How to Hang a Witch (27 page)

She pauses. “That's the problem, Elijah. You can't do what I want.” Her voice wavers. “You look at her the way you once looked at me. You love this girl.”

Heat seeps into my battered cheeks. She grips the bowl of potion until her knuckles turn white, waiting for Elijah to deny it. A tear runs down her cheek. She steps toward me. More of her hair turns brown, and her skin gets younger. My spell's wearing off. She holds the bowl above the journal on my chest and spills a few drops onto it.

Some of my life force is yanked out of my chest. My mouth opens, and I wheeze. Elijah flickers violently. The blood she poured on the journal lifts into the air and swirls around him, attaching itself to his skeleton. He falls to the floor, his head near mine. He grabs on to his arm where the blood is forming veins and grits his teeth.

“I will make you remember how you once felt about me,” Vivian says through her tears. “I will erase her from your memory.”

“You cannot cover truth with lies,” he says, his voice pained. He tries to stand, but his new body won't support him.

She makes sure she has my attention and points at Alice. The pendant I put in her boot flies out and onto the floor, rendering it useless. “I'm sick of your protection spells. How will you protect your father when you're dead?”

Protection spell on my dad?
I never put a spell on my dad. Did I? Elijah tries to say something, but his voice is too strained.

“I always wondered if it was my fault. If the spell I killed your mother with somehow gave you these abilities.” She pours a couple more drops of the potion on the journal.

My mother.
My heartbeat slows. I barely have the energy to resist. My life is slipping away.

“But when you're gone, I'll make sure Charles suffers.”

“No!” I scream.

An awful expression takes over her face. “When the police find you here, all evidence will point to you. I'll explain to your father how you lost your mind, how you killed these girls and took your own life. Before he dies, he'll think you're a monster.”

She's going to take everything from me.
Vivian curls her hand into a claw, and the Descendants squirm with pain.

“Please stop,” Mary pleads.

Susannah whimpers. Above my head the noose dangles like in my visions. All my visions are coming true. I cut my cheek, Susannah will hang, and Vivian is the crow. Standing up for the Descendants wasn't enough. And if I give up now, I'm no better than any of the Salem townspeople back in the sixteen hundreds.
No. I refuse to die like this.

Determination pulses through me and I push against her spell to lift myself off the floor. My veins bulge. I concentrate on my neck and head, pulling them with all my might. They lift an inch. Then another inch. Elijah's journal falls off my chest and onto the floor.

She watches me, genuinely confused. “Why is your face doing that? Who's helping you?” Her words are fast and jumbled.

I push again, harder. It's like the strings that make up her spell and secure me to the ground are snapping. I sit up. She drops her hand and lifts the bowl. I fling the journal out of the circle before another drop hits it. It slides near the fireplace.

Her eyes widen. “Cotton!”

She sees Cotton when she looks at me?
I force myself out of the circle and immediately feel stronger. I run for the journal. She mutters a few words and my knees give out, hitting the floor with a bang.

“No,” I say definitively, and use my hands to force myself back into a standing position.

The journal lifts into the air. I grab it as it whizzes past my head. It tugs against my hands, but I maintain my grip. She shrieks behind me, and her feet pound against the wood floor. I run for the fireplace.

I take only two strides before her nails scrape down my neck and pull at my shirt, choking my already sore throat. I throw the journal toward the fire, and it lands on one of the burning logs. We fall to the ground, her weight on my back. As my chin smacks onto the floorboards, the edges of the old pages catch fire. The taste of blood fills my mouth.

She pushes herself up, using my body as leverage to propel herself forward. I grab her dress and she comes toppling down again. She tries to stand, but I jump on her. I get one knee on either side of her waist and use her neck to smack her head into the floor.

She spits out a spell. Hot pain runs up my arms like they are being dipped in boiling water, and I lose my grip. Her hands shove me backward and I hit the floor. She moves toward the journal again, pulls it out of the logs, and tries to pat out the flames with her hands. But it's already fully alight, and burn marks appear on her palms.

