Ivory’s resolve, paired with the overwhelming feeling of loss, pushed her, lending her strength as she pulled her lover farther down the path to a barren clearing that offered little more than a rotted apple core festering in maggots.
She piled dead leaves, branches, and debris near a decaying tree stump and laid Elizabeth’s body over the compost. Ivory breathed deeply and spoke to the Universe once more.
“You have made her this way—brought her to this end! Now I return her to you. Take her ashes, so that her spirit may live on.”
She burned the body. The skin melted against bones, and blood bubbled until little remained. Smoking charcoal and sulfur accosted her nostrils.
When the fire exhausted and the remains cooled, Ivory wiped the tears from her cheeks and whispered, “Live on, my love.”
She covered the evidence with dirt and hiked away from town.
What Anne had witnessed was love, not witchcraft. She had been unknowingly correct when she accused Elizabeth of being a witch, but she hadn’t known what being a witch meant. Ivory and Elizabeth had harmed none.
Though more deaths followed, the court’s approach shifted by the next hanging. Thornhart was perhaps spooked by the disappearance of Elizabeth’s body but clearly not enough to put an end to the horror. Ivory returned to town only long enough to steal Elizabeth’s court documents—documents detailing the trial of the only true witch killed during the Salem witch trials—and to murder her sister.
***
IVORY’S FIRST THOUGHTS upon waking were, as always, of Elizabeth. A sharp pang pierced through her, and she tried to lift her hand to wipe grit from her lips, but instead she found her movement restricted. Her wrists and ankles seared with pain. She could do little more than raise her head and shoulders from the ground. After blinking several times, her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting.
Chains staked into the ground bound her wrists and ankles, the metal burning against her flesh as though heated over a fire before securing her. She glanced around, a stillness where her heart would’ve normally sped.
Dirty sheets of canvas billowed on every side, and, straight ahead, two flaps opened to a wooded area and a small campfire. The air carried the scent of smoke, cold, and earth.
This was someone else’s tent—not her own. A small cot with rumpled sheets and a thin woolen blanket sat to one side of the tent, and to the other side was a wash basin filled with water.
No, not water, she thought. It’s too dark to be water.
There was a brushing sound outside the tent. Boots scuffing over leaves, she realized as a pair of legs came into view. A man bent to stir the fire.
“You have awakened,” he said without looking back.
Ivory tried to speak, but her throat felt cracked and burning. He strode into the tent and crouched beside her.
“There is not much life in these parts. I drained you first”—he pointed to the washbasin—“so that we may eat.”
He doesn’t mean…that is my blood?
“Why?” she whispered hoarsely.
“Please see it as a gift. I could have killed you.”
The man turned to face her, his skin an unnatural pallor in the moonlight. His hair was dark, even his eyebrows the darkest she had ever seen, and his nose hooked a little toward the end, dimpled on one side. He sat back and kicked his feet in front of him.
He dribbled something into her mouth—a fluid that soothed her throat. “Drink,” he said. “You will feel better.”
Each suggestion he made reflected in Ivory’s own thoughts. Their minds were as one.
“I must keep you restrained,” he said, “until your urges pass. The silver with which I have bound you will sap your strength, but you will see soon enough the great power you now possess.”
Without a need for words, the man’s knowledge became one with hers. He was her sire—the one who had turned her. She would live eternally. She would never pass to the afterlife where Elizabeth surely awaited her arrival, not unless her life was taken from her, and Ivory already knew she was too much of a coward to allow that, let alone carry out the deed herself.
She would never forgive him for this.
“You have abandoned your former name,” the man said, a trace of amusement in his voice. “I will call you Lenore.”
Dropping her head back, Ivory closed her eyes against a lifetime of memories she wished to forget.
“Do not fear,” her sire soothed. “Your wounds will quickly heal.”
Ivory bristled at his sentiment. He was wrong. There were wounds in her that would never heal.
...
Province of Georgia, 1732
THE HUMAN WORLD moved on without Ivory, and she vowed never to allow something so horrible to happen to any of Elizabeth’s descendants. She watched her lover’s son from a distance until he grew to have children of his own: the first, a boy, born in 1709, and two years later, a girl. They called her Mary.