She crosses her arms behind her head, speaking to the sagging ceiling. “It’s rude to come calling after supper, my daddy taught me.”
“I was concerned the presence of your jailers might inhibit your honesty. I wanted to speak more . . . frankly.”
“Well frankly, Mr. Hill”—Juniper does not look away from the ceiling, does not change her tone in the slightest—“you can go fuck yourself.”
Another low laugh. Then a sibilant mutter too soft to hear, the clink of a tugged leash.
Juniper startles at the sudden sloshing of boots beside her: Gideon Hill and his dog are standing inside her cell. The door remains closed and locked behind them.
Juniper feels the fine hairs of her arms stand on end. All the scathing swagger drains away from her.
He draws so close she can smell the fresh moonlight on his suit and feel the heat of his hound’s breath against her bare skin.
He smiles down at her. It isn’t the craven, cringing smile she remembers from the Women’s Association, or even the hearty, false one that beams from thousands of campaign posters. This smile is all canines and red gums. It seems to be stolen from someone else entirely; Juniper would very much like to know who.
“You girls have done very well.” Juniper wants to write the word girls on a ribbon and strangle him with it. “You chose nice, visible subjects, ideal for stirring up a fuss. It will cost the city a considerable sum to replace the statue of Saint George, by the way.”
Juniper doesn’t think she’s ever cared less about anything. She watches him through narrowed eyes, wary as a cat.
He shrugs at her silence. “I can’t say I’m sorry, honestly. It was always a terrible likeness. But what I want to know is—”
“I’m not telling you a single name. So why don’t you save yourself some time and slither on home.”
Hill flicks a disinterested finger. The gesture has more authority than Juniper thought Hill had in his entire body. “I’m not interested in names. Your friends are far more useful to me playing witch, putting the fear of God in the common folk. If I wanted them locked up with you, they would be.”
Juniper’s fingernails cut crescents into her palms. “How did you know about the graveyard? Who blabbed?”
Hill makes a soft, pitying sound. “No one, James.”
He holds a hand in front of his lantern. It casts a five-fingered shadow against the scummed water between them, perfectly ordinary, until the edges ripple outward. The fingertips lengthen like claws or roots. His dog whines at his heels and he gives her a sharp, vicious kick.
Juniper stares at the shadow with the rising, queasy sense that she got it all terribly wrong. There is indeed a witch running loose in New Salem—the kind who deals in shadow and sin, in ways and words so wicked even Mama Mags wouldn’t have touched them with a ten-foot pole—but it sure as hell isn’t Miss Grace Wiggin.
It’s the man standing with her in the prison cell, smiling his not-right smile, looking nothing at all like the stoop-shouldered bureaucrat Juniper met at the beginning of the summer. His hair is still thinning and his eyes are still pink-rimmed and too wet, but it’s like his body is a house with a new owner. Everything is subtly rearranged: his limbs move differently in their sockets and his muscles are pinned differently to his bones. The only thing that remains unchanged is the furtive flick of his eyes.
Hill smiles at her again, flexing the fingers of his shadow-hand. “Everything casts a shadow, Miss Eastwood, and every shadow is mine. There are no secrets in this city.”
His hand remains still, fingers splayed, but its shadow twines itself into a shape Juniper recognizes: three circles, interwoven. The lines are uneven, interrupted by bulges that might be the heads of snakes as they swallow their tails.
“The signature you left at your greatest works, I believe.” His voice is softer now. “Not many people know it, these days. Tell me: where did you find it?”
Juniper gives him the sullen shrug that used to drive her daddy to drink. “Thought you knew everything.”
“There were certain warded places, certain materials I couldn’t . . . I’m a busy man. I can’t watch everything.”
Salt to keep things out. She grins at him. “Guess there’s one secret in this city, then.”
“Did someone teach it to you? Was it written somewhere?” The furtive thing in his eyes is writhing right beneath the surface, a grub beneath the soil. “What else have you found?”
“Maybe we found an ancient scroll. Maybe a fairy told it to us. Maybe we’re the secret great-great-granddaughters of the Last Three themselves.”
The flesh of his face goes taut, the sick smile stretching into a grimace. “The Three died screaming, along with their daughters. Tell me the truth, child.”
Juniper leans forward and spits in the water between them. It lands with a satisfying spatter of scum and snot.
He dabs at his pant leg, sighing a little. Juniper doesn’t see the shadow until it seizes her.
His shadow-hand oozes up her leg like a liquid spider. She swears and scrubs at it but her fingers pass through it as if it isn’t there. It scuttles up her belly and across her chest, wraps cold fingers around her throat. Dull heat gathers in her collar, mounting as the shadow-hands tighten.
Hill watches her gasp and claw at her throat. “Clever things, these collars. They dampen magic, but they don’t actually prevent its presence—they merely react to it. An invention of Saint Glennwald Hale, in the sixteen-hundreds.”
Her blisters hiss and pop against the hot metal. A scream gathers in her throat, but she meets Hill’s eyes and clamps her jaw against it.
He gives another short sigh, as if this is all rather tiresome and distasteful, and Juniper feels the oily creep of his
