The Year of the Witching(59)
Immanuelle traced the carvings with a trembling hand, following their path from one wall to the next. The carvings could be separated into three distinct shapes: one on the left wall, one on the right, and another on the far wall between them, where the two marks became one. It took her some time to recognize these shapes for what they were—sigils, just like the ones she’d seen on the foundation stones of the Ward house.
Three shapes. Three . . . seals.
Immanuelle stooped to set down the oil lamp, then slid her knapsack off her shoulder and withdrew the slips of paper on which she had copied the foundation stones’ sigils. It took her only a few moments to sort through the different symbols until she found the cursing seal. Immanuelle held the paper up to the wall to compare the two marks and found them to be a perfect match in everything but scale.
Swallowing her mounting dread, Immanuelle moved on.
The sigil on the left wall was not a match to any of the sigils carved into the foundation stones. It was a striking twisted shape, looking almost like folded hands or meshed fingers. But despite that, it looked distinctly familiar to her. After a few moments of puzzling in silence—assessing the mark from different angles, tracing the cuts with her fingertips—it came to her. Stooping to one knee, she snatched her mother’s journal from her knapsack, flipped through it to the page of her second self-portrait, the abstract illustration she’d sketched in the days after her return from the wood. In the image, she stood naked, arms half wrapped around her modesty, her swollen belly painted with a sigil . . . the same one that was carved into the wall. If the first seal was a curse, then this second was, perhaps, the conception of it. A kind of birthing sigil, if you will. A mark of creation.
Puzzled, Immanuelle moved on to the last sigil, the one on the far wall, the only one that she immediately recognized, because she had seen it every day all of her life. It was the same seal that brides wore, carved between their brows—a symbol of union, a binding sigil.
Immanuelle stood up and went over to examine the sigils more closely. She traced the sweeping contours of each carving in turn, moving slowly from one wall to the next: one birthing seal, one cursing seal, and a binding mark between them.
Her blood begets blood. The words from Miriam’s journal danced in her mind. She thought back to the night at the pond with the witches, to the start of the blood taint. The first plague, and all of the plagues to follow it, triggered by her first bleed.
Her bleed. Her blood.
They will call her Immanuelle. Her blood begets blood.
The truth struck her like a knife between the ribs.
Lilith hadn’t cast the plagues. Miriam had.
And Immanuelle was the curse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We will soon have to choose between who we wish to be and who we must be to carry on. One way or another, there will be a cost.
—FROM THE LAST LETTERS OF DANIEL WARD
IMMANUELLE HAD NEVER been quick to anger. As a child, under Martha, she’d been well schooled in the virtues of patience and restraint; she was more apt to take a slap than to deliver one. But now, as she emptied her lamp, splashing the walls of the cabin with kerosene, an ugly rage ripped through her, as if some animal caged within was trying to claw its way out.
She’d been used.
It was a truth so terrible, Immanuelle could barely conceive it. It was worse than being the harbinger of the plagues, worse than damnation itself. The idea that her mother—for whom she’d spent nearly seventeen years grieving—had never loved her as anything more than a weapon, an agent of her own vengeance.
Immanuelle threw oil across the sigils with blind fury. She snatched the pack of matches from her knapsack and struck one alight, holding it pinched between her fingers as she stared up at the oil-slick carvings.
One for cursing. One for binding. One for birthing.
She flicked the match into the puddle of kerosene a few feet away and a sea of fire washed across the floor. She retreated as the flames rushed down the hall after her, past the threshold, spilling into the front room. In a matter of moments, the building was almost entirely engulfed.
Immanuelle emerged from the cabin in a cloud of ash and cinder. She wasn’t sure if she was crying more from the rage or the smoke. She took no comfort in the sight of the cabin burning. A few flames weren’t enough to protect her from the truth.
To avenge her lover, Miriam had surrendered her daughter, body and soul, to Lilith’s coven. She was their curse made flesh, and everything—the blood and the blight, the darkness and slaughter to come—it was all within her. Miriam hadn’t wanted justice; she had wanted blood . . . and Immanuelle had provided. That night in the Darkwood, when she had bled for the first time, she’d unleashed it all. This was Miriam’s legacy: one not of love, but of vengeance—and betrayal.
Smoke tumbled through the treetops as the cabin continued to burn. The heat was such that Immanuelle staggered back, the ash on the air so thick it nearly choked her.
But still, she didn’t retreat.
In her heart, she knew it made no difference—the cabin on fire, the flames of her own rage roaring from within. None of it would amount to anything more than cinders on the wind. But it felt good, so good, to burn and rage and lose herself to the flames. It was her own personal purging, and in that moment, it was the only comfort she had. She felt almost drunk with it, and perhaps Miriam had as well, all those years ago, when after Daniel Ward’s death she’d fled to the Darkwood and struck her deal with the witches. Maybe that devouring rage had mattered more to her than anything else . . . her soul, her daughter, her own life.