The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,74

air feels thick and sour on her skin. A stale breeze exhales from somewhere.

“No.”

“What are you—”

Quinn cuts her off with a low rasp in her ear. “Not here.”

Beatrice doesn’t understand where else they might find opportunity to talk, as the cemetery is full of baton-wielding witch-hunters and the sun will be rising soon. She imagines spending an entire day in the tomb, a grown woman reduced to a little girl locked in the dark again. Panic claws up her throat.

“Listen, I c-can’t stay in here. I have to get out.” That wind blows again, damp as breath on her neck.

Quinn’s arms unwrap from her chest. One palm rests lightly on her shoulder. “Hold on.” Beatrice hears the shush of fabric and the snick of a struck match before her eyes sting with sudden light. Quinn touches the match to the narrow tip of a wooden wand. She whispers the words and the wand glows a rich, tiger’s-eye gold. Her face emerges from the blackness like a fire-lit dream, all dark hollows and honeyed planes, the witch-light burning in her eyes.

The light spreads, filling every cobwebbed corner of the mausoleum, and Beatrice discovers why she felt a breeze blowing inside a stone tomb.

“Stairs?” Her voice is an octave higher than she’d like it to be.

Quinn holds a finger to her lips and turns back to the door. She sings a short hymn and presses her wrist—the scarred wrist, pocked with white slashes and circles—against the aged wood. Heat flares, driving back the damp chill of the tomb. A lock creaks into place.

Then Quinn takes Beatrice’s hand in hers and pulls her down the narrow steps and into the long, serpentine tunnel that runs beneath the New Salem cemetery.

For a long time after they descend, Beatrice hears nothing except the nervous pant of her own breath and the shush of her skirts along the dirt, and sometimes the scuttle of some many-legged creature dodging Quinn’s wand-light. Several times she knocks her head on the sloping ceiling or scrapes an elbow along the wall, but no dirt shakes loose. The tunnel walls feel smooth and unyielding, as if they were carved from granite rather than clay and root-riddled soil. There are no struts or beams, no wooden trusses beneath her trailing fingers. Beatrice grew up in Crow County; she knows enough about mineshafts and cave-ins to understand that this is impossible.

“What is this place?” Her own voice sounds over-loud, shouting back at her from the too-close walls.

“Why,” Quinn answers, with a showman’s sweep of her wand, “the Underground Railroad, of course.”

“Really? You mean these tunnels go as far as—”

Quinn’s laughter echoes through the tunnel. “No, not really. Saints. No one dug a hole all the way to Canada.” Her shadow flickers as she shakes her head. “These tunnels are only under New Salem.”

“Oh,” Beatrice says, intelligently.

“This city was built in a huge hurry, did you know that?” Beatrice did. After the burning of Old Salem there had been a great rush to rebuild, as if the fresh-paved streets were ropes to bind the unruly past. “City Hall and the College were built within a year, along with half a dozen churches, all those boring square houses on the north end . . . Who do you suppose built all that?”

Beatrice has read any number of pamphlets and historical texts about the founding of the city but can’t recall anything about the workers. “I don’t know. I suppose it would have been—”

“Slaves.” Quinn’s tone is perfectly even, but her spine is rigid. “Slaves, in the nation that so recently fought for freedom. Slaves, building the City Without Sin.”

Beatrice feels a queasy flick of shame. “I didn’t—”

“But their work was plagued with delays and setbacks, missing tools, mistakes. Because they were busy building something else beneath all that marble and money. Something that would let them move through the city without fear, whenever they pleased.” Quinn gestures with the wand at the endless tunnel around them, smooth and hollow as the burrow of some vast snake. “They taught their sons and daughters, and the secret was passed down to us.”

Beatrice is quiet for several steps before asking softly, “Who is us?”

Quinn stops walking. Her shoulders lift and fall in a steadying sigh. “The Daughters of Tituba.”

If her voice wasn’t so flat, so entirely empty of humor or mockery, Beatrice would think she was being laughed at. It’s like claiming to be a vampire or a valkyrie, a monster out of myth. The Daughters of Tituba