She pulled a kitchen knife, already bloody, out of her pajamas. Jonah tensed, the doll raised in his hands like a talisman. When he tightened his grip on the body of it, he felt the hinged structure instead. Like the poppet’s bones. Arlene dragged the knife over her skin, from the heel of her hand up along her forearm. Water and blood dripped out of the wound, and the flesh tightened visibly down around the bones. Age spots appeared, dark and coin-sized on her skin.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I love her.”
Haddon blood on Haddon soil. Jonah had been wrong. It hadn’t been sour earth. Someone had hated the Haddon patriarch enough to curse his blood and his works. The splatter of Arlene’s blood was enough to piss that old, lazy hex off.
The ground rippled under their feet. Gravestones cracked or sunk into the ground. Dull red mud bubbled up from the cracks like blood, viscous and full of Jerusalem's secrets as the Haddon ground spat out generations of hex-boxes.
Wood and metal. Wrapped in silk or sealed with red wax.
Some of them cracked open as they rolled over the ground, and old, fermented spells spilled out like gas.
“No!” Deborah blurted. She grabbed Arlene’s arm and tried to wad her sleeve up into a makeshift bandage for the cut. “What are you doing? This will ruin us. It could ruin everyone!”
Something that congealed into an unnaturally orange snake, mouth sealed and eyes drops of liquid poison. A girl’s voice caught midway through a song, plaintive and with an old, heavy Dutchy accent. Shadows that cut through Jonah like fear turned into a weapon, his heart squeezed tight and panicky in his chest.
He glanced around desperately as he tried to think through the fear.
Shiloh was down, tears on his face as the shadow of a beautiful woman in a hippy dress pressed her hand over his mouth and pinched his nose shut. He’d left the hag injured, knots of matted hair torn out of her head, and her substance somehow shrunken. She dragged herself over the ground on limbs that had lost their skin of glamor and were just leather-sinew tendons and sun-bleached bones and on top of Luke.
Shadows crawled in from the graveyard walls and slid out from behind the few headstones still standing. They were full of whispers, promises and threats. Both would end up being the same thing if you listened. They always did.
Temptation itched in his back teeth and made his fingers twitch. All he needed was one hex. Not even a real hex. There was enough spilled-over magic here that he could just siphon some off, no sacrifice required. Would that evencount?
Jonah wanted to buy into that. Hewantedto, but it just hadn’t sealed the deal. All that fast talk and rationalization couldn’t quite paper over the black hole where he’d buried his last week in Babylon.
The secrets.
The death.
The sound of nails driven into wood, one after the other, and the ache in his hand when he finally put the hammer down.
If he wanted a hex, it was under there. All he’d have to do was let it all back out again.
He reached for it, but snatched himself back as if it was hot. Maybe it would be the right thing to do, the moral choice to sacrifice himself for the others, but he wasn’t a moral man. Not enough.
Jonah squeezed the doll again, and… maybe. He hesitated as he wondered if he could trust his instincts. He’d gotten it wrong twice. Third time wouldn’t be the charm. He took a tuft of the dry, dyed blond hair stitched into the doll’s scalp and pulled it.
It came loose in his hands, dead and rough, and Deborah flinched and reached up to swat something away from her head. Arlene wrenched away from her and lunged at Jonah, the knife gripped clumsily in uncooperative fingers. She slashed with it, a long, low swipe that would have opened his stomach from hip to hip.
Jonah got the doll between them, and Arlene’s face twisted in mute horror as she cut it open. Cigarette butts, the ends stained with bright red lipstick and crumpled with age, fell out, along with the blackened, alcohol-soaked stuffing. At the same time, Deborah cried out and clutched her stomach. Her legs threatened to give way under her, and she staggered backward into the wall.
“What?” she whimpered.
“You’re dead,” Jonah told her. “Have been for a while. You have to remember, Deborah. That’s the only way to get away from this.”
She pressed her hand to her chest. “I feel sick,” she said and retched. “What’s wrong with me?”
The bones were hotel bar miniature bottles. Jonah pulled them out and tossed them away.
“It was after the conference,” he said. “You’d met Arlene that night and, what, made her some promises?”
Arlene dropped the knife and threw herself at Deborah. She was too weak to keep her wife on her feet, and they both slumped to the ground.
“And she kept them,” Arlene said as she stroked Deborah’s face. “Debbie never lied to me.”
“Shame you can’t say the same,” Jonah said. There were wadded-up panties in the doll as well, stained yellow with either puke or piss. He tossed them aside with a grimace of distaste. “You’d drunk too much, and… what happened, Arlene? Did she have a seizure? And you were a Haddon girl. Even if you couldn’t lay a hex to save her yourself, you knew where to find someone. You knew what to offer them.”
Arlene shook her head and pulled Deborah closer.
