by V. V. James
“Because what did Sarah do with that knowledge of my frailty? Blackmail. Mary-Anne’s told you how she came to our house. She did so to threaten me. She swore to reveal all if I didn’t get my son to abandon his testimony.
“And when I told her that it wasn’t my choice to make? That Jacob was a righteous boy, and I would support his truth? She cursed him. And now my son’s fighting for his life in a hospital bed.”
Tad breaks down weeping, the microphone drooping from his fingers. I step forward to take it and watch the crowd heave with emotion as the lawman shakes and sobs, comforted by his wife.
I couldn’t have asked for a better curtain-raiser.
But just wait till they hear what comes next.
“You’ve maybe heard the accusations Harper Fenn made on TV against my son,” I say, looking out across the sea of faces.
A ripple runs through those gathered. Shock, perhaps, that I’ve even acknowledged it.
“You’re probably expecting my next words to be a denial. Well, they’re not. He did it.”
Eighty-Eight
Sarah
My phone buzzed a few hours ago. A message from Bridget, telling me what was just said on the news about the dog walker’s discovery. It couldn’t be worse timing.
I’d hoped the blood would fade and the marks disappear before anyone stumbled upon any of the sites. But it wasn’t to be.
My phone vibrates again on the table. Another text from Bridget.
Somethings happening in the square Sarah. Abigail, Tad, Maryanne all there. Im worried for u Sarah. Think u shd get out, stay somewhere for a few days. Maybe call Pierre?? Take care. B xoxo
I go to the window and open it. I live several blocks from the square, and I can hear the noise faintly on the wind. A voice, amplified by a microphone. Mary-Anne Bolt? And the restless sound of people gathered together.
What is Abigail up to now?
Should I take Bridget’s advice? I’d worried that running would look like an admission of guilt, but I don’t have many options left. I still have no idea where Harper is, though. I wonder about a blood rite, something to enable my blood to call to hers. It’d take some figuring out.
And when I go for good, I’ll need the things in my workroom—above all, my charts and my copy of Starcross. I’m still not sure if I could bear to sell the book, but whether as an asset or simply a link to my ancestors, it’s the most precious thing I own.
The booth is much better protected than this house, particularly since I layered those extra spells on. I’ll lie low there and make my final preparations. Call the detective to reassure her that I’m merely heading out of town until things cool down a little. Promise to stay in touch every day, so it won’t look like a guilty run.
Then once I’ve prepared everything for me and Harper—pouf!—we disappear.
It’ll be the work of fifteen minutes to pack the essentials from this house and go. I run upstairs to my room and drag my travel bag out of the closet. Then it’s a case of ransacking drawers and cupboards for the things I can’t replace.
In a box in the closet, the jewelry my grandma left me. Her expensive jewels went to my mother, but I got the heirlooms: a tarnished copper ring said to have passed down our family from the age of persecution. An old deer antler pendant, whittled by an enlisted Fenn during the Civil War. I remember my mother taking the silk-lined box of my gramma’s pearls, and her diamond engagement ring, and looking enviously at these dirty, homemade objects.
I’m rummaging through drawers for the blanket my gramma knit Harper when she was a newborn when I hear the brick go through the window downstairs. Catcalls and hoots from the street are loud through the hole it’s made.
My chest tightens, but only briefly. I’m a witch. And though I’m not permitted to defend myself aggressively with magic, I can use it in subtler ways if they try to get in.
“We know you’re in there, witch,” calls a voice. A young male voice. Maybe one of the boys Dan boasted to after he’d hurt my daughter. Hatred rises up and chokes me.
The things I could do to these young men.
I could do the thing they’re accusing Harper of. I swear to the goddess I could. And worse.
My hand goes back into the drawers, and I start pulling things out heedlessly. It’s only what they’ll do, anyway. In a flash, I see it—though is it imagination or the craft?—a vision of my little house, burning.
A second smash. Another brick.
“Feel free to try to stop us,” taunts the boy. “Show everyone what you are.”
“Witch!” calls another.
How close to the surface it lies, this hatred of us. What people don’t know or understand, they fear. It’s always been this way—even here in America, the country to which my ancestors fled seeking haven.
I find the blanket and tug it out. Harper’s baby booties, too. I have everything I want. Is there anything of Harper’s I should take? I cross the landing to her door.
Something thuds through one of the smashed windows downstairs and a roar goes up. It’s not the jubilant kids outside, though. It’s fire that must have caught the curtains immediately. Once it reaches the stairwell, this old wooden house will burn like kindling.
“Fire’s the only thing that gets rid of a witch” taunts the voice below. He’s shouting loudly, to make sure he’s heard. Doesn’t he realize what a risk he’s taking? He’ll be recognized—reported. You can’t burn a house down and get away with it.
Or maybe he can. Perhaps there is no law here anymore—none to protect me, at any rate. Above the crackling fire I can hear the rally in the square, and the voice speaking now sounds like Tad Bolt.
There’s no help coming.
I shoulder open Harper’s door. But I don’t know where to start in here, or whether I even want to. This is her space. Whatever is most important, she presumably has with her in her hideaway.
