The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,137
November and slink back under whatever rock he came from. But their stores of witch-ways are running thin, and every midwife and herbalist has been driven out of town. The sickness is worsening, too—even The Post now calls it the Second Plague—and panic worsens with it. The shadows coil thicker and darker, like fattened flies, and Gideon Hill’s face smiles down from every window and wall. Our light against the darkness.
Juniper and her sisters make it four nights at Mr. Blackwell’s before Agnes spots a shadowless man standing on St. Jerome Street, staring blankly through the windows, waiting. That night they say farewell to Mr. Blackwell, who sends them with several bottles of wine and a hooked cane for Juniper. A Daughter escorts them north through the tunnels to stay with Inez and Jennie in the glamorous near-mansion Inez’s deceased husband conveniently left behind.
They make it two days before fists thump on the door in the middle of the night. Bella whispers the words to tangle the halls and doors of the house in a winding labyrinth behind them—a spell taught to them by Inez’s chatty Greek maid—while all five of them slip out the kitchen door.
They spend the following night beneath a bridge, huddled together with the heat of their spells warping the air around them, and another handful of days back in New Cairo, in the well-warded house of Cleo’s aunt Vivica. But the shadows always find them eventually, and they always run.
By the end of August, Juniper can feel their list of willing hosts shrinking, doors slamming and locks clicking ahead of them. Partly it’s the fear rising like sewer-stink through the city as Hill’s mobs grow bolder and the plague worsens. Partly it’s Eve, who screams at inconvenient hours of the night, and whose hair remains eye-catchingly red no matter how many spells or dyes they apply. Sometimes the problem is Miss Cleo Quinn; it turns out even the suffragists who seem sympathetic with the cause of colored women balk at the thought of welcoming one into their actual homes.
Another time they were asked to leave after the mistress of the house discovered Cleo and Bella in her washroom somewhat less than fully dressed. They behaved themselves better after that, but there was still an ardent, unsated thing between them. It unsettled people.
It unsettled Juniper, to own the truth. True, Bella’s cheeks were flushed and her stutter was gone, but Juniper recalled the preacher’s admonitions about man and wife and the natural order of things. She asked Agnes about it one evening and was told in no uncertain terms to mind her own damn business.
“What’s wrong with loving somebody, anyhow?” Agnes hissed. “Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness?” Juniper surrendered and resolved thereafter to mind her own damn business.
The morning after, she caught Agnes whispering to a mockingbird on the window ledge, watching it wing into the dawn as if half her heart was flying alongside it. The next time they have to run, Agnes says, quietly, “I know a place.”
She leads them to one of the crookedy, higgledy-piggledy stacks of tenements in West Babel only a few blocks north of South Sybil. A thin, tired-looking woman opens the door, her hair brittle white. She flinches only briefly at the sight of three women, an infant, and a pair of uncanny birds standing in her hallway, before inviting them inside and introducing herself as Miss Florentine Lee.
Her apartment is a single cramped room, the walls stained with years of cooking-grease and close living. A small window provides a stingy square of summer-light, obscured by laundry-lines and balconies.
Mr. August Lee is waiting at the kitchen table. He stands as they enter and his face when he sees Agnes is—well. It’s private, Juniper decides. She busies herself with her cane, wondering a little bitterly how her sisters found the time to pursue romance alongside all the witching and women’s rights. She tries to imagine herself looking at someone like that, all soft and aching, but finds herself thinking instead of the mountainside back home, sweet and green.
That evening Miss Lee feeds them a cabbage-and-ham stew which Juniper doubts has done more than meet a ham once in passing. August’s mother watches them eat with faded-cotton eyes, her gaze flicking from Agnes to Eve to August, not saying anything.
August clears the dishes from the table after supper and his mother fusses at him. “There’s no need—”
“It’s fine, Ma.” She subsides with a fragile-looking smile. There’s something strained and careful