Secret Worlds (58 page)

More onlookers gathered by the second, as though drawn by the sudden commotion. Ivory’s gaze swept across the villagers, some standing with mouths agape while others whispered amongst themselves. She looked at her own disheveled appearance, and then over to Elizabeth, who had dressed in such haste that her bonnet was crooked and her apron loose.

Ivory and Elizabeth stood without movement, a stunned tableau in the center of town. Anne tilted up her nose, smirking. Dirt scraped beneath her square-toed shoe as she turned toward the gathering of townsfolk.

“Witch!” She pointed at Elizabeth. “She has stricken my sister! She bids the devil’s work!”

Ivory searched the faces of the crowd, looking for even one kind expression—
there must be at least one who doubts this accusation
?

But as her gaze landed on one unforgiving face after the other, her hope withered.

***

AT DAWN the next morning, Ivory fell upon the courthouse, carried by a sea of excited townsfolk. She paused outside the low brick wall surrounding the establishment, but her mother pushed her through, whispering in her ear that seeing this would be a good life lesson.

Once inside and seated, Ivory glared at Elizabeth’s husband, who sat on the worn pew at the front of the courtroom. Beside him, Elizabeth’s fourteen-month-old sat with his arms hugged around his stomach.

Magistrate John Thornhart entered the room, his long gray hair stiff and thinning, his narrow, aquiline nose pointing toward his dimpled chin. The crowd quieted, nothing remaining but the creak of the wooden pews and the rustle of papers.

“Bring forth the accused!” His powerful voice sent shivers down Ivory’s spine.

Two men brought Elizabeth into the courtroom and pushed her into a chair. Ivory’s gaze followed the length of her lover’s body from untamed hair to bare, dirtied feet, anger bubbling in her chest at the way she’d been mistreated.

Thornhart crossed the room, his shiny black buckled shoes clicking evenly on the wood floors. He faced Elizabeth, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Elizabeth, what evil spirits have you familiarity with?”

“None,” she replied.

Thornhart raised one eyebrow and paced away. He looked back over his shoulder to her. “Have you made no contract with the devil?”

“No,” Elizabeth said, her voice harder and more direct.

Thornhart pointed at Ivory, his gaze still leveled at Elizabeth. “Why do you curse this woman?”

Ivory shot to her feet. “I have no grievance! She does not harm me!”

Thornhart jerked his head toward her. “Speak not out of turn, I warn you, Sarah, lest you are attempting to curse us as well.”

As all the eyes in the courtroom shifted to Ivory, her skin prickled with heat. She lowered herself to her seat.

“Elizabeth, what say you?” Thornhart asked.

“I do not curse her.” Elizabeth’s voice remained strong. Still, her eyes pleaded to the court, and Ivory’s heart dropped to her stomach.

“Who, then, do you employ has cursed her?”

“No creature, for I am falsely accused!”

There was an edge of anger in Elizabeth’s voice, and the crowd murmured.

“You bid the work of the devil when you make this woman lay with you as a heathen.”

Was the town so sick with desire for a witch-hunt that they would accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft before considering both women guilty of expressing their love to one another?

“Anne, you identified her as the one who torments your sister.” Thornhart paused briefly from his pacing. “What have you to say in evidence?”

Anne fingered a small pendant on a chain at her neck. “My sister behaves strangely only when in Elizabeth’s presence. The witch is an enemy to all good!”

Ivory kept her arms crossed, hoping her expression was stoic and cold instead of as rigid and fearful as she felt. Already she tasted the tears in the back of her throat.

“See now what you have done, Elizabeth? Redeem yourself and speak the truth, for you have cursed this woman.”

Elizabeth’s hands curled into tight fists. “I do not curse her!”

“Tell us, Elizabeth. How do you curse her?”

Before Elizabeth could declare her innocence once more, her husband stood. His expression was weighted, and he swallowed. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet Ivory had to strain to hear.

“She tells me of voices that speak to her,” he said. “She has been accursed for some time now.” He lifted his apologetic gaze to Elizabeth. “I’m so sorry. Please, let them help you.”

Ivory nearly choked on the air. Elizabeth had told him? The revelation was a sharp knife in Ivory’s heart. How could Elizabeth have been so foolish?

