Bert nods, sadly. “I told you. It’s taken root in her.”
My mouth is very dry, vision blurred. I claw at Bert’s restraint as Alice moves closer. I scuffle for purchase on the linoleum. He continues to hold the witch pricker out, his hand steady.
“I don’t want to,” Alice says quietly. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
“It doesn’t hurt them. You know that, don’t you?”
I watch with dread fascination as Alice reluctantly lifts her hand, hesitates, then grasps the witch pricker. Bert turns it carefully so the blade is pointed outward, mindful that she holds it the right way. The look of vacancy on his face is terrifying. I am frozen to the spot.
“She doesn’tlooklike a witch,” Alice says uncertainly.
“That’s because it wears a human cloak,” Bert replies. “You’ll be next. In the night you’ll wake and find the Devil in your throat. Do you want that?”
“No,” Alice says tearfully.
“Don’t listen to him!” I urge her, as pain radiates from my armpit in tight, muscular waves. “It’s me, it’s Mina!”
“Look at her, Alice.Reallylook at her.”
Bert pulls my hair until my face is tilted up to the ceiling. I’m pale and breathless and wild-looking and something in Alice’s face is frightening me. She believes him. Alice grabs the handle of the witch pricker with both hands as if she is going to drive it into my skull.
“It wants you to hesitate,” Bert continues in the muffled silence, almost drowned out by my frantic, panting breath. “The longer you wait, the better as far as the witch is concerned. It has more time to think of all the ways it will dig into you when it has the chance.”
I see Alice tighten her knuckles as she steadies her grip. Her eyes widen.
“I’m sorry, Mina,” she whispers and then she drives the witch pricker into the top of my thigh. The shock makes me gasp and I twist violently. Bert’s hand is tangled in my hair and there is a ripping sound as strands are tugged free at the follicles. I look down at where Alice has jabbed the pricker but there is something wrong. Different.There’s no pain,I think calmly.There’s no blood.Alice frowns, pulling the pricker out of my thigh. I lift the material slowly and study the place it went in. There is a small, red mark, barely visible. Nothing more. I rub at it, confused.
“You see?” Bert says with mocking triumph. “The witch’s mark. I told you.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
I’m thinking about the ice. Thinking about the pyres on the Green climbing toward the arch of the heavens. A flower crown is placed, Caesar-like, over my head. It makes me look ethereal; green-gray leaves of sage and sprigs of fresh rosemary studded with little purple flowers, cow parsley and borage with its pale, watery blues and star-shaped blooms.
I am a Goddess. I am an ascending angel. I am speaking in tongues.
Bert says, it is time for your Riddance, Mina Ellis.
THIRTY-NINE
My head is spinning and the stones around my neck are so heavy they pin me to the earth. My footsteps drag over the grass. I experience moments of strange clarity punctuated with flashes of nothing, lost time. A small, distant part of me knows it is a reaction to the shock. My mind is reduced to rubble, smoking craters and scorched earth. It retreats.
—FLASH—
The night is inkydark, humidity pressing close to the skin. Smothering us. Sam, running his hands through his hair, walking beside me, long shadowed, pleading. He is still clutching that shoe to his chest, glassy eyes deeply socketed. Distantthunder over the moors, a pall of hazy smoke across the green. The crackling PA system, which plays over speakers hanging from the branches of the trees; a waltz, the tune slow-moving and drowsy. Children running through the dark laughing and playing pixie in the dell, holding sparklers aloft and streaking embers like comets. The stones hanging around my neck are rubbing the flesh of my neck raw. Paul and Lisa beside the bonfire, their features corrupted by shadows so it looks as though they have holes for eyes.
—FLASH—
Bert is cloaked insmoke and darkness.
—FLASH—
Sweat warm and saltyon my lips. The bonfire is a spirited wraith in veils of orange and gold, logs split and crackling and throwing up sparks and I’ve never felt more beautiful. I let the heat press against my skin, the fury of it. Crowds of people stare with wet, moony eyes: the woman with the dog that pissed on the gate; teenage boys on their bikes; young girls in tank tops and eyeliner, glossy lipped, unafraid; a man with a round face and upward slanted eyes shouting something, spraying spittle all over me.
—FLASH—
Someone shouts, “Good Riddance,”and throws something at my feet. There is a bang loud enough to make my teeth rattle and acheer goes up from the crowd. A scorch of lightning flickers blue and silver in the sky to the east. The dress billows around me.
—FLASH—