“The Fair,” she breathes.
Her eyes cross Cleo’s and for a moment the memory of that June afternoon blooms between them, shimmering and sweet, when they swayed together in the glass cage of the Ferris wheel. Bella feels a surge of regret that she wasted those precious minutes on worry, rather than wringing every ounce of joy from the world while she could.
Bella sees some of her own wistful hunger reflected in Cleo’s face before she stands and places her derby hat neatly on her head. Her chin lifts. “Shall we, Misses Eastwood?”
Bella tries to tell Cleo she ought to run, that she doesn’t have to follow them this far into madness, but the words lodge like swallowed stones in her throat. Instead she finds herself reaching for Cleo’s hand as the four of them sweep down the steps of South Sybil and out into the dying day.
The nearest entrance to the railroad is two blocks east, down a set of stone steps and through a door reading Miss Judy’s Tea Shop: CLOSED. Cleo shows the door her patterned scar and it opens into cool darkness.
They follow the tiger’s-eye of Cleo’s witch-light in silence. Bella thinks about the hands that carved the tunnels like veins beneath the city, the bodies laboring unseen and unfree; she thinks of the ways people make for themselves when there are none, the impossible things they render possible. She looks at the white of Agnes’s knuckles and begins, just a little, to believe.
They emerge from an outhouse door on the north side. It’s after curfew, and every door is locked tight, every curtain drawn. There’s no one to notice four women filing through the alleys with familiars winging behind them. No one to hear the steady clack of a black-yew staff across the cobbles.
No one to see them pause beneath the high arch of the fairground entrance, or to wonder how they open the gate despite the stout iron padlock and the heavy chain around the bars.
They could hardly have chosen a better setting for the summoning of undead spirits. The bones of the Fair hulk around them like the remains of some prehistoric creature: the Ferris wheel, skeletal and dark; the sagging strings of light bulbs; the empty stands and tents, canvas flapping in the wind. The only sound is the dry capering of old ticket stubs across the boulevard and the cawing of crows.
The sun seems to be graying rather than setting, as if someone is wrapping stained gauze around it, but the tower would still be far too visible. “We should wait for full dark.” Bella’s voice echoes eerily.
“Why not make our own?” Juniper withdraws a red-dyed handkerchief from her skirt pocket. She spits into the dirt at her feet and whispers to the wet earth. Red skies at night, witch’s delight.
She calls, and the storm answers. Above them the clouds darken like bruises. The watching crows go silent, vanishing into the blackening sky behind them. Strix and Pan circle, visible only by the firelight of their eyes.
“How’s that?” Juniper’s face is flushed with the heat of witching, eyes shining.
“Good enough.” Agnes kneels on the cold stone and lays her candle-stubs and matchsticks in a circle a second time. Bella and Juniper kneel beside her. Agnes lets three drops of thin milk fall into the circle. Juniper scrapes her bloodied palm on the ground.
The wind rises. It lifts their hair from their shoulders, three shades of black tangling together, and buffets the wings of the owl and hawk high above them.
The first time Bella worked this spell she was in her office in the Salem College Library, foolish and alone. The second time she was with Cleo in the wild ruins of Old Salem, full of desperate hope. Now she is here in the empty fairgrounds with her sisters and her lover and her familiar, and they have whatever is left behind when hope fades—a scorched, enduring thing, like the earth after a wildfire.
It will have to be enough.
Bella holds out her hands to her sisters.
Juniper frowns. “Is this part of the spell?”
“No,” Bella admits. Juniper’s hand closes tight around hers and the lines between them seem to sing, like a string finally in tune. Bella’s tear slides cinder-hot down her cheek and splashes silently into the circle.
They speak the words together, a children’s song about wayward sisters and lost crowns. A rhyme too dangerous to be written down, which was whispered and sung and stitched in secret, passed in pieces through the centuries. Bella thinks of the faint verse she found written in the back of Children and Household Witch-Tales, placed there by a different pair of sisters. She wishes she could thank them.
The heat strikes and catches behind their ribs as the Eastwoods speak the words. They draw three circles with their edges overlapping, and the heat becomes a flame that becomes a blaze.
Agnes’s will is an anvil, an avalanche, cold and inevitable. Her fisher-hawk screeches a war-cry and Strix echoes him, their eyes scorching the sky. Just at the moment Bella thinks her skin will split and crack with the heat, it is done.
The tower stands in the unnatural dark of the New Salem fairgrounds. Gray curls of ash drift and shush around their skirts and burnt branches crisscross above them. On the ground between them three circles glow white.
Bella bends, scooping ash and earth into a glass jar. She works the binding and Cleo works the banishing, and then—with the faint snick of silver shears cutting the air—the tower vanishes again, tucked neatly into nowhere like a handkerchief folded back into a pocket.
Cleo slides the scissors back into her pocket. “There. Now hurry. I’m sure someone saw something, even with the clouds, and I don’t intend to be here when they come looking.”
Agnes and Juniper are already crouched again above their
