The Witch Haven

by Sasha Peyton Smith

  “Well done.” Finn gives me a nod. “Helen left you in the city?”

  “I ran away.” The look of pride that crosses his face makes me smile. I want Finn to think I’m as bold and brave as he is.

  “And now you’re back to break in?” He looks impressed.

  “I don’t need much time. Just wait here, please.”

  Finn shoves his hands into his pockets, he looks worried. “You’re sure you won’t get caught?”

  I hope the smile I flash looks confident. “I’m rather an expert at sneaking in and out of Haxahaven, I’ll have you know.” He doesn’t need to know it isn’t entirely the truth. I’d rather he think me as assured as I pretend to be.

  I leave him at the gate, and alone I march forward into the darkness.

  The school looks so much bigger at night.

  I picture myself as I was the first day I arrived here. I was trembling then, too.

  But I know more now than I did then.

  With a flash of magic, I unlock the gate and march back into Haxahaven for what I pray is the final time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The foyer is quiet and cavernous. Everyone retired to bed long ago. I take in the sweeping staircases, the dark chandeliers. I want to commit this to memory, this place that was once my home.

  I don’t know who is on patrol tonight, but they are nowhere to be found. I wonder if Helen has returned yet to tell them I fled. Perhaps they’re out looking for me now.

  I creep upstairs to my room, where Lena is sitting up in her bed, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.

  “How was it?” she whispers as I walk through the door.

  I’m shocked she waited up for me. I remember how it felt the night I killed Mr. Hues, how lonely it was walking into an apartment of sleeping girls with no one to help me. Lena’s voice in the dark offers me more relief than I can say.

  “I’m leaving,” I whisper as quietly as I am able.

  I crouch under my bed and pull the scrying mirror from its hiding place. The little black cat who once scared the living daylights out of me is under there too, eyeing me judgmentally. I give it a pat on the head. It nuzzles against my hand like it knows I’m saying goodbye.

  “What?” Lena hisses. She leans forward on her knees. “You can’t just leave.”

  I’m surprised by her shock; I hoped she’d be excited. “Finn is waiting outside the gates. I only came back for the mirror, the book, and you and Maxine.” I wouldn’t leave you behind.

  Lena bounds out of bed and shoves me by my shoulders into the quiet hall. She shuts the door to our room slowly, silently. The portraits on the dark walls seem to watch us. I can’t be out of here soon enough.

  “Why are you leaving? What’s the rush? Sleep on it, please, I beg you.”

  I tell her about the commissioner and Helen sawing his hands from his body. The blood runs from her face as understanding dawns on her.

  She looks sick as she says, “You think she’s responsible for the bodies washing up on the bay?”

  “I know Mrs. Vykotsky and Boss Olan are in conflict. Helen sure looked like this is something she’d done before. What if she’s the one who killed my brother, Lena? We can’t stay here.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “The Sons of Saint Druon,” I say. Her face scrunches up in disgust at the name. “But we don’t have to stay forever. We’ll go wherever we want, Paris, California, Japan!”

  I’m hopeful, underneath the sickening anxiety, that I could have a future. I will solve my brother’s murder. Stay with the Sons long enough for them to help my mother, as Finn once promised. I could move on. I could have a life. I could finally do right by the ones I love.

  The sorrowful look on Lena’s face snaps me back to reality. “I don’t want to go to the Sons of Saint Druon, or Paris, or California or Japan. I’ve told you: the only place I want to go from here is home. I can’t go with you.”

  I didn’t expect this. My eyes well with tears. “Please, Lena—” I’d do anything to convince her. I search my brain for the right words, but nothing comes.

  She shakes her head sadly. “I’ve had visions of myself leaving, but it’s not tonight. It’s not like this. I’m sorry, Frances.”

  “But it could be tonight. Let’s go—let’s go together.” I’m holding both her hands in mine, staring into her eyes. My words fall short, but maybe she can see it in my face, how desperately I want her to come with me. “You have to come. What if they hurt you? You don’t know what they’re capable of; you weren’t there tonight. Please, Lena.”

