For a dizzy second she hears the scuff of red scales across the floor, the hiss of triumph, of pent-up hate finally set free—but then someone shouts look! and she does.
Another group of women is marching down the avenue, headed straight toward them. Juniper blinks twice—are they coming to join them? Is it the rest of the Women’s Association?—but then she sees the pale sashes crossing their chests.
“Oh hell.” It’s those Christian Union women who are always writing nasty letters to the editor and waving signs with slogans like WOMEN FOR A PURE SALEM and MICAH 5:12. How did they turn up so fast? Before the police, even? Juniper didn’t exactly advertise her march in the Sunday classifieds.
One of the Union women—a willowy, white-gloved woman Juniper recognizes from the papers as Miss Grace Wiggin—plants herself directly in Juniper’s path, chin high and skirt starched. There’s a shine to her, a porcelain perfection that makes Juniper want to rub her powdered nose in the mud.
“We, the good and righteous women of New Salem”—Wiggin gestures behind her to the other unionists, as if clarifying which women are good and righteous—“object to the promotion of sin on our streets!” Her voice is high, piercing.
“Oh for Chrissake,” Juniper drawls. “Don’t y’all have anything better to do?”
“They claim they are harmless! They claim they want justice! But what justice was there in the dark days of our pasts, when thousands of innocents suffered in the Black Plague?”
“Knitting, maybe. Charity work.”
Wiggin’s jaw flexes. “If we permit these women—these witches!—to march freely down our streets, what comes next? Will our daughters want broomsticks and cauldrons instead of pearls and dolls? Will our sons be seduced by their black arts? Will a second plague strike us down? The Christian Union urges you to vote for Mr. Gideon Hill this November!”
She keeps speechifying, her voice getting higher, more strident. The crowd presses closer, nodding and muttering and sometimes hear-hearing.
Behind her, Juniper hears Jennie curse softly, but she doesn’t turn to look because she’s looking at something else: Miss Grace Wiggin’s shadow.
It’s long and dark in the almost-sunset, flung black over cobblestones. At first it mimics Wiggin’s own gestures, like a good shadow should, but after a minute its hands fall to its sides. Its shoulders roll, as if stretching out stiffness, and then—like a puppet shedding its strings or a train waltzing off its tracks—it steps away from its owner.
Juniper goes very still. She watches Grace Wiggin’s shadow distort, stretching into a creature with too many hands and too many fingers. It finds other shadows—docile, well-behaved shadows lying in their proper place—and pulls them into itself. It swells and blackens; Juniper thinks of things left rotting in the sun.
She remembers asking Mags when she was little if witching was wicked. Mags had cackled. Wickedness is in the eye of the beholder, baby. But then she sobered. She said witching was power and any power could be perverted, if you were willing to pay the price. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways.
Juniper touches the locket on her chest, full of poison. Mags never told her what went into the making of those teeth, but Juniper found the burned bodies of three snakes in the hearth and saw the bandages wrapped thick around Mags’s wrist, and knew the cost was cruel and high.
Now she watches the shadow oozing through the crowd like spilled ink, coiling around ankles and sliding up skirts, and thinks the price for this must have been even higher.
As the shadow spreads, the crowd shifts. Meanness turns to malice; heckling turns to hate. Juniper feels it as a prickle of fear along her arms, the kind that means a thunderstorm is rolling in or your daddy’s coming home with a bellyful of liquor.
Juniper sees whitening knuckles, scowling faces, eyes gone empty and dim as closed-up houses. It’s as if their souls were stolen along with their shadows.
She looks back to Grace Wiggin. She’s smiling so wide and bright that Juniper understands two things in a hurry: number one, that there’s a good chance the wicked witch wandering around New Salem is standing right in front of her in a white sash.
And number two, that she’s glad, for once, that her sisters forsook her, because at least they won’t be here for whatever happens next.
Beatrice is wishing very much that she forsook her youngest sister. She’s wishing she didn’t invite Miss Cleopatra Quinn to accompany her to the Fair, didn’t watch from the fringes as Juniper raised her banner, didn’t trail after the white cloaks of the suffragists while the crowd soured like milk around them.
Because then she wouldn’t be standing here in the darkening street while a cluster of glassy-eyed men peel away from the crowd and lurch toward her, their shadows twisting and rippling behind them.
Their eyes are on Miss Quinn, a colored woman dressed a little too well, a little too far north. Beatrice sees the shape of slurs on their lips, the promise of punishment in their fists.
She hears Miss Quinn hiss a rude phrase beneath her breath. Then there’s a hand in hers—warm and dry, urgent—and Quinn is pulling her sideways, shoving her against the sooty brick wall of a pub.
Miss Quinn removes a stub of white chalk from her coat pocket and sketches something on the wall, a shape made of lines and stars. She whispers a half-song beneath her breath in a language Beatrice doesn’t know, then grabs Beatrice by the shoulders and presses her hard against the brick. Miss Quinn places her palms on either side of Beatrice and hisses, “Don’t move.”
Beatrice tastes witching in the air, feels the sudden heat of it radiating from Quinn’s skin. She doesn’t move.
The cluster of
