“For the last time, girl: Where did you see their sign? What else have you found?”
The shadow slides deeper, questing and clawing, and she feels words pulled from her, rising like vomit in her throat. “We saw it on the tower door.”
“On Alban Eilir?” Juniper stares up at him, bewildered, gagging on shadows, and he amends, “The equinox. The tower on the equinox?”
“Yes.” The word is stolen from her, pulled out between reluctant teeth.
“You and your sisters are the ones who called it, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“And you have been trying to find the necessary means to make a second attempt?”
“Yes.”
“And have you succeeded?” Juniper hears the shift in his voice, catches the pale grub of fear in his eyes, and understands that this question is the one he wants answered more than any other, the real reason she’s locked in the Deeps with a shadow-hand between her teeth.
She fights as the confession is dragged out of her, feels the edges of the word slicing the soft meat of her throat. It leaves her lips with a splutter of blood. “No.”
She can almost see the tension unwind from Hill’s frame. The shadow retreats, coiling like a snake from her mouth, leaving Juniper to retch helplessly into the water below. It’s not just the black taste of the shadow in her mouth—it’s the invasion of it, the queasy betrayal of her own body. Even on his worst days her daddy could only touch the flesh-and-blood of her; her will remained her own.
Somewhere above her Hill is straightening his cuffs, wrapping the dog-leash neatly around his palm. “So I suspected. But some of your spells have been . . . substantial, and I wondered if somehow—but no.”
She feels his hand on her cheek, chill and damp, and lacks even the energy to spin and bite it.
“Thank you, Miss Eastwood. You’ve quite put my mind at ease.” He wades back to the cell door with his dog picking her way delicately behind him. They pass like ghosts through the iron.
“What are you?” Juniper wishes her voice didn’t shake as she spoke, that there wasn’t acid sick drying on her shift.
The warm glow of his lantern is already spiraling back up the steps. He calls back, “Merely a man, Miss Eastwood. And perhaps—if you and your sisters keep stirring up trouble—a mayor. We’ll see in November.”
Juniper curls around herself in the center of the iron bed-frame trying to tuck her bare flesh away from the shadows. She dreams herself home again, but this time she is running endlessly down the rutted clay of the drive, calling after her sisters. They do not answer.
Agnes is not dreaming. She is awake, pacing again, when she hears the second knock on her door.
She already knows who it is. She felt her sister coming nearer through the line between them, like a fish reeled in to shore, and only Bella is capable of tapping quite that timidly at a door.
But when she opens the door she finds two women standing in the hall: Bella, accompanied by the woman she still insists on referring to as Miss Quinn, although the rest of the Sisters have called her Cleo for weeks now.
Cleo hurries across the threshold as if she doesn’t like to be out in the open. Bella follows after her, sliding the lock behind them.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Agnes observes. She adds, half against her will, “I heard the police were hassling women walking the streets at night.”
Bella waves this concern away. “Oh, we weren’t on the streets. And we’re in something of a hurry. We’re taking the earliest train north in the morning, and I needed to give this to you before we depart.” She withdraws a glass vial from her sleeve and extends it to Agnes.
Agnes does not take it. She can see three droplets clinging to the glass, clear as water. “What is this?”
“Crone’s tears. You’ll need to provide mother’s milk, of course, and find some way to get a drop or two of Juniper’s blood. We really ought to be together to conduct the ritual properly, but we’ll have to hope the Lost Way of Avalon isn’t too particular about the details.”
“The Lost—” It’s only then that Agnes understands what her sister intends to do, what madness has come knocking at her door in the middle of the night. “I thought we didn’t have the words.”
Cleo shrugs rather casually. “Your sister and I are going on a research expedition.”
Bella nods briskly. “May we count on you to be ready on the evening of the solstice?”
Agnes considers for a long moment. Her daughter is very still inside her, as if she, too, is waiting for her answer. “No.”
Bella tsks at her. “Well whatever you have planned, surely you can skip it. This is worth missing a shift.”
“No,” Agnes says, and finds her eyes sliding away from Bella’s as she says it. “I meant: you may not count on me.”
She hears Cleo gasp, but not Bella. Perhaps she isn’t all that surprised that Agnes would disappoint her. “This is our baby sister we’re talking about,” she says softly.
“And do you know what our baby sister did? What she is?” Agnes read the article beneath Juniper’s bloodied face, understood why Juniper ran away from the only place she ever loved.
“Yes.” Bella is watching her with those steady, storm-cloud eyes. “We are all what we have to be, to stay alive. Cowards. Traitors.” The eyes flash, lightning behind the clouds. “Even villains, sometimes. Surely you can’t hate her for it.”
Agnes looks away again. “No.”
“Agnes, she needs us—”
“Oh, don’t pretend this is about anything but you and your books and your cleverness. You just want to be right, to snap your fingers and see one of your precious stories come to life.” She fires the words like arrows; by
