Page 77 of The Devil Knows Her Name

Dread crashed over me in a hot, sick wave. The bulrushes and ferns swooped and blurred in my vision, and I fought to stay steady on my feet, to keep my face from showing what I felt.

“So I got curious, and I thought I’d take a look, maybe see exactly where the property lines are. I did a little digging in the records department, and I had to dig a lot further back than I expected, but—well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this, right?”

He waited for a long time. Maybe he expected me to offer a reason, an explanation, a lie, but my mind was blank. His hand stayed perched on his holster the entire time he stood there.

“It doesn’t matter what we find in that pond tomorrow; I know you did it, and I know why you did it, and it’s not going to work. I’ve already told the judge, and I’m going to tell that boy and his mother that they’re owed this land. You killed that man for nothing, and even if it doesn’t weigh on your conscience, I’ll be damned if I let you get away with it.”

Chapter

24

My house was destroyed. The kitchen table, where just a few weeks ago my friends had gathered and laughed and ate, was tipped on its side, one leg broken off and another bent. The couch cushions were disemboweled, the X-pen mangled, the drawers of my desk hanging open, mugs shattered in the sink. I moved through the wreckage like a ghost.

The cellar had not been spared. Fruits and vegetables were strewn across the floor and stomped to pulp. A full shelf of my canned produce had been tipped, beets and cherries and plums now mixed with broken glass. The shelf in front of the wooden door had been cleared but not moved, and even empty, I barely had the strength left to push it aside.

I opened the door. The shaft of dim light barely illuminated the fawn, still asleep on my jacket. I scraped a match to life and lit the stub of a candle, then stepped inside and shut the door behind me.

This room was never as silent as it should’ve been. There was the fawn’s slow, shallow breathing, but if you stayed long enough, you’d become aware of other sounds—soft pings from the glass jars, faint scratches from the boxes, a rustle like spider legs across the pages of a book. The things in here were restless, eager to be used, but there was nothing in here that would save me.

I slowly paced the room, running my fingertips across every lid and surface, stopping only when I came to the poisons. The quickest would probably be the oleander or the hemlock, but the lily of the valley would also do the trick. They all promised the same fate, my last moments spent vomiting and disoriented, but at least it would be by my own hand. The wolfsbane seemed to gleam at me from its dark bottle, and I picked it up, considering. It was, perhaps, one of the worst ways to go—every muscle locked, conscious and trapped in my body until the paralysis reached my lungs, drowning me on the floor of my home.

There was a ghost of a whisper over my shoulder, something I sensed more than heard. I turned, following it, and found myself standing in front of my grandmother’s grimoire. I picked it up, felt its familiar weight and the rough edges of its pages, let it fall open in my hands even though there was nothing inside that could help. I’d thought this book was my salvation once, thought it contained all the secrets of the universe, and, after my mother died, ransacked every corner of the house to find where she’d hidden it. But it had yielded all its secrets, and none of them could save me now.

I flipped to the back cover and ran my hands over it. Familiar as it was, my thumb caught on something new—a thin line, like a seam. It was barely perceptible, so small it could’ve been mistaken for a flaw in the goatskin, but it didn’t align with any of the stitches.

I kept my needles and razors in a leather case, and I snatched out one of the blades now. The ancient skin parted easily beneath the blade, revealing that the cover was indeed two pieces, and I peeled them apart, exposing what lay between them.

The scrap was ancient, not paper but vellum, and I didn’t dare touch it; the edges had begun to curl the moment I lifted the goatskin away. The writing was in a strong, slanted hand, but even so, I could barely make out the letters at the top:

To binde The Devil to thy will

There were only two lines beneath that. Two components. Just two components to gain power over the devil himself, and yet it was out of reach.

The signe of God

The blood of a child moste precious

It gave no incantation to speak, no other ingredients, but I’d done enough spellwork to read between the lines. I knew, for instance, that the crucifix had to be made within a circle, because any time you wanted to summon and bind something, it had to be contained.

I knew that the circle and the crucifix were meant to be dug out or hollowed out of a surface so that the blood could fill them.

I knew that the child had to be precious to the caster of the spell—not biologically related, perhaps, but you couldn’t steal someone else’s beloved child. Someone else’s pain would not satisfy the requirements of the spell. The devil was not meant to be easy to bind. The caster was meant to sacrifice—

I froze.

In her sleep, the fawn gave a soft sigh.

The vision from the belladonna came to me again: the terror in the fawn’s eyes, the fountain of blood. What had I said to the devil, just before that vision was granted? I didn’t come for power. I came to learn how to save my sanctuary.

“No,” I said aloud, so harshly that all the dead things in their jars went quiet. “No. Fuck you. I won’t do it.”

But it was only me in that room. My mother was dead, even if I imagined her there. So too was the pastor, the reason this was all happening. There was only me, and the fawn, and the choice.

The belladonna had given me what I’d asked for. The fawn wasn’t a human child, but she was mine all the same. And precious.

I knew the destruction of the sanctuary was coming. That was not a far-off possibility but a certainty, and yet if I lost the sanctuary, it would be because I did nothing.

If I lost the fawn, it would be because I cut her throat.