scab spell book lay on the sewn swan altar. Green cover, slack and unmarked. Baby Shiloh had fed it blackberries. Hard to think of a kid in here.

I shook myself. I shook without shaking myself. My skeleton thrummed inside me. My long bones moved like plucked strings. I swiveled my gaze back and forth across the room, overwhelmed by the sheer number of eyes on me, and then I caught a glimpse of a teacup on a countertop.

The contents of the teacup glinted. It looked, from this angle, like glow-stick juice.

I staggered to the counter and seized the teacup, held it close to my face. I peered down into its depths. There, at the teacup’s bottom, a lavender marble put off light like a distant star. I wasn’t sure what the liquid was that it rested in. Water? It was clear, but it sloshed oddly when I twisted my wrist. Rubbing alcohol? Vodka? Some magic witchfinding corrosive acid?

Fuck it, this was for Jing. I dove my ring and middle fingers into the cup, fished the marble out. The liquid was frigid but didn’t hurt. I slammed the cup down, held the wet mimic in my hands. I rubbed it between my palms, let out a shuddering breath. Maybe I’d fucked up, maybe I hadn’t helped where I thought I had—but I had this, and I’d fix things with it. I’d make things okay.

What the fuck was I supposed to do with it?

Did it have an off button or something?

“How do I,” I mumbled, whipping my gaze around the room. Surely in this literal torture chamber there was a meat tenderizer or something I could crush it with. Should I just stomp on it? Or would stomping on it make it worse?

There was a soft sound beside me, like a pigeon fluffing and flying overhead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it—the book with a green leather cover opening over the swan mouths. Its pages turned softly, gracefully. I thought of pirouettes. It landed on a blank page. Ink bloomed inside, stabbed up in pinprick dots that stitched together and formed phrases. The book read: Blow on it.

I stared at the book. My throat clapped.

I cupped the mimic in my hands, held it like I was cupping water for drinking. I brought it close to my mouth. I imagined it was a birthday candle. I filled my lungs and blew.

The lavender trickled out of the marble and vanished through my fingertips. The light extinguished inside of it. It was a marble. Mundane, nondescript. It could’ve been a chunk of ice.

I dropped it back in the teacup and sighed, scrubbed one of my hands over my head. Jing would be fine, now. She’d have autonomy over her body. She’d be able to move or stay as she pleased, and she wouldn’t be coming here. She wouldn’t be dragged to this, subjected to this, pried open on the countertop and robbed of her specter.

I turned on my heel to go.

I did not take a forward step.

Grace Chantry stood before me wearing lace gloves and a smile. She held a rifle in her hands. She cocked her head to the side, popped a vertebra in her neck. Her blond curls bounced. She lifted her gun up. She jabbed the muzzle between my eyes.

I stared at her finger on the trigger. Little white flowers. I went cross-eyed. My jaw slackened and I did not swallow. I held up my hands, stretched my fingers apart.

“You know what,” she dripped in that mid-Atlantic voice of hers. She gave me a slow appraisal, recurled her grip on her weapon. Little white flowers danced on the trigger. Caterpillar on a hook. “You’ve got some nerve coming down here alone, sweetheart.”

My chin trembled but I didn’t cry. I didn’t blink. I couldn’t look away from her finger.

Grace strode forward.

The gun between my eyes drove my head. I took a backwards step, then another.

My back clapped the wall.

My knees buckled. I thought I’d faint. The world got blurry. It was hard to see her finger. The flowers bled together. It looked like she was gloved with foam.

“Name your coven,” she said.

My mouth twitched.

She tsked. “Oh, I wouldn’t toy with me. You’re an intruder. I’m the lady of the house. Stand your ground laws aside,” she purred, “do you really think anybody would ever know what happened to you? My husband’s force is eating finger sandwiches on the veranda. Speak up. Your coven?”

“Don’t have one,” I lied.

“Look at that.” She smiled a little wider. Her teeth were terrible, preternaturally even and scalding white. “A girl! Here I’d thought you were a boy witch—boy witches are useless, so I’m not sure why I’m surprised. Anyway. You’re a liar. You just blew that mimic out. Someone from your coven has had a terrible morning, haven’t they? Those are no fun. Awfully gallant of you, coming down here to save her. You’ve dashed her invitation to my soiree. A sister? A girlfriend? And they say romance is dead.”

