Standing there, I felt small and strange again, desperately wishing that the last second had not happened. That it had never become this. It had only been a split second. I had donenothing.
But I had done something.
The blood kept beading on his skin and streaming onto the floor. And then his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he fell like a tree onto the floor with a great thud. The girls in the hallway pulled back. Josef went white.
Witch, the shadows of everyone at the corners of my eyes whispered.
And just like that, my curse was revealed in the dull firelight. I wanted to protest, but there was nothing I could say. I stood there, clutching my trembling hand to my thin shift, and no defense came to mind. I stared at the floor and the viscous puddle still forming, crawling over the floorboards. From underneath the shadows of the bed a tiny creature crawled. It looked like a regular mouse, except for the claws and the set of tiny horns, and it began lapping up the edge of the wave of blood.
As I stood there, stupid and silent in shock, everything went dark.
MY SENSES CAME BACK TO ME IN A DARKNESS AS COMPLETE ASbefore creation. My head throbbed and my legs were bent and stiff. The quiet was too close, and it smelled of rotting earth. Josef must have stuffed me in a corner of the cellar until the priest could arrive. I had to escape. They would drag me off to my pyre as they once had Valerie. I forced my eyes open.
The darkness stayed so profound, so solid, I thought I still dreamed. I blinked to rouse myself out of my sleep, but it didn’t help. I tried to move, but my hands and feet and knees all bumped against rough wood. I didn’t have much room, but I managed to slam my fists against the door, again and again, until my wrists felt close to snapping. Then thumped my knees against it and cried out, hoping Dacia or one of the other girls would hear.
Maybe this was only a nightmare.Wake up.
Eventually, it dawned on me. I was beating upward.
The door over me. My back against the wall. My heart began to race.
I knew already where I was—Iknew—but I could not accept it. Of all the endings, I had not imagined this one. I racked my mind, trying to recall a cellar in the village that would feel like this. My fingers, hot and pulsing with the throbbing in my head, touched the wood and pushed. A trickle of sifted earth fell upon my brow.
They had buried me alive.
Every moment of suffocation in the last five years rose up inside me as sheer panic. I couldn’t be buried; I was still alive! I screamed. Kicked. Beat my fists until they bled. My voice rebounded on me, close and cramped. Every slam of my fists, dulled by the profound weight of the earth, sent a heavy shower of dirt down, choking me.
Shutting my eyes made the darkness easier to bear, and I screwed them tight and willed myself to lay still. The silence closed in again. My mind roiled, wordless and frenzied. Cold passed over my feet and a shudder of nausea rolled through my body.
Even in my grave I couldn’t find peace! I couldn’t see them, but I knew from the feel that spirits were still there, curled at the bottom of the coffin. One itched at my skull, as if it were eager to watch me become one of them. I screamed and kicked again, but it got me nothing but another mouthful of dirt. Exhaustion washed over me.
One thought rose, sharp and striking.
Not like this.
I wanted to die on my own terms. I wanted the last look of the world to be of my own choosing, not Maxime’s pooling blood or the pitch black of my own coffin. I wanted to own my body, my life,andmy death. I had to escape or die trying. Pulling my knees up until they hit the coffin lid, I pushed. The wood strained and creaked.
With each press of my legs, the wood heaved and sagged back into place. Pausing, I wiped the dirt off my face and pulled the edge of my shift over my mouth to make it easier to breathe. I kicked again. And again. The wood groaned but refused to break.
Help me, I begged the spirits, the watchers, my tormenters, thoughthey were always silent. Never my friends. Desperately, I dug deep in my body, scraping its corners with my prayers. My power seemed to be a thing that happened to me, and not something I could control, but if there was ever a time to call upon it …
The wood creaked. Sweat dropped down my temples. I gave one great shove, a choked cry in my throat. And finally,finally, the wooden planks cracked. A heap of soil, damp and heavy, fell onto my chest.
If I didn’t sit up, I’d be crushed. I needed to clear a way through. Wrapping my fingers around the splintered edge of the coffin, I yanked. The seam opened wide. The dense, damp earth poured over me. I pulled myself up as far as I could and dropped all my weight down to tear apart the wood. The earth wrapped itself around me again, and I sputtered and coughed. The panic flashed like lightning through the darkness of my body.
For a moment, it was too much. Too confining. There was no way I could do this. And yet I screamed through my teeth and tore at the wood like something feral, until the smell of blood mixed in with the damp earth. A hole cracked open. I dug upward, ignoring the scrape of the rough edges of the wood.
Half burrowing and half kicking, I swam through soil so thick and dark it threatened to swallow me. Still, I reached. At every point it felt like my death would be final. But at last, my hand broke to the wondrous cold bite of winter.
The crown of my head broke next—freed from the earth like a newborn out of the tight grip of the womb. I gasped a deep breath of air and choked on my caul of dirt. I was alive! My strength surged. I found the edge of the broken coffin lid and stood.
Coughing and sputtering, I wiggled out to my chest. My waist. The spirits stayed clustered at the edges of the grave, a sullen begrudging that I had not stayed with them.
I was so relieved to see their gruesome forms under the rising moonlight, I could have kissed their cold mouths. Before this, I had not known there was a dark so profound it swallowed even souls. Mychoking coughs echoed in the quiet night, puffs of silver breath and dirt-laced spittle obscuring the snow. At my hips, I could reach the grave’s edge and solid ground. I pulled onto my hands and knees and rolled, finally, gasping, onto my back on the mud-tracked snow.
Above me, the stars burned bright. In the distance, the village stood still and cold.
I was alive. And for the first time, it felt glorious.
