Page 82 of The Devil Knows Her Name

“My dad,” he started, but faltered. Perhaps he was remembering the smell, or the prick of the coffin nails through the sleeves, or the glint of silver in the eyes. Alive, his father had been a looming shadow of God’s judgment; dead, he was a martyr and a saint. Now he was something else.

“I don’t think I should leave my mom alone.”

His instincts were good, even dulled by the heavy hand of my new magic. His heart was good. But there was no more room for goodness.

“It’s too late for that,” I said.

He started to run, fleeing back down the hill toward the safety of the village and his mother’s arms, but he couldn’t escape me. Every tree and vine and blade of grass in the valley heeded my call now, and he had not taken two steps from me before the ironweed and bearberry and thistle wrapped around his ankles. He went down hard, his scream cut short and replaced with a breathless groan. The roots and vines and stems coiled and strained, answering the call of my newfound power and dragging him along behind me.

I turned and continued up the hill.

By the time we reached the southern border, he had screamed his throat bloody. His fingernails were broken nubs from clawing at the ground, but the roots and canes and branches were inexorable. They rose like ancient bones, deep earth clinging in black tendrils as they curled around his knees and wrists and neck, extending to their full length before another stretched out to take the burden. His skin was scraped raw by the bark.

I expected the noise to frighten away any creature within a mile, but instead the woods were dotted with the shine of hundreds of eyes. Coyotes, foxes, deer, squirrels, owls—animals of both the day and night, big and small, predator and prey, came to watch our progress through the dark.

This is all for you, I thought. Soon you will all be safe.

We came to the place where my rose had been, and just beyond it, I sensed the new shroud that had been cast over Burrsville. The weave of my old magic paled in comparison to this; there would be no danger of greedy opportunists finding us, not when their eyes skipped over Burrsville’s name on a map, not when their ears muddled the very sound of it, not when their minds refused to hold the memory of it.

David was nearly quiet, his wails reduced to croaks in a ravaged throat. The hole left by the rose’s roots yawned like a grave, and I set him down gently beside it, the roots and vines disentangling from his limbs. His shirt hung off one shoulder, and tears shone on his young cheeks. I bent down, my gown rustling in the grass, and wiped them away with my thumb.

“What’s happening, Tess?” he whispered. “I want to go home.”

I took his hand again and lifted him to his feet. His fingers were a ruin now, but I remembered how gentle they’d been with that first, ill-fated squirrel. I remembered how they’d trailed over the bunches of herbs in the feed room, how they’d administered salve and bandages at my direction. In my periphery, the devil emerged from the clinging shadows of the trees, the pastor’s skin shed. That meant his part was done, and David was all that was left.

“You don’t have a home anymore,” I said quietly. “Isn’t this what you wanted, to be free of them?”

David glanced over his shoulder, his wet, long-lashed eyes open wide and guileless, and caught sight of the devil. I gripped his chin, turned his face back toward me. “You tried to help me, David. You were the only one who did. It didn’t work, but you tried, and now I’m trying to help you. I don’t know if this will work either. I don’t know what will happen to you. But I’m doing my best.”

He shook his head. “No, please—just let me go home.”

“Burrsville is not your home. You have no place here.”

He turned to run back into the trees. I summoned the grasses and the vines again, and they brought him down. He lay there on the ground and wept; I went to him and pulled him up, steadied him as he swayed.

“It won’t hurt. If that’s what you’re worried about, it won’t hurt.”

The veil shimmered in my periphery, close enough to touch. On the other side was the wide world, a place over which I had no power and little knowledge. It was cruel and chaotic, a collapsing system that was almost certainly beyond saving. Worse, I would leave him with nothing—no friends, no protectors, no memory. He might get hit by a car a mile down the road. He might get picked up by someone even more dangerous than me. He might receive all the help the world could possibly give him and still end up destitute and alone, unable to grow once severed from his roots.

But he would have a chance.

“Tess?” the devil asked. “What are you thinking?”

His silver eyes were sharp and curious, but there was no judgment in them. I wiped away the tears still streaming from David’s eyes, and as I did, I wiped his mind clean. He didn’t just forget me, and Burrsville, and the fawn; he forgot his mother, and the way she frowned when he spoke. He forgot his father, and the bike he made him give up for the sake of appearing righteous. He forgot his grandfather and the callouses on his palms from wielding a saw. He forgot his own name, and everything that came with it.

“I’m thinking that I’m not my mother’s daughter,” I said, “and he’s not his father’s son.”

With that, I pushed him through the veil.

He ran. I thought he would fall at first, that I had hollowed him out entirely and he was now just another body, but then his foot stepped out, took his weight, and he ran without hesitation, without looking back. I couldn’t see his face, and I didn’t know if it was freedom or fear that he felt, but a little of both might keep him alive.

The devil came to stand beside me, looking out over the moonlit landscape. “You’re taking a risk,” he said. “What if he finds his way back?”

“Then he finds his way back. I have nothing left to be afraid of.”

Chapter

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