The Year of the Witching(78)

“Your Mother was trying to protect you. Everything that girl had to give, she gave to you.”

“If that’s true, why did she cast the curses?” Immanuelle demanded, growing angry now. “I saw the cabin myself. I know what those sigils on the walls mean. If she loved me so much, why would she use me like that?”

“Like I said, she was trying to protect you.”

“By making me a weapon? A pawn in Lilith’s hands?”

“Miriam was trying to give you the power that she never had. But she was grieving and afraid and sixteen years old and more vulnerable than she knew. Lilith could see that. She perverted Miriam’s desire to protect you, preyed on her weakness. I watched it happen. Every time she ventured into the woods, she was a little more mad than the time before. In the end, I think she was more like them than she was us.”

“In what way?”

Vera paused before answering, as if to sort through her thoughts. “In life, most of us have the luxury of nuance. We may be angry, but we balance that anger with mercy. We may be filled with joy, but that doesn’t prohibit us from empathizing with those who aren’t. But after we die, that changes and we’re distilled down to our most rudimentary compulsions. A single desire so powerful it trumps all others.”

“Like Lilith and her desire for revenge?”

Vera nodded. “Toward the end, your mother became the same way. She was obsessed with protecting you, imbuing you with the power and freedom she so desperately wanted but never had. It was like she lived for nothing else, so she might as well have been dead.”

The explanation accounted for Miriam’s madness. The writings and sketches in her journal, her singular obsession with the Darkwood and the witches it harbored. But something still plagued Immanuelle, stoked the flames of her rage. “If you knew all that—if you knew my mother was being manipulated and used by Lilith, driven mad by her grief—then why didn’t you do something to stop it?”

Vera struggled with an answer. “Because at the time . . . I was as sick as she was. I’d lost my boy, watched him burn alive on the pyre before my eyes, and his screams, they haunted me like the witches did your mother. But I didn’t know Miriam would wield the plagues or bring all of this upon your head.”

Immanuelle mulled this for a moment in silence, trying to decide whether or not she believed her. “The cabin where she cast those curses, it was yours?”

Vera nodded. “In part. But it belongs to you too. For twelve generations, the women of the Ward family practiced their magic there.”

“And is that where you taught her the ways of the witches? How to practice the dark craft?”

“I never taught Miriam anything,” said Vera in vehement denial. “What little she learned, she learned from Lilith and from the Darkwood itself.”

“But why did Lilith bother with my mother in the first place? If she was just a grief-sick girl, then why did the witches even answer her calls?”

“They didn’t,” said Vera, speaking low now. “The only reason the witches showed their faces to her was because she bore you in her belly. It was your blood running through Miriam’s veins that gave her the power to cast those curses. The witches were drawn by you.”

Immanuelle’s heart stumbled, skipping several beats. “I don’t understand.”

Vera’s voice grew very soft, and for the briefest moment, she stared at Immanuelle with the same tenderness she did the portrait of her son. “Miriam was a brokenhearted farm girl with a vendetta and a vicious temper. And, yes, she carved the sigils, orchestrated the plagues. But the power she siphoned came from you. A babe with the blood of witches running through her veins. All of that nascent power for the taking. You made the perfect vessel.”

Immanuelle sat, stricken, in her chair, trying and failing to speak. In her bones, she knew what Vera said was true, but one detail gave her pause. “If I’m nothing more than a vessel to the witches, why was I given the journal?”

“The witches are evangelists before they are anything else. How else could four foreign girls raise armies so large they rivaled the forces of Bethel? How else did they sow the seeds of discord if not by winning the hearts and souls of the Church’s flock?”

“So they weren’t trying to bait me; they were trying to win my soul?”

Vera nodded. “They want you, Immanuelle—your power, your potential. Lilith would like nothing more than for you to join her, as a sister and servant of the coven. And before the end comes, mark me, they will make you an offer. Invite you into their ranks.”

Immanuelle considered the idea, imagined what it might be like to walk the woods alongside Lilith. She would not be made to fight temptation any longer, or grovel at the feet of the Prophet. She would live free of Protocol and punishment—to roam and do as she pleased. “What happens if I refuse their offer?”

“Then you’ll share in Bethel’s demise.”

Immanuelle straightened in her chair. Her hands stopped shaking. Her shoulders squared. For the first time, she looked Vera dead in the eye. “Is there any way to stop them?”

Vera nodded. “There is one way. A powerful sigil to redirect the energy of the plagues. You’d need to carve it into your arm with a consecrated knife.”

“Like a holy dagger?”