The silence swells inside her. It presses against her ribs and pops in her ears, until Agnes is nothing but pale skin wrapped around a soundless scream.
Her own voice has a distant, underwater warble. “Who?”
The other girl answers this time, reaching an arm around her sister. “Inquisitors. A pair of them, wearing those red-cross uniforms. They knocked and Clara answered, and they said they were looking for a baby girl.” Her eyes shift a little, uncertain. “They said a w-witch had snatched her straight from her mother’s arms and run off with her.” Her arm tightens around her sister, as if she thinks Agnes might snatch one of them next.
“And where”—her voice is still perfectly calm; only the very tips of her fingers tremble—“did they take her?”
“Don’t know,” says the girl. “They—they said if you had any questions you could take them up with the mayor.”
The mayor. The girl sounds doubtful as she says it, because even a little girl knows mayors don’t meet with witches. But Agnes recognizes it for what it is: an invitation.
A trap, into which she would walk willingly and open-eyed, because he has stolen her daughter away from her and there is nothing she would not do to get her back.
The girls gasp and clutch at one another. It’s only when one of them pants, “What—what is that?” that Agnes becomes aware that Pan has materialized on her shoulder, talons biting through her blouse. “You are a witch!”
“Yes,” Agnes answers distantly. “And they should have thought of that before they took what was mine.”
And then she’s back in the street, stumbling over cobblestones and shoving past strangers. She’s crossing the Thorn, heading for St. George’s Square, before it occurs to her, with a faraway flick of annoyance, that her sisters will follow her into the trap. That they will feel her fear through the binding between them and come running, and then Gideon Hill will have all three—four, Agnes thinks, with a swallowed scream—Eastwoods in his palm.
She thinks how very tiresome it is to love and be loved. She can’t even risk her life properly, because it no longer belongs solely to her.
A feathered shadow sweeps across her. Pan. What is he, really? A piece of magic itself, flown through from the other side and tethered to her soul. An else-wise, otherworldly creature that doesn’t particularly care what is and isn’t possible.
Agnes cranes her neck upward. “Warn them for me, Pan. Tell them to stay away.” She feels the hot spark of his eyes on her. “Please.” He shrieks back to her, a shivering, wild sound entirely out of place in the civilized sprawl of New Salem.
Agnes runs.
Bella thinks at first it’s a roll of thunder cracking over the city, out of season, or perhaps a distant earthquake. Some vast, shattering thing, blind and angry.
Then she realizes it’s her sister’s heart splitting in two.
The spell of warding dies on her lips. “Three bless and keep me,” she whispers.
Miss Araminta Wells and another pair of women look over at her, harassed. “Thought we were working these wards together,” Araminta drawls.
They’re standing at the north end of Nut Street, their fingers crusted with salt, their pockets weighted with thistle and chalk. The canniest and cleverest members of the Daughters of Tituba have gathered to work what wards they can while others ferry the youngest and oldest occupants of New Cairo into the tunnels, blindfolded. Bella provided them with all the words and ways she could and a list of addresses and households willing to shelter them until Hill’s raid was over.
Araminta held the list, running her thumb over the names in tidy writing: Miss Florentine Lee, 201 Spinner’s Row, Room No. 44 (3 persons). Mr. Henry Blackwell, 186 St. Jerome St. (15 persons).
“I keep waiting for you to disappoint me,” she said querulously, before bustling off to gather supplies from her cellar.
“That’s more or less a declaration of love, from my mother,” Cleo sighed at her elbow.
Now Araminta glowers as she watches Bella. “What is it? Who is it?” She bites hard into the words, like a woman used to bad news and dark portents.
“It’s Agnes.” But Bella thinks: It’s Eve. Surely nothing else could crack her sister’s heart like that. Bella catches the worried O of Cleo’s mouth, but she can’t seem to focus on anything except the splitting of her sister’s heart. “I’m sorry. I said I would stay but I have to go.”
“Go, child,” Araminta tells her. “We’ll finish without you.” Her mouth works for another second, as if there’s something unpleasant caught in her teeth. “And call on the Daughters, if you have need of us.” She touches her breast pocket and Bella hears the crinkle of folded paper.
She wheels to Cleo and presses her hand once, too hard. “Meet me tonight. Back at South Sybil.”
If Cleo answers, it’s lost in the frantic thump of her feet and the mutter of spells as Bella runs.
She follows the echo of Agnes’s fury north out of New Cairo. At Second Street she grabs the rail of a passing trolley and steps aboard, glaring with such ferocity that the conductor elects to look the other way.
The city whitens around her. Police stroll past, batons swinging jauntily, and Inquisitors strut in their still-fresh uniforms. None of them notice a hunched, white-haired woman clinging to the trolley as it jangles past, or the flitting shadow of an owl’s wing above them.
Bella sees the dome of City Hall ahead and tastes the sour bite of fear in her throat. Why would Agnes be at the square? Why would she leave the safety of their circled wards?
She hops down from the trolley and stumbles against a plain-looking woman pushing a frilly pram, limping on every other step. It’s only after the woman hisses in her ear, “Saints, Bell,
