by Jessica King
Ivy looked at the woman now lying lifeless on the floor, at the blood that was seeping into the cracks between the shining wooden slats. It had been an easy choice for her. And she had not made an evil decision. She had made the completely selfless choice. She looked up to where the front of Jennings’s body was angled. A camera sat, blinking. Jennings had ensured her killer had a front-row seat to her death. She stepped in front of the camera and stared up into the lens. She hoped the murderer was watching from the other side. She hoped she looked as terrifying and defiant as Aline had.
Anger bubbled in Ivy’s chest as she grabbed her own phone and called the officers tailing Jeremiah Ethan. Vince flashed his phone screen at Ivy. Next to the name “Jennings Ford,” “WIP” had been changed to “2017.” The officer on the other end picked up. “Is Jeremiah Ethan in his home?” she asked. When the officer confirmed, she said, “I need you to bring him in for questioning. I will be there as soon as possible.”
+++
Saturday, January 30, 1692, 4:10 p.m.
Martha Eaton hated drawing water. It was her least favorite of all her chores. It hurt her back and hands, which never seemed to have the callouses she needed them to. Despite the sun, her breaths blew out in puffs of smoke in front of her. She imagined herself to be a dragon like in the stories her other brother told her when she was small. Stories that her mother had ordered both of them to never tell their younger sibling; they still had.
A shadow came up behind her.
“Da, I promise, I know Ma needs to cook; it’s just heavy.” She picked up the pails of water, which bit into her skin.
“Martha Eaton.” Martha turned around to face the owner of a voice that was certainly not her father’s. The owner of the voice appeared to be the leader of a small group of men. “You have been accused of witchcraft.”
Martha had seen it happen to too many other people, and she considered confessing to the accusation right on the spot, knowing what might come.
“Please,” she said, even as two men moved to her sides, even as she tried to rush forward, to get the man to look into her eyes and see that there was no trace of the devil there. “You are reasonable people,” she said. “Why would I be a witch? Why would you think that?”
They didn’t listen to her. They forced her to walk past her home and her family’s measly crops. Her father stood with a locked jaw, his nose red from holding back tears as he watched his only daughter being marched to jail until she would face her near-certain death. Her little brother stood next to him, a tiny mirror of her father, though tears ran down his cheeks, and his deep gusts of breath shook his too-thin body. Her footsteps crunched over the frozen grass and dead leaves, which amplified in her ears ten times over until she believed she was walking across bones.
Her mother ran after the group, screaming, sending her older brother into a chase after her, grabbing her. Good. Her mother might get hauled off along with her if she kept that up, and Thomas locked eyes with her. She shook her head. I’m not! She wanted to scream it, to make sure that at least her family knew.
It wasn’t a far walk to the jail, but the town wasn’t large at all. She ducked her head so that her hair would fall across her face, which she knew was burning red with shame. She started to whisper a prayer, and one of the men at her sides yanked her arm.
“She’s casting a spell against me,” he said, his voice rising in panic.
“I’m praying!” she yelled. “I am praying to our God!”
Another yank, and then she was pushed into one of the two pillories in front of the courtroom. It was then she started to cry. She would have preferred a prison where she would be inside. Hidden, at least, from the people who would now stare at her and the snow she could smell was coming. She could already hear the collection of murmurs, people exchanging her name over and over.
“Please!” she yelled, now staring at the ground, her tears falling. “Please! I—I’m not a witch, please!”
A pair of rough hands landed on her back and yanked. When the stitching of her dress tore and cold air hit her back, she knew. She pushed up her head against the bar across her neck, searching for one of three girls. Her school friends, the only people who would know about the birthmark on her back. They’d stayed up too late one night—their parents were furious—exchanging all their secrets. She had no impressive secrets. No stolen kisses with any boys, no daring feats on horseback, or fights with her family. So, she’d told them what her mother had always told her about the darkened piece of skin, just the size of a fingernail, right behind the place her waist curved in on her right side. That she’d been touched by an angel before she’d even been born.
Lucy March stood a way away, looking scared at what was happening to her childhood friend. But when Martha finally managed to catch her eyes, Lucy’s face crumpled into sobs as she turned away.
But now Martha ground her teeth, as a fingernail poked her right where that angel’s touch had left a button on her skin.
“Witch!” the man yelled. “She has the mark of the devil!”
Martha knew that it would only make things worse if she told them what it actually meant. That she had somehow been blessed before she’d even been born. That an angel had meant for her to be special. They’d take anything she said now and turn it into a reason to kill her.
Her wrists and neck chafed from the wood of the stocks as a crowd gathered. And when she heard the crack of a whip, she screamed, terrified. They were going to whip the angel’s mark right off her back. She clenched her teeth and tried to breathe. Someone was reading a passage of Scripture behind her, and she tried to focus on the words, and not the fear that was telling her to beg for forgiveness they wouldn’t give to her.
“From the book of Ezekiel!” A man’s voice yelled over the murmuring of the crowd. “Thus says the Lord God: ‘Woe to the women who sew magic charms on their sleeves and make veils for the heads of people of every height to hunt souls! Will you hunt the souls of My people, and keep yourselves alive?’”
