The Year of the Witching(14)



“I saw something,” Immanuelle said, and her own voice sounded distant and foreign, like some stranger was speaking from another room.

“What?” A terrible light came to Martha’s eyes. “What did you see?”

“Women. Two women in the woods, alone.” Immanuelle folded her fingers around the strap of her pack. The strange book felt as heavy as a stone at the bottom of it. She knew she ought to surrender it to Martha. But she didn’t; she couldn’t. The women’s words in the wind traced through her mind: It’s yours. Immanuelle had never owned much of anything. Sometimes she felt like she barely belonged to herself. The idea of parting with one of the few things in the world that was hers to claim was almost unbearable, worse than a lashing. No, she couldn’t give it up.

“And what were these women doing in the woods?”

Immanuelle swallowed thickly. For a moment, she remembered how she had felt back at her first confession: sitting at the edge of her chair in the shadows of the kitchen, the apostle Amos seated opposite her, Scriptures in hand, frowning. He’d asked her if she’d ever indulged in the sins of the flesh, or if, in the night, her hands had wandered where they ought not go.

Martha huffed, and Immanuelle returned to the present. “They were together, holding hands. And their eyes were odd, glazed, all white. They looked sick. Almost, well . . . dead.”

Martha’s lips twitched, then twisted so violently that, in the dull glow of the hearth, she almost favored Abram. Her hand shook as she reached for the poker again, grasping its iron hilt as she drew it from the coals, hot and red and smoking. “Hold out your hand.”

Immanuelle took a half step backward. Try as she might, she couldn’t bring herself to unfurl her fingers. Her nails cut deep into the soft of her palms.

Martha’s gaze darkened. “It’s either your hand or your cheek. Choose.”

Gritting her teeth, Immanuelle raised her arm and extended her hand into the bloody glow of the fire’s light.

In turn, Martha uttered the sinner’s prayer. “Mind thine eye and heart’s desire. Still thy tongue and stop thy ear. Heed the call of thy Father’s whisper. Linger not with devils near. Turn thy heart from sin’s temptation, and when thy soul is cast astray, seek solace through true confession, in atonement find thy way.”

Martha’s grasp tightened around the poker’s hilt, and she lowered its glowing point to the flat of Immanuelle’s palm. “For the glory of the Father.”

The scorching pain of the burn brought Immanuelle to her knees. She cut a scream through gritted teeth and collapsed, weeping, clutching her hand to her chest.

Her vision went for a moment, and when her eyes focused again, she found herself leaning against the kitchen cabinets, Martha on the floor beside her. The faint smell of flesh char hung on the air.

“Evil is sickness, and sickness is pain,” said Martha, looking ready to weep herself, as if the act of delivering the punishment was as bad as the punishment itself. “Do you hear me, child?”

Immanuelle bobbed her head, choking back a sob. With her good hand, she drew the knapsack close, fearing her grandmother would search it and find the book within.

“Tell me you understand. Promise me.”

Immanuelle dragged the words up from the pit of her belly. The lie tasted bitter as it skimmed across her tongue. “I promise.”





CHAPTER FIVE





The Father loves those who serve Him faithfully. But those who stray from the path of righteousness—the heathen and the witch, the lecher and the heretic—will feel the heat of His heavenly flames.

—THE HOLY SCRIPTURES





THAT NIGHT, AFTER Anna bandaged her hand and the rest of the Moores were asleep in their beds, Immanuelle slipped the forbidden book from her knapsack and raised it to the candlelight. It was well-made, she realized upon closer inspection. Its front and back covers were cut from scraps of leather, as soft as the muzzle of a newborn calf. A silk bookmark stuck out from between its pages, so light it fluttered a little when Immanuelle breathed.

She peeled open the front cover, the spine cracking with the motion, and caught the mingling perfume of aged paper and horse glue. There was a scribbled signature at the bottom of the first page: Miriam Elizabeth Moore.

Immanuelle’s hands shook so violently she almost dropped the book. That was her mother’s name and signature. The book had belonged to her. But why would those women in the Darkwood have a book that was once her mother’s? What business did they have with her?

Below the signature, to Immanuelle’s shock, was a small ink sketch. Its edges were ragged as if it’d been ripped from some other book and pasted into the pages of this one, but the details were so well rendered that Immanuelle immediately recognized her mother’s features from the paintings that hung in the parlor. In the sketch, Miriam was young, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, barely older than Immanuelle herself. She wore a long dress, colorless in the drawing, but Immanuelle knew it to be wine red, as it was the same one that lay folded at the bottom of her hope chest. In the portrait, the woods were behind her, and she was smiling.

On the following page, an illustration of a young man who favored Immanuelle. His hair was a tight cap of corkscrew curls, and a few of the loosest ringlets fell over his brow. He had a cut jaw and dark eyes fringed with thick lashes, and his skin was just a few shades deeper than Immanuelle’s. His expression was rather stern, but his eyes weren’t unkind. There was no date beneath that portrait, just his name, the first time it had ever appeared in the pages of the book: Daniel Lewis Ward. The portrait was accompanied by a series of writings that read like love poems:

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