First she curses—Gideon Hill and his damn shadows, herself and her terrible choices, the world that demands such a steep price just for living—then she says the words.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, mine to yours and yours to mine.
The words Mama Mags used to bind split seams, then sisters, then her own soul. Surely they would work now, for Juniper.
Bindings usually involve ways and means, objects and complicated affinities, but Juniper has nothing but the taste of Gideon Hill’s bridle between her teeth, the scars of his collar around her throat, and her own will, which does not waver.
She reaches for his soul as it runs past her, curls her fingers into it. It twists in her hands, fighting to escape, but her will is a hammer and anvil, a stone and a sledge. She doesn’t let go. She says the words again and the shadow goes limp and cold in her hands.
Juniper fights the urge to toss it to the ground and stamp it like a roach. But she couldn’t even if she wanted to: it’s streaking up her arms, twining upward. She feels it climb her collarbone and writhe up her neck, pressing like a cold finger between her lips and pouring itself down her throat. It’s like drinking pond-slime or January mud, thick and foul and unnatural. She retches at the oily touch of his soul inside her.
A laugh rings from somewhere inside her skull, sickly familiar, and a voice whispers: I wanted you to stay with me, James Juniper, and now you always will.
He swallows her whole. The world goes black as the belly of a whale.
Bella sees the shadow reaching toward the scaffold.
She sees her sister step—stupidly, bravely, perfectly predictably—into its path. The darkness flows up her arms and slips into her mouth, stretching black tendrils up her cheeks and filling her eyes with shadows. Bella feels it through the thing between them, a suffocating, poisonous cold.
Juniper stiffens, her mouth open in a silent howl, her fingers clawing at her own chest as if a weed has taken root inside her. Bella’s scream is lost in the howling chaos of the crowd.
Only Cleo hears her. “What is it? Oh, Saints.” She sees Juniper, her spine bent in an unnatural arc, her nails digging into her own skin. Her eyes are black as graves.
Bella is aware that her own lips are moving, a breathless chant of oh no, oh no, oh no. “He’s taking her, just like he took the others.”
“She’s got a strong will, your sister. Maybe she can stop him.”
“No, she can’t.” Bella knows it, feels it through the binding between them. Her breath catches. The binding. “Not alone.”
She shoves her will toward Juniper, every scrap of fear and fury and desperate love she possesses, and prays it’s enough.
Juniper flinches. Her neck snaps toward the scaffold and her lips peel back from her teeth in a snarl that doesn’t belong to her—then it passes. Her spine unbends. Her shoulders square, familiar and stubborn. The blackness recedes from her eyes and leaves them clear silver, entirely her own.
She meets Bella’s worried gaze and gives her a tired half-smile. Bella feels a giddy rush of relief.
Until she sees movement at Juniper’s side. The black wolf—the one that lay beside its master’s body on the balcony—is standing now beside her sister, looking up at her with red, red eyes.
Juniper figures a few hundred years of always getting his own way has spoiled Mr. Gideon Hill. He’s grown used to weak wills and whispered words, to women bound and burning.
But Juniper learned spite in the cradle. She knows all about long odds and losing choices, about grit and spine. She plants her feet and holds fast.
He might still have won, in the end—Gideon Hill who was once George of Hyll, who has been stealing souls for centuries before Juniper or her mother or her mother’s mother were even born—except that Juniper is not alone.
Bella’s will floods her heart like the first warm wind of spring. It drives the chill back, presses Hill down inside her until he’s nothing but a shard of ice between her ribs.
A mocking voice hisses in her head. How long do you think you can keep this up? How long can you resist me?
Not forever, she knows—he’s a tumor in her breast, waiting for the moment her attention slips or her will flags—but she doesn’t need forever.
Long enough, you bastard, she thinks, and takes a single step. It’s harder than it ought to be, like there’s a weight pulling hard against her, like her muscles aren’t quite her own. A warm weight leans against her leg and she looks down to meet a pair of mournful red eyes: Gideon Hill’s familiar, still wearing her iron collar. Still bound to her master, following him loyally to his next body.
For the last time.
Juniper digs her fingers into her dark ruff and the two of them walk back to the scaffold, to her sisters and the stake, to the flames that curl like fingers into the sky, beckoning.
Bella watches her sister walk back to the scaffold as if she’s wading through knee-deep water. As if each step costs her dearly but she is bound to take it anyway.
There are people running and shoving around her—well-dressed gentlemen fleeing in terror, shouting Inquisitors with blood smeared on their white tunics, mad-eyed men clutching stones and broken bottles, looking for wicked witches to kill—but none of them seem willing to touch the young woman and the black wolf.
Bella reaches for her hands as she climbs the steps, but Juniper flinches away from her touch. Her hands curl back on themselves as if they’re smeared with something foul. She buries one of them in the black fur of the wolf at her side.
“June! What happened? Did he bind himself to you somehow?”
Juniper shrugs one shoulder and doesn’t meet her eyes. “No.”
“Then how—what—”
“I bound him to me.”
Bella considers bursting into tears.
