Page 18 of The Year of the Witching

Her name rose to Immanuelle’s lips like a curse. “Lilith.”

The Beast huffed hard. Steam churned through the cracks of her skull, coiling around her antlers.

Immanuelle squatted low to the mud. Even in her terror, she had the good sense to know a queen when she saw one. She dropped her gaze, her heart pounding so hard within her chest it hurt. And there she lay, prostrate in the muck and shadow, her breath hitching, her tears cutting tracks through the grime and pond sludge on her cheeks.

She was going to die there; she was sure of it. She was going to die like the others who’d been fool enough to cross into the woodsat night. She had no faith that she would reach the heavens—not after all of her sins and folly—but she prayed anyway.

The Beast’s feet shifted. Her bare toes clutched the mud as she lowered herself to a crouch. Immanuelle risked a glance upward. That great skull head angled to the side, a motion so human, even girlish, that for a fleeting moment, Immanuelle was reminded of Glory.

The Beast raised a hand that looked only loosely human. With fingers that were long and impossibly thin, she skimmed along the bridge of Immanuelle’s nose, then slipped down to the dip of her cupid’s bow.

Transfixed, Immanuelle searched for Lilith’s eyes, staring into the fearsome skull’s black, empty sockets. But she found nothing within them but steam and swirling shadows.

Her knees went weak beneath her.

Lilith wrapped a giant, cold hand around her wrist and dragged her to her feet. The wind shuddered through the forest, and the trees seemed to bow and tremble in her wake. The waters of the pond churned and surged, and fog flooded the clearing, swirling around her ankles. As the creature raised a hand to tuck a curl behind Immanuelle’s ear, something like a sob broke from her lips.

Then pain pierced through her stomach once more, and Immanuelle doubled over, barely staying on her feet. Again, she begged for salvation—this time out loud—calling to the Father, then to the Mother, and finally to Lilith herself, whatever gods might deign to listen.

But there was no response, nothing. Nothing but the burning pain in her belly.

And as Immanuelle’s knees weakened beneath her, a trail of blood slicked down her leg, threading along the slope of her calf and slipping down to her ankle, where it disappeared into the water pooling at her feet.

All at once, the pond stilled.

The wind calmed, and the trees ceased their thrashing.

Lilith retreated slowly into the shadows, dipping her skull low to avoid catching the branches with her antlers. As she did so, Immanuelle could have sworn she saw something briefly flicker in the blacks of her sockets. And then the witch was gone.

IMMANUELLE RAN. BUTwith every step, every lunge she took through brush and bracken, the pain in her stomach grew sharper, and the darkness grew thicker, and the forest seemed to swallow her up, dragging her back ten feet for every five she sprinted. Overhead, the branches arched into a strange kaleidoscope, moonlight splintering, shadows smearing, stars flickering in the black.

But she ran onward, even as the darkness dragged at her ankles, drawing her back to the forest’s heart. She saw a distant light in the darkness. The dull glow of candle-warmed windows. The Moore farmhouse peered through the gaps between trees.

Pain carved through her belly and a great roaring filled her ears as the shadows rose around her. The last thing Immanuelle saw, before the night swallowed her, was the bright eye of the moon, winking through the trees.

CHAPTERNINE

With the bloodletting comes the power of the heavens and hells. For an iron offering buys atonement, in all of its many forms.

—THEHOLYSCRIPTURES

IMMANUELLE WOKE SPRAWLEDacross the floor. It took her a few seconds to realize she was not in the deep of the Darkwood, but in her own house, in her own kitchen, lying facedown at the foot of the sink. Across the room, her wet and muddied cloak lay in a heap beside the back door, which was slightly ajar.

All at once, the memories of the night came flooding back to her. There was Delilah slithering through the reeds and shallows, Lilith slipping back into the shadows of the Darkwood as silently as she arrived, the branches closing in around her, the darkness falling. She remembered running through the woods, the pain in her belly, the bleeding, collapsing at the forest’s edge, the moon’s face peering down at her through the breaks between trees.

She might have thought it was all a dream, if not for the black sludge caked beneath her nails, her wet hair and muddy nightdress.

No, it had happened.Allof it had happened.

From the blue light seeping in through the kitchen window, she knew it was nearing sunup, though as far as she could tell the rest of the household had yet to wake. She was grateful for that.She could only imagine the thrashing Martha would inflict if she knew Immanuelle had been in the forest again.

Immanuelle pushed the thought from her mind, tasting bile at the back of her throat. Dull pain split through her belly again and she winced. Squinting, she peered down between her legs to see that there was a small, cold puddle of blood beneath her. She was flowing freely, the red wet seeping through her underskirts and staining the floorboards.

Her first bleed.

IMMANUELLE SCRAMBLED TOclean the kitchen, sopping up the blood with an old dish towel, wiping the mud away. When the floor was scrubbed clean, she crept upstairs to the washroom, snatched a fistful of rags from the basket by the sink, and struggled to fit them into her bloomers, feeling less like a woman and more like a toddler trying to change its own soiling cloths. Her bleed should have been a moment of celebration, relief—against all odds, she was a woman at last—but all she felt was small and wounded and a little sick.

Immanuelle shared the news with Anna first, then Martha after her. There was a flurry of excitement, someone sat her down in a dining room chair, provided her with a steaming cup of raspberry-leaf tea and a plate of eggs and fry cake, which she felt far too ill to eat. But despite Anna’s insistence that she remain in bed, by sunup Immanuelle was on her way to the pastures, crook in hand. Herding the flock was a difficult task. She was slow and tired from her night in the woods, and her belly ached with the pains of bleeding. The flock seemed to sense her disquiet. The rams were restless, the ewes skittish. The lambs bleated at every passing breeze as if they feared the wind would snatch the meat off their bones. It took everything Immanuelle had to herd themto the western pastures, and when the deed was finally done, she collapsed into the high grass, spent, her stomach aching.

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