March 19, 2026
Salem, Massachusetts
The ceremonial athame didn’t look like much.
Eliza had expected… well, she didn’t know what she had expected exactly. Something ancient and foreboding-looking, perhaps. Instead, it looked plain, as if its only purpose were to open letters.
“Okay, Eliza, walk it through for me one more time,” Aunt Ivy said.
Eliza recited the plan the way she’d once recited her catechisms. “We leave the house at four, Holly drives. We arrive before first light and walk in from the road. You’ll carry the bag, I carry the blade. At the crossroads by the stone wall, you lay the salt and light the candles. I’ll make the offering.” Her thumb pressed against her opposite palm, as if practicing for the slice. “And then I draw blood and call upon the Keeper.”
“That’s right, very good. And if she comes?”
“I state my intent, to trade places with Lilith.” Eliza glanced up. “And I answer any of her questions truthfully.”
Aunt Ivy nodded. The kitchen smelled of afternoon coffee and a rosemary and lemon pepper chicken they had for dinner. Outside the window, the last of the sun’s light was fading.
“Aunt Ivy,” Eliza said. “Are you worried that we haven’t heard from Lils yet? We won’t know if she’ll be there.”
Ivy took it in. “You’re right, we won’t know.”
Eliza waited for the rest of it, the comforting part, the but. Aunt Ivy was usually generous with her buts.
Instead, Ivy picked up the silver and black leather athame and turned it over in her hands.
“My grandmother used to say that a spell is half preparation and half faith, and faith is the half that does the heavy lifting.” She set the knife back down, center between the salt and the candles. “Holly and I have done everything we know to do, Eliza. The rest of it, we have to trust will take care of itself. So I’m choosing to believe that our girl will find her way to a crossroads during Ostara. She’s a Proctor, after all. Stubbornness runs in our blood.”
Stubbornness runs in our blood. Eliza thought of Samuel’s face, the last time she’d seen it running toward her across a frozen field, chasing her. Yes, stubbornness runs in the blood, alright.
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A floorboard creaked in the doorway. Lucy was standing there, and Eliza could tell that she’d been there a while and had been caught shifting positions.
“Luce,” Aunt Ivy said, clutching her hand to her chest. “How long have you been eavesdropping?”
“I wasn’t! I was walking by the doorway.” Lucy came in and plopped herself into the chair across from Eliza.
“Lucy…”
“It’s just—” Lucy moved forward and accidentally knocked a candle over, and Eliza caught it before it rolled off the table. She looked directly at Eliza. “I need to say something, and I need no one to be weird about it.”
“I shall try,” Eliza said, “to not be weird about it.”
“So the other night when it stormed and we made chocolate chip cookies and stayed up late… you know, when I said all that stuff about wanting my real sister back.” Lucy’s neck started to flush blotchy red, working its way up into her cheeks. “I keep thinking about how it sounded, and that you’re leaving tomorrow, and I don’t want the last thing… I don’t want you going back thinking I was, like, glad.” She finally looked up. “Because I want my sister back, but I also want to keep you here. It sucks so much.”
The floorboards creaked under Holly’s footsteps somewhere upstairs.
“Lucy, it’s okay to want both things. I do too,” Eliza replied. “Do you know what I prayed for, the morning they came for me? Back in my own time, when I was being chased?”
Lucy shook her head.
“A miracle, any miracle. I was not particular.” Eliza reached across the table and took her hand. “And some combination of the Lord, Hekate, and thy sister’s own recklessness sent me here. So no matter what happens tomorrow, I was given a taste of a life I could have never dreamt before.” Her voice sounded calmer than she felt. “And a little sister, even. And I’m glad for it.”
Lucy got up and came around the table, hugging Eliza tightly. Eliza held on and tried not to cry.
She noticed Aunt Ivy turn toward the stove and become very busy with the kettle.
◆◆◆◆
Several hours later
◆◆◆◆
Eliza could not sleep, of course.
Down the hall, the line of light under Aunt Ivy and Holly’s door stayed lit past eleven; she could hear the low rise and fall of them talking, too soft to make out.
She sat at Lils’s desk and wrote a letter underneath the light of the small lamp.
It had taken her a half hour to start, because she had not known what a person could possibly say in this situation. Dear Lils. Dear Lilith. Dear cousin. In the end she’d settled on ‘Lils.’
Lils,
Thank you for finding me, blood of my blood. I am grateful to have lived your life for a short while. Give Luce, Ivy, Holly, and Becca all my love.
— E
Eliza folded it twice and wrote LILS on the outside, propping it up against the desk lamp where it could not be missed.
Then she crossed to the window and pulled the curtain back to look down at the street. The streetlight flickered at the corner, and she saw the neighbor kid’s bicycle splayed out on the lawn next door.
And that’s when she noticed it. Eliza stopped breathing.
There was a woman standing across the street.
She wore a long, dark coat with a wide-brimmed black hat, bare hands pale at her sides. While the wind was moving the branches all around her, not even one strand of her hair moved along with it.
She stood on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road — between, Eliza thought, of course, between — and her face was tilted up beneath the brim, fixed on Eliza’s window.
On her.
The pull behind Eliza’s ribs, that low thrum she had carried for the past few months, swung all at once toward the street and held there, pointing, certain.
Then, between one streetlight flicker and the next, the strip of grass was empty once again.