The whip cracked, and a horrible pain racked her whole body. Was she on fire? The whip cracked again, and she was sure. They must have been pouring boiling water down her body, branding her skin, something. The whip alone could not be so horrible. Another crack and she could hear the blood dripping from her back onto the ground.
“Therefore, thus says the Lord God: ‘Behold, I am against your magic charms by which you hunt souls there like birds. I will tear them from your arms, and let the souls go, the souls you hunt like birds. I will also tear off your veils and deliver My people out of your hand, and they shall no longer be as prey in your hand. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.’”
A series of “amen” rose from the crowd, each one its own, tiny lash upon her back.
“Help!” she screamed.
The whip was a horrible, whistling sound that cracked against her, traveled up her spine, and amplified a thousand times over through the screech she tried and failed to contain. She tried to form the words. That she was dying. That please, she was dying. “I—” the whip cracked again. “I confess!” she screeched. “I confess!”
The whipping stopped, and she sobbed, each cry choking on its way out against the pillory. A piece of her died with shame—she’d given up so quickly. Four, or had it been five, whips? That’s all she could get through? Had not her own Lord taken thirty-nine? Her ears burned even as she could feel her blood sliding from her wounds and soaking into the front of her dress.
“You admit to collusion with the devil?” a loud voice yelled above her.
She tried to move her eyes to see who it was, to find out which one of her neighbors was leading this farce of a trial, but her neck hit the wood, and her eyes were forced down to the ground.
“I was tricked,” Martha said. “I was tricked by a witch—she turned me into one, too!” She hardly knew what she was saying. Anything, anything to make this stop.
“Who was this witch?” the voice asked.
Martha l
ooked up, her eyes once again locking on Lucy. Her once close friend’s bloodshot eyes went wide.
“I don’t know,” Martha said, her voice breaking, and her gaze dropped from Lucy back to the ground. “It was in a dream. I followed a woman into a forest, and she fed me and gave me water. She took the dye from a flower and gave me the mark on my side.”
“And you believe that now the mark is gone, you have been freed?”
And there it was. Her way out.
“Yes,” she cried, the agony fueling her. “Yes, it’s gone. The devil’s grip on me is gone! Thank you! Thank you!”
But she wasn’t thankful. The angel’s fingerprint was gone. She’d be left with crisscrossing stripes all along her back for the rest of her life, a constant reminder that the angel who touched her would not remember her when she was in heaven.
If she made it to heaven after this lie. She didn’t dare to whisper a prayer again.
She’d passed out when she’d gotten home, and it was a whole day before she was awake and speaking again. Her mother was quiet as she helped her into one of her father’s loose shirts. She knew her mother was boiling with rage, even with the day between the whipping and now to simmer.
“You’re not done yet,” she’d said. “I’ve seen whipping scars turn angry and red. If you start to feel too hot, you let me know.”
She’d spent the rest of the day lying on her stomach, watching the snow drift down from the sky into a thick blanket. She’d missed her favorite part when the white covered the ground so quickly, she could see the world change in just an hour or two. Normally, watching the snow would lull her to sleep. But now the snow was only a faint piece of entertainment as the pain got worse with its burning or would ebb a bit. But it was, at all times, horrific. That’s what she’d said to Thomas when he asked how the pain was. She was climbing mountains of pain where the peaks were high, the valleys were shallow, and there were no streams or clearings.
Her little brother, Michael, seemed to believe that water was the only way she would heal, so he kept bringing her ladles of water every quarter-hour. He didn’t speak often, and when he did, it wasn’t entirely coherent. It was like he had his own language, though the other children of the village seemed to like him enough.
“It’s the only way he knows how to help,” her mother said when she had finally shooed him away, telling him she’d explode if she took another sip. He’d scrunched his face in confusion and instead came back with a branch he seemed to think was particularly nice; she managed to smile for him.
Her family, exhausted from emotions and work, had fallen asleep right away after guarding her all night. They wouldn’t tell her, but her blurring between consciousness and sleep had probably looked like some sort of witchy hallucination, and they didn’t want anyone to see. But tonight, as they slept, her pain kept its relentless pounding. And she was growing far too hot. Sweat trickled down her brow, and she’d grown itchy.
Martha bit on her tongue as she pushed herself off the mattress. Her little brother usually slept by her side, but now he was with Thomas; everyone was too afraid to jostle her. She felt a trickling down her back and bit the inside of her cheek, tasting blood. Her eyes stung, but she walked stiffly toward the door and managed to undo the leather latch.
Freezing snow met her bare feet as she unbuttoned her father’s shirt and threw it over the clothesline. Only in a pair of Thomas’ trousers, she sat down in the cold, which immediately soaked through the trousers, making her skin prickle into gooseflesh. She stifled a scream as she lay back into the snow, the freeze and simultaneous burn a relief to her back and its relentless fire.
The snow slowly warmed up around her to a blessed cold, and the pain started to become a dull throb.
She heard the crunching sound of footsteps and hurried to cover her chest. It was likely Thomas; he had always been a light sleeper. “I’ll be in in a second, Thomas,” she said. “The cold just feels good.”
