She must know that he tells us what to say, I thought. What is she looking for?
The door opened. “Alissa,” Father Joshua prompted me, but I was the only one left, anyway.
“Hi, Alissa, have a seat.” As I walked in, Paola smiled at me now, the way I might smile at an injured bird on the sidewalk. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions about life here.”
“S—sure. Go right ahead.”
“He can’t hear you,” she said. “I cast a silence spell on the room. That’s why I didn’t want to meet at the community center. He put his wards up there.”
I was sweating all over. What if I told her? But what if she was a spy, working for him? The council benefited from the purification spell. I knew they had paid over a million dollars for access to his secrets. So she could be on his side, all along.
If I told the truth and she told him, what would happen to my parents and Carrie?
“Alissa, you are sworn in marriage to that man, yes?” she asked.
“Yes. Yes, Father Joshua.”
“He’s much older than you.”
“He…he is very respected. It’s an honor.” The words came out, a script I had gotten a lot of practice in by now.
“Are you happy about the marriage?” Her eyes were large, dark penetrating orbs that begged to suck secrets from my soul.
“Yes, madame.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how a man and a woman produce a child?”
I froze, scrambling for an answer, and she said, “You do not.”
“I know it has something to do with…being close and having pure thoughts.”
“Thoughts have nothing to do with it,” she said.
“They must!” I was surprised.
“No. You can have a child with a man you hate. He can force himself on you.”
“But what if I think too many wicked thoughts during the pregnancy?”
“That won’t matter at all.”
“It will make your child ugly and wicked.”
She tapped her pen hard on the paper and met my eyes. “It will not, Alissa. I swear to you that. I suppose this is what he told you?”
I bit my tongue, realizing I had done something wrong. I had made her suspicious of Father Joshua. Maybe it was already too late. I fidgeted, trying to force the words out.
“Madame, I—I—can I ask you something?”
She tried to look more gentle for me, but there was still a harsh fury burning under the surface that made me nervous. “Yes. Please do.”
“When a man has multiple women…touch him…” I didn’t know how to even ask. Father Joshua always said that the priestesses were sacred and their duty was to touch him and suck on him and do what he liked. “It’s right for a holy man to…”
She reached for my hand. “Alissa, what are you referring to?”
“The…priestesses.” I felt dizzy.
“What does Father Joshua do with the priestesses?”
“He…they…touch him…”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“Is he clothed or naked?”
I started to cry. I was reliving it again, the fear in all of them and in me, the way he controlled us, the helpless feeling that robbed me of my appetite and happiness all the time, not just when I was with him.
“Alissa…it’s okay,” she said.
The door burst open and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Paola let go of my hand. Father Joshua was there, as I expected, but worse—Carrie was there in tears.
“What’s wrong?”
“Mom is…having the baby…I think? She’s bleeding a lot.”
“Is the midwife there?”
“Dad went to get her.”
“You left her alone?”
“She told me to hurry and get you.”
“Go, Alissa,” Father Joshua said. He was holding another small box like the one he gave my dad. Another box of bullets. He had a little gleam of triumph in his eye and I understood that he would give them to Councilwoman Garcia in exchange for her silence. “I’ll speak to our guest now.”
For the first time, I saw a small crack in Councilwoman Garcia’s confidence. He wouldn’t hurt her, would he?
No, I understood. This would merely be bribery. But what about my mom?
Carrie held my hand, pulling me along, tearfully explaining. “I just got home from school. Dad gave me crackers and cheese and then we heard a cry. She sounded like she was in pain. I didn’t even know it was Mom at first. Mom never cries like that. And there was a thud and—Dad ran up the stairs. She tried to get out of bed and she fell and there was blood all over her dress and I’m so scared…”
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “She had a miscarriage before, when you were little. But this baby is almost ready to be born, so the midwife can fix it and we’ll have a new little sister or brother.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling—
I mean, the timing of it…
Did Father Joshua curse my mom? Poison her?
She had a history of difficult pregnancy now, so no one would ever believe that. Not that they would anyway. Father Joshua was Father Joshua. Beyond reproach.
If Mom loses the baby, he can tell me it was my fault. I was thinking too many wicked thoughts. And even if we both know it was really his fault, that won’t matter.
He’s punishing me.
This is a message.
He knew I said something to Paola.
Carrie threw open the front door. “Daddy?” she called out. It seemed he wasn’t home yet. “Mom’s upstairs in the bathtub, or she was anyway…” She panted out the words, breathless from running with me as fast as her little legs would carry her. “Mom?”
We rushed upstairs and Mom looked barely conscious, red blood soaking her dress. “Thank the gods…,” she said weakly. “Alissa, hurry…come here… Carrie…go down and wait for daddy…”
“O—okay.” Carrie seemed reluctant to leave Mom, and no wonder. Her skin was gray and she looked ten years older in an instant. She lifted a hand to me.
“Mom, I have a wand…I can try and heal you. Don’t talk.”
