Look ahead into the trees where a crow has settled, such a wild and beautiful creature. Look up, look away, and if you still see him then you will know. This is the way it happens, on an ordinary day, this is the way the future is revealed.
They were a mess when they reached solid ground and Sally’s breathing was shallow in her chest. She was disoriented and the sun on her shoulders seemed to be burning her; her hand in his was aflame as well, but when she turned back, there was the shade once more. She kept thinking about that kiss. She kept feeling it as if it were happening all over again in a loop of time that failed to stop.
The dark-haired girl had been out in the marshes, in a coil of time in which she made her escape before Hannah Owens’s house was set on fire by the first Thomas Lockland. Perhaps Sally could spy the shade because she was stunned by grief, raw and open to the world in a way she’d never been before. She, who believed her heart to be cold, who had been married twice but had feared committing to anyone, who expected the worst and got it, who’d made a vow when she was not more than ten years old that she would never fall in love, was standing in a muddy dress, barefoot and burning, who instead of walking away did something rash, kissing Ian so deeply they might have vanished into the bog where many had disappeared in the past, but fortunately fate had seen to it that they had reached dry land.
II.
From a distance, Kylie could detect smoke from the fireplace as it spiraled through the trees. Her sister’s voice echoed in her head and, indeed, she considered turning around. Antonia was so often right, turning to logic when other people might panic. Kylie could run back to the village and grab the taxi she’d seen idling outside the inn, but she’d left the book behind, and the curse was still unbroken. She went on, through the ivy and the ferns, the scent of clover filling her head. She was dizzy, she was all alone, she had already made one mistake after another. Everything seemed spun from a dream, and she was a sleepwalker wanting one thing, to undo time and go back to the afternoon on the Cambridge Common before the storm struck. For all she knew, Gideon might be having the very same dream. He wanted to reach her but he couldn’t get to the door. In his dream he saw a shadow just as Kylie observed the very same thing; it was Tom Lockland standing there outside the manor house, waiting, frustrated that Kylie had taken so very long just to go to the market and back.
“About time,” he said.
She saw something inside him then, what he’d been hiding, a dark line, the sort that appears when there is a crack in a china plate.
“I got lost,” Kylie said simply.
“Well, follow me then.”
They went along a path behind the house down to a stream, where they shared their picnic, eating from the packages Kylie had picked up at the shop, cheese and bread and pickles. She found she could eat only a bite or two. Her stomach was a nest of nerves. There was so much power in the curse and it had lasted so long, she feared what disaster a single mistake might cause. There was always a price to pay, although what the price might be was unclear.
“There’s got to be a way to open this damn thing,” Tom muttered.
He leafed through The Book of the Raven as he drank one of the beers, the other bottles kept cooling in the stream. He’d been studying the text while Kylie was off on her errand and had realized that its purpose was to grant the reader their deepest wish, the one desire at the core of someone’s being, worth the price to be paid. He wasn’t interested in ending a curse. It was creating one that was his fervent desire. It was payback to everyone who had ignored him and belittled him. A curse for a curse. He’d brought along the ingredients most often needed to invoke dark magic, and before Kylie had returned, he’d found what he wanted under the section “How to Seek Revenge.” It was possible to summon the Red Death, a plague set upon the town. He wasn’t strong enough to call down so great a curse. This was why he’d brought Kylie over to the dark side. He had a witch with real power. So much the better that she had no real sense of her own capabilities, for he intended to use her skill for his own purposes.