(Originally published in Decoded Pride.)
She went a different way through the woods. Typically at this junction Katherine would turn south, the most direct way toward the bridge that crossed the river Far-Away-Water, and return to the village from the west. But if she went north she could watch the winter sunset from the top of the sandy dunes and still be back before she was missed.
Today, Katherine turned north, enjoying the way the path through the pine forest looked at once familiar and all too strange when traveled in a different direction. She reveled at the imagined danger in her whimsical act, it thrilled behind her teeth. The forest floor was dusted with snow that the ground was too warm to hold on to. She kicked clumps of dirty slush from the travelers that had passed before her. Though she generally wasn’t one to be beset by song, the way was pleasant enough that she even began to hum a little.
Pleasant enough until she came across a demon in the path. At first she thought the figure to be a traveler overcome by thieves, the way it was lying so still. But then it lifted his head, and who else could be wearing Edward’s face besides a demon?
The last time Katherine saw her fiancé he was headed South in his Union blues, determined to participate in a war he shouldn’t have had to fight to begin with. As far as Katherine was concerned, abolition ought to be the white man’s burden. After all, colored people did not enslave themselves. Wispy dreams of greatness and valor blinded Edward to the surety of suffering, of bloodshed. She’d read it in the shells but he wouldn’t listen. The cowries never lie. Seeing him here confirmed what was whispered in her cast. That and well, her Edward had never looked at her thus. As if she were a choice cut he could hold between his teeth. Her Edward had never turned towards her with his manhood tenting his trousers, proud and insistent. Not that she wouldn’t have welcomed it.
Katherine backed up the path, always keeping the demon in her sights. It had her at a disadvantage—clearly it knew her, but she had yet to identify it. Katherine’s back hit a wall of granite that hadn’t been there before yet was solid and sure as the ground beneath her and her own fists clenched in the pockets of her skirts.
Ah. So it would be like this.
Katherine sighed, her breath rising in a feathery plume, and approached the demon who opened Edward’s arms to embrace her. She remained a healthy distance apart—foolish, Katherine was not.
The demon cocked its head. “Is that any way to greet a lover?”
“I am no naïve maiden. Tell me what you want so that I may be on my way.”
It chuckled. It was Edward’s laugh, but not his smile.
“I see why this boy liked you.” The demon circled her once, appraisingly. “Tell me three true things and I shall let you go.”
“Unharmed?” Katherine prompted.
“Unharmed.”
“How will you know if I am telling the truth?”
The demon laughed softly again. “How could I not?” It was then that Katherine began to understand. The truth held power. Each true word spoken would tie them together. And if she refused, or worse, if she lied…
“Truths coat the tongue like pepper-honey, warm and sugared, easily swallowed. Please me and you’ll be on your way. Toy with me, and I’ll open your chest so we may prophesy the future from your entrails together.”
A demon’s tongue was forked. Every word had a double meaning, but this threat she suspected was straightforward. Best get this over with.
“Edward was not my true love,” Katherine said. That’s not to say love between them couldn’t have grown over time. With effort. A seedling might have already rooted in her heart with another’s name on it, but she’d planned to do her best by Edward.
The demon turned this over, the way she’d seen Mister Starling do with his brandy as she and the other help tried their best to fade into the background of the dining room. To be fixtures and not people. Abruptly the demon spat, the ground sizzling some where the spittle landed. And then a darkness blossomed in Edward’s abdomen, that grew and spread until the wound opened like a smile and his insides, pink and glistening, glopped out into his shaking hands. So that was Edward’s demise—the wrong end of a bayonet. He’d deserved so much more than the world was prepared to give him. The demon bared Edward’s crimson teeth, his mouth overflowing with blood.
“I said, ‘Please me.’ You have two more chances. Give me something to fill my belly. Not this sugar-crusted thing with an airy center. Give me a truth that means something,” the demon urged. And then it began to change.
The demon slunk and writhed until its Edward skin split and crumbled into ash, carried away on the breeze. Left in his place was Annie. This was unexpected. And from the crook of Annie’s grin, the demon knew it too. Katherine kept her memories of Annie in a shrouded place. She neither nurtured nor neglected that stubborn sprout in her chest with its fragile roots. That the demon could pluck this image from her vaulted mind meant trouble.
