A poppet, even.
“Where’s our strongbox?” Shiloh used the shovel as a prop to push himself back to his feet. He held the doll up, throttled in one hand, and shook it like a dog with a rat. “Where are my mother’s bones, Slater?”
Deborah stared at him, her mouth lax, and her hand stalled halfway to her mouth.
“I… I don’t know,” she said. “That’s not what should have… Maybe there’s a crossed wire in our records. I can assure you that there’s nothing—”
Luke’s fingers tightened on Jonah’s hand until the bones ached.
“Look,” he said raggedly. “The shadows.”
Everyone looked. Even Jonah. He should have known better.
The shadows clotted, opaque and dense, and then Luke’s hand was ripped out of Jonah’s grip. He turned and saw the hag drag Luke away, bony fingers locked around his throat in mimicry of Shiloh’s grip on the doll.
“How did that get in here!” Deborah said. She took a step backward and then another, only to nearly trip over one of the worn-to-a-nubbin gravestones. “What’s going on?”
Ssssshhhhhhh, the hag crooned, the memory of a sour taste in the mouth and dizziness.Don’t go far.
It opened its mouth so wide it made Jonah’s jaw ache and hauled Luke up into a grotesque parody of a kiss. Ragged fingernails gouged into the soft skin under his jaw, and blood ran down to stain his borrowed T-shirt. The two guards dropped their torches and ran.
“What did you do?” Jonah demanded. He grabbed her arm and shook her roughly. “Who is that, Deborah, and how did she die?”
“I don’t know!” she said and pulled at his hand to try and squirm free. “It’s nothing to do with me!”
“Liar.”
“No!”
She pulled free from him and turned to run… straight into Shiloh. He caught her and pulled her up onto her toes. His too-pretty face suddenly wasn’t so pretty anymore. Anger had scoured the soft edges from his bones and thinned his mouth into a cruel line.
“Fuck the hag,” he said and shoved the doll in her face. “What did you do with our curses? Who is this supposed to be?”
Deborah shoved at him furiously and kicked at his shins. “I don’t know what you mean!” she yelled. “Is this some sort of setup? Did you let that thing onto the property?”
The panic was real. If Deborah could fake fear that well, she’d not have told so many bad lies. Jonah grimaced as he realized he’d been wrong again. It didn’t help that he didn’t have time to work out how just yet.
“I’ll deal with her,” he said. “Get the hag off Luke.”
Shiloh gave him a quick annoyed look. In the dim light, his pale eye looked yellow-amber. “He’s not my problem.”
“The hag is,” Jonah said. “It’s the whole problem.”
Shiloh narrowed his eyes for a second, then grunted. He tossed the poppet to Jonah and pointed at Deborah.
“We aren’t done. You’ll answer for this.”
He bent down, grabbed the shovel, and loped away toward the hunched, smoky form of the hag. A wide swing buried the muddy blade in the middle of the hag’s matted crown of hair and garbage. It screamed, a static howl that rattled Jonah’s bones, and lashed out a wiry arm in a vicious blind arc. It caught Shiloh in the gut and sent him flying. He crashed into one of the old graves, and it cracked under the impact like a rotted tooth.
“Fucker,” he spat out as he rolled back to his feet. He’d managed to keep hold of the shovel.
The hag tossed Luke away and slipped down into the ground. The earth went sodden where it had sunk through it, thick and marshy with old booze and rot. A hand thrust up out of the grave, an old watch loose around the bony wrist, and grabbed Shiloh’s ankle. It dragged him down into the grave with it.
Shiloh gripped the handle of the shovel with both hands and drove it into the mud like a railroad spike. The scream that seeped out of the ground wasn’t the hags.
It was an old man’s squall of rage, full of inchoate choked lust, and it blasted through Shiloh like lightning. He staggered, retched, and went down on one knee as the broken hex backlashed through him.
The Crossroads Crows, Jonah remembered, weren’t the only people whose hexes were buried in the grave dirt.
