The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,185
wants to keep doing it.
She wishes she could stay right where she is, with the frost-bitten edge of the wind in her hair and the wild wheel of stars above her and the beat of her sisters’ hearts beside her.
She wishes she could run away. Mount her rowan branch and disappear with her sisters, never to be seen or heard from again. They might go back home, to the mist-hung mountains and the cold creeks, and build their tower deep in the green woods. They might let the blackberry vines grow high as a rose-thorn hedge around them and raise Eve together in the leaf-dappled dark, safe and secret.
She wishes she were one of those firebirds from Mags’s stories, that something might rise from her ashes.
She can’t hold out much longer. Gideon Hill’s soul seeps like venom through her veins, settling into her bones. It seems like a fitting end, at least: her mother died for her and now Juniper will die for Eve. Maybe Eve will be the one to finally redeem all those generations of debt, all the sacrifices of the women who came before her.
Juniper draws a last breath. Pats the black wolf once on the head, like a loyal hound.
Hill twists like a knife inside her but she still feels some reserve in him, a calculating calm. Maybe he can’t quite believe she’ll do it, even now, because he can’t quite imagine loving anything more than he loves himself.
Or maybe he thinks he’ll survive it. Maybe he plans to slither away from her burning body the way he left his last one, clinging to the world until he finds some weak-willed creature to bind himself to.
He doesn’t know the Eastwoods have spoken to the Last Three, that they have the secret to his unmaking. That all his sins have finally come home to roost.
Juniper licks cracked lips. “You’ve had a lot of names, Gideon Hill.” She feels him cease his struggling, listening. “Gabriel Hill. Glennwald Hale. George of Hyll. Always Gs and Hs, so I guess you must have missed her.” He coils tighter inside her, cold and terrible and just beginning to be afraid. “Your sister sends her love, Hansel.”
Juniper feels a tremor move through his soul, a wave of confusion and longing and finally terror, as he understands that this death will be his true and final one, that all his scheming and stealing will end here, tonight, in the fire he lit himself.
Juniper steps into the flames and they close their waiting arms around her, hot and close. She hears Agnes screaming, Bella wailing, “June, no! Stop her!”
Then there’s nothing but the sound of burning and the words in her own mouth.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—
Ring around the roses,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all rise up.
A spell to bind a soul, requiring an untimely death & a destination
Agnes Amaranth screams. The wolf howls. The crowd roars. And beneath all that desperate noise Agnes hears the soft, inevitable sound of her own heart breaking.
She should have known better than to draw that circle wide. Should have known what it would cost her.
Agnes rushes toward the flames but reels back at the snap of black teeth. Gideon’s wolf is standing between her and the fire. There is no wrath in the deep red of her eyes, but merely a weary duty.
Agnes curls her spine around Eve to protect her from the hiss of cinders. “August!”
He’s already beside her, drawn by her scream. She knows by the sound of his swearing that he’s seen Juniper standing in the white heart of the fire, her hair floating in a dark halo around her head, her woolen shift burned black.
“Help me—the damn wolf—” Agnes can’t seem to string her words into sentences—Juniper’s pain is echoing through the binding between them, vast and hot—but August understands her. Agnes feints left and the wolf follows her while August leaps behind it.
He dives into the flames without hesitation or second-guessing, as if it’s his own sister burning, and Agnes has the fleeting, mad desire for her daddy to appear beside her so she could show him what love ought to look like.
The wolf snarls and follows him into the flames, jaws reaching for a boot or a leg. A too-long second follows, while the wolf pulls August backward and August refuses to be pulled. Both of them tumble out of the fire, smoking faintly, coughing and retching—