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But all else falls away when, as her sentence is read aloud, she turns that bewitching gaze toward Isaiah and me and I realize I stand alone. Isaiah has vanished. Or maybe he was never here at all. Maybe it was me all along.
Her gaze makes my heart stop beating. It sends a shiver so cold along my spine that I wonder if it’s all true. If she is a witch after all. If there is such a thing.
The wagon is moving again, the horse carrying the doomed woman up the hill to the hanging tree.
I swallow down bile, my jaw tense, teeth so tightly clenched my face hurts. I watch her, the crowd hurling accusations, condemnations. It’s all background noise to me.
Our locked gaze is broken when two men mount the carriage, and I am relieved. They take her bound arms and move her toward the readied noose. She struggles.
It’s the first time she betrays her fear, and there is an evil inside me that relishes the sight. It shames me. Maybe I’m no different than Isaiah Delacroix. No less evil. I am, after all, of the bloodline, a direct descendent. The next Penitent.
They turn her so she is facing me again. This is what Isaiah’s money has bought.
Her eyes lock on mine once more. Eyes I know. They belong to another Wildblood. One not for this time. One who will be sacrificed to me.
When they fasten the noose around Elizabeth’s neck, I feel the rope scrape roughly against my own. My throat closes up as they tighten it.
Always in this nightmare, this time is ours. Her witch’s gaze never leaves mine. This is our shared moment. It’s seconds away, her execution, and it’s then that her lips begin to move, subtly at first.
So subtly I’m the only one to see it.
To feel it.
An angry wind icier than the morning air howls in the distance, and the line of the sun darkens, a storm cloud appearing out of nowhere to obscure it.
A woman screams. Another follows. Cries from the crowd quickly grow into a full panic as Elizabeth Wildblood’s lips move faster, speaking her silent words. She casts her spell, her curse, as thunder rumbles in the distance, lightning splitting the now near-black sky.
Screams to hang the witch abound. Our eyes remain locked even as the men hurry to jump from the carriage, to flee the witch in their panic.
I know the driver wants to crack his whip over the back of his horse and get away from her as fast as he can, but there’s money in it for him if he goes slowly. If her neck snaps, he only gets a third of it. It’s a mercy Isaiah would not allow her. She will hang. She will feel the rope tighten around her neck, feel it bite into that delicate, alabaster flesh and slowly, ever so slowly, strangle her.
Some darkness inside of me is jealous of that rope, and I know Isaiah hasn’t fully left me. He’s inside my head, his vile thoughts contaminating mine.
The horse neighs. The animal wants to be away, and in the next instant, the wagon is gone from under her, and she drops. The branch creaks even with her slight weight. But her lips are still moving, and her eyes are still on mine, and I pull my hands out of my pockets because I can’t breathe.
But when I see what it was in Isaiah’s—my—pocket, a wave of nausea has me stumbling. I open my hand and watch those wisps of the reddest hair fly into the wind, some sticking to my palm with her wet blood.
The noose is tighter now and I’m choking. I’m fucking choking. Even though she is the one at the end of that rope, it is I who cannot breathe.
Blood vessels burst in Elizabeth’s eyes. It’s the last thing I see before she stops her twisting, her turning, a stream of urine running down her legs, over her bare feet and into the ground. She swings there in that icy morning, her eyes open, locked on me in death. Accusing me. Cursing me.
My own throat is raw as the dark cloud vanishes back to the hell it came from, and there’s one final shift in the scene, this nightmare of mine. One new aspect I haven’t seen before.
The woman hanging from the rope, it’s no longer Elizabeth. This woman is not yet dead. Her eyes accuse me just as those of her ancestor did only moments earlier.
And I hear Isaiah Delacroix’s voice again telling me it’s time, boy.
The Tithing time.
Time for the next Wildblood witch to be sacrificed.
1
WILLOW
“Blessings!” Cordelia sings as she presents a three-layer chocolate cake onto the table before me.
As the youngest Wildblood sibling, it is her privilege to deliver the cake to the birthday recipient each year, an honor she has always loved and cherished. But this year, even my youngest sister seems to be aware of the dark shadow looming over the festivities. In place of her vibrant smile is a notably tamer one, and the lightness she injected into her tone was forced–much like all the moods around the table this evening.
