Page 51 of The Year of the Witching

Immanuelle stood up and went over to examine the sigils more closely. She traced the sweeping contours of each carving in turn, moving slowly from one wall to the next: one birthing seal, one cursing seal, and a binding mark between them.

Her blood begets blood.The words from Miriam’s journal danced in her mind. She thought back to the night at the pond with the witches, to the start of the blood taint. The first plague, and all of the plagues to follow it, triggered by her first bleed.

Her bleed. Her blood.

They will call her Immanuelle. Her blood begets blood.

The truth struck her like a knife between the ribs.

Lilith hadn’t cast the plagues. Miriam had.

And Immanuelle was the curse.

CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR

We will soon have to choose between who we wish to be and who we must be to carry on. One way or another, there will be a cost.

—FROMTHELASTLETTERSOFDANIELWARD

IMMANUELLE HAD NEVERbeen quick to anger. As a child, under Martha, she’d been well schooled in the virtues of patience and restraint; she was more apt to take a slap than to deliver one. But now, as she emptied her lamp, splashing the walls of the cabin with kerosene, an ugly rage ripped through her, as if some animal caged within was trying to claw its way out.

She’d been used.

It was a truth so terrible, Immanuelle could barely conceive it. It was worse than being the harbinger of the plagues, worse than damnation itself. The idea that her mother—for whom she’d spent nearly seventeen years grieving—had never loved her as anything more than a weapon, an agent of her own vengeance.

Immanuelle threw oil across the sigils with blind fury. She snatched the pack of matches from her knapsack and struck one alight, holding it pinched between her fingers as she stared up at the oil-slick carvings.

One for cursing. One for binding. One for birthing.

She flicked the match into the puddle of kerosene a few feet away and a sea of fire washed across the floor. She retreated as theflames rushed down the hall after her, past the threshold, spilling into the front room. In a matter of moments, the building was almost entirely engulfed.

Immanuelle emerged from the cabin in a cloud of ash and cinder. She wasn’t sure if she was crying more from the rage or the smoke. She took no comfort in the sight of the cabin burning. A few flames weren’t enough to protect her from the truth.

To avenge her lover, Miriam had surrendered her daughter, body and soul, to Lilith’s coven. She was their curse made flesh, and everything—the blood and the blight, the darkness and slaughter to come—it was all within her. Miriam hadn’t wanted justice; she had wanted blood... and Immanuelle had provided. That night in the Darkwood, when she had bled for the first time, she’d unleashed it all. This was Miriam’s legacy: one not of love, but of vengeance—and betrayal.

Smoke tumbled through the treetops as the cabin continued to burn. The heat was such that Immanuelle staggered back, the ash on the air so thick it nearly choked her.

But still, she didn’t retreat.

In her heart, she knew it made no difference—the cabin on fire, the flames of her own rage roaring from within. None of it would amount to anything more than cinders on the wind. But it felt good, so good, to burn and rage and lose herself to the flames. It was her own personal purging, and in that moment, it was the only comfort she had. She felt almost drunk with it, and perhaps Miriam had as well, all those years ago, when after Daniel Ward’s death she’d fled to the Darkwood and struck her deal with the witches. Maybe that devouring rage had mattered more to her than anything else... her soul, her daughter, her own life.

But even as Immanuelle’s anger boiled within her—even as her rage and guilt consumed her—she couldn’t imagine selling her family to the darkness the way that Miriam had sold her.

And therein lay the difference between them.

Immanuelle ran then, fleeing the forest and all of its evils, leaving the burning cabin behind her. Every time she closed her eyes—every time she blinked—she could see the words carved into the walls, the sigils that tied her to the curses... and she ran even harder.

After a long, brutal sprint through the thicket, she emerged from the woods and into the light of the setting sun. She brushed the leaves off her skirts and tried to collect herself, picking the twigs from her hair and wiping the last of her tears on her sleeve.

No one could know what she had found in the woods. Not if she wanted to live.

Upon returning from the Outskirts and reaching the Moore house, she found Martha outside, axe in hand, stooped over the chopping block. Without a word of greeting, the elder woman walked to the chicken coop, seized a hen by the throat, and forced it to the block. In one smooth shift of the shoulders, she cleaved its head from its neck. The hen’s body scrambled off the stump, wings snapping, claws scrabbling for purchase as it hit the ground.

The Moores usually killed chickens only on holy days, so this was a rare treat, but Immanuelle couldn’t muster any joy. The fear in her belly had been replaced by rage since her discovery of the cabin, but now it began to build again as she read the dark expression on Martha’s face.

Panic took hold of her: the blight, the girls. Sometimes—on the gravest of days—the Father demanded sacrifice, blood in exchange for a blessing. And perhaps, if they were desperate enough, if one or both of them had taken a turn for the worse...

“Honor and Glory—”

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