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T he following day drifted by in such a dense haze that it was like trying to breathe through wool.

I went through the motions: rising, washing, setting the table for breakfast. I heard my father’s voice in every room, always pitched just above the hum of my own thoughts.

He was gentle at first—he must have expected me to be fragile.

I would have resented it, if I could muster any feeling at all.

I hadn’t had anything to eat since the previous night, but I didn’t feel hungry.

I didn’t have the stomach for food. My hands shook, but only when I held them still.

If I kept moving, they seemed almost normal.

I swept the floors, though they were already clean.

I washed a window that I’d only washed a week before.

I folded and unfolded the same shirt until the seams began to fray.

Whenever I looked up, I caught my reflection in the glass.

Each time I was surprised to see myself intact, not cracked down the middle like the porcelain dolls we’d buried with Mama.

My father hovered in the periphery, always just out of reach.

He made tea and brought it to me, the cup rattling gently in its saucer.

I sipped it because he expected me to, not because I wanted it.

He asked how I slept. I lied. He asked if I’d like to talk.

I shook my head, or pretended not to hear.

He waited for a sign—some clue that his daughter was still somewhere beneath the mask—but I couldn’t give him that comfort.

I spent the morning in the kitchen, but my mind was still in the graveyard.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the heart burning in the bowl, the ash swirling in water, the way Edwin’s lips had smudged the rim of the glass.

I heard Mercy’s scream echoing off stone and frozen dirt.

I saw her face, first alive, then dead, then something else altogether.

By noon, I was sure I would never speak again.

It was like the feeling I’d had after I saw the man bite Mercy, but compounded a hundred times.

Maybe I had gone mute, like Nathanael Forsyth, a nice young man from the church who’d returned home after serving in the U.S.

Army. He’d been in what they called the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Physically, Nathanael came back in one piece.

But he left his soul on the battlefield.

As the story went, they’d slaughtered over three hundred Indians that day.

It changed the poor boy. He’d never be the same again—and he hadn’t said more than a few words since his return.

I knew now a little what that must’ve been like. To see something so terrible that it sends your soul into hibernation, if not into hell. I wasn’t much more than a walking, cleaning corpse. Not unlike that monster Mercy used to be—for a few nights, anyway.

Though I suspected she wasn’t scrubbing dishes or sweeping floors.

My father would not be denied.

He found me at the table, elbows propped on the wood, hands covering my face.

“Alice,” he said, his tone gentler than I remembered him ever being, “you haven’t touched your breakfast.”

I looked down at the plate. The eggs had gone cold and congealed, yellow pooling at the edges like the fat on cooling broth.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. My voice sounded strange in the room, as if it belonged to someone else.

He sat across from me, folding his hands in front of him like he did when counseling parishioners in distress.

“I realize last night was… difficult,” he began, choosing his words with the caution of a man laying powder near an open flame.

“But you did well, Alice. You did as the Lord commands. You brought comfort to the dying, and peace to the living.”

I felt a wave of nausea, sharp and sour. “Did I?” I asked. “Did I bring peace? Or did I just watch a girl get torn to pieces and then help her brother drink what was left?”

His face pinched at the memory, but he did not look away. “It was necessary. You saw what she had become. You saw what was at stake.”

I laughed, thin and brittle. “Did I, father? Because from where I stood, it looked like a room full of grown men taking orders from a witch and then pretending it was God’s work.”

He flushed, color rising in two sharp spots on his cheeks. “Do not blaspheme, Alice.”

“I’m not blaspheming,” I said, my voice trembling with something like anger, maybe, or just exhaustion.

“I’m just trying to understand. You tell me witchcraft is evil, but when there’s no other hope, we run to it like a dog to its vomit.

You say we trust in God’s plan, but the minute things get ugly, we grab our shovels and our knives and do whatever it takes to save ourselves.

What’s the difference? Is it only witchcraft if someone else is doing it? ”

He sat back, folding his arms. The lines around his mouth deepened.

“You have every right to feel what you feel. No one should have to see what you saw last night. But you need to understand: desperation drives men to do things they otherwise would not. Mr. Brown has lost his wife, his daughter—he was not about to lose his son as well. Would you have let the boy die?”

I thought of Edwin, his face as pale as milk.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that would have been kinder.”

He looked at me for a long time. “God is good and gracious, Alice. He forgives those who repent. Even when we act out of fear.”

I stared at the table, tracing the wood grain with my thumbnail. “Do you think Mercy wanted forgiveness? Do you think she wanted anything from us at all?”

He exhaled, slow and deliberate. “I think she was lost. Lost to her pain, lost to her grief. I think you tried to help, and that’s all anyone could have asked of you.”

I shook my head, unable to agree. “You don’t know what that witch was really up to. You really expect she did what she did to help a man who belongs to an order that wants her dead?”