  Her bottom lip quivers. “This isn’t how I leave.”

  I suck a deep breath in through my nose. My whole chest aches from the effort it takes to keep from sobbing. “I don’t know how to do this without you.” My voice breaks, and the tears come steadily, rushing down my cheeks. I was so sure of myself just moments ago, but I don’t know if the right decisions are supposed to hurt this much.

  Tears from Lena’s eyes spill over too. “This isn’t the end for us.”

  “How do you know that?” I hiccup. “You can’t see my future.”

  Lena gives me a watery smile. “It’s just a feeling. A plain old, regular feeling.”

  I pull her into a tight hug; it feels so inadequate. We hold each other until her nightgown is damp with my tears. I don’t want to let her go; I don’t know if I’m strong enough.

  Lena pulls away first.

  “Until we meet again.” I have to believe in a future where we are together once more.

  “Until we meet again,” she echoes.

  She sneaks back into the room that was once ours, but that I have no intention of ever entering again. The click of the door behind her shatters my heart.

  I run down the stairs, clutching the mirror to my chest, and creep into Maxine’s room.

  She’s asleep, wearing a striped pajama shirt, her silvery hair sprawled out against the pillow, illuminated in starlight.

  Silently I crouch at the edge of her bed. First, I pull The Elemental from where it rests under her bed, beneath a pile of strategically discarded clothing. I prop it up with the mirror by the door. Perhaps it’s a rotten thing to do, taking it while she sleeps, but I refuse to take the risk that she won’t let me have it.

  Next I whisper, “Psst, Maxine. Wake up.” The skin of her hand is cold where I grab to shake her awake.

  She comes to with a gasp. “Frances, Jesus Christ?” Her eyes widen in horror at my tear-stained face.

  “I’m leaving.” I mean it to come out dignified, strong, but it comes out as a pathetic sniffle.

  She blinks a few times, her eyes heavy with sleep. “What?”

  I shake her shoulder. “Maxine, get up, let’s go.”

  She finally sits up, voice thick with sleep. “Where are you going? What is happening?”

  Like I told Lena, I tell Maxine what happened to the commissioner, about Helen and the hands, about the way I ran like hell. Like Lena, her eyes go wide with horror.

  “Dopey old Helen sawed a man’s hands off?” she asks.

  I’m getting annoyed at how slow she’s being on the uptake. “Yes, please, Maxine, Finn is waiting. Let’s go.”

  Then she asks the question I’m dreading most. “What about Lena?”

  The pieces of my broken heart ache. “She’s not coming.”

  Maxine takes a deep breath, the way an adult does when they’re preparing to give a child bad news. “You know I can’t go with you.”

  I don’t want to do this by myself. I’m so sick of being by myself.

  “Please, Maxine, I can’t lose you, too.”

  “You aren’t losing me. You could stay. You need to stay.” She scrubs a hand across her face in frustration.

  “You can’t honestly be suggesting that after everything that’s happened.”

  She throws up her hands in exasperation. “This place is my home!”

  “They’re murderers!” I spit back.

  “That’s not en
tirely fair. It sounds like Helen was provoked.”

  “Was she provoked every time she dumped another handless boy in the river? She might have killed my brother, Maxine.”

  She is fully awake now, sitting upright, her eyes wide and full of anger. “That is a completely unreasonable accusation and you know it. You truly believe Helen, Helen, whose interests include knitting periodicals and being the world’s worst watercolorist, is a killer?”

  It feels like I’m in one of those nightmares where you’re trying to speak, but no one can hear you. I don’t know how to make her understand.

  “I know what I saw tonight.” The color in my cheeks rises. “You truly don’t believe me?”

  “I believe you…” She trails off like she doesn’t believe me much at all.

  “You believe me, but you won’t leave with me.”

  Her face crumples. “I wish I could.”

  “Then do it, Maxine. Leave this place behind. Be more than this, like you’re always talking about! You want more power; you’ve told me as much. We could become as powerful as we want. We could stop wasting our time on floral arrangements and needle threading and make a difference.” I’m so filled with anger that my body shakes.