Which is when my eye falls on a recent picture of us, from Thanksgiving, when Harper incinerated a green bean casserole. We’re curled up on the couch clutching cartons of takeout noodles, grinning at my phone like loons as I take the photo. I loved it so much I had a copy made for each of us.
It’s tucked into the rim of her mirror. Harper didn’t take it with her.
It’s unimportant.
Tears are coming again, but not of laughter. I wrench the photo from the mirror frame. It’s important to me. I turn to head downstairs and out the back door, then remember the route my daughter often takes from this room, and shove up the sash window instead.
It’s not a long fall into the yard. I let the bag go, then drop down after it. My knees jar and I roll. No harm done—which is more than can be said for my home. One of the windows and the pane of the back door are red with raging fire.
I dash for the gate that lets out into the alley where I parked my car so I could come and go away from the eyes of the journalists. I’m glad of that now. Tossing the bag onto the passenger seat, I slide behind the wheel, trash crunching beneath my feet. I reach down to swat it and come up with a half-empty bag of cat treats.
Which is when I nearly puke over the wheel.
Aira. My darling. My more-than-pet. My second soul and familiar.
Where is Aira?
A vehicle pulls in to the far end of the alley. It might be blocking my exit, but there’s no time to think about that. I scramble out and back through the yard gate.
Surely my familiar is here somewhere. She would have shot through the cat flap. Or maybe she’s fled further from danger. She’s probably five yards over by now, or on the other side of the street altogether.
But one look at the back of the house tells me the worst. Behind the back door with the cat flap, is an inferno. Aira couldn’t have gotten out of there unless she went before the flame took hold.
She must have. She must have. She…
&nb
sp; She’s at the kitchen window, scrabbling desperately at the glass. It’s the only window downstairs not spewing flame, because the kitchen door is closed—a gust when the first window broke must have slammed it shut. But as I run toward the house, fire begins to lick up the frame.
Aira sees me and batters the windowpane in a frenzy. I’m overjoyed because she’s still alive, and so afraid because what if the fire is faster than me?
And once I smash that glass, the inrush of oxygen will cause the inferno that’s surging against the door to flare up in a fireball that will take us both.
Unless I do something about it.
Eighty-Nine
Maggie
The TV crew has long since packed up and moved on before Forensics calls it a day at the bloodstained tree. Chester and I watch them going about their business, scraping and photographing.
Scratched into the dirt are more witch signs. But they don’t look like the three in Izzy Perelli’s journal. They’re elegant curlicued markings. I’m not sensing that crawling wrongness of the villa.
“How does it feel?” I ask Chester, to check it’s not just me.
“Not like…that,” he says, understanding what I’m asking. “It’s creepy, but not scary. Does that make sense?”
“Perfectly. Same here.”
But it should feel scary, shouldn’t it, if this site is responsible for the sickness in Sanctuary, like the TV report suggested? I guess that’s a question for Rowan in the morning.
“Nothing more to see here tonight,” I tell Ches. “Let’s head home.”
Back in the car, I turn on the radio. I always stay tuned to the local channel when I’m working a case. It helps me get the sense of a place. But Chester leans forward to turn up Smooth Sound FM at the exact moment I do when we realize what we’re hearing.
We listen in silence for a few minutes.
“Why the fuck weren’t we radioed about this?” Chester says. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him cuss so filthy. “A rally in the square? Chief Bolt’s there? They must have deliberately not told us.”
I switch course and step on the gas. We’ve just hit the Cobb when Chester points.
“Over there. Isn’t that where Sarah Fenn lives?”
On the horizon, something is burning, smoke pluming into the sky.
In the distance, a siren wails—someone has alerted the fire department, at least. But we’re nearer. The rally can wait. I tear down the street to the front of the house, which is a scene of utter destruction. The entire facade is in flames, boards falling and collapsing.
Fenn’s neighbor is hurrying three tearful small kids out of his house. The buildings here are set close and made of wood.
“Have you seen Sarah?” I yell out my window.
The man shakes his head and spits on the ground.
“Hope she’s in there,” he says. I’m stunned for a moment.
“’Round the back.” Chester grabs at the wheel. “If the fire started at the front, it may not have reached the back. These places have alleys; you can go in through the yard.”
We spin around. Chester’s out faster than I am, and we sprint toward Fenn’s yard. There’s a car pulled over with its interior light on, one door open.
“Sarah’s,” Chester says. “She must have gone back to the house.”
Through the gate, the scene is apocalyptic. The house looks less like a house than a crude child’s drawing of a house done in red, yellow, and orange. The outline is still there, but the structure is made of flame rather than wood. My face scorches even at this distance.
Closer—far closer—impossibly close—is Sarah Fenn. Her hands are moving commandingly in the air. She pauses, then smashes a window with the heel of her hand.
Any cop can tell you what will happen next. But it’s too late. Before Chester or I can scream out a warning, flame has erupted from the shattered window, surging outward with a horrible roar.
I go rigid with shock. This is how it ends for the witch. Something as simple and awful and ordinary as this, after all these weeks.
