Four

Protect Me from What I Want

Madeline walked down the aisle. Chin up, shoulders squared, patent leather brogues breaking the light. Dominick and two witches I didn’t recognize trailed behind her, hard and gloomy, but I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t look away from her. She’d grown her hair out since she sawed it off—sawed mine, too, I’d been in her hands at the time—and had slicked it back. She looked hollow, sallow. Her eyes hung half-shut and the lids looked bruised. Lips chapped. She wore a suit and it made her look like she’d been cut from construction paper with dull scissors—long, too angular, more exaggerated than organic life ought to be. The air around her head shimmered. The way all the attention fixed on her sizzled the edges of my vision. It was too intense. It hurt my teeth.

Madeline strode up to the fire’s lip, put her toes on the pearly hearth tiles. She paused, rolled her shoulders, about-faced. She didn’t look at any of us. She fixed her gaze on some indeterminate speck in heaven like a dancer spotting a turn. She knelt without blinking. Her trousers looked impossibly black against the floor. She put her hands in the air, wrists by either temple, and didn’t resist when Dominick and some stranger took those wrists and extended them. I watched, awestruck and nauseous, as they wound chains around her wrists and the mantel’s hooks above her. Heavy chains, something you could use to lash a gate. Little sigils painted up the length of every other jump link. They padlocked the chains in tandem, spat some minor incantation, and the fire behind her jumped up with a shock of violet light.

Not cool, not normal. Nobody was doing the plan.

Madeline curled her lip. She lifted her gaze and her lashes brushed her black slashes of brow. Her expression was inscrutable—I wanted to say she looked tired, but she didn’t. Something scorched in her. Maybe there was some part of me that had splintered off my specter and lodged in her throat forever, but I swore for a moment that I felt a rush of white-hot fury that was not of my own making. It burned. I scraped my tongue with my teeth and wanted to break something with my hands. Her hands maybe. On second thought, maybe this rage was mine. When she’d said she’d hurt me because she was afraid of her coven’s retribution, I hadn’t believed it could be this bad. Witches were against power. This felt just like it.

Madeline gave her chains an experimental tug. They didn’t give. She jerked her head to the left, locked eyes with the witch who wasn’t Dominick and said in her low, raw voice: “Is it time?”

The stranger witch nodded.

Madeline snorted, then resumed her neutral position, head forward, gaze blank. “My name is Madeline Kline. I was a Sister Corbie once, but not anymore. I am here because a witchfinder yanked the specter from my neck, and to avenge myself I took another witch’s specter, and I used it to burn a witchfinder child alive. Because I am uncovened, I’ve asked for any determinations of justice”—a mirthless smirk flickered then died—“to be made by the full present flock. I defend myself, as per usual. You’ve got an hour to question me, a forum will be held, and I will be dealt with according to consensus.” She hardly spoke above her breath. I felt bitter cold and shifted, pulled my jacket closer around me, Daisy closer to my chest.

She hadn’t said my name. I’d expected her to say it. Why wasn’t she looking at us?

Someone behind me said, “That’s not quite the whole story, is it, dove? I’ve heard that you were intimate with that witchfinder who took your magic from you. That spell they use for their violence requires the witch’s consent. You must’ve agreed to it. You know him well. Is that true?”

Clipped murmurs filled the air. Immediate derision, both for the concept and the question, impatience and curiosity and the peaks of clashing displeasure.

“He was my boyfriend,” Madeline said. “I was stupid. He attacked me.”

“Did you know he was a witchfinder when you were together?” A different voice, maybe sympathetic.

“I didn’t know when it started.” Madeline’s lip twitched. “Things happened pretty fast after I found out.”

“She’s a kid,” said one of the women who’d been floating on the porch. “I cannot believe we’re pressing a vulnerable girl about her involvement with people who actively seek out vulnerable girls for destruction.”

“Witchfinders take out entire covens once they find one witch,” a woman reclining beside Lupe said. “Her misstep could’ve led to the death of every single Sister Corbie, the seizing of their specters and their book devil. I’m not interested in blaming Kline for the violence done to her, but the stakes cannot go unstressed.”

