Archive of Our Own

“I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin...”

           - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Without even thinking about it, I used to be able to fly. Now I’m trying to look inside myself  and find out how I did it”

            - Kiki’s Delivery Service

I

They’re being played.

The fact that none of the rest of her family give this theory no more than a passing eye roll only makes Hilda clutch it to herself all the tighter.

Played. And by that greasy scheming joke of a High Priest nonetheless.

It had all begun after they’d defeated the Thirteen. They was a strong word. It had been her and Cee, their little nucleus flickering and wavering against the onslaught of old magic. Zelda was gone not two minutes into the whole mess. 

It felt bitterly familiar. The warmth and safety of basking in her sister’s protection, weaving her own magic, hither and tither, like a needle through heavy cloth then-

Nothing.

For a moment, Hilda recalls the first of their long separations. Zelda hadn’t wished that one, at least that much could be said for it. She’d scrunched her face up something fearful and had kicked and bitten, all to rush forward and clutch Hilda one last time-

“They’re much too attached-” She remembers Mother saying over her head. The salt air of the harbour was heavy around them. The steamer bound out of Boston reeked of grease and fuel. Zelda was clutching her head with clammy fingers and peppering kisses into her frizzing hair. Hilda wanted to live in that moment. Still does. Zelda’s love for her was a rarely glimpsed thing, a leviathan far from shore, always surprising in its scale. There was something in Mother’s  voice that was almost admonishing towards Father. “It won’t do. Not for Edward’s future.”

In the corridors of Greendale High Zelda had a choice however. And she didn't choose Hilda. She chose her job, Hilda tells herself, late at night when the house is quiet and her novel has become stale. She chose responsibility, Hilda tells herself, pressing earth gently around the small beetroot saplings she hopes will take root this year at last. She chose Faustus, she finally admits, watching Zelda preen and adjust one last time, morning after morning, week after week,  in the hallway mirror on the way to the Academy. 

That wasn’t the worst of the whole business. Not by a long shot. They’d slain the monster and life should have returned to unblessed routine. Zelda should have smoked and read newspapers, Sabrina should have caused trouble, Ambrose should have listened to music too loudly and Hilda should have been tasked with wrangling the  infuriating, wonderful lot of them.

Instead Zelda had received a renewed teaching position. She went every school day now, and not only to make adolescents warble pretty versions of mortal tunes Faustus would never approve of, but to teach. She was quite the favourite according to Sabrina.

“I think the Weird Sisters are all half in love with her” The girl had let slip over a late night hot chocolate by the fire “Some weird Mommy kink. I'm really trying not to think about it Auntie.”

Hilda had blushed fiercely at that. Since when had her Sabrina become so coarse? Was this another effect of her white hair and strange new powers? As far as Hilda could see Sabrina had also gained another plentiful serving of ego. The High Priest hadn’t helped with that either. Head Girl indeed! And as a first year. Obvious flattery is what it was.

Zelda didn’t think so. She’d simply smiled indulgently at Sabrina after hearing the news over the dinner table and said “It’s about time His Excellency recognised the talent in this family.” 

She’d gestured to Ambrose’s empty seat “To think that your cousin is following Edward’s footsteps to one of the nine kingdoms of Hell when last year all he was doing was wearing a bathrobe that was actually coming to life”

Hilda and Sabrina had looked at the chair too. Hilda had felt none of the elation that was pouring off Zelda in waves. It was more like someone had stolen into her room and taken something very valuable from her, with no promise of ever returning it. Of course she wanted Ambrose to be happy and free, but it all felt too sudden. They hadn’t paid for this bounty. Hadn’t earned it. And Hilda feared the bill.

At least Faustus had made no attempt to win her over. If she was honest, at first it stung a little bit. She’d always been the least important Spellman in everyone’s calculations. She had no unnerving gifts like her niece, she wasn’t a beauty like her sister, nor a natural leader like her nephew. Or a force of nature like all three come to think of it. She simply was, year after year, season after season. As equamimable  as a good dress, a sturdy porch or a reliable kitchen garden. She had known this about herself since she’d signed her name in the book. It had bothered her once, but as she moved through life she understood that for there to be flowers, there had to be a branch. 

She had thought Zelda understood this too. She thought for a brief span of decades that her sister had come to, if not admire her, then appreciate her. Draw from her well.

“You are being ridiculous Hilda” Zelda says again, not looking up from the paperwork she is annotating. Hilda had tried to sneak a glance, only to be told- snapped at really- that it was Academy business. She’d tried to do her own work quietly, she really had, but it had just bubbled out of her. She was so worried most days it was like walking around with a cord tied around her heart. 

Zelda’s bored tone more than anything was what finally made her loose her cool. “I am not sister!” With a whoosh she pushes Zelda’s paperwork off the desk. For a moment they hang there. Zelda’s eye twitches. Her fingers ball. Every warning signal in Hilda goes off. 

She squeaks and runs from the room.