Until Ches grabs my arm and points.
Walking out of the flames unharmed, the cat in her arms lashing its tail with furious life, is Sarah Fenn.
And I find myself thinking, unwillingly, of Izzy Perelli—who was at Dan’s fatal party, yet came out of it with no breathing problems or burns at all.
Ninety
Abigail
“You’ve maybe heard the accusations Harper Fenn made on TV against my son,” I say. “You’re probably expecting my next words to be a denial. Well, they’re not. He did it.”
The crowd recoils. Good. It’s time for Sanctuary to hear the worst.
Tad Bolt’s seedy testimony couldn’t have prepared the ground better. The chief has just explained to everyone how Sarah Fenn’s magic can take a person and twist them into a dark distortion of themselves.
“I’m going to tell you why he did it. The answer’s simple. It was because of Sarah Fenn.
“There is a secret I’ve carried for six years now. It’s about the day Sarah performed a miracle that turned out to be more monstrous than you can possibly imagine. When he was twelve, my son Daniel fell from a window and landed headfirst. His precious skull cracked like an egg…and he died.”
A ripple of shock runs through the onlookers. Up here, on the podium, I actually see it: a pressing together, a lift and surge, a sway.
“It was during a dinner party at a friend’s house. The kids were supposed to be asleep upstairs. Sarah was there, and others who’ll back up this story. My husband is a medical professor at Yale. He did everything he could, but our boy was gone.
“In my grief, my madness, I begged Sarah to do something unthinkable. You would all have done the same. A mother whose only child has just died isn’t in her right mind. No, the person who needed to stay calm, to say, ‘I feel your pain, but I won’t do that,’ was Sarah Fenn.
“She didn’t. She said yes.”
They’re with me, this crowd. The people of Sanctuary. I feel their rapt attention as if it flows in my veins. Is this what it feels like for Sarah, all the time, having reserves of power at her command?
How dangerous she is! How have we let people like her live among us like normal citizens? Allowed them to be our neighbors—called them our friends?
Our ancestors had it right. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
But it’s too soon for that. The time for that will come when the law has run its course.
“She did something savage—terrifying. And I helped, and the other women helped. Every awful moment of it is sealed in my memory until the day I die.
“And at the end of it, my son’s chest shuddered, and he drew in a breath. His eyes opened. My son came back.
“But you’ve all watched the movies or read the books. You’re probably imagining what I didn’t dare admit to myself. That Daniel hadn’t come back the same.
“Outwardly, he was still my sweet boy. That was who Dan truly was. The boy I hope you’ll all remember. But every now and then, a crack would show. I’m his mother. I loved him. I couldn’t let myself acknowledge the truth—that this wasn’t my Daniel anymore. There was a darkness in him, biding its time…”
I’m making it sound like demonic possession. Sarah always refused to discuss the spirit world, and I still don’t know if she reached out to it that night. But the crowd listening to this can think what it will. Not being certain is even more terrifying than knowing.
“You all know that ‘something given for something gotten’ is the witches’ mantra. I don’t think life comes cheap. And it was my poor boy, not Sarah, who paid the price.
“Occasionally, very occasionally, this thing inside Daniel drove him to hurt people and to hurt himself. There were things he did which, when he realized them, he’d weep and cry and ask me what was w
rong with him.”
I made that up. There’s no one now to call me a liar.
And just a few more lies and this town will be mine.
“Each time this happened—and it happened fewer times than you could count on one hand—Dan promised me he’d be stronger. Better. That it would never happen again. And I couldn’t betray my little boy’s trust, because I had asked Sarah to save him. I was the one responsible. I supported and prayed for my son. Prayed that together we could beat the darkness inside him.
“I thought Sarah had given me my life’s greatest gift when she brought Daniel back from the dead. Instead, it was a wicked, wicked curse that’s blighted lives. She knew what she was doing, and she did it anyway.
“My son’s not here anymore to accuse her—and he was only an innocent child of twelve when she broke him. But I accuse her. I accuse Sarah Fenn of forbidden, unnatural acts. I accuse Sarah Fenn of every hurt my guiltless boy ever perpetrated. And I accuse Harper Fenn of his murder, in order to keep the secret of her mother’s dreadful deed.
“I call for their trial. I call for the death penalty. The Bible and the law of this land demand it. And a mother’s broken heart demands it.”
The crowd heaves again. Not away from me, in shock, but toward me in support. In compassion.
In fury.
“Go home,” I tell them. “Go home and rest, and pray, and prepare. Because we must be brave enough to do as our ancestors did. To take back our town. To free it from the evil of witchcraft—and make it once again a sanctuary.”
Ninety-One
Maggie
Chester is tailgating me, driving Sarah Fenn’s car. In his place, strapped into my passenger seat, are a frightened, angry witch and a livid familiar.
After her house was torched, I reckon Sarah Fenn was ready to bolt. But I can’t let her go.
So I dangled the one hold I have over her—that I’ve discovered the whereabouts of her daughter. I’ll get her to a safe place, then bring Harper there.