The Witch of Tin Mountain(47)

“Hello?” I cup my hands around my mouth and call out. “Are you lost?”

All of a sudden, the song stops, like somebody’s turned the dial on a radio. By now, the birds should be awake, but all’s quiet apart from the spring’s distant trickle.

I ignore the electric feeling in my skin and pick my way down into the holler. The locust tree at its center looms overhead, with twisted, thorny branches thick as a man’s waist. Across the way, the ruined log house that once belonged to Granny’s kin sits low in the holler. There’s a crumbling chimney at each end, the stone streaked with mud dauber nests. The swaybacked roof stretches between them, with the barest hint of the old log walls and foundation visible through the brambles of poison oak and pigweed. I cross the clearing and carefully climb the rotted steps. “Hello?” I call through the door. “Anyone in here? I heard your song. It was real pretty.”

I don’t get an answer, so I step under the bowed lintel. Inside, the air is rich and loamy, damp with rot. I blink as my eyes adjust to the light. It’s built almost the same as our cabin up the mountain, but bigger. An altar of sorts stands in the corner, next to the hearth, branches stacked to form a bower. Animal bones and feathers adorn it, and a slab of rock sits at its center. There’s a dark stain on the rock’s surface. It looks like blood. A low creaking sounds from overhead. I look up. Totems like the ones we wove to ward off Bellflower hang from what’s left of the ceiling.

Suddenly, the dense heat flies away, replaced by the icy cold of a chilly January day.

“You finally came.”

I startle at the sound of a woman’s voice behind me, my skin prickling. I slowly turn.

At first, I think I’m seeing my reflection. Only there’s no mirror. I shake my head, disoriented. The woman looks a little like Granny, gone back in time. She’s wearing an old-fashioned nightgown, her dark-red hair loose in a frizzy halo around her face. This feels like one of my dreams, but I know I’m awake, because I feel a slow trickle of sweat running down my spine.

“Do you know who I am?” Her voice is soft and childlike, but her blue eyes carve into me with an ancient knowing, sharp as two pieces of cut glass. She takes two steps toward me, holding out her hand. “Do you know who I am?” she asks again, and this time her voice echoes all through me.

My heart thrashes like a trapped animal, because I do know who she is. I want to run. Everything in me screams to go. But my feet are rooted to the spot. She closes the distance between us, bringing the scent of charred embers with her. She leans forward and her lips meet mine. This ain’t a kiss like Abby’s, all flower-soft and testing. Her mouth is cold and hot at the same time, like an icy, burning brand.

A rush of memories flows through me with her breath. Only the memories aren’t mine, they’re hers. A log cabin, spilling chimney smoke into the winter air. Lovers in a tangled bed. A line of torches, moving down a hillside. A little boy crying for his mother. A crowd of men, jeering for the woman’s death. Then nothing but fire, fear, pain. So much pain—hotter and keener than in any of my dreams.

Anger comes next, searing my veins with a white-hot power that burns fiercer than the fire that killed her and sets my heart to a purpose. Vengeance. Redemption. Justice.

I open my eyes.

Anneliese. My name is Anneliese.

Her voice is a frail, fey whisper in the loamy air of the cabin, but she ain’t there anymore.

She’s all through me.

I go outside, my legs wobbly, the taste of ash thick on my tongue. There’s a new magic to the dappled light shining through the cedars. The cicadas drone loudly around me. I touch the trunk of the locust tree and feel its old pain. It was put to a purpose it never wanted and cursed because of it. Anneliese was a part of the land and it loved her—as much as it loves every bramble of blackberry and wild running thing that refuses to be tethered.

That land is a part of me. Part of us.

And it wants a reckoning for the wrong that was done on it.





EIGHTEEN

DEIRDRE





1881




Summer rolled on for Deirdre in a haze of longing for home, though home didn’t seem like an auspicious place. She’d written Robbie three letters but had yet to receive a reply. Pa had written twice. In his letters he’d been spare with his words except to say the constant rains had rotted every crop the Rays and Nilssons grew. Children fell ill with typhus, and some had died. Reverend Stack was stricken down during a church service and passed two days later. Bad heart, the doctor had said. Deirdre had no quarrel with that. It was long past time for Old Stack to stand in judgement before his maker.

According to Pa, Ambrose Gentry had moved his ragtag brush-arbor congregation to Reverend Stack’s Lutheran church that next Sunday.

Somehow, he was able to be in two places at once.

He was still stalking her. Taunting her. Deirdre had learned not to react to her visions of him, at least in a way that others might see. Still, her skin nearly crackled when she sensed his presence. She’d gotten brave and tried touching him once—to see if he was corporeal. He’d laughed when her hand glided through him, leaving an oily sensation on her fingertips. He usually appeared to her at night, hidden in the shadows, the silvery glint of his eyes the only thing visible. But right now, in broad daylight, he sat on the corner of Esme’s bed, watching Deirdre while Esme snored on, none the wiser.