*

She has no idea how she ends up in town. It’s late in the day, and most shops are closing, so Hilda finds a park easily and manoeuvres the hearse in. She gets out and wanders. Cee’s closed up shop still hurts to look at. She’d been so different there. For the first time in centuries she’d been someone and Cee had noticed. He’d looked and he’d given her the bulk of his attention. A rare gift that no one had given her since Sabrina was small.

There’s a coffee shop a little further down, a dull chain affair. It has some of the trappings of Cee’s shop (brick walls, quirky posters) but none of the heart. None of the pulsing possibility she’d felt there. She gets a coffee anyway. Probably good to have a little bit of energy for when she has to climb out of her own grave tonight. Zelda will be very efficient. They’ve nearly got this down to a fine art by now. 

She probably should just go home and get it over with. The longer she waits, the more frightening the idea of death becomes. It’s best when Zelda surprises her. An axe in the face. That time with the crossbow. The afternoon in then attic with an awl of all ridiculous things.  Actually it’s best when Zelda doesn’t kill her at all. They’ve had a strangely peaceful year. For a few months there Hilda had actually hoped something was mending between them.

Father and Mother had said something, done something to Zelda when Hilda returned from England at last. It had been three years, and Hilda had spent nearly every other minute dreaming of finally being reunited with her sister. She’d inspected herself in the mirror daily. She had taken to wearing her hair in ribbons at night so it would curl slightly just like Zelda’s. She had a fantasy, so well worn and lived in by the time they arrived in Greendale that she actually had to remember it hadn’t happened, of the two of them, finally the same height strolling down a busy city street. What beautiful girls everyone who looked at them thought. Sisters of course someone else would say.

It hadn’t happened.

The Zelda she’d come back to find was more like Father in temperament than anything else. She pulled her beautiful hair up to reveal a neck Hilda could never emulate, and had a different boy call on her every night. Hilda waited. She waited for the moment when Zelda would drop the act and they would be friends again. She’d waited three whole weeks. One week for each year she’d reasoned. Then she’d put on her prettiest peach dress, and paid Zelda a call in her room.

It was the first time Zelda murdered her. Sewing scissors in the neck of all things. Mother was there when she climbed out of the cold dirt. “You really shouldn’t aggravate your sister” She said after brushing the worst of the dirt off Hilda’s dress. Hilda sniffled. She looked up to Zelda’s bedroom window, somehow sure that her sister was watching the whole exchange.

“Is this seat taken?”

Hilda starts with surprise. The voice is alien in her current setting. If she did not see Faustus Blackwood sitting down at a table in a mortal coffee shop with her own eyes she would never have believed it.

“No- I - No?” She splutters and gapes at him. He’s dressed a little less Machiavellian than Sunday service, but he stills sticks out. Hilda glances around. None of the other patrons, a teenage couple by the water cooler, an old farmer in bib-overalls reading the free newspapers, or the group of young mothers clustered by the fireplace, have so much as glanced at the High Priests’ outlandish attire. A charm then.

Faustus is smiling when she turns back to him.

“Hilda Spellman” He says, seeming to relish the words. Hilda smiles uncertainly. She’s been excommunicated, but she still feels the urge to defer. 

“A mystery if there ever was one” Faustus’ smile is sharp and Hilda longs to be home suddenly and completely. Even if it means getting murdered by Zelda. 

A mystery? Her mind does catch on that. No one has ever called her a mystery in her long years on this earth. You are the worst liar I’ve ever met, Edward, freshly of the clergy, laughing at her stuttering attempts to tell him that no she didn’t see him with anyone last Saturday, certainly not a blonde mortal woman young enough to be his granddaughter-

“Ta-da” She mumbles and feels herself going bright red after. Of all the stupid-

“You know I’ve spent hours contemplating what you might like” He waves a taloned hand carelessly. “It was barely a thought for the rest of your family. They were like open books. But you-” He spreads his hands wide and offers her what he must think is a roguish smile. “What do you want Hildegard Spellman?”

“Nothing” She answers before she can think better of it. “Just stuff I’ve already got. My family. My garden.”

“No more mortal friends then?”

“No” She flushes, this time in true shame. The word mortal had rolled off the High Priest’s tongue much the same way it had rolled off Zelda’s throughout her brief stint of employment. She’s an embarrassment to their coven, or used to be, when she was still a part of it. If only she could work out what she had done. The Cerberus business was obvious, as was that bit of Catholicism that got her excommunicated. But before that? She cannot ever recall any incident that warranted the way they treated her. Faustus, Zelda, Edward even. The whole stinking lot of them acted like she was always on the verge of some great faux pass.

Be the branch she tells herself. She sinks back into an old trick. Makes herself feel the roots sprouting out of her shoes straight into the ground. Feels the cool of the earth. 

It works. Within moments she’s calm enough to gift Faustus a smile and answer correctly.

“I’m not wanting for anything. I thank His Unholy Eminence, but I’m content with my lot.”

