Ambrose always teases me, but tonight his voice struck me as mocking. My eyes narrowed.
“Seriously, Ambrose, I want to know.”
“Seriously, Sabrina,” said Ambrose, mimicking my voice, deep and stern. Then he broke into a mischievous grin. “I’m never serious. I don’t think I’m going to tell you.”
“You’re not funny, Ambrose.”
“Au contraire, cousin. I’ll have you know I was celebrated for my wit in the French court. The Sun King thought I was hilarious!”
“I don’t believe you!”
I turned and left, closing the door with a sharp click. I stomped my way back to my bedroom and sat down on the bed with a creak of my wrought-iron bedposts, sinking into the piled-up quilts.
Not like anybody’s actually getting attached, Ambrose said this morning. Ambrose, with his cold, fickle witch’s heart. Ambrose can’t even imagine truly caring about mortals. Naturally, he doesn’t think magically playing around with human love is a big deal.
I’m half mortal, so what does he really think about me?
I shoved that thought aside. One of my school reports said Sabrina has a very tidy mind, and I thought that was true. Compartmentalizing keeps everything neat: my friends in one box, my family in another. I love them all, and I don’t want my situation to get messy. I like to keep things organized.
These days, I keep worrying that the dark baptism will dump all the things I care about out of the boxes where I’ve carefully placed them. Everything will be mixed up and muddled and ruined.
I’m attached to Harvey, to all my friends. No matter what happens, I’m going to keep being attached. I have no plans to cut ties.
I sighed and picked up the framed photograph of my parents on my bedside table. It made me feel better to look at them. My father, tall, dark, and handsome. My mother, fragile, blond, and lovely. Like the hero and heroine of a story. A powerful warlock and a humble mortal, but he loved her enough to marry her and have me. I know they loved me too.
Sometimes I dream of how it would be, to live in a different house with no dead people in the basement, to have my father and mother waiting for me when I got home. My mother attending parent-teacher meetings and sympathizing about mortal problems, my father powerful and respected and able to answer every question I had about witchcraft: to have a real family. I love my aunts and Ambrose, but I’d still have them too. If my parents had lived, we’d be a proper family, and I would never have doubted they loved me. We’d be so happy. I’m certain of it.
No matter what Ambrose says about witches and their cold, fickle hearts, I know better. Maybe it’s true for Ambrose, but it won’t be true for me.
I’m not like my cousin. I’m like my father. My parents would have understood.
Death is the darkest place.
Zelda Spellman kills her sister, Hilda, sometimes, and puts her in the Cain Pit in the Spellman graveyard so she will return to life. Hilda tries not to get too cross about it. Zelda would never do it if she couldn’t bring Hilda back.
Sometimes coming back is harder than others.
The earth lies heavy on Hilda’s breast. The worms slide down her face like tears.
What wakes Hilda up is, she thinks, the same shock of fear that wakes a million mortal mothers. A worry that jolts women from soft pillows and fast sleep, sweat on their faces on a cold night.
Where are my children? Are my children safe?
Hilda’s not a mother. She’s never had the chance to become a mother. Witches are meant to be slaves to the pleasures of the flesh, and Hilda always supposed she would get around to that. But orgies honestly seem alarming—wouldn’t everyone be looking around and judging you for not being as lascivious and flexible as the other witches?—and no man has asked her for her time one-on-one. She’s thought about it, of course, especially when she reads a really good book, like When the Shepherdess Met the Marquess, or All Scot, No Waiting, or The Wicked Celtic Billionaire’s Most Forbidden Secret Baby. But Hilda doesn’t know if she’ll ever have the nerve to ask a man to experience carnal joys with her. She doesn’t know if she could ever even gather up the courage to kiss a man.
Still, there are children who come first in Hilda’s heart, and who have nobody else to care for them. She never expected that for herself. Zelda is the one who obsesses fiercely over babies, who decided (she’s always deciding things for Hilda) that they would become midwives. Every baby they delivered, Zelda would touch with possessive love.
Hilda’s the Spellman who was always a bit of a disappointment. Sabrina’s father, Edward, was magnificent. Her brother always seemed so big, his shadow swallowing Hilda whole. And Zelda is the example Hilda can’t manage to follow, unyielding in all things, especially in her commitment to the Dark Lord.
Hilda has no problem with Satan, or magic, or the thrill of woods or fresh blood. But sometimes she envies the mundanes, many of whom take faith easily, who go to their church and worship their false god. Some of them don’t have faith at all. It seems terribly comfortable, not to have to believe and serve so intensely. She’s never said it, but somehow the coven looks at her and just knows. Edward knew, and Zelda knows, and Father Blackwood, the current head of the Church of Night … he definitely knows.
Since she wasn’t going to make her family proud like the others, Hilda was expected to make herself useful. So she (usually) does what Zelda says, and she (usually) tries to be a good member of the coven, and she cares for the Spellman orphans.
When witch-hunters and tragedy struck Ambrose’s family, Hilda was there in England to pick up the pieces and look after the child.
She remembers little Ambrose years and years ago, toddling across cobblestones that Hilda’s long dress and petticoats swept over. He would dash fearlessly out into any danger, and she fretted constantly that he might be run over by a rattling carriage or drown in a duck pond. But she could never leave him behind, even when she went out on an errand, could never resist his huge, beguiling eyes or the little hands lifted entreatingly up to her. Auntie Hilda, pick me up, take me with you, Auntie Hilda, carry me! Ambrose liked to be perched in her arms, held up high to see everything that he possibly could. Your eyes are too big for your stomach, mortals say about little ones who want to eat more than they can manage. Ambrose was always greedy for the whole world.
She remembers Sabrina, saved by a miracle from the devastating crash that killed her parents. Sweet baby Sabrina, her tiny face framed by ruffles and ribbons, rocked in midair by magic as Hilda sang a witch’s lullaby.
“Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetops
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
Baby flies over a village and curses them all.”
Hilda’s heard the mortal version. She thinks it’s barbaric. There will be no fall for her darlings.
Hilda has always been the least important of the Spellmans, but to a child with nobody else to look after them, you can be the most important person in the universe.
But she couldn’t seem to do anything right. Even caring for a child, Hilda got terribly wrong.
You spoiled Ambrose, and look what happened, Zelda told her when they decided to take Sabrina in. You ruined that boy. You will not make the same mistake with Sabrina. I will take the lead with Sabrina, and I will make her a shining darkness for the Spellman family. Try not to get in my way and wreck everything again.