The pain eases with each knock of her sisters’ knuckles, each round of one for sorrow, two for mirth. A blissful coolness follows behind it, like creek-water on a hot day.
Juniper lies still, listening to the even beat of her blood and the tiny, invisible motions of skin reknitting and blisters shrinking. Her sisters are talking above her, their voices falling from some great height down to her ears.
“They’ll be here soon.” That’s Agnes, tense with fear.
“Who?” Bella sounds profoundly un-Bella-like, giddy and pleased and thoroughly unworried. Juniper wonders if she’s drunk.
“Everyone! Police, mobs with pitchforks, Hill and his friends! We have to go!” There’s something very important Juniper needs to tell them about Hill, about witchcraft and stolen shadows with watching eyes, but the thought sinks into the blessed coolness and vanishes.
Bella sobers. “I am not leaving this library for those depraved people to discover.” Library?
Agnes makes a wordless growl, but Quinn says calmly, “Hide it, then. If you can bind hats to cloaks and hide them away, why not a tower?”
There is a small silence, while the words ashes to ashes, dust to dust rattle loosely through Juniper’s skull. Then Bella says, “That is—quite brilliant, Cleo,” with such admiration in her voice that it’s almost indelicate. “But one of us will need to leave, to work the binding and find a safe place to hide it. And draw the Sign to give us a way back out.”
“I’ll do it,” Agnes offers quietly.
Bella’s voice cools for some reason. “Of course. I had forgotten you were already leaving.”
Juniper finds the voices above her blurring together after this, devolving into a jumble of plans and mutters and hurry nows. She would be content to lie there, basking in the absence of pain, except—
“Wait!” Her voice is still all kinds of wrong, thin and hoarse. “Thank you. For saving me.”
There’s a shush of skirts and Agnes’s face appears above her. “Hush, baby.” Her voice is warm and low and bossy as hell, just like when they were girls.
“I didn’t think you’d come. Now that you know about Daddy.”
“It’s true, then.” Agnes sounds neither surprised nor especially upset. Just tired.
Juniper swallows and gasps a little with the pain of it. “It’s true.”
“Oh, June.” Bella kneels on her other side, her face long and sharp beside Agnes’s. “Why? After all those years.”
“He got sick. He was always getting sick after the fire—weak lungs, the doctor said. This time was worse. He spent weeks laid up in bed, coughing up blood and slime.” Juniper remembers sleeping on the floor by his bed so she could tend to him in the night, listening to the wet rattle of his breath. “The doctor said there was nothing he could do. He had a lawyer come draw up a will and gave Daddy a brown bottle for the pain. Whatever it was made him . . .” Strange. Feeble. Not himself. He looked at her sometimes with his eyes all wet and shining and called her by her mother’s-name. Once when she was setting his dinner tray on his lap he’d touched her wrist in a way that made her stomach twist sickly. That night she slept outside, letting the cold wind scour her clean.
Her sisters’ faces are grave and silent above her. Juniper closes her eyes. “One day near the end he started carrying on about sin and regret and how he was sorry I wasn’t born a son. He said at least Dan would do right by the farm. And that’s when I knew he’d taken it from me, all of it.” Even now, the ghost of that rage is enough to choke her. That land belonged to her, by birthright and blood.
Bella begins, softly, “So that’s why.”
“No.” Juniper swallows again, feels the pucker and rip of the wound in her throat. “I wanted to, but I didn’t. Till he started apologizing for . . . other things. The cellar. The two of you leaving. Our mother.” Her voice wobbles on the last word. Juniper doesn’t know why; she’s never even met the woman, never known her as anything but a curl of hair in Mama Mags’s locket, the reason her sisters wore black on her birthday. “He said he—that he—”
Juniper had understood then that her daddy—her flesh and blood, her enemy, her only-thing-left—was a murderer. And then, as the snake’s teeth bit into her palm, she understood that she and her daddy had one thing in common.
A warm hand slides into hers. Bella starts to speak but Juniper cuts her off. “Did you know? The two of you?”
Above her Juniper feels her sisters look at one another and then away. “Not really,” Bella says just as Agnes says, “Yes.”
There’s a brief pause before Agnes amends, “When her pains started, Mama told me to go ring the bell, but Daddy caught my wrist . . .” Juniper hears the bitter guilt in her voice. “I don’t know if he meant for it to happen. But he knew how hard her births had been before.”
“You should have told me,” Juniper says, but she doesn’t know if she means it. What would it have been like to grow up knowing that? Is this the reason her sisters were always a little less wild than she was, a little more frightened?
“You should have told us,” Bella answers, a little waspishly. “Before you were dragged off to prison.”
“I thought if you knew what I did, what I am, you might . . .” Hate me, leave me, turn around and never come back.
“But surely you didn’t think it would surprise us. After what we saw.” At Bella’s words, Juniper feels that unseen something swimming up from the deeps of wherever it lives inside her. She wants to look away from it, to send it back down where it belongs, but she’s tired and hurting and cracked wide with confession. It looms closer.
Agnes is shaking her head. “She doesn’t remember, Bell.”
Juniper doesn’t want to ask.
