“Is that supposed to be me?” Juniper asked, pointing to the maiden.
“I took certain artistic liberties,” Victoria allowed.
Now there is nothing to do but wait. Juniper and her sisters sit in the comfortable, shabby back room of Salem’s Sin, watching the sun fade from brass to copper to rose-gold. Strix and Pan rustle in the shadows or circle near the ceiling, restless and worried.
Pearl’s girls rotate through at irregular intervals, rarely speaking. Juniper might have been puzzled by their odd hours and various states of undress, except that Frankie Black took her aside several weeks ago and explained in plain terms what sort of establishment Salem’s Sin was, causing Juniper to snort coffee through her nose and reconsider several of her assumptions about decency, morality, and sin.
But there isn’t much business this evening; most of the north end’s wealthiest men are stuffed into boardrooms and elegant parlors, drinking champagne and waiting for the election results to come in like everyone else.
Juniper rises to renew the wards across the threshold and sills every so often, whispering the words like prayers. Bella sits with her notebook on her knees, not writing anything, and Agnes dozes with Eve in a puffy armchair. Eve’s sleep is troubled, her face flushed and her brow wrinkled in angry furrows.
An angry woman is a smart woman, Mags used to say. Juniper feels a great swoop of sadness that Mags will never meet her great-granddaughter. She folds her fingers around the locket on her chest, flesh-warm.
She must fall asleep, because she wakes to find the room sunk into midnight-gloom, lit by a single candle. She sits with Bella for a while, feeling their breathing fall into perfect rhythm and knowing without looking that Agnes is breathing with them. Together they watch the subtle creep of shadows in the alley outside, looking for reaching fingers or sightless heads.
The next time Juniper wakes it’s to the tap-tap of knuckles at the back door. The candle is a slumped puddle over-spilling its saucer, and the window is graying into morning.
Bella hurries to the door and Miss Cleopatra Quinn steps through it. All three sisters look up at her, a silent question hanging between them.
Cleo doesn’t say anything. She merely looks at them, eyes somber and tired.
“Oh fuck,” Juniper whispers.
Agnes shoots her one of her brand-new watch-your-mouth-there-are-children-present looks, but her face is pale. Pan alights on the arm of her chair, neck-feathers bristled.
“Was it close, at least?” Bella whispers. “Will there be a recount?”
Cleo slumps into an empty couch. “The Post headline this morning refers to it as a ‘landslide,’ I believe. The Defender prefers the term ‘catastrophe.’”
Juniper feels a delicate snap in her chest, a final thread of hope breaking. She thinks of Hill’s face—not his smiling, chinless mask, but the true face beneath it, all red gums and grubbing fear. He already possessed some dark, creeping power that lurked in alleys and stole souls; what would he do with the kind of power he could wield in broad daylight?
A voice swears softly in the doorway behind them: Miss Pearl stands there, clutching a slinky silk robe tight around her throat and staring at Cleo. Juniper notices the seams at the corners of her eyes for the first time, the soft folds of flesh at her throat.
Bella settles on the couch beside Cleo. “He won’t take office for a while. We’ve still got time, we can prepare.” She sounds like a woman trying to reason with a rifle or a bear trap. From the corner, Strix makes a soft, sorrowing sound.
Cleo shakes her head once. “In light of the city’s great need—witches running loose, murderers not apprehended, recent evidence of black magic, et cetera—he’s taking immediate control. The Fair is closing early, the police force is expanding. He spoke this morning from the steps of the capitol.” She withdraws a flyer from her skirt pocket and passes it among them.
Bella gasps as she reads it. Agnes sighs. Juniper swears.
To protect our BELOVED CITIZENS against the ongoing scourge of WITCHCRAFT, the city of New Salem is obliged to adopt a new set of ORDINANCES:
For Immediate Effect
1. Any and all practitioners of WITCHCRAFT (including hedge-witches, street-witches, fortune-tellers, abortionists, midwives, suffragists, prostitutes, radicals, or other unnatural women) will be placed under immediate arrest and subject to TRIAL BY FIRE.
2. Any and all individuals harboring (offering aid to, sympathizing with, housing, feeding, or assisting) a known practitioner of WITCHCRAFT will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to ninety (90) days, and a fine of no less than $100.
3. Any individual or establishment selling materials known to be associated with the practice of WITCHCRAFT—herbs, potions, spells, bones, sacrificial animals, bodily substances, chalk, candles of particular colors, Satanic texts—will be subject to arrest, imprisonment of up to seven (7) years, and seizure of all assets.
4. The GEORGIAN INQUISITORS will be immediately reassembled and granted all former legal powers and privileges historically associated with their rank, with the sole purpose of enforcing the above ordinances, with special priority granted to the infamous EASTWOOD SISTERS.
The words trial by fire swim hideously in Juniper’s vision. “They can’t do this.”
Cleo laughs. It isn’t a very good laugh. “They already have.”
“But it’s not legal. It can’t be.