“No…listen to me…you need…”
I took her hand and was shocked at how cold it was. “The midwife will be here any minute.”
“…to run. Run.”
“What? Where? I can’t.”
“He’ll…kill you…you’re…special…”
I swallowed a heavy lump in my throat. “We can talk about this when you’ve recovered.”
She seized my hand, her eyes widening. “Go to them,” she said.
“Go to them? Who? Mom…!”
Her hand went limp, her head falling back against the rim of the clawfoot tub. Her legs twitched with some spasm. I could see more blood pooling in the tub under her.
“Mom!” I screamed. “Mom!”
Carrie ran up the stairs, panicked. “What’s happening?”
I took out the wand I didn’t know how to use and pressed it to her forehead as she twitched a little more. “Oh, please…Ethereal spirits…send healing light to our mother…and our sibling… I give all that I have to bring her back…”
I thought I would rather die than Mom. She still had two small children to raise, if the baby lived, and she loved Dad. All I had was a miserable marriage. I wanted to pour my life into her. I would give her everything I had.
Mom’s hand grabbed mine and shoved me away, her last act of strength. She went limp as Dad and the midwife burst into the room. Carrie was screaming and sobbing.
“Anna?” Dad rushed to her side and looked toward me.
“I’m so sorry!” I threw my arms around Carrie.
“We might be able to save the baby,” the midwife said. “Help me get her out of the bathtub. Take the children away.”
“Save Mom!” Carrie sobbed. “I don’t want a baby sister anymore if I don’t have my mom!”
“Carrie…come with me,” I
said as numbness swept over me.
“No…!”
I had to pick her up and hold her like she was a toddler, carrying her heavy body downstairs, and about halfway down she stopped screaming and struggling and just clung to me.
You need to run.
He’ll kill you.
Go to them.
Mom’s final words pounded in me, louder than my heartbeat. Her dying words. Run.
How can I leave Carrie? I couldn’t imagine leaving her now. How did Mom know I would be killed, and why did she think so?
Who was ‘them’?
I couldn’t go anywhere, not with so many questions, but then it seemed like she clung to life just so she could tell me these final, terrible sentences.
I held Carrie, and Carrie held Joan of Arc, and we clung together quietly until we heard an infant squall upstairs. Carrie started crying again.
“I feel like we traded her,” she sobbed. “We traded Mom for a baby. I don’t want the baby now. I hate the baby!”
“It’s not their fault,” I said. “Think how terrible you would feel to grow up without Mom, with everyone telling you it was your fault.”
“Yeah…but…it’s…it’s not fair!”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “It really pisses me off too.”
Carrie’s eyes widened that I swore. “Pisses me off,” she repeated, boldly. I was probably corrupting a six-year-old. I didn’t care. There was no word in the world strong enough.
Dad came down the stairs, his steps heavy, a small bundle in his arms. He managed a smile through a face that looked like hell, as if he had also aged ten years in the space of an hour. “You girls have a sister,” he said. “Your mother came to, very briefly, one more time, to see her face. The midwife said it was a miracle, that she should have been…gone. And then…she was. No—I shouldn’t say that.” He approached us and we wriggled to the side of the sofa to make room for him. “She will never be gone. Do you want to see your sister?”
“No,” Carrie said. “I don’t.”
“I understand,” he said.
He showed us anyway. The baby was awake and oddly calm, as if she realized she had been born into such terrible circumstances that she needed to make herself small and quiet. She was tiny and blue-eyed with a full head of dark hair.
“She looks exactly like Carrie when she was born,” I said.
“Yes, she does,” Dad said. “Carrie…do you want to name her?”
Carrie looked at the baby with a mixture of joy, despair and apology that no small child should ever have to bear. It was far too adult an expression to sit on her bright little face. But then, I already knew that she would never look so bright again.
“Joan,” she said firmly, not needing even a minute to think.
Joan, I thought, was sort of an old-fashioned, boring name for a baby. “Her real name in French was Jeanne,” I said.
“No,” Carrie said, being a typical little kid again. She knew the name Joan and wouldn’t accept anything else.
“Joan it is,” Dad said. “Joan Johns.”
That was an absolutely terrible name, but Carrie nodded, completely sure of herself on this one point, and Dad almost smiled, and so my littlest sister came into the world.
Chapter Ten
Alissa
Mom’s death sent such a shock though the village and especially, through our own family, that we were immediately swarmed with other women of the community who cleaned the bathroom of blood, washed and dressed Mom’s body for burial, filled our fridge with milk from other nursing mothers in the community, made dinner, got Carrie dressed in new clothes that didn’t have streaks of blood on them, and basically did everything for us while we were in a haze of disbelief and pain. In a moment like this, I was reminded of the safety and love I had often felt in our little village as I was growing up, and how big and terrible the world outside was.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Councilwoman Garcia went home. Maybe she intended to report to the witches’ council and make a plan to rescue me, but if so, I would never know about it.
Which, I’m sure, was Father Joshua’s intention.
