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“Drowning.” I tried to show her, but there’s not a lot of detail when you are submerged in a vat of saltwater. So I added what little I knew: “Dunking stool. Prisoner of an old lady.”
“Geneviève . . . how?”
The stool popped above the water, and I was left dripping wet, chained to a wooden dunking chair. I was also no longer able to thought-speak with Beatrice.
“You will forsake your evil master before you die, Geneviève.” The woman gave me such a piteous look, bobbing her head and revealing that her hot-roller curls had been practically shellacked. “I want you to enter Heaven, which means you must be without sin and—”
My laughter buried her words. “You have me confused with someone else, Grannie. I have no sinful congress to repent. You want me to repudiate Satan? Done. ‘Get thee behind me.’ That’s the words, right?”
The supposed nun sighed before saying, “I fear this will be a long night. We’ll get you to atone, Geneviève Crowe. The Sisters of Purity and Redemption have yet to fail. Every witch atones before her death.”
With that ominous proclamation, she affixed a ring to the other end of the lever and stepped back. All I could think about was the “every witch” part. How many people died at their hands? How could a person claim religious faith and still harm others? How did she see herself as righteous, but steal the freedom and lives of other people?
And how was I going to escape before I was added to the death toll?
I studied the room around me as I was left suspended in mid-air, chained to a chair over a vat of salt water, and Sister Purity—or whatever the batty old bird’s name was—turned and tugged open a heavy wooden door that glided open on silent rollers. Beyond the door was an antechamber, what looked like a mud room, and beyond that was another wooden door. That one had a grate of metal bars so the person outside could see the face of the person on this side of the door.
“Sister Agnes,” a man’s voice said.
There, smiling his accountant’s smile, was Chester—oldest living human, alchemist, murderer of the only reanimated Hexen I knew, and hater of yours truly.
That, more than anything else, made me question the likelihood of escape. It wasn’t about the corrupt nuns, or the chains, or anything so mundane. The cold truth was that even if I were unchained, I wasn’t certain I stood a chance against Chester.
Trapped and chained, I was fairly sure I was facing death.
8
GENEVIÈVE
Ihad tried to summon my fae magic, my necromancy, mydraugrstrengths. Nothing seemed to enable me to break free of the chair. I didn’t know enough about alchemy to say if there was a spell, binding, or whatever other esoteric knowledge Chester had gathered to nullify my own magic. Alchemy was a field that was both credited as the source of early chemistry and affiliated with magic.
And alchemists were notorious for not correctly writing down spells, recipes, or instructions. They would leave an element out or transfer a detail, create a key that was specific to them or that had to be added to the information in a book to make it work. As such, the knowledge that I had learned was a lot of “maybe this would work if I had the key” mixed with “this feels like blatant misdirection.” Chester being an alchemist already explained a lot about his personality.
It also meant that I was unable to undo whatever he’d done to bind my magic here.
Am I going to die here?The cost of being born a witch shouldn’t be my life. That statement, I believed, ought to be true for most every category—with obvious exceptions like predators. Inthatcase, I was intolerant. But to hold me captive because of my genetics was absurd.
Eventually, I must’ve drifted to sleep because I woke as another woman entered my prison chamber. This one looked barely out of high school, all spindly legs and arms, as if a scarecrow had decided to don a veil that exposed only the short fringe across her forehead.
“I’m Sister Beverly,” she greeted. “I’ll be your confessor for this session.”
Without any other words, she flicked the ring off the lever.
I gasped for air as I plummeted back under the tepid salt water. The last nun seemed to have a sense of how long a person could safely hold her breath, but drowning was a very real fear as I tried to stay calm under the water. No magic. No rescue. Each moment my body was attacked, I weakened. No food. And if Ididget set free, there was Chester.
There was a very distinct chance that I was going to die here.
I let my muscles relax as best I could. Panic wasn’t the answer.
“Geneviève!”
At some point in the last hours, I’d convinced myself that I imagined talking to Beatrice, but now that I was under the water, I could hear her again.
“Geneviève!”
I mentally exhaled in relief and began to pelt images and words at her rapid-fire,“Chester. Sisters of Purity and Redemption. Well. Stone room. Dunking chair. No windows. At least two stories.”
“Saltwater?”
