The torn-up rags of a pillow had been used to shape the head. It was definitely puke dried into that.
“It’ll kill you,” she said. “Then him. She’ll forget this. You can’t stop it. I made it with love. Your shit little spells can’t touch it.”
That was her mistake. Her only mistake. It was never love. Oh, people said it was, swore to it, but when it came to the crunch, it was something else. Love went to church. Everything else was the hex-doctor’s business.
“Kill him!” Arlene yelled. She flung her arm out and splashed him with her blood. “Kill him first.”
The hag looked up, her mouth hung open and still drooling booze, and without the full head of filthy matted tangles, the resemblance to Deborah was clear. She dropped Luke to the ground and stuttered across the space between them. She flickered in and out of existence with each step.
“I’m sorry,” Jonah said, “but I’m not laying hexes anymore.”
He stuck his finger down his throat until his teeth scraped his knuckles, and he gagged. Hour-old bitter black coffee spewed up from his stomach and into the emptied-out body of the doll. He sucked the puke off his teeth and spat the last of it in. Then he pulled a handful of salt sachets out of his pocket—some pepper in there too, but he didn’t have time to sort—and stuffed them in with the rest of it.
The hag picked him up and threw him across the graveyard. He hit something that knocked the wind out of him, but he managed to hold on to the doll. It squished foully between his fingers as he got his elbow under him and tried to prop himself up.
He’d landed next to Isiah’s empty little grave. The coffin was smashed open; dirt splattered over the stained wood and sad little lacework blanket inside.
The hag coalesced out of the shadows and landed on his chest. Bony knees dug in under its sternum, and it hunched over him. Its mouth opened, the gash of bright lipstick widening as the cheeks split in raw fissures. Dark, clotted liquid frothed on the back of its tongue and oozed between its teeth. Drops of it splattered on Jonah’s face as it leaned over him.
It didn’t smell like grandad’s whiskey anymore. Cider. The same smell as the apples from the car.
Jonah reached into the grave and wrenched a strip of the lid free. He swung it like a bat and drove the end of the nail into the hag’s face. It pierced through its cheek and came out under the empty socket of an eye. The ground might not be hallowed anymore, but the nail was still an iron nail that had been prayed on. The hag’s makeshift flesh bubbled and dissolved in wet, shredded holes around the metal.
It screamed, and Jonah shoved the puke-soaked poppet into its mouth, as far back as it would go.
Some things weren’t meant to come that close. The magic that made the hag, contaminated by Jonah’s addition, pulled the rules that held it together apart. It threw him backward and pinballed around the graveyard as it tore chunks out of itself. Cigarette butts and old bottle caps, gouts of boozy cider blood, and stained bits of old lace littered the ground for a few seconds before they melted into the curse-rucked-up ground. It pulled up chunks of the spilled hexes and tried to patch itself with them, shoved death into holes and bad luck into its mouth.
Some of the patches filled in with something that wasn’t a monster.
Shiloh sucked in a ragged breath as the ghost who’d pinned him down was strung out into threads of long blond hair.
For a second, at the end, it looked just like Deborah. Younger. Clearer eyed.
The hag looked around at Deborah for a second, her face beautiful and still. Deborah smiled slowly at it and was, just for a moment, beautiful too. Then the hag rotted, ten years of decay in seconds, and came apart.
In Arlene’s arms, Deborah sighed deeply. And that was it.
The torn pieces of curses faded down into the dirt or slunk away into the dark. Shiloh coughed and swore, vicious and precise, as he dragged himself up. And Arlene wailed as she clutched the body of her wife.
Jonah lay there for a second, then rolled over. He pushed himself up onto his knees and flinched as his hand touched something hard-edged and sharp. One of the hex-boxes, still locked and sealed. His fingers brushed over the metal tag screwed to the lid.
“Are you OK?” Luke asked, his voice raw and the stink of booze eye-watering as it spilled off him. Sweaty hands gripped Jonah’s shoulders. “Is it over?”
“Close as it gets,” Jonah said as he let Luke help him up. He looked over the graveyard to where Shiloh had dragged himself out of the mud, filthy and pale. There was blood around his mouth and nose and rage on his face as he looked at Arlene. “For you. At least until the Crows call in their debt.”
Beams of light flickered through the dark as people headed toward them from the farm. Jonah brushed himself down and straightened up so he could stand under his own steam. Apparently he’d lied. The night wasn’t quite over yet.
Shiloh stalked over and dragged Arlene to her feet, away from the corpse.
“Wipe your tears,” he said flatly as he marched her over to the gate. “And make our excuses.”
And that was it.