I jump to my feet as the pain in my arms subsides. She frantically chants spells at the journal. I grab a heavy iron forked poker from an old set of fireplace tools and swing it. It connects with her head and she falls backward with a loud thud. A trickle of blood runs down her forehead.

I step over her, and her eyes meet mine. She brings her palm to her head and looks at the blood on her fingers. I lift the forked tool to hit her again.

“Cotton,” she says once more, only with less force this time.

I freeze. The poker hangs above her in midair, ready to strike.
What did she say before?
We're alike, both killing to get what we want. My big plan turned out to be hunting and killing a witch. Beating her with a pitchfork. I thought I was breaking the pattern of the Trials, and here I am repeating it. And like Cotton three hundred years ago, I believe I'm eliminating evil.

A small smile forms on Vivian's lips.

“Hit her!” demands Lizzie.

I'm not Lizzie. I can't kill her.
And if I do, I'll be continuing the curse. The poker lifts in the air, but it's not me doing it. Cotton stirs inside of me.
Maybe that inside-out spell had more consequences than I realized.

“No,” I say to myself as Cotton makes my arm take aim.

Vivian looks like she's won something. Susannah's stool flies out from under her. She drops. The rope makes a horrible snapping sound as it straightens and the beam creaks under her weight.

“Put this down!” I yell at Cotton as Susannah chokes. “I need to help her!” My legs won't move—Cotton and I are fighting for control over them.

“She has been killing our family for centuries—we must put an end to this,” I say in a voice I don't recognize. It's a hybrid of Cotton and me, like we're both speaking at the same time.

“Sam, help her, please.” Mary's voice is so thick with sobs it's hard to understand her. Mary's stool drops.
Snap, creak.

Fear and helplessness swirl around me like a black fog as I watch Susannah and Mary hang. I fight my own body, but it won't budge. “They're going to die!” I plead with Cotton.

“Then stop this woman,” he answers with my mouth.

Vivian's eyes sparkle with interest.

“You're not letting me,” I say with such heaviness that I almost give way to my grief. “Don't you get it? She wants me to repeat the Trials. Prove that I'm like you.”

“They can't breathe, Sam.” Alice's voice is surprisingly even. She's inching her stool toward Susannah so that Susannah can get her leg onto it. She's actually
doing
something. That is, until her stool flies out from under her.
Snap, scream.

Vivian gloats and lifts her head off the ground. Blood drips into her brown waves.

“Kill her, Sam!” Lizzie shrieks. “She hurt my brother and your father. My
brother,
the one person I could rely on!” Her voice wavers as her deep sadness falls out of her like water from a broken vase.

Vivian shrugs, and Lizzie's stool drops, too.
Snap.

Four girls hanging, the deaths of countless others, and my dad's safety all hovering before me like a rainstorm in the distance.

“I
will
save them,” I say to Vivian, searching myself for every ounce of courage to follow through on my words.

Susannah rotates toward me on her rope, her hair falling into her face. Tears stream down her bright red cheeks.
You believed in me, Susannah.
Elijah believed in me.
I close my eyes and tears seep through my eyelashes.

When I open my eyes again, I concentrate on the wood beam that holds the ropes.
I need to break it.
It's the only way to get them all down at once. I stand a little straighter, fighting my urge to give in to the blinding panic and the gasps of suffocation that fill the room. I picture breaking the beam in the center, splintering the wood. I throw all my terror and frustration at it, punching it with my mind. I gather every ounce of strength I have left and direct it at that old piece of wood. There's a small creak. My heart makes one deafening thud.
Is it working?

Vivian turns toward the Descendants, then looks at me like a cat looks at a mouse. I push harder, faster. I hit the beam with my thoughts. There's a cracking sound, like the beam is holding too much weight. It buckles downward a bit. A force flings me backward a few feet.

Vivian stands. “I guess you
are
my daughter in some ways.”

