Knuckles tap twice on the roof, and the three Eastwoods—four, Bella supposes, catching the delicate curve of her niece’s cheek in the moonlight—stumble out into the night.
They’re on a street she doesn’t know, standing in the shadowed dark between two gas-lamps. Bodies move in the darkness around them, hurrying steps and hushed voices. Bella hears the snick of locks turning in latches, even the muffled thump of a hammer nailing shutters closed over a window, as New Cairo battens itself like a ship before a coming storm.
The driver tips his cap to them, addressing Agnes more than either of the others. “Mr. Lee begs you to send word to the Workingman, Misses Eastwood, once you’re settled. He assures me you have your methods.”
Agnes sweeps her stained cloak around herself and nods regally. “Thank you, sir.” She falters, suddenly more woman than witch. “And thank him, for me? Tell him—” But she doesn’t seem to know what she wants to tell him.
The driver grants her another grave tip of his hat. “I will, miss.” Then, far less formally, “Trust August to fall for the most wanted woman in New Salem.”
He flicks the reins and Juniper’s affronted mutter (“I thought I was the most wanted woman in New Salem”) is lost in the muffled clop of hooves.
Bella is blinking up at the stars, squinting through smudged spectacles at the distant street sign. “Ah—this way.” Bella walks south and her sisters follow a half-step behind her, scuttling like field mice beneath a full moon.
No one sits on stoops or plays cards on street-corners. The barrooms are dark and vacant. The only people they pass are clusters of men carrying cudgels and hammers, and long-cloaked women with hard, fearless expressions that make Bella think there are reasons the police don’t like to patrol Cairo after sundown.
She turns twice and doubles back once before she finds Nut Street. But the night market isn’t what she remembers: the stalls and rugs are being rolled away, wares packed hastily into canvas sacks and crates, dark cloaks pulled over colorful skirts. Eyes turn and catch on Bella and her sisters—three white women and two black birds and one red-haired baby—but Bella ignores them.
She finds Araminta’s shop and staggers through the door, weak-kneed and reeling. Araminta herself (Quinn’s mother, Bella thinks with a small, internal wail) sits behind the counter. “Now what’s going on—” she begins, but then she catches sight of Bella’s face. Her eyes flick to Agnes, too pale and shivering in the warm evening. “I’ll fetch her.”
The three of them stand, swaying slightly, until Quinn appears wearing a half-buttoned gentleman’s shirt over her nightdress. “Bella!” She reaches toward Bella as if she wants to hold her, but at that moment Agnes says unff and slumps sideways against a shelf of tiny wooden drawers.
Then the shop is full of low voices and reaching hands, the shuffle of feet as they hurry into the back room and make a pallet of pillows and spare quilts. They settle Agnes in the center while Araminta sings a spell against fever and another against blood loss, feet shuffling, a chalk map of stars drawn hastily on the floor. Juniper cradles Eve with her lower lip caught between her teeth, looking awkward and fierce and full of unwieldy, fresh-hatched love.
Araminta presses her palm to Agnes’s forehead as the song ends and nods once. Juniper nests beside Agnes, the baby swaddled between them, and Araminta hauls herself upright and picks her way over to Quinn and Bella. “They’ll keep for the night.”
She looks at her daughter and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Get some sleep, you two.”
Quinn ducks her head and heads up a narrow flight of stairs and Bella watches her go with a silent sinking in her heart.
Halfway up, Quinn turns. She meets Bella’s eyes and extends her hand, palm up. An invitation, a question, a challenge. Bella hears Juniper’s voice: Are you such a coward?
Bella isn’t.
Quinn’s hand is warm and dry. She leads Bella up the stairs to a room she recognizes. There’s the bed with its saffron quilt, gone gray in the gloom. There’s the pillow where Bella woke with the memory of warmth beside her.
Quinn sits on the foot of the bed and slides the gentleman’s shirt from her shoulders. Her arms beneath it are bare and long, velveteen in the dark, her nightdress ghostly white. She looks like a living Saint, the street-lamp painting a glowing halo behind her head.
Bella thinks she should probably leave.
(Bella does not want to leave.)
Quinn smooths the quilt beneath her, a gentle invitation. Bella doesn’t move or speak, as if her body is a fractious animal that will betray her given the slightest loosening of the reins.
“You can leave if you like.” Quinn’s voice is carefully neutral. “There’s room beside your sisters.”
“No, thank you,” Bella breathes.
The white flash of Quinn’s teeth in the dark. Her chin tilts in a come here flick, and this invitation is less gentle, warmer and sweeter and far more dangerous.
Bella makes an inarticulate sound, swallows, and tries again. “Mr. Quinn—”
“Does not live at this address, nor has he ever.” Bella blinks several times and Quinn explains gently, “The two of us grew up together, and understood very young that neither of us was interested in . . . the usual arrangement. He lives in Baltimore with a very nice gentleman friend and a spoiled dog named Lord Byron.”
“I . . . oh.” Bella has not previously imagined any arrangements other than the usual one; she feels simultaneously too young and too old, terribly naive.
She looks again at the space beside Quinn. She sits.
“It’s gone, you know.” Bella’s voice is hoarse from swallowed smoke. “All of it. The hoarded magic of witches, lost in a single night. It would have been safe if we’d just left it hidden where the Last Three put it, but we didn’t. I didn’t. And now it’s gone and all