He frowned, but didn’t answer right away. “You’re right to be suspicious. Moll is dangerous, and not to be trusted. But sometimes God uses the wicked to accomplish His purposes. We see it in scripture—Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, the Roman centurions.”

“And you think God is using Moll Dwyer?” I asked. “Or are we just too weak to admit we’ve lost control?”

He didn’t answer that, either. Instead, he reached across the table and took my hand. His was warm and rough, the skin callused.

“I’m proud of you,” he said softly. “Even if you don’t see it.”

I wanted to pull my hand away, but I let it rest in his.

“Sometimes,” he said, “God calls us to walk through fire. But He does not leave us there.”

I thought of the grave, the ash, the scream. I did not feel delivered. I felt scorched to the bone.

I spent the rest of the day pretending to busy myself with chores. I swept the entryway twice, then polished the silver, though we never had guests. I rearranged the pantry, only to find myself putting everything back exactly as it had been.

Still, Mercy’s face haunted every quiet moment. The way her eyes had opened in the coffin, wild and red and desperate. The way she’d screamed not in fear but in rage and unimaginable pain, as if even in death she’d refused to let the world have the last word.

By dusk I was so tired I could hardly stand, but the prospect of sleep terrified me. Even if Mercy was dead—really dead, this time—the thing that made her was still out there. Would he be angry about what we’d done? Would he come after us in vengeance?

I was heading to my room, planning to read until my eyes gave out, when a knock rattled the front door. Not the tentative tapping of a visitor, but a frantic, uneven pounding.

My father met me in the hallway, his face already tight with concern.

“It’s Mr. Brown,” he said. “He’s—he’s in a state.”

I followed him to the entry, and there was George Brown, hatless, his hair in disarray, his coat thrown over his nightshirt. He looked ten years older than he had the night before, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen.

“Alice,” he said, his voice so hoarse I barely recognized it. “You have to come. It didn’t work.”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

He looked past me, to my father. “It didn’t work. Mercy’s out there. I saw her, I swear on the Holy Book. She came to the window, just like before.”

My father tried to reason with him, his tone steady but urgent. “Mr. Brown, we burned her heart. There is no way—“

“She was there!” George shouted, spittle flecking his chin. “I saw her, and she saw me. The boy is sick again. Worse than before. Please—please, help.”

A tremor ran through me, cold and deep.

“I’ll come,” I said, before my father could protest. “Just let me get my coat.”

My father stepped between us. “Alice, this is not—“

“I have to,” I said. “It’s my fault, isn’t it? I was the one who gave Edwin the ashes.”

“What do you think you’re going to do about it?!” My father screamed. “You’re just a girl. You’ve done enough!”

“ Just a girl?“ His dismissal only hardened my resolve. “You want to protect me now, but you sent me into that sanatorium without a second thought?”

“It wasn’t like that—“

“Then you let them use me again. To do that horrible ritual.”

“She’ll be safe,” Mr. Brown insisted. “She might be the only one who can stop… the devil.”

“Your daughter, you mean?” I resisted the urge to stomp through the floor. If I hadn’t been just a girl, I might have had the strength to do it.

Mr. Brown shook his head. “My daughter is dead.”

I clenched my fists. I wasn’t raised to disrespect my elders, but even a minister’s daughter has her limits.

“Is that what allows you to sleep at night, Mr. Brown? Because I heard her screams. I heard how she called out to you as you let that witch cut her apart. That didn’t sound like a devil to me.

It sounded like a terrified girl, like your daughter. ”

“Enough!” My father had heard enough. “Both of you! We’ve reached the end of the line. There’s nothing more we can do.”

“Your daughter has a guardian angel,” Mr. Brown insisted. “There’s no other way to explain it. Given that the rest of us are tainted in our sin, on account of our dabblings with the witch…”

I huffed. “I took part in that too.”

“Not by choice,” Mr. Brown said. “We took advantage of you. You have a pure heart, Alice.”

I snorted. “I don’t know about that.”

Mr. Brown didn’t flinch. “What we’re facing is pure evil. We made a grave mistake, trying to conquer evil with evil. We have no choice now but to turn to someone who is untainted by our sin. Your light might be the only thing that can stand against the darkness that’s consumed—“

“Your daughter.” I finished the sentence for him. “Say her name, Mr. Brown.”

“I can’t. She’s not—“

“IF YOU WANT MY HELP, SAY HER NAME.”

It probably took a good ten seconds before he mustered a reply. “Help Mercy. Please, Alice. We have things you can use, things you might wield against her. Weapons that can defeat a creature of the night.”

“A creature?” I cocked an eyebrow.

“It’s a weapon that can stop Mercy. That can help her.”

“What kind of weapon?” I asked.

Mr. Brown took a deep breath. “Let’s just say I’d use it if I could. But I’m too tainted. All of us are. I’m afraid you are our best hope of wielding it against her… against Mercy and the devil that’s taken her.”