I breathed in and in and in.

“Say.” She squinted at me. “You look awfully familiar.”

In and in and in and in.

Recognition sparked. Her face lit up, went rosy. “Why, you’re that bitch who slithered out of my window last October, aren’t you? That’s it! You must be the stupidest girl alive, having made it out of this house once and returning of your own volition.”

A manic grin cracked over me. My eyes brimmed. “You got me there.”

“I’m not in the mood to save anybody.” She licked her teeth. “You picked a sorry day for heroism. May God forgive the mess.”

I knew what that meant.

I knew it. I felt it.

I jerked my chin up and met her gaze.

Grace Chantry pulled the trigger. Lace grub thrashed hard on its hook.

Click.

Something flashed, then a silence passed between us. Inside it, I did not die. A bullet did not obliterate my face and the brain behind it. I stood with a gun to my head, she stood with a gun in her hands, and neither of us had been changed.

Grace’s smile froze. She pulled the trigger again, then again.

Bruisy light burst in front of my eyes. Lilac sparks, then stillness.

One of her lacy hands flew over the magazine, still pregnant and prone. Her smile fell. She pulled the gun off my brow, twirled it like a majorette’s baton, and lunged at me, angled the rifle’s butt at the bridge of my nose. If she couldn’t execute me like a soldier, she’d beat me to death like a dog.

The gun skittered off nothing. It struck a flash of light, rebounded.

She wound back and struck again. Harder, more frantic. Two of her hairpins clattered to the floor. She cracked the butt of the rifle over my crown and struck light again. She contorted her pink pout into a snarl. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes. They spilled with abandon. “This isn’t fair,” she gasped. “I can’t believe this, why would you do this to me, why won’t you . . .”

The light that surrounded, that shielded my head, was the same color the mimic had been. Jing’s magic—this was Jing’s magic, my lungs filled to bursting and I gasped, broke into a grin that nearly broke me.

She’d kissed my forehead this morning. She’d murmured against my hairline and she’d marked my brow with her lipstick. The spell she’d done driving, the one that’d fed the mimic, she’d used her kiss mark as a sigil.

Jing’s kiss was a mark of Cain.

Jing loved me and I was unkillable.

I grinned like an idiot. I curled my lip. I watched Grace Chantry batter against the open air, watched her crack her weapon again and again, and then watching got harder. A tear dripped off my jaw and splashed the floor between my boots. “Give it a rest, Mrs. Chantry.” I licked my bottom lip. My voice was thick, raw, and awful. “You’ll pull something.”

Something came over her. Her face was dry at once. She took the rifle in both hands and shoved it against my collarbone, against my windpipe. She leaned her weight against it. “If you think that sigil will hold forever,” she sneered, “you’ve got a new thing coming, baby doll.”

I spat at her.

It sparked on her cheek like more lace.

Grace’s brows shot up. She puckered her lips in a perfect peony O. She shifted, edged me a little to the left. She opened her mouth and whispered. Her whispering sped up, I couldn’t track the consonants as they fell out of her mouth. They reached a fever pitch—her tongue moved so fast between her teeth that she could’ve lit a match with the friction.

I heard that dove sound again. The rustling.

Something snaked around my thighs.

I glanced down and my smirk plunged.

The swan taxidermy altar wasn’t as dead as it had been before. The birds twisted up my body, coiled their necks around my legs, my hips. Their wide bodies braced my shins. They stretched their wings with a vile, creaking sound, twined them around the meat of my torso. The swans moved with stop-motion uneasy smoothness, disjointed and deliberate, a way that no animal could ever muster on their own. Their fake, glass eyes sparkled under the hanging lamp.

I wish I’d kicked. I wished I wrenched and fought like Jing had against the mimic. I wish I’d been stronger, sturdier, but fuck, with taxidermy swans surrounding me it took all I had in me not to scream bloody murder and piss myself. A beak needled under my arm and cemented there. The tears fell faster. I sputtered, froze like if I moved they’d maul me.

They couldn’t maul me.

The birds weren’t alive to maul me.

I looked up and Grace leaned against a nearby countertop. She’d set the rifle down, drummed her French nails on the green leather grimoire’s spine. She glanced around the room, hummed along to the song that bled under the door. Her eyes fixed on a twine strand hung across the room. She extended a finger. “Eloise Pike,” she said. She glanced at me. “That’s you, hmm?”