A cold wind passes through the little cafe. Hilda sees the fireplace flutter. The groups of mortals give little starts. The farmer behind Faustus rolls up his paper, shrugs on his jacket, and gets up to leave.

Faustus has stopped smiling. The shop around him darkens, until the only pinpricks of light shine behind his eyes. Hilda knows it’s only a spell. A damn terrifying one, but nothing more than a elemental spell, and the whole of Greendale still exists outside their little bubble. He’s reached for her hands and she can’t seem to move them. A mobility curse then. Not something he can upkeep indefinitely. 

Her heart still beats very fast.

He presses his thumbs into the center of each wrist. A sharp pain lances through her joints, and for a second she thinks he’s poisoned her.

Then just as abruptly the lights and murmur of the cafe flood her senses again. There is no one in the booth across from her, but when she checks, both wrists bear a half moon crescent cut.

As if sharp nails have punctured the skin there.

*

The drive home is strange.

The best Hilda can compare it to is the feeling when she’s just about to put out her back. Except it’s her whole body. Any wrong move, it seems to be all but screaming at her.

She handles the steering wheel gingerly, using only her index finger and thumb to steer on the slow winding country road home. She drives very slowly. Broaching the subject with Zelda will be the tricky part. ‘Zelds you’d never believe who I saw at the little coffee shop in town’ would not go over well. Nor would the fact that Faustus had all but admitted to buying the Spellmans off. But she’d have to. There was nothing for it.

And the last bit. That she wanted her sister’s advice on more than anything. What had Faustus done to her? The marks have already faded into scars as if from wounds that happened months ago, not the very same evening. There’s some nasty magic at play here, Hilda’s sure of it.

The Spellman mortuary is dark. Hilda parks the hearse in the old barn, and wonders how she can intercept Zelda before the killing blow. She sits in the dark of the car for another minute, feeling the cab begin to cool, and chewing on her nails. 

Finally, and here she straightens her back and puffs out her chest a little, she opens the door and gets out. The barn is dark, she has to feel her way along the musty cold walls. Once in a while her hands pass over objects and she can immediately place them, floating bright and serene, far away from the current frighting moment. Her big rake for overturning the garden beds in spring. Sabrina’s antique steel sled, abandoned going on two years into her acquaintance with Harvey and his vastly superior sled collection, a scarecrow Hilda had never quite gotten around to putting out into the rows of peas by the west end of the house.

All the time, the feeling lingers. Something is wrong. Something is more wrong with Hilda than has ever been in all her decades on earth. It’s worse those pinching shoes Mother made her wear to her dark baptism, or being pressed to eat a scrap of liver at the last coven feast she attended, or even slowly dying at her sister’s hand. No this something is bone deep. It’s like her entire being has come unspooled-

The front door closes with a bang. Hilda flinches and eyes the front staircase, ears straining for Zelda. But everything remains quiet, except the dignified ticking of the grandfather clock upstairs. 

She doesn’t remember the walk from the shed to the house. There’s a curiously blank spot in her mind where the last few minutes should be. 

Deep breaths, Hilda tells herself. Deep breaths chicken, she soothes as though her own mind was a frightened child, and we’ll get this all sorted out. 

And then she has most comforting thought she’s had since she’s come home; Zelda will sort it out.

With that she’s finally able to relax her grip on her purse and take the first step up the stairs. 

“Turning in so early sister?”

She turns. It’s too dark. She thinks Zelda’s voice might have come from the kitchen, but she’s not sure. Her heart beats fast. Everything depends on what she says next.

“Zelda.” She swallows. It was always like this. She choked on words mid-harrowing at the Academy too. The sound of quick moving footsteps behind her. She turns. Nothing. “Zelda, please -“

The knife glides into her sternum so easily that for a moment Hilda can only stare at the handle. It’s not one of the kitchen knives. Zelda must have been saving this one for a special treat. She’s pierced Hilda’s heart with unerring accuracy. A hand comes around her shoulder blades.

Hilda looks up. Zelda doesn’t appear particularly enraged. More annoyed if anything. “Really Hilda,” She says, sounding not angry at all, more chagrined with her clumsy little sister. Sometimes in weak moments when she’s near death this tone makes something clench inside Hilda.  It does now. “I thought we were past childish tantrums.” Zelda sighs, and her hand tightens just a fraction, at Hilda’s nape.

And just like that Hilda knows that some terrible final piece has clicked into a trap. A trap built for them by Blackwood that she still only sees the hulking outline of. But Zelda will understand- Zelda was always the one who protected them, except when she didn’t, when she left Hilda against the Thirteen-

Hilda’s heart spasms around the piece of steel lodged in it, her mouth is starting to fill with blood, but she stays upright. From past experience she knows she has maybe a minute or two, less, if Zelda pulls the knife out.

“Sister - something is wrong-” She gasps, and there must be something in her voice, because Zelda frowns.

“What are you blabbing about? It’s my Satan-given right to discipline you-“

“No” she