The footsteps kept coming. “Thomas, I’m not dressed,” she said, annoyed as the footsteps kept coming.
The moonlight was suddenly blocked by a pair of bulky shoulders.
“Who—” She squinted against the sudden block of light. She wasn’t able to identify the man, but she could identify the click of the gun before it fired, and she suddenly hoped the snow melted her blood away before Michael would see.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Friday, February 17, 2017, 4:58 p.m.
He held tight to Timothy, who meowed when he felt that he’d been squeezed too hard. He let go of Timothy as a cold numbness moved up his neck to his face, and his heart beat too hard. He wrung his hands and deleted the videos and messages from his phone, but he knew he’d left a trail. There was no way the video was entirely gone. Surely, it was somewhere on the internet, somewhere in a database that would soon point him out as a killer.
As a serial killer.
As a serial killer who killed women.
As a serial killer who killed women and threatened children.
His cries got caught in his throat, and he pressed his hand into a fist, punching his legs over and over, trying to hit hard enough that his pain would move his focus away from the tightness in his throat. The world tilted, his kitchen seesawing up and down and somehow spinning as well. He turned off the oven; he didn’t want to pass out and have the whole place burn.
He reached for his phone and Googled a video about breathing during panic attacks. He found the one he regularly used, a video that used an animated blue circle to lead the breath in and out. The video didn’t ask for deep breaths. He didn’t have any of those. It simply asked for steady breaths, and he tried.
He’d been shaking when he’d sent that video. He’d looked so evil, waving behind Jennings’s two little children. He had almost not been able to do it. Nausea rolled over him, and he spat, trying to get rid of the burst of saliva before he vomited.
He didn’t even want to think about the real question.
If Jennings had not slit her own throat, would he have been able to kill her children?
He bit down on a scream. What would he have done if Jennings had called his bluff? He spread his arms and legs until he was facedown on the ground, exhausted. The ground wasn’t cold enough, and he reached for the towel hanging from the cabinets, still wet from the water he’d spilled on the counter. He pressed the towel across his face.
The look of that cop, staring into the camera he’d just watched Jennings’s suicide through—she’d known. Her eyes were beyond anger. They were a promise.
He turned off the video and opened a message. He’d never responded to the random number before, and he’d only received three messages from the sender: Amber Woodward, Erin Preston, and Jennings Ford.
He typed out the message: I quit.
+++
Friday, February 17, 2017, 5:17 p.m.
Ivy was not going to be playing with him this time.
“You can’t use physical force, Ivy,” Vince said, following her too-fast pace. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard you,” she said. “Detectives Hart and Vince,” Ivy said, pointing between herself and Vince as she approached an officer waiting for them. “I need to talk to Jeremiah Ethan.”
“Back here,” the officer said, leading them with a sense of urgency. Ivy’s hands twitched at her sides. Dead bodies didn’t bother her much, she’d been around enough of them that the emptiness didn’t bother her. But she’d never really felt the change—from full to empty that came with a body actively losing life. She could still feel the blood under her fingernails, and she stifled the urge to run her nails beneath each other. To go scrub her hands again.
Jeremiah Ethan was waiting, one knee crossed over the other. When Ivy walked in, she said nothing. The room had an overhead fan-light combo, which was twirling slowly above Jeremiah, who lifted a hand in a wave.
“Detective,” Jeremiah said as a greeting.
Ivy pulled out his phone, which the officer had confiscated. “Did
you delete any messages from your phone today?”
“No,” Jeremiah said. He tapped his fingers on the table, and Ivy moved back to the wall, casually leaning against it despite how stiff her limbs felt. She wanted to be as far as possible from the man. Taking a breath, she collected her courage.
“You seem to possess the skills that would allow you to hack into personal closed-circuit security systems. Have you ever done that?”
“Yes, I have the skills, but no, I never have,” he said.
Ivy pushed off the wall. “Are you quite certain?”
Jeremiah examined her. “Yes.”
Ivy placed his phone between them and leaned onto the table. “Did you receive an anonymous text message today?” The phone sat, the screen dark. There was a crack in the glass that hadn’t been there the last time she’d had his phone.
“Yes,” he said, confirming the message Ivy had seen on his phone: “Jennings Ford, eliminated.” Ivy maintained her composure despite how good it would feel to smack the smug look off Jeremiah’s face.
“Did you update the Kingsmen website today?”
“Yes.”
“How did you feel about updating the website?” she asked.
The man pressed his lips together in a suppressed smile that made Ivy boil. “You know how I feel about witches. But I didn’t kill her.”
I didn’t kill her. Like he expected that someone had physically done the damage themselves. “Does your contact ever tell you how they murder these women?” Ivy asked.
“No,” Jeremiah said. “I find out that they die. I don’t know how until the media releases it.”
Ivy sat down and tented her fingers. “Jeremiah Ethan, if you are lying to me, I’m going to make sure you are convicted in this state because they allow the death penalty.” She knew it was an empty threat. He’d never get the death penalty for his role in this deadly game, but she hoped he didn’t know that. She stared at him and could see the fear brewing in his eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”