  She leans forward on her knees and grabs my wrists. Her eyes search mine. “Don’t leave, Frances. Please. Not with him.”

  “With him?” I’m stunned by the turn in the conversation.

  “I don’t trust him.” She pauses and swallows hard. “There’s something I’ve never told you. I didn’t just find The Elemental. I dreamed it.”

  “So?” I don’t understand what she’s implying about Finn, but I don’t like it.

  “Surely you don’t think it’s a coincidence?”

  “It sounds like a lot more of a coincidence than witnessing Helen murder a man. God, you’re always going to defend them, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t say ‘them’ like you’re not one of us,” Maxine quickly shoots back.

  The most awful thought I’ve ever had bubbles back up to the surface. There is no more suppressing it. I think of all the time Maxine spends alone with Helen in the city, all the ways she defends them at any cost. It’s a spiral I can’t stop. My head aches. It’s all so clear now. I take a careful step back.

  “Are you part of this? Are you helping Helen? Do you all really hate the Sons that much? You hate them so much you’d kill them?” The accusation comes out as a whisper.

  Maxine’s face turns to horror. The air between us goes still and cold. “How dare you.”

  I don’t want to believe it. I love Maxine too much. But her silence feels like a confession.

  I have nothing left to say to her. I back farther away, toward the door, gathering the mirror and book in my arms. If Maxine notices the book I’ve stolen, she doesn’t say. Rage too large to hold inside my body any longer, I rip the diadem from my head and hurl it at her. It lands at the base of her bed.

  With my back turned, she whispers once more. “I loved you. I thought of you as a sister.” She takes a shaky breath, then snaps, “Get out.”

  “I loved you, too,” I say under my breath, so low I’m not sure she hears me.

  I close the door right as she begins to cry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Finn is waiting at the gates where I left him.

  He’s leaning against the Model T, smoking a cigarette. I’ve never seen him smoke before; the smoke curls between his long fingers.

  “You were gone a long time. Was everything all right?”

  He must see the devastation on my face, because he pulls me into his chest and lets me fall apart.

  Against the warmth of his beating heart, I sob into his shirt, dampening it with my tears. After a moment, he nudges me. “You have everything you need?”

  I give a pathetic nod.

  Finn brushes my hair back from where it’s plastered to my face with tears. “Then we need to go, love.”

  I imagined I’d feel relief pulling away from Haxahaven, but there’s nothing but a deep ache, like someone has scooped out my chest cavity and left it in a bloody mess all over the school’s fine marble floors.

  I can’t stop picturing Lena’s and Maxine’s faces. I even think of Sara, Cora, Maria, May, Aurelia, and Ruby. All the girls I kept at arm’s length, I didn’t imagine I’d miss them at all.

  But then I remember the sound of Helen sawing through muscle, how casually she pulled the dagger out of her handbag, and I know that I am making the right choice.

  Tomorrow I do the resurrection spell. I will get answers from my brother himself, and then I will stop the killings; I will find peace. I will make a better world than this one.

  Finn spends the entire drive into the city with his hand gripping my knee like he’s reassuring himself I’m truly here. The heavy beading of my dress makes me feel like I’m suffocating.

  “Can we make a detour?” I ask Finn as we enter Lower Manhattan.

  “Sure thing, where to?”

  I give him the directions to the final place on my list tonight.

  After my brother’s body was found, the Callahans paid to have him laid to rest. There isn’t much space for bodies on the island of Manhattan. My mother and I planned to have him cremated, but the Callahans insisted. At the time I remember thinking it was odd, but now I’m grateful.

  The cemetery isn’t far from the Commodore Club. Finn follows my instructions diligently, without question.

  He slows the car in front of a wrought-iron gate set between two redbrick buildings. It’s strange, which is saying a lot for a city filled with strange things. There are dozens of graveyards on the island, but this one is newer. It would be easy to walk right by, if not for the skull welded right into the bars.

  Finn cuts the engine and turns to look at me. His hands grip the steering wheel so hard, his knuckles are white.

