“If the girl gets this incensed over a silly boy, imagine when she finds out that her whole family”—Esme turned to Cat, spitting purple blood as she hissed the words—“is rotting on the putrid New Shores of Arkansas.”
Cat tackled Esme. Bees stung her arms and face, but she didn’t seem to notice. She had the witch in a choke hold, until Esme snapped her neck free. Cat tore at the gossipwitch’s hair as bees crawled up her hands, her fingers trolling the back of Esme’s head. Then she paused as disgust filled her face. “What the—”
“Control your impudent friend, Eureka!” Esme shouted, and struggled to untangle herself from Cat. “Or you will all regret it.”
Cat thrust the witch’s head down toward her chest.
Where the back of Esme’s skull should have been was an amethyst-colored void, at the center of which a single monarch butterfly flew furiously in place.
This explained the gossipwitches’ endless appetite for winged creatures. This was how they flew.
Cat plucked the butterfly from the void in Esme’s head. Its wings beat just once more between her fingers; then the insect curled up and died.
Esme roared and flung Cat off her. The other gossipwitches gaped in horror at the back of her empty head. They touched the backs of their own heads, checking to make sure everything was still intact.
Bees flocked to Esme’s fist, coating it like a glove. She towered over Cat, grabbed the back of her head, and punched the base of Cat’s skull with her bee-bound fist.
Pain exploded in Cat’s eyes. She screamed a brutal scream.
Eureka shoved Esme aside and swatted at the bees on Cat’s scalp, but they wouldn’t fly away. She tried to pick them out of Cat’s hair. They stung her hands and would not budge. They were a part of the base of Cat’s skull now, swarming the back of her head, stinging and re-stinging endlessly.
Esme staggered backward to rejoin the other witches. She was out of breath. “If you will carry Ovid as far as the threshold, we will take him from there.”
“The only thing you’re getting is out of here,” Eureka said.
“Be gone!” Solon said, taking courage from Eureka’s stand. “I’ve wanted to say that to you bitches for so long.”
“You’re not thinking, Solon,” the middle witch said. She and the old witch were supporting Esme, who looked faint. “Remember what happens when you can’t afford our glaze.…”
“Nothing lasts forever,” Solon said, and winked at Eureka.
“All your little enemies will find you,” the old witch said. “The big one will find you, too.”
“Solon,” Ander said, “if you let them drop the glaze—”
“Are the bad people coming back?” William leaned on Eureka. She hated that she could feel his rib cage through his shirt.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered automatically as she tended to Cat’s scalp. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
It was too late. William’s tears fell on her shoulders, on her cheeks. Their innocence was startling, a sparkling jewel in the black rift. She changed her mind.
“Cry,” she said. “Cry it all out on me.”
William did.
“We will give you until midnight to change your mind,” the old witch said. “Then the glaze is gone.”
Solon stamped out his cigarette. He walked to where Cat whimpered woozily in Eureka’s arms. He kissed Cat’s cheek.
“As you wish.” Rage surged beneath the surface of Esme’s weakened voice. The other two witches flicked their tongues and four bees slowly returned to orbit their heads. The rest remained with Cat.
Carrying their crippled companion, the old and older gossipwitches lumbered back through the long, dark hall of skulls.
20
YET TROUBLE CAME
Around dusk, Eureka and Ander stood at the edge of the veranda and looked down at the Tearline pond. Solon had retreated to his workshop with Ovid, and the twins and Cat were resting in the guest room. Cat said the throb in her skull had dwindled to the level of a migraine. She barely felt the constant stings anymore; that pain was easier to bear than knowing what had happened to her family.