“You weren’t struck by lightnin’. It was somethin’ else.”
Ivy ran back toward the burning cotton fields. Genevieve called after her, trying to get up, but she was still reeling. She leaned her head back in the thick mud, rain falling steadily on her face. Rain mixed with the tears of defeat. She drifted in and out of the moment, in and out of consciousness. She heard Ivy’s voice, faint, in the distance, calling her name. When her eyes focused again, the old woman was next to her, her skirt gathered in her hands.
Ivy was carrying something in the folds of her skirt, and she dumped it out on the wet ground next to Genevieve. Tiny vials of powder and bottles of what looked like sand and dirt knocked against each other.
“What are you doin’?”
“Makin’ an offerin’. To the Spirits. They’re the only ones who can tell us what this means.”
“Ivy, calm down. You’re talkin’ gibberish.”
The old woman pulled something from the pocket of her housedress. It was a shard of mirror. She thrust it in front of Genevieve.
It was dark, but there was no mistaking it. Genevieve’s eyes were blazing. They had turned from deep green to a fiery gold, and they didn’t look like her eyes in another unmistakable way. In the center, where a round black pupil should have been, there were almond-shaped slits, like the pupils of a cat. Genevieve threw the mirror to the ground and turned to Ivy.
But the old woman wasn’t paying attention. She had already mixed the powders and the earth and she was sifting them from hand to hand, whispering in the old Gullah language of her ancestors.
“Ivy, what are you—”
“Shh,” the old woman hissed, “I’m listenin’ to the Spirits. They know what you’ve done. They’re gonna tell us what this means.
“From the earth a her bones and the blood a my blood.” Ivy pricked her finger with the edge of the broken mirror and smeared the tiny drops of blood into the earth she was sifting. “Lemme hear what ya hear. See what ya see. Know what ya know.”
Ivy stood up, arms open to the heavens. The rain poured down upon her, the dirt running down her dress in streaks. She began to speak again in the strange language and then—
“It can’t be. She didn’t know no better,” she wailed at the dark sky above.
“Ivy, what is it?”
Ivy was shaking, hugging herself, and moaning, “It can’t be. It can’t be.”
Genevieve grabbed Ivy by her shoulders. “What? What is it? What’s wrong with me?”
“I told you not to mess with that book. I told you it was the wrong kinda night for Castin’, but it’s too late now, child. There’s no way to take it back.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“You’re cursed now, Miss Genevieve. You been Claimed. You’ve Turned, and there’s nothin’ we can do to stop it. A bargain. You can’t get nothin’ from The Book a Moons without givin’ somethin’ in return.”
“What? What did I give?”
“Your fate, child. Your fate and the fate a every other Duchannes child that’s born after you.”
Genevieve didn’t understand. But she understood enough to know that what she had done couldn’t be undone. “What do you mean?”
“On the Sixteenth Moon, the Sixteenth Year, the Book will take what it’s been promised. What you bargained. The blood of a Duchannes child, and that child will go Dark.”
“Every Duchannes child?”
Ivy bowed her head. Genevieve wasn’t the only one who was defeated on this night. “Not every one.”
Genevieve looked hopeful. “Which ones? How will we know which ones?”
“The Book will choose. On the Sixteenth Moon, the child’s sixteenth birthday.”
“It didn’t work.” Lena’s voice sounded strangled, far away. All I could see was smoke, and all I could hear was her voice. We weren’t in the library, and we weren’t in the vision. We were somewhere in between, and it was awful.
“Lena!”