Page 69 of The Year of the Witching

“But it is... at least in part.”

Immanuelle shook her head and slid the drawing across the table again. “It’s yours. Take it.”

Vera didn’t move. Her gaze became hard again, the way it had been last night. She nodded to the journal. “Who gave you that?”

Immanuelle saw no point in lying now, when she’d come all this way to learn the truth. “It was a gift from two women. Witches that I encountered in the Darkwood.”

Vera’s expression remained unchanged. She leaned back into her seat. “Why did you come?”

Immanuelle reached for Miriam’s journal and opened it to the final pages, with the writings:Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. She slid it across the table to Vera.

The woman stared down at the journal. Immanuelle couldn’t parse her expression, but she knew one thing: Her grandmother wasn’t surprised.

“You knew,” said Immanuelle, so softly she wasn’t sure she spoke the words aloud. “You knew about the cabin. You knew about the plagues and the witches and the deal my mother cut with them in the Darkwood. You knew she sold me off.”

Vera stared at her, clearly confused. “Miriam didn’t sell you to the witches. Your mother loved you. She chose you over everything else. Her home, her family, her life, even her soul.”

“That isn’t true. I don’t know what she told you, or what youthink you knew of my mother, but she didn’t love me the way you loved Daniel. She made no sacrifices on my behalf. She sold me out. She bound me to darkness before I was even born. My mother bought the plagues with my blood. All she cared about was vengeance.”

“Your Mother was trying to protect you. Everything that girl had to give, she gave to you.”

“If that’s true, why did she cast the curses?” Immanuelle demanded, growing angry now. “I saw the cabin myself. I know what those sigils on the walls mean. If she loved me so much, why would she use me like that?”

“Like I said, she was trying to protect you.”

“By making me a weapon? A pawn in Lilith’s hands?”

“Miriam was trying to give you the power that she never had. But she was grieving and afraid and sixteen years old and more vulnerable than she knew. Lilith could see that. She perverted Miriam’s desire to protect you, preyed on her weakness. I watched it happen. Every time she ventured into the woods, she was a little more mad than the time before. In the end, I think she was more like them than she was us.”

“In what way?”

Vera paused before answering, as if to sort through her thoughts. “In life, most of us have the luxury of nuance. We may be angry, but we balance that anger with mercy. We may be filled with joy, but that doesn’t prohibit us from empathizing with those who aren’t. But after we die, that changes and we’re distilled down to our most rudimentary compulsions. A single desire so powerful it trumps all others.”

“Like Lilith and her desire for revenge?”

Vera nodded. “Toward the end, your mother became the same way. She was obsessed with protecting you, imbuing you with thepower and freedom she so desperately wanted but never had. It was like she lived for nothing else, so she might as well have been dead.”

The explanation accounted for Miriam’s madness. The writings and sketches in her journal, her singular obsession with the Darkwood and the witches it harbored. But something still plagued Immanuelle, stoked the flames of her rage. “If you knew all that—if you knew my mother was being manipulated and used by Lilith, driven mad by her grief—then why didn’t you do something to stop it?”

Vera struggled with an answer. “Because at the time... I was as sick as she was. I’d lost my boy, watched him burn alive on the pyre before my eyes, and his screams, they haunted me like the witches did your mother. But I didn’t know Miriam would wield the plagues or bring all of this upon your head.”

Immanuelle mulled this for a moment in silence, trying to decide whether or not she believed her. “The cabin where she cast those curses, it was yours?”

Vera nodded. “In part. But it belongs to you too. For twelve generations, the women of the Ward family practiced their magic there.”

“And is that where you taught her the ways of the witches? How to practice the dark craft?”

“I never taught Miriam anything,” said Vera in vehement denial. “What little she learned, she learned from Lilith and from the Darkwood itself.”

“But why did Lilith bother with my mother in the first place? If she was just a grief-sick girl, then why did the witches even answer her calls?”

“They didn’t,” said Vera, speaking low now. “The only reason the witches showed their faces to her was because she bore you inher belly. It was your blood running through Miriam’s veins that gave her the power to cast those curses. The witches were drawn by you.”

Immanuelle’s heart stumbled, skipping several beats. “I don’t understand.”

Vera’s voice grew very soft, and for the briefest moment, she stared at Immanuelle with the same tenderness she did the portrait of her son. “Miriam was a brokenhearted farm girl with a vendetta and a vicious temper. And, yes, she carved the sigils, orchestrated the plagues. But the power she siphoned came from you. A babe with the blood of witches running through her veins. All of that nascent power for the taking. You made the perfect vessel.”

Immanuelle sat, stricken, in her chair, trying and failing to speak. In her bones, she knew what Vera said was true, but one detail gave her pause. “If I’m nothing more than a vessel to the witches, why was I given the journal?”

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