Took the mood down a touch. Jing shifted beside me, unsettled Daisy, who put her elbow in my gut. I winced but allowed it. I didn’t have it in me to move. If I moved I might break some dam in my head and the feelings would slosh out of my nose and spill all over the floor.

“I didn’t know,” Madeline said again. She looked waxy. “I thought he was just a boy when we met. My fucking mistake.”

“I’d say so,” someone from behind me added. I assumed they were sneering. Had that nasal edge.

“You didn’t come to us for help.” Maurice Delacroix. He wasn’t where I could see him but I knew his voice. “You were surrounded by people who would’ve helped you. You worked here. You performed here, in this house, and had all of my resources at your disposal, not to mention your own coven. You didn’t call upon your community. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Madeline said curtly.

“I think you do,” he replied.

She grimaced. The tail of it flipped and went smile-shaped. “You heard Tonya. Levi Chantry is an unforgivable offense. I knew how the Corbies would act when they found out and I was right. Why the fuck would I think you’d be different?”

Dominick’s jaw twitched.

“I literally don’t know why we’re talking about this. They hurt Madeline. Scary and bad! That’s not what’s pressing, here,” said Daisy from my lap. Then, in a louder voice: “Why did you pick Sideways?”

My gut twisted. My veins clapped shut and my body went frigid and I died violently in every dimension then slammed back like a rubber band. I seethed all over. I wanted to push Daisy Brink off my lap so hard she’d bowl into Madeline and make a strike sound, bowling alley victory display screen in midair and everything. I put an arm around her waist and pulled her a little closer to me instead.

Madeline shot her eyes at us, beseechingly.

“Well?” Daisy prodded. “Spit it out. Why Sideways Pike?”

Her silence stretched a moment longer. “Because she was there.”

Daisy tensed like she was going to spring. I closed my arm around her tighter. She strained on my lap like the crook of my elbow was a leash. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jing reach for her, saw her put a warning hand on her scabbed-up kneecap.

Yates said: “Could you talk about the Christmas party? Could you tell me your intentions? I can understand retribution for what was done to you, and as a preventative measure to protect girls like us who Levi and his family might find in the future. Dozens and dozens of people you didn’t know nearly died as well.”

“I just wanted the Chantrys dead.”

“You locked all the doors and started a fire,” Jing said.

“Couldn’t have them slipping out, now could I?”

“Dozens of people,” Yates repeated, but Madeline shifted and she fell silent.

Into the back of Daisy’s neck, I breathed, “I promised her we’d save her.”

“Hush,” Daisy growled. “Trust the process.”

Madeline’s face had flashed a bloodless, horrible lavender color. A few strands of jet-black hair sprang from her pompadour and fell across her face like cracks. “The spell was for killing Chantrys. That’s all. I didn’t mean for the house to catch fire. I refuse to apologize for going after witchfinders.”

“The spell didn’t work because you were casting with Sideways’ magic,” Jing said. “It didn’t work and you nearly fucked up and killed everybody, us included.”

“That,” Dominick hissed, “is the problem.”

Madeline whipped her head around to look at him. He leaned against the wall beside the fireplace, bony shoulder shoved up against the bottle-green wallpaper, a vein throbbing in the spoon of his temple. He and Madeline didn’t look alike. Still, whatever passed between them read with a tension that skewed domestic—he felt like her big brother, or an uncle maybe. Their expressions were nearly the same.

Dominick took a step away from the wall. “You aren’t ours anymore. This isn’t our call. But I bring to my sisters,” he said, darting his eyes over the witch assemblage, “this. Madeline endangered me and all my elders. She put our lives and our book, a book that’s been among the Sisters Corbie for four centuries, in jeopardy, and hid our peril from us. She lied to us. I’d forgive that—she’s young and has her reasons to be mistrustful, and with full knowledge of the situation we could’ve banded together and stood against the threat. The problem is, Madeline didn’t just endanger herself and every Corbie by extension. Madeline fraternized with a witchfinder and became one.”

Madeline’s face turned.

