Her name came again, soft as moonlight. “Adelaide, my love. I am here.”
Awash in silvery moonlight, Elijah stood at the edge of the field. He’d returned to her, as the man had promised. Addie rushed out after him, following the firefly glimmer of him through the woods, into the old churchyard, past tombstones, until she came to his grave marker. Whispers sounded around them in the September dark. It was cold here, so cold. Elijah shone like a coin in a pond. He was her beautiful love, but there was something of the grave about him now. Weeds wove into his thinning hair. Shadows ringed his eyes and made gaunt his cheekbones. His shirt wept blood where the bullet had done its work.
“You’ve summoned me, my love.”
“Yes,” Addie said, eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve paid the price for you, too.”
“Don’t you know that every soul you give him increases his power? That it binds you to him forever?”
Addie didn’t understand. Why wasn’t Elijah happy? “I did it so that we could be together always.”
“And so we shall. For I cannot rest until you do. I am bound to love you till you die.”
His mouth opened in a scream then. From it fell beetles and maggots and all manner of death. In the trees, the crows cawed, and it sounded like cruel laughter. This creature before her was not Elijah, not the Elijah she’d kissed under the sun. He was something else entirely, and she wanted no part of him. Adelaide ran. She ran past the tombstones and the scarecrows, all the way back to the safety of her bed, which was no safety at all.
In the morning, when she threw back the blanket, she screamed loud enough to wake her sister. There in the covers was a dead mouse with its eyes missing and its entrails ripped out. It lay on a blanket of browned daisy petals.
Addie read the books. She learned the spells. At midnight, she went to Elijah’s grave and dug up what was left of him, breaking off a sliver of finger bone, prying out a tooth, cutting off a lock of his hair, scooping up a handful of graveyard dirt. These she placed in an iron box, and then she performed the ritual to bind Elijah’s spirit so that he could not come to her anymore. He could not harm her.
But what of the King of Crows, the man in the stovepipe hat?
Addie had given him power when she asked to see Elijah once more. She’d tied herself to him by an invisible thread that she could not sever. She had entered into a bargain blindly. No, not blindly. She’d made the choice. She’d pledged her allegiance to that man in the hat. In the years since, she’d had time to reflect. To question the vow hastily made for love, fashioned from grief, from a need to believe in something grander than herself.
Adelaide Proctor was old now. She had watched them bury the boy she loved in the muddy soil of Virginia, and she had buried her family soon after. On a day in April, she read about the president, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, and of the assassin’s death, too. When President McKinley also fell to an assassin’s bullet, she was there. She’d seen the birth of the automobile and the aeroplane. The steam trains crossed the country, the gleaming tracks clumsy sutures across wounded miles of stolen land. In New York Harbor, the ships sailed in with their precious, hopeful cargo gaping at Liberty’s torch. The towns spread and grew; the factories, too, belching smoke and ambition into the air. The wars continued. Hymns were raised to the glory of the nation. The people were good and fine and strong and fair, hardworking and hopeful; also, vain and grasping, greedy and covetous, willfully ignorant and dangerously forgetful.