Thornhart’s eyebrows rose. “Tell us of this curse, Elizabeth. Confess of it and the evil things you’ve done as its vessel. It is the only path to redemption.”

Elizabeth shook her head slowly. “There is no evil in me,” she said. “I have harmed none.”

Two girls started screeching and writhing on the ground. One’s body went limp.

Thornhart spoke over the crowd’s loud chattering. “Order!”

“She has afflicted me, too,” one girl cried. “Look at these punctures on my arm. They are the bite marks of her specter!”

Ivory shot the girl a dirty look. The marks on her arm were caused by nothing other than the dig of her own fingernails.

Thornhart whipped his gaze back to Elizabeth. “Why do you torment these children? Why will you not confess, when we can see you clearly for what you are?”

All of the village joined in: “Confess! Confess!”

Though the shrieking of the girls bounced off the room’s wooden walls, Elizabeth would not confess. Thornhart asked the jury of their verdict, and they returned a true bill.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ivory mouthed to her lover, the tears hot on her cheeks. Her nose stuffed up, causing a pressure in her head that throbbed with each fearful thought.

Ivory had been a fool to believe there was any hope. Elizabeth’s guilt had been determined by the very fact she’d been accused.

Thornhart declared Elizabeth’s execution to be carried out immediately. “Let the first witch hanged be an example.”

Anne grabbed Ivory by the arm. “I did this for you, Sarah. It could have been you both meeting an end, had I not accused her.”

Ivory didn’t believe one word. Her sister had always been jealous of Elizabeth, ever since Elizabeth’s family forced her to marry the man Anne loved.

Disgusted, Ivory clenched her fists and pulled away from her sister. “You will burn in hell, Anne, and no prayer will save you.”

Two men escorted Elizabeth to the gallows. The sun beat against the planks of the platform where the crowd huddled near. Some of the townspeople cupped hands by their mouths to holler and condemn her. Others held baskets of rotten vegetables, the scent overpowered only by the pine of the newly constructed gallows and the draft of horse manure from the wagon awaiting her corpse.

The rope binding Elizabeth’s frail wrists pinched and reddened her flesh. One of the men shoved her toward the platform’s steps, but the only sign of fear was the tension along her temples and the slight tremble of her lip.

Elizabeth’s gaze found Ivory’s, eyes soft and forgiving. A man looped the noose around Elizabeth’s neck, and Thornhart’s shoes thudded across the planks, somehow louder than the excited murmurs of the crowd.

Children climbed on barrels and the shoulders of their parents for a better view. Townsfolk spat at Elizabeth and tossed their rotten produce. A man to Ivory’s side lifted a stone from the ground, but as he cocked his arm back, Ivory jabbed her elbow hard into his ribs and ducked away as he keeled over.

“Confess,” Thornhard said, “should you save yourself from the rope.”

Elizabeth defiantly stuck out her chin, but her gaze was already dimming. “I have nothing to confess. I meet my fate with a pure heart.”

The crowd grew eerily silent. Tears lined Ivory’s eyes, but she rigidly held them back. She watched until just moments before they dropped the floor, then turned quickly to leave. She heard the snap of Elizabeth’s neck, the tug and creak of taut rope, the shuffle of fabric. An eruption of cheers followed.

Ivory wove through the crowd, trying to hold it together. Guilt dug like sharp nails into her heart. She should have done something more to save Elizabeth. But what? What could she have done, other than get herself killed, too?

Perhaps that is what a real lover would have done. Died alongside a loved one. Never again did Ivory want to hear her name spoken aloud. Sarah was the woman who would have saved Elizabeth from this town, and she had failed.

Ivory turned back, stealing one last glance at Elizabeth’s empty gaze. Thornhart signaled to the hangman, who sawed through the rope with a large hunting knife. The body thumped into the wagon below.

Ivory broke out of the crowd and stormed off to a quiet spot they’d kept in the woods.

“Speak to me now!” she cried out to the Universe. “Tell me what you want!”

Garnering no response, she fell to her knees and cried. Her fierce sobbing emptied her stomach of what little she’d managed to eat that morning. When her tears subsided, it was dark, but she knew what must be done. The town would kill Ivory if they caught her, but she refused to send Elizabeth from the world this way.