I bit my bottom lip.

“Eloise,” she pronounced slowly, drawing out the syllables like elle, oh, wheeze. “Pike’s an interesting surname. I knew a witch called Pike a few years ago—my, more than a few, now. I age myself.” She chuckled. “Anyway, she was a mean one. Brassy, independent. I liked her. Lenora was her name. A grand old Pythoness. She had a brat who’d be about your age.”

No.

“Here’s the thing about this whole witchfinder business: you can’t pull a specter out of somebody with a stock sigil. It must be drawn by the witch herself. Forcing people to draw one, that doesn’t usually work. So, we coax. I am a great believer in women’s power. I like seeing us climb ladders. I like seeing us win. Elias, bless his heart, usually appeals to holy morality. He’s so cheesy with all that. See, I appeal to money. Access, connection, status. If you make a deal with me, sign your specter over, I can see to it that you marry rich.” Grace shook a hand through her hair. She smoothed it behind her ear, collected herself. “Mm, take this one girl. Trailer trash, nasty disposition. Easy. Liked rough boys. Her sister had real artistic talent, though, and she adored her sister more than anything else in the world. So, I took this little witch, and I told her that if she gave me her soul I’d give her a man with a big house and three cars, and I’d see to it that the right people saw her sister’s work. I’m a woman of my word. Why, this dress is a Chelsea Stringer original. I bought it off the runway last spring. Isn’t it lovely?”

I thought about Daisy Brink and Jing Gao as little girls finding Daisy Stringer’s body in their garden. In my head Daisy Stringer and Daisy Brink looked just the same. She’d quit her coven. She’d lasted—she’d survived—without her specter for nearly a decade. I glitched, I shifted. The birds constricted when I moved. They squeezed me tighter. Circulation felt fuzzy in my legs.

“Now, Lenora . . .”

My breathing went ragged.

Grace Chantry smiled at me. She pursed her lips, cocked a brow. “Oh, sugar. So, she was your mother. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that she was the most stubborn bitch I’d ever met and she wouldn’t budge for anything. She was more than content to keep you in that shithole flat you shared forever. Nothing swayed her. She was incorrigible and proud to death of being a witch.” She clicked her tongue. “Which of course is why I hexed her brakes.”

A sound cut out of me. I thrashed against the swans, I kicked and howled and howled and howled, my mouth opened wide and sound spilled from it. They held me back. They held me when I beat my fists against the wall and held me when I went slack. I heaved. I shook my head, my jaw unhinged, I choked and coughed and spluttered. I said mother, mother, but my lips didn’t move. It was a single, jagged note. It unfurled forever. Inside I was nothing. Everything I was degraded, and I was just the sound. My throat split. The pitch changed, went ragged. My hands dangled limp behind dead white feathers.

My mother’s murderer fanned a hand over her heart. “I can’t kill you, so I’m going to give you a choice now, Eloise. Here it is: if you draw a pretty sigil for me, give your soul to me, I’ll let you go. You can limp to your friends. You can give them a running start. Or, you can stay right here, your specter intact inside your body, and when we’re done with the raid I’ll come back and tell you all about it.” She smiled serenely. “It’s been a hundred years since there’s been a real witchfinding total war. The Honeyeaters’ Theater—gosh, legendary. It’s going to be my pleasure, watching the Delacroix go up in flames. So. What will it be, sweetie?”

My shoulders jerked. I looked up at her. I said, my voice in ribbons: “I am my mother’s child.”

“I thought you’d say something like that.” She rolled her eyes, turned away from me. She took a few steps toward the door, took her time. Fit her hands around her waist. “It’s for the best. I’ve got no idea what I’d do with a mannish lesbian. Pretty witches are the only ones that last.”

“How could you be like this?” I shook my head. “What is there to gain?”

She laughed at that, really laughed. She laughed like an ingenue. She gave her green spell book a kiss, took up her rifle and rested it against her shoulder. “Are you kidding me? I’m the witch who married the witchfinder general. I’ve got earrings made from the souls of bitches who wronged me. I am the queen of the world. I’m the future, baby. You’re going to wish you were me. Talk soon, okay?”

Her heels tapped across the floor. She turned out the light. She bathed me in darkness and the door closed with a click.