That night, very late, Dad came into my room after he saw an exhausted Carrie off to bed. “You’re leaving tonight,” he said.
“What?”
“Your mother’s very last words were ‘I told her to go. Make her go.’ And she’s right.”
“Go where?”
“Father Joshua told you have had other lives, yes? You have another family. From before. He said if we ever let you set one foot outside the village wards, they would find you and take you.”
“What family?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Then, how do you know they exist?” I swallowed. “Dad…you do know something.” I could tell. He was lying to me, or at the least, giving me half-truths.
I also loved him more than words could say. Telling me this was bringing him pain.
“You’re my family,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”
“He also said that after you bore his children…you would have to be sacrificed.”
“What? Sacrificed as in killed? Why? When did he say this?”
“He said you’re a special being and spilling your blood would save us when the end times came. He made it clear that this was something we had to do to protect the entire village. At the time we didn’t dream of questioning it, but now…look, Father Joshua has always had a very special ability to fight dark spirits. Maybe he is the savior of our world. But…I can’t watch another member of my family die. Whoever your other family is, I think they must want you back very badly. Sometimes I wonder if I…if I’ve kept you from someone who loves you as much as I love all of my girls. If all of this might be wrong.”
“But if we don’t know who they are…! Maybe they’re no better than this! Maybe they’re even worse. Or maybe they don’t even exist.”
He swallowed. “I think Father Joshua killed your mother. So that you would submit to him. To help the rest of us. I just can’t let you do that. You have to try another path.”
“Are you coming with me then? With Carrie and Joan?”
“No. I can’t. The world you come from—it’s not our world.”
I bit my lip. “Are they…Sinistrals?”
“Promise me you’ll go and keep safe,” he said. “And never look back. Get yourself far from here.”
“Dad—“
“I demand that you go.”
“I can’t leave you!”
“If you stay here, he will kill you while your sisters and friends and every member of this community are forced to watch,” he said. He shoved a satchel into my hands. “Go. I’m casting a cloaking spell on you that will last for twenty-four hours and there is a weak spot in the town’s warding spell right behind Jack Pulaski’s shop. Okay?”
I had been raised to obey my father, but in that moment I felt everything inside me shift. I didn’t feel obedience. I felt a deep, strange relief that reminded me of how I felt when I saw the wand for the first time. I knew I had to go. I had no idea what awaited me in the world outside, but I suddenly thought, I would have escaped before the wedding night even if they didn’t tell me to go. They know it too. They gave me permission so I didn’t have to feel responsibility for leaving my family.
I still did.
“I’ll come back someday,” I said. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too. Dearest daughter. But you need to go, now, while Father Joshua is getting ready for the funeral.”
I wasn’t even going to be able to attend my mother’s funeral.
We exchanged a quick embrace and then he cast a cloaking spell on me. Even though Dad had the real magic that all married men of the community were permitted to practice, I still worried more than a little that Father Joshua would know.
Oh, yes, it would not surprise me in the least if he had some way of knowing about every spell cast within the wards of the village. If every wand was tr
acked the way mine was.
But every man had to sleep some time. It was half past three in the morning.
Once the spell was cast, Dad wouldn’t let me even look at my sisters one last time. He seemed as anxious as I was. “Just get past the wards,” he kept saying.
“Is Father Joshua going to know you helped me escape?”
“Pulaski’s going to back me up,” he said.
Some people said old Jack Pulaski, the blacksmith and church elder, was the man whom the late Father Ludwig wanted to succeed him. I guess he was still harboring a grudge against Father Joshua, so Dad had confided in him. I hoped we could really trust him. I had to trust in a lot of things. One mistake and I would be caught, the whole plan unraveling, and I didn’t even want to think about how Father Joshua would treat me.
I hurried down the paths of the village, the cloaking spell shielding me. I could feel it around me, and I cast no shadow when I passed one of the solar lights that dimly illuminated the village at night.
I didn’t know what was in the satchel Dad had given me. I knew nothing; I could only trust that when I rushed into the night, someone or something would be out there to catch me.
Something?
They could be Sinistrals. Dark wizards, vampires, werewolves, demons…
Dad didn’t deny that my kin could be among the beings I knew were evil. There was no denying it; they belonged to another world entirely. They drew power from a dark realm where spells were cast with blood and death and cruelty, as often as not.
I had never seen one before, except in books. They looked like us, on the surface, but in picture books they often had ugly, twisted faces and fangs.
It was cold outside, colder than I expected, like winter was coming early this year, but I didn’t feel it as I hurried along. I didn’t feel it until I stopped in front of the fence by Elder Pulaski’s weathered clapboard house. Then I started shivering all over. I could see puffs of my breath. The fence was easy enough to climb, but we didn’t need much of a fence because the village was surrounded by the wards. The wards were supposed to keep bad things out, but I suppose they also kept us in. We were told not to cross them. If I had learned much magic, I would have been able to see them, but as it was I could barely tell where the wards had been weakened.
Take Me Slowly (Forever in Their Thrall Book 1) Page 6