The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,144
hall as their former neighbor.
“I need someone to watch my baby girl while I run to the grocer’s. Please, just for a minute. She’s sick.”
The girls look at one another, communicating in the same silent language Agnes once shared with her sisters. They nod, and Agnes sets Eve in their arms with shaking hands. Better to keep her hidden away than risk someone on the street spotting a red curl.
Agnes hurries up the street with her head bent and her shoulders hunched, trying to look harmless and timid and forgettable. Every now and then her gaze crosses another woman’s and she sees the same desperate innocence in their faces. It sends a shiver of fury through her.
She arrives at the corner of St. Lamentation and Sixteenth before August. She circles the block rather than lingering, ducking her head politely at a pair of patrolling Inquisitors.
He still isn’t there when she returns. Fearful questions clamor in her skull—was he detained or delayed? Was he already in the Deeps, outed as a witch-sympathizer?—but she keeps her feet shuffling and her face slack. A flash of shadow tells her Pan is hovering somewhere high above her.
She circles the block again. This time August’s absence is a bell tolling in her chest, a low warning. If he could have come to her, he would have: it was written in the tilt of his smile, the shine of his eyes when he looked at her.
Had her mockingbird failed somehow? Had it gotten lost or eaten or—her heart vanishes mid-beat, a breathless silence—intercepted?
Agnes feels something falling inside her from a very great height, a silent rushing.
She runs. She runs as if there are wolves or shadows at her heels. Her body jars with the running, her breasts tender, her belly weak, but she doesn’t stop.
Eve, Eve, EveEveEve.
She crashes through the boarding-house door, heaving up the steps. She doesn’t bother to knock at No. 12. The door bangs against the cracked plaster. “Where is she? Is she safe?”
The blond girls are holding one another on the floor, shoulders shivering with sobs. One of them looks up at Agnes with the shine of tears on her cheeks, one eye puffing with the promise of a bruise. “They c-came knocking right after you left. They said—”
But Agnes can’t hear her because she’s listening to the silence running beneath her, the terrible absence of the sound she’s heard every second for seven days: the dry, desperate rattle of her daughter’s breath.
The silence swells inside her. It presses against her ribs and pops in her ears, until Agnes is nothing but pale skin wrapped around a soundless scream.
Her own voice has a distant, underwater warble. “Who?”
The other girl answers this time, reaching an arm around her sister. “Inquisitors. A pair of them, wearing those red-cross uniforms. They knocked and Clara answered, and they said they were looking for a baby girl.” Her eyes shift a little, uncertain. “They said a w-witch had snatched her straight from her mother’s arms and run off with her.” Her arm tightens around her sister, as if she thinks Agnes might snatch one of them next.
“And where”—her voice is still perfectly calm; only the very tips of her fingers tremble—“did they take her?”
“Don’t know,” says the girl. “They—they said if you had any questions you could take them up with the mayor.”
The mayor. The girl sounds doubtful as she says it, because even a little girl knows mayors don’t meet with witches. But Agnes recognizes it for what it is: an invitation.
A trap, into which she would walk willingly and open-eyed, because he has stolen her daughter away from her and there is nothing she would not do to get her back.
The girls gasp and clutch at one another. It’s only when one of them pants, “What—what is that?” that Agnes becomes aware that Pan has materialized on her shoulder, talons biting through her blouse. “You are a witch!”
“Yes,” Agnes answers distantly. “And they should have thought of that before they took what was mine.”
And then she’s back in the street, stumbling over cobblestones and shoving past strangers. She’s crossing the Thorn, heading for St. George’s Square, before it occurs to her, with a faraway flick of annoyance, that her sisters will follow her into the trap. That they will feel her fear through the binding between them and come running, and then Gideon Hill will have all three—four, Agnes thinks, with a swallowed scream—Eastwoods in his palm.