Elizabeth’s body still remained in the open wagon near the platform, crumpled over the loose hay of the wagon’s bed, her hazel eyes as empty as buttons that had lost their luster. Thornhart had left her there, a reminder to the townsfolk of what would become of anyone who dared perform witchcraft.

Ivory shook her head, vomit rising from her stomach in disgust at the people of her town. One day, Ivory hoped to see them suffer.

All the houses in the village were dark and the roads bare. Arms looped under Elizabeth’s shoulders, Ivory dragged her lover’s body into the woods behind a nearby store. She sagged beneath the weight in the same way the weathered roofs of the town drooped from the weight of snow in the winter. Elizabeth’s body was stiff and cold to the touch—not how Ivory wanted to remember her.

Ivory’s resolve, paired with the overwhelming feeling of loss, pushed her, lending her strength as she pulled her lover farther down the path to a barren clearing that offered little more than a rotted apple core festering in maggots.

She piled dead leaves, branches, and debris near a decaying tree stump and laid Elizabeth’s body over the compost. Ivory breathed deeply and spoke to the Universe once more.

“You have made her this way—brought her to this end! Now I return her to you. Take her ashes, so that her spirit may live on.”

She burned the body. The skin melted against bones, and blood bubbled until little remained. Smoking charcoal and sulfur accosted her nostrils.

When the fire exhausted and the remains cooled, Ivory wiped the tears from her cheeks and whispered, “Live on, my love.”

She covered the evidence with dirt and hiked away from town.

What Anne had witnessed was love, not witchcraft. She had been unknowingly correct when she accused Elizabeth of being a witch, but she hadn’t known what being a witch meant. Ivory and Elizabeth had harmed none.

Though more deaths followed, the court’s approach shifted by the next hanging. Thornhart was perhaps spooked by the disappearance of Elizabeth’s body but clearly not enough to put an end to the horror. Ivory returned to town only long enough to steal Elizabeth’s court documents—documents detailing the trial of the only true witch killed during the Salem witch trials—and to murder her sister.

***

IVORY’S FIRST THOUGHTS upon waking were, as always, of Elizabeth. A sharp pang pierced through her, and she tried to lift her hand to wipe grit from her lips, but instead she found her movement restricted. Her wrists and ankles seared with pain. She could do little more than raise her head and shoulders from the ground. After blinking several times, her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting.

Chains staked into the ground bound her wrists and ankles, the metal burning against her flesh as though heated over a fire before securing her. She glanced around, a stillness where her heart would’ve normally sped.

Dirty sheets of canvas billowed on every side, and, straight ahead, two flaps opened to a wooded area and a small campfire. The air carried the scent of smoke, cold, and earth.

This was someone else’s tent—not her own. A small cot with rumpled sheets and a thin woolen blanket sat to one side of the tent, and to the other side was a wash basin filled with water.

No, not water
, she thought.
It’s too dark to be water
.

There was a brushing sound outside the tent. Boots scuffing over leaves, she realized as a pair of legs came into view. A man bent to stir the fire.

“You have awakened,” he said without looking back.

Ivory tried to speak, but her throat felt cracked and burning. He strode into the tent and crouched beside her.

“There is not much life in these parts. I drained you first”—he pointed to the washbasin—“so that we may eat.”

He doesn’t mean…that is my blood?

“Why?” she whispered hoarsely.

“Please see it as a gift. I could have killed you.”

The man turned to face her, his skin an unnatural pallor in the moonlight. His hair was dark, even his eyebrows the darkest she had ever seen, and his nose hooked a little toward the end, dimpled on one side. He sat back and kicked his feet in front of him.

He dribbled something into her mouth—a fluid that soothed her throat. “Drink,” he said. “You will feel better.”

Each suggestion he made reflected in Ivory’s own thoughts. Their minds were as one.

“I must keep you restrained,” he said, “until your urges pass. The silver with which I have bound you will sap your strength, but you will see soon enough the great power you now possess.”

Without a need for words, the man’s knowledge became one with hers. He was her sire—the one who had turned her. She would live eternally. She would never pass to the afterlife where Elizabeth surely awaited her arrival, not unless her life was taken from her, and Ivory already knew she was too much of a coward to allow that, let alone carry out the deed herself.