A shiver crawls up my spine.
Them girls.
Plural.
“That scream still rakes across my sleep,” she mutters. “Cut my story clean in half.”
I stare at her—this woman bornen caul. “I came across something while doing someresearch. It was an old interview with your grandmother.”
She smiles, only somehow, she doesn’t look better for it.
I can picture Harper cowering at the sight.
A witch, she would say.
“She talked about children bornen caul,” I continue, “which supposedly gives them second sight. With the ability to see into a place calledde Overlaag.”
Mistress Bramble looks at me without blinking.
“You were bornen caul.”
She nods once.
“So you can see into it—de Overlaag.”
She doesn’t object.
I exhale a bit disbelievingly. “What is it?”
She doesn’t answer at first. She just stares past us, through us, like we’re not there, the smoke from her pipe drifting around her like a spirt. I start to think she won’t answer at all, when finally, she speaks. “This valley has always been thin. A wrinkle between worlds, thanks to them angels inside that tomb you opened Halloween Night.”
My mouth falls open.
“How do you know this?” Jude asks.
“Those who came before me stretch back as far as that there codex. When my ancestors settledhere, in the new world, they made it their business to know, and to pass that knowin’ along.” She comes forward in her seat and flips several pages. This time, to a series of drawings. A tomb. A comet. An angel with wings. A young man resurrected.
It’s the story of Seraphina, of Ezra and Raphael Vandenberg, of the curse.
There’s a date, too.
A very familiar date.
One featured in my last podcast episode with Twig, the finale of season two onAccounts of the Uncanny. The topic was Dante’s Comet, which blazed across the night sky on Halloween. The last time it came was 268 years ago, and it was accompanied by a flash of blinding light. Multiple people in Foggy Hollow—andonlyFoggy Hollow—witnessed it.
I run my thumb across the date. “The Flash of 1757.”
“You know what caused it?” Mistress Bramble asks.
Suddenly, I do.
It’s so obvious, I’m not sure why I haven’t connected the dots until now.
“A massive supernatural event,” I say.
When a mortal moved against an angel and his brother died in the crossfire. He begged that angelto bring his brother back to life. She did, but then he trapped her in a tomb and she cast a curse.
“It blew that wrinkle wide. And for 268 years, it’s been feedin’. It feeds and it feeds, and everything inside does the same.”