  “Well…” He takes a minute to gather his thoughts. “We have your brother’s watch, the mirror, the book—and the dagger is shoved under my mattress back at the club. If I were a betting man, I’d bet you’ve taken me to where William rests.”

  My chest is tight with emotion. “It’s the last thing we need.”

  Finn gives a solemn nod. “Would you like me to go with you?”

  I shake my head, but his kindness softens some of the hurt. “I think I’d like to do this on my own.”

  “I’ll keep watch.” He reaches over and gives my hand a squeeze of encouragement right before I hop out.

  I’m surprised the gate isn’t locked. It greets me with a low whine as I push it open.

  The soft night has washed the cemetery in silver light as if from another world. There’s something about the quiet of this place that makes me want to sink to my knees and ask for forgiveness. It is still here, so far removed from the street just feet behind me. And in the stillness, I am utterly alone.

  I remember now why I don’t come visit; I don’t feel my brother here.

  William couldn’t stand still for longer than thirty seconds. He would have hated the idea of eternal rest.

  The tombstones sit in rows. Many have gone crooked with time, but my brother’s is new. It sits on the edge of the small plot, dignified and cold, nothing like William was in life.

  WILLIAM JOHN HALLOWELL

  BELOVED SON, BROTHER, FRIEND

  I trace my fingers over the words. They’re too sterile, so unlike my bright light of a brother.

  “I saw Oliver tonight,” I whisper out loud. I don’t know why I do it.

  The cold grave gives me no answer.

  I sigh, press my forehead to the stone. I’m so tired, I ache down to my bones. “He misses you too.”

  A single, pointless tear escapes. I wipe it away with the heel of my hand.

  I scoop a fistful of dirt and drop it into my fine beaded bag.

  I rise from the ground, brush the dirt from my dress, and steady myself with a breath.

  It’s done, William, I think. I’ve done it. I’ve gotten every object needed
for the Resurrection. Now all that’s left is to gather every last ounce of my courage.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I half sigh, half wish. Lifting my fingers to my lips, I kiss them and place them on the cold tombstone.

  “I promise.”

  I stride out of the cemetery and back into Finn’s waiting automobile.

  We drive the final few minutes to the Commodore Club in silence, both lost in our own thoughts.

  Finn gently parks the machine against the curb, and we make our way up the marble steps. He pauses right before we enter through the double doors.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he whispers.

  I’m surprised to find the same tiny bald doorman in the foyer this late at night. Finn passes him the mirror and the book and kindly asks him to place them in his room. It makes me uncomfortable to hand them off to a stranger, but I follow Finn’s lead. My brother’s watch I keep clutched in my sweaty palm. I have no intention of ever letting it go.

  Finn’s hand rests in my other, warm and steady against mine. It makes me feel less like I’m being swallowed whole by this building.

  Together we go up the grand staircase to a study paneled in dark wood. In the corner is a taxidermy leopard, posing in an eternal snarl. I’m too tired to be frightened of this place. I suspect that will come in the morning.

  We pause at the same door I remember well from the first night I came here. I shoot Finn a questioning look.

  He squeezes my hand in reassurance. “We’ll need to see Boss. He’ll be thrilled to have you.” Have me.

  I open my mouth to protest. A conversation with Boss Olan is the last possible thing I want to do tonight, but Finn knocks on the door before I get a single word out.

  “Come in,” a booming voice instructs.

  Boss Olan looks as grand as ever sitting behind his desk. Illuminated by stained glass Tiffany lamps, papers spread in front of him, in a well-tailored suit as if it’s the middle of the workday, not the middle of the night.

  He smiles as we enter. “Why, Mr. D’Arcy, it looks as if you’ve brought me a present.”

  Finn nods. “Aye, Boss. Thought you’d be pleased. Frances here has finally decided to join us.”

  “Well, Miss Hallowell,” Boss Olan booms, clapping his hands together. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am that you’re here. We have extraordinary plans for you. Together, we’ll remake the world.” He laughs, openmouthed like a jackal.