Her words tear at my most inner self. I use my grief to direct my energy more aggressively. There's a loud splintering sound, and the girls tumble to the ground gasping and coughing.

Vivian frowns.

I stare at her with more confidence. “It was Cotton's fault he didn't stop you three centuries ago. And I won't make that mistake again. But I won't do it by killing you,” I say with our hybrid voice, and I can feel Cotton considering my words.

She twists her fingers, and it's as though a thousand needles are pricking me over and over. I want to tear my own skin off.

“Kill me? I was just a girl. He went off and had a life, wrote books about it. I had no life. Everything I had was taken from me.” Her words feel raw and new, like she never wanted to admit them.

I fight to keep my thoughts clear with Cotton in my head. “That power and importance you thought you had by hanging witches was a delusion. You weren't rooting out evil. You and Cotton were misguided bullies, crushing the dreams and the lives of the people around you.” As I speak, Cotton stops fighting me. He loosens his grip on my body and the stiffness slips away.

“After everything I've done for you…You have no loyalty!”

Everything she's done for me? That's how she sees it?
To my surprise, it's Cotton who answers her. “I'm truly sorry for all of your pain. But I'm not the cause of it anymore. You are.” Now it's me considering his words.

A high-pitched noise comes from her throat, and the forked poker lifts into the air above my head. I reach my hand toward it. It stops mid-swing. We stare at each other, both struggling to control the tool, both determined.

“Look at us. We're all trapped together, making the same mistakes over and over. You were right; we're not that different. I'm not good the way I once imagined. And you're not purely evil.” For the first time, Cotton and I answer together.

The poker falls with a clang. She throws an arm in the direction of the Descendants, still bound and struggling to catch their breath on the ground. “They took your hair, and I sent them a warning with those pastries. They wrote
PSYCHO
on your locker, threw a rock through your window, and turned the damn town against you. So I gave them a rash. I showed them there were consequences.”

What is she saying? Is she trying to tell me she did these awful things because of me? “You killed people.”

“I was the
only
one defending you! I gave you the choice not to die, to help me. To kill them instead. And after everything I've done for you, you still turn on me. No one ever chooses me. Not you, not Charles, not Elijah!”

This is about her being chosen?
My heart thumps. It's just like when she killed Abigail. She couldn't handle not having the top spot in Elijah's life. Everything spins. She lunges for me, knocking me backward. We hit the floor hard, her weight on my chest. My back screams in pain from the impact. I grab her wrists before her nails make it to my face. She struggles to get out of my grasp but doesn't seem to have the energy. Her face contorts and her body heaves in exhaustion.

She turns her head toward Elijah. “I have nothing anymore. I have no one.” Tears mix with the blood on her face.

I've never seen weakness from Vivian, or any sign of vulnerability. I don't know how to process it.

“You took the last person who cared about me,” she says with the weight of three-hundred-year-old longing. She elbows me in the ribs, her wrists still in my hands.

I grunt from the blow, and my aching body begs for the struggle to finish.

“Ann…nothing is going to change unless you make different choices,” Elijah says, using her real name.

She whimpers and her face collapses on my chest. Her breathing is heavy and her shoulders shake lightly. I lie still, unsure what to do. I let go of her wrists. Her fingers curl into my hoodie next to her cheeks. She makes no effort to lift her face as she cries into my bloody shirt.

My skin tingles, and the air around me stirs. Cotton's arms lift out of my own and he pulls himself from my body until he stands, looking down at us. His clothes are antiquated, like in my visions of him, and his posture is straight. There's pride showing in the lines of his face that reminds me of my dad.

Vivian doesn't seem to notice but instead pushes brown waves back from her damp cheeks. Something deeply hidden in me stirs, like a small candle at the end of a long hallway, and I bite my lip. I wrap my arms around her.
She's so small.
All this time, I thought she was the big one with all the power. I had no idea how breakable she was.

My own chest lifts a little. “All my life, bad things have happened to the people around me.” I don't know how to ask what I want to ask, and I hope she understands.