Page 43 of The Devil Knows Her Name

This is unwise, came my mother’s voice again. You can’t control it.

“I can’t control anything anymore,” I answered. “And you’re dead.”

My mother had forbidden me to use belladonna or any of the other shadow herbs. For her, they cut too close to what people already believed about us, and they frightened her. She did not wish to know the future or understand the secrets of the universe; she only did what magic she’d needed to survive.

My grandmother, according to her journals, had been an avid user, a seer, but over time my mother wore her down. I only ever saw her bring out the trencher once, while my mother was gone and she and I were alone in the house. She’d read stones rather than bones, pebbles and river glass and amber she’d collected over the years. I remembered my fingers itching to rub their shining, smooth-worn surfaces, but my grandmother had slapped my hand away. When I looked up at her, her eyes were blown so huge and black I thought they would swallow me.

“Go play outside,” she’d rasped, and her teeth and lips were stained like mine were now. “Go,” she snapped more forcefully when I hadn’t moved. I went—straight up to the attic, crawling on my belly to avoid the creaky boards until I found a hole through which I could watch her. It wasn’t much to watch, at least not from my vantage point, but up until then my mother and grandmother had been wholly open with me, explaining everything they did and teaching me to do it alongside them. The idea that something was not for my eyes and ears was new to me, and the allure of the forbidden was strong.

I was jolted out of the memory by pain in my fingers. I snatched my hand back from the fire—the same one the fawn bit, still in its bandage—and tried to assess the damage, but my vision swam as soon as I focused my eyes. I was in the belladonna’s hold.

I reached for the box of bones. The fire popped, loud enough that I felt it in my skin, and I jumped. My hand went astray, and my fingers dipped over the edge and met my mother’s.

Blade peeling through dead flesh, palm to nail split, blood congealed, blood oozing, I am a butcher I am a butcher I am a butcher—

I had just enough sense left to pull my hand back yet again. The memories faded from my mind’s eye, but when I reached for the box again, my own fingers were flayed neatly open, knuckle bones rising white from tendon-laced flesh. I tried to shut my eyes and failed.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real—”

My voice didn’t even sound like me, a clotted, staccato series of gasps. For a moment, my entire body was alien and everything teetered on the edge of hysteria, each new prick of awareness threatening to cascade into terror. I clawed myself back from the edge, seized the box, and dumped the bones into the trencher with enough force that a distal phalanx broke off and leaped into the fire.

I stared into the trencher for a long time. It was hard to focus, and the materials appeared to move of their own accord. I kept losing my place, or perhaps I only thought I did, because every path ended in destruction. I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, following the trails through the bones with rising panic, hoping that each new angle and turn would show me a way forward. They did not; each one concluded with the razing of the sanctuary and my own death or imprisonment. There was no escape, no opportunity to reinterpret, no end but earth scraped raw, trees slashed and burned, the creek dammed, pond drained, habitats and burrows crushed beneath caterpillar tread. I saw it again and again—the meadow burned to ash, the forest uprooted, nothing remaining but acres of abraded land primed for building. Whatever loss I felt at the killing of the rose wards was wholly subsumed by this, every bit of life and magic drained until the earth itself turned black. I did not see the pastor and yet I did; something about the hard-edged furrows of the upturned dirt reminded me of his face, the lines around his mouth. Whatever was to be built here was for his purpose.

I finally sat back. My eyes burned, and for a moment I was certain I’d scorched them in the heat of the fire, singeing off my eyelashes, the skin of my very eyelids. When I reached up to touch them, the tickle of my unburnt eyelashes reminded me of spider legs, and I found myself shaking my hand frantically, pale spiders falling from my sleeves and out from underneath my fingernails.

A distant part of me realized this was a very bad trip, and my fear had colored the casting of the bones. Perhaps this was why my mother did not read the future, not in stones or tea leaves or anything; she was always afraid, and it tainted everything. I gathered up the bones in my bare hands, heedless of the images that welled up before my waking eyes, and tossed them again.

The clatter came to me long after they’d hit the bottom, long after I realized my ability to read had fled. I could see hints of something, a future perhaps even darker than the first, but the materials were unwilling to give up their answers. There were glimpses of a way forward, flashes of power and reclamation, but I saw them as impressions in my periphery, and the harder I stared the more the bones curled in on themselves, a disembodied fist refusing to open and reveal the knowledge inside.

I told you not to look.

“You have no right to deny me,” I snarled. “Now show me the answer!”

In a fit of rage, I lifted the trencher and slammed it down again. I only intended to clatter the bones inside, but the impact as it hit the ground shook the entire thicket, rattled me down to my core. The ground quivered and split, the floor of the thicket cracking like plaster and swallowing the trencher whole, bones and all. I gasped and pulled back, and suddenly it felt like the ground I was sitting on was thinner than spring ice; one false move and I too would disappear into the void beneath.

“Tess?”

I blinked hard. When I opened my eyes again, the ground was whole in front of me. The trencher was not, broken in the middle with its contents spilled on the ground. I looked up and saw the devil sitting on the other side of the fire.

“You’re not real,” I said immediately, although a second ago I had been ready to accept that the trencher had fallen to the center of the earth. “You’re not actually here.”

“Why not?”

I expected defiance, insistence, not a question, and it caught me off balance. It took me minutes or perhaps hours to work out my reasoning. “Because I wanted protection. That’s why I came here. It should’ve kept you out.”

“Liar. You wanted knowledge and power, and you know I can give you both.”

He melted into the darkness outside the circle of firelight, drifting like the smoke itself until he was suddenly solid and whole at my side. He looked more human in this light, the startling silver of his eyes reduced to an indeterminate grayish hue, but he still smelled as he always did—the way I imagined the ocean to smell. I breathed deeply despite myself, even though it meant taking in more of the poisonous vapor of the belladonna. He laid a six-fingered hand on my knee, and the touch grounded me. I knew I should knock it away, but for the first time since I sat down in the thicket, I felt the comforting cocoon of reality. I was loathe to reject it.

“Tess,” he said, quiet and cajoling, “I know what you saw. I know the future the bones showed you. I can’t stand the thought of it.”

In this light, with every devilish angle of his face made soft by shadow, it was easy to believe him. I wanted to believe him; I was tired of searching out the lie in every turn of phrase. His hand slid higher up my leg, and a sudden flush climbed my neck, chasing away the chill of fear.

“I think, in your heart of hearts, you know the truth.” His voice was so low, just a rumble in his chest, and I found my hand straying there to feel it. “You know I only want to help you. You know your grandmother and mother warned you against me out of fear. They were afraid of what I offered, afraid of true power.”

That I did know to be true. They would’ve quaked at the sight of me now, mouth and eyes stained black, already so far fallen. The worst thing they could’ve imagined happened to me before my mother even died, and for a moment I struggled to remember why I still shared their fear.

“I don’t want to take anything from you, Tess,” he said. “I’m not trying to steal from you. I just want a home.”