Katherine turned her thoughts over for a second true thing. Something with heft, sustenance. It was not enough to name Annie as her lover or even her true love. In the way the demon ran Annie’s index finger down the column of her neck, she knew it knew. Staring into Annie’s eyes, she also knew the demon would only accept one thing.
“I did not know Annie would take the blame.” Saying the words out loud caused something in Katherine to twist. There was a chafing behind her sternum that threatened to bow her over. She stood tall against it.
The missus, Lucretia Starling, would not bear children. When her husband began to beat her for her incompetence she shifted the blame to the help. Miss Lucretia urged Katherine to be more discreet but she never stopped asking for her tea. When the cook became suspicious, Katherine knew she had made a critical error. Somewhere along the line she had begun to trust Miss Lucretia. Ignored the chasm between “help” and “friend.” The missus’ accusations shocked Katherine, but nothing could have prepared her for the blow of what Annie would do next.
It had been a century and a half since this land was overrun with moral panic, purging its so-called witches rather than its wickedness from the hearts of its men. But this knowledge is ancestral—the people, they still hunger for the spectacle of an accusation. The mob still knows their part. The gallows remain eager for sudden weight, tension and sway.
Before her eyes, Annie’s form twitched, the toes of her boots snaking in the damp leaves. Her eyes bulged, showing the stress from the constriction of the invisible noose. Katherine did not close her eyes against it the first time. Nor would she now. Perhaps the demon meant to shock her. Break her with the second death of her first love. The vulgar display hardened her. And she was more determined not to become this demon’s plaything.
Annie and her unseen gallows went up in a pyre of heatless flames. When the smoke cleared Katherine gasped. From the coals rose her own form. Naked and stumbling on unsteady feet. For the first time, she considered that she ought to be afraid. If the demon could be her in form already, what did it need with the power gleaned from her truths? The demon danced its hands over the facsimile of Katherine’s wide hips before hiding its fingers between its own sex. Her own sex.
“That was good but I think you can do better,” the demon told Katherine with her own mouth.
A chill raked down Katherine’s spine. She scratched at the crusted blood inside her palm. Picking at scabs had always been a bad habit, but this time, she thought it might have purpose.
The demon was asking her for a third true thing. A thing with edges, that swirled with depth. A true thing that was a pleasure to sink one’s teeth into. Even if she could deliver such a thing, Katherine doubted that she and the demon had the same idea of being left unharmed. She bit her lip and kept picking at her palm. Blood held power too.
Katherine took a steadying breath. “I intend to make them pay,” she said finally, looking right into her own eyes and the hellfire that danced behind the demon’s pupils. Edward died to right a wrong that wasn’t his. Annie wasn’t a witch, but now they’d have one. Katherine had a long list of grievances to attend to. She repeated them nightly like a prayer.
Demon-Katherine raised one eyebrow. It would seem it got the message. And Katherine was ready.
The demon lunged at Katherine with obsidian talons instead of square-tipped fingers. It slashed at her cloak as she spun making a grab of her own. She caught herself by the neck and held tight. The sigil she’d cut into her palm days ago was bleeding freely. This was not her first attempt at a binding, but she would not let this opportunity go to waste. Her own blood burned and smoked as it trailed down the nape of the demon’s neck. It howled and still she held. It shed its human skin a final time, crumpling to the forest floor. It was a leathery thing with too many eyes, and hooves for hands and feet. Eventually these hooves curled in on themselves like the wick of a burning candle until at last there was nothing but ash where the demon had been.
Katherine stood examining what was left of the charmed symbol carved inside her hand. Faint brown lines crisscrossed her palm in a way that might shock one who could read such things, but no one else would be any wiser. Her skin buzzed as the binding settled. The air was heavy with the scent of lemon and cedar smoke. She inhaled greedily. Katherine kicked at the ashes until they were spread about. She opened her mouth to taste them as they fell back to earth. The demon told her one thing true—power did sit nicely on the tongue. She swallowed the sweet-heat that was left of the demon and adjusted her skirts. Katherine had work to do and she intended to get home before dark.
