“Oh, are we on first-name terms now?” Quinn’s lips are a teasing curve, but that tender thing lingers in her voice.
“Of course we are.” Bella swallows once, too hard. “Cleo.”
She finds she can’t look into Quinn’s eyes as she says her name. She looks down at her notebook instead, rubbing her thumb across the words. “If anything untoward happens, you should run.”
“No, thank you,” Quinn says politely.
Bella tries again. “If it goes awry . . .” They both know it would be unwise for Quinn to be found in a scene of obvious witchcraft beside the burned husk of a white woman.
“Then I advise you not to let it go awry.” Quinn catches her eyes. “I am not here as a spy, Bella. Or even as a member of the Sisters of Avalon. I’m here as your . . . friend.” Her grin tilts. “And because I am the most curious creature ever cursed to walk the earth, to quote my mother, and I would very much like to be there when the Lost Way of Avalon comes back to the world.”
“Your mother seems a wise woman,” Bella says, and adds, a little daringly, “I’d like to meet her, someday.”
“But you already have!” Quinn sighs at Bella’s slack expression. “I did tell you my mother ran a spice shop.”
Bella considers objecting on the grounds that Quinn never said her mother ran a secret apothecary disguised as a spice shop while actually leading a clandestine society of colored witches, but instead says, “Oh.”
Quinn gives her a consoling pat. “She thought you were very sweet.”
Bella closes her eyes in brief and mortal mortification. “Well. It’s time, don’t you think?”
Quinn’s hand slips into hers, warm and dry. Bella wets her lips, feels the cool whip of wind on her tongue, and says the words a coward never would:
The wayward sisters, hand in hand,
Burned and bound, our stolen crown,
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
It’s seven minutes past midnight when Juniper’s collar begins to burn.
She splashes to her knees in the dark waters of the Deeps, fingers scrabbling at the hot iron, teeth gritted on howls and curses.
She heard the dogs, earlier—even buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone and iron she could hear that mad chorus, sense the wicked heat of witchcraft in the air—but her collar had remained dull and cold against her blistered throat. Now it blazes, and beneath its heat she feels the lines that lead to her sisters, taut and singing with power.
Her lip splits beneath her teeth. Blood runs hot down her chin, too hot, and drips to the cold water below. Juniper hears the delicate splish as it lands and remembers her blood falling to the limestone cobbles of St. George’s Square—then the whipping wind, the dark tower, the wild smell of roses—Bella’s fingers on her mouth: maiden’s blood.
She knows, then, what her sisters are doing.
“Oh, you fools. You beautiful Saints-damned sinners—” She curses them and cries as she curses, because she knows they are doing it for her. Even though they abandoned her once before, even though they know now what she is—a murderess and a villain, worse than nothing—
It hurts even to think it. They came back for me. She feels something snap in her chest, as if her heart is a broken bone poorly set, which has to break again before it can heal right.
For a moment she pictures herself standing arm in arm with her sisters, triumphant before the Lost Way of Avalon. She knows it will never be. Because—though she can sense the rightness of the words and ways, though she feels her sisters’ will scorching down the line between them—Juniper knows they will fail.
Bella calls. The magic answers.
Cauldron bubble, toil and trouble,
Weave a circle round the throne,
Maiden, mother, and crone.
The heat gathers first in her palms, spreading like fresh-caught flames up her arms, burrowing into the hollow of her throat. The invisible lines between Bella and her sisters—the bindings left behind by that half-worked spell months before—hum like fiddle strings beneath the bow.
The wind rises, and with it comes the calling of night-birds and the feral smell of magic.
The wayward sisters, hand in hand—
She feels Agnes a hundred miles away, lit like a torch in the center of New Salem, the cobbles growing hot beneath her heels. She feels her hands steady on the glass vials, and the bright hiss of tears and milk and blood as they fall.
Burned and bound, our stolen crown—
But where is Juniper? The line between them is thin and weak, far too cold.
Bella kneels on the bare earth of Old Salem, still speaking the spell, magic burning through her. Steam rises from the soil as it boils beneath her.
But what is lost, that can’t be found?
The words feel true in her mouth, like keys sliding into invisible locks. But the heat is consuming her. She pictures her veins glowing hotter and hotter until she ignites, until she is a bonfire with a woman’s voice.
She feels Agnes burning with her, arms wrapped tight around her belly, hair rising around her in the same wind that whips dirt and dead leaves around Bella.
But she doesn’t feel Juniper. There are only two of them, and two is not enough.
The last time she worked this spell—when she was just a librarian named Beatrice who found a few words that shouldn’t exist—she had grown frightened and fallen silent. Without the words the spell suffocated like an airless fire, and the only price was a little Devil’s-fever, quickly cured.
But now she is Belladonna Eastwood, the oldest sister and the wisest, and Juniper needs her.
She circles back to the beginning of the spell in an