“After Levi Chantry stole your specter,” Dominick said, fully facing us now, face turned from her though he addressed her directly, “you stalked around for months searching for unaffiliated witches. You knew dozens of witches in community, you worked here, you had coven mates. You were looking for someone alone. You needed someone vulnerable, inexperienced, and without the protection and guidance of a dedicated book devil. If you went after me, the other Corbies would’ve skewered you for it, and you’re smart. You’d never go after somebody who knows you well enough to know when you’re conning. Fucking hell, Madeline. You got close to her. This happened at a house party. You went to a house party and used witchfinder magic to rob a girl of her specter so that you could use it.” Dominick’s eyes flashed. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that you didn’t know that Levi Chantry was a witchfinder, because you knew how to hunt like him. You’re a grifter and a liar. You’re a witchfinder. You know their trade.”

Concord snapped. People talked over each other, erupted into side conversations and hissing, snarling spills of discourse. A few witches stood, then half of them did. Jing twisted in her seat and said something brisk to a witch behind her. Yates looked at the ceiling beseechingly. Daisy cracked a laugh.

Madeline locked eyes with me. Something in her look muffled the rising fever pitch.

“Jesus H., settle down.” Blair clapped her hands and the arguing tapered to a quick-paced, prickly murmuring. She stood up, kneaded her hands. She looked mournful, I thought. Sober, solemn. Shadows hung off the lines in her face. “We need to talk about the Chantry boy. He was fourteen. We can talk about retribution and violence some other time, your aim to kill the witchfinding family is not what troubles me. The only life lost that night was the youngest.” Blair shut her eyes, brows in a knot. “A child is dead, Kline. A witch killed a witchfinder’s son with magic she stole by that family’s teachings. There will be repercussions for this. I doubt they’ll just fall on you.”

Daisy put her nails in my wrist. I let go of her, but she squeezed harder, leaned back against my chest. I could only half-see Blair from around Daisy’s head. Her shoulders tensed. I wondered for a horrifying moment if she was going to cry. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if she did. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do in general. I put my arms back around Daisy and wished for a moment that she was heavier. I could barely feel her. She was hardly enough to anchor me to earth.

“I don’t have a question in this.” Blair sighed. She dropped her hand and reached to rub one of her shoulders, hand under her jacket. “You made choices and we will share the burden of their consequence.”

“I can’t take it back,” Madeline said. She said it tonelessly but with conviction and my skin crawled. She hadn’t looked away from me. I wondered if this was part of some spell. The purple fire behind her flashed higher and I thought about Jing’s basement and being magic-drunk and drunk-drunk and Madeline’s glowstick halo cracking on her forehead, how the candy-bright trickling had made her look holographic, how I’d had such an instant and all-consuming crush on her that I didn’t ask a single question. “None of you have done a single fucking thing about witchfinders. Nobody does. Complicity is not moral high ground. Letting them pick people off isn’t moral high ground. I used their tactics because they worked.” She shook her head. More fringe sprang loose from its sculpted arc. The chains clinked, and it occurred to me with a jaggedy start that they looked like they hurt, that her skin was a pinched white around the metal’s edges. “You won’t get penitence out of me. Do your worst.”

“So be it.” Dominick tossed his head back. “You used witchfinder tactics because they worked. Your words. Witches observing, I think Madeline Kline shouldn’t have her specter inside her. I think that she’s a danger to every witch alive. That’s the method she’d use, and it’s what I propose. Tonight, we look through the specters recovered from the witchfinders, and we will pull this rock from between Kline’s jaws and keep it here, in the Delacroix House, with the burned devils in urns and the living devil archives. This ends here.”

Daisy tensed in my lap but I could hardly feel it because I could hardly feel anything at all, now. A cold rinsed me and my body went screaming numb.

Dominick looked down at Madeline, kneeling before the fire with her arms wrenched back, and he inclined his head, said something that I shouldn’t’ve have heard, that was out of earshot and therefore impossible, but cut around my head all the same. He tucked a lock of sallow blond hair behind his ring-heavy ear and said to her, voice small and brittle: “My worst is yours, little sister. I’m sorry. Death to traitors. See you in hell.”

Madeline closed her eyes. She squared her shoulders, swayed her hips forward, loosened her arms so that her pose of confinement looked comfortable, some model contortion, not a gallows slouch. Anne Boleyn stretching her neck out so her killer can get her with a single smooth whack. I could see all the veins in her. She looked poisoned. The tension fell out of her mouth. She looked at me and said, “I knew I’d never grow up.”

Some fuse blew in my head. I pushed Daisy onto Jing and I stood up, suddenly my height felt cartoonish, I was Alice in Wonderland and I’d fill the whole house. I turned my back to Madeline and I stared at my fancified elders. “Isn’t anybody going to ask me what the fuck I think should happen?”

Lots of blinking. Clearly, most of the people in this room had no idea who I was.

“I’m Sideways Pike,” I said. “I’m a Scapegracer. She took my—it was my—I’m the one she robbed. I’m also the person who smuggled the specters out of the Chantry house.” The energy shifted in the room, and suddenly I was an understudy onstage and everybody was looking at me, so I picked a face in the crowd, some stranger with long eyelashes, and spoke just to them. “I know Madeline fucked up. Believe me, I do. I refuse to believe that pulling her specter out solves anything. It doesn’t fix that month of my life, it won’t unkill the Chantry kid. It might kill her. I have my specter back now. I risked my life breaking into the Chantry house to recover hers. It is outright insane to me that we’re seriously considering wounding her like a witchfinder would. Literally what would that accomplish?”

Dominick watched me carefully. He said, “What would you propose?”

The plan! Be so fucking cool! “Letting her go.” I looked at my coven, who looked thrilled. I looked at a different stranger. “Chett-hexing her.”

“Chett-hexing her,” Dominick repeated incredulously.

“Yeah.” I looked over the audience, which was also what the audience was doing.

Someone offered in a loud whisper, “They’re the ones who curse people in clubs, no?”

“The one with the accounts,” someone said.

“Does anyone else have anything to ask of Miss Kline?” It was Maurice, in the back. He sounded strained. “If not, we should adjourn to the parlor.”

Everyone started talking. They stood and made for the door in one great wave, like everybody was eager not to look at Madeline anymore, or desperate to scream at each other unobstructed. I felt furious. Furious. My blood beat through me in mean, sour punches. There were hands on me, Scapegracer hands, Jing and Yates on my upper arms, Daisy around the back of my neck. Daisy, right—I put an arm around Daisy and crushed her to me. I tucked her cheek in the hollow of my throat, and imagined that my specter throbbing by her ear was still inside of Madeline, even just splinters of it. I thought as crisply as I could muster: You’re not going to die here, Madeline Kline.

Kline thought back with old Scratch clarity: I won’t if you do something about it.

“Sideways,” Jing said in my ear. “You sure?”

“She hasn’t said shit,” Daisy hissed.

“She thinks loudly,” Yates said. “I agree. We stick to the plan.”

“Nobody is being cool at all,” Daisy pressed.

“Yeah, well,” I said. I rested my chin on the top of her head. “Fuck this noise. We’re busting her out anyway.”

“Literally shut the fuck up, they’ll hear you,” Jing whispered. She squeezed my arm. “All in?”

“All in,” said Yates. She had that oracle of Delphi look again and I prayed uselessly to the cosmic current itself that maybe it could calm down so that she could relax and feel at peace and look less creepy. “Are we going to just wait for everybody to leave? Everybody might not leave.”

“Nah,” said Jing. “We’re getting reinforcements.”

Daisy bounced on her tiptoes in such a way that she turned all four of us on an axis. Somehow, we were all facing chained-up Madeline Kline, who was staring miserably at the floor in front of her, like a dog in a kennel commercial. I was going to hyperventilate if we didn’t do something active right fucking now.

Daisy said, “Chill here for five minutes, ’kay?”

Madeline looked up at us. She blinked. She rattled her chains.

“Great!” Daisy said, and with a power she alone possessed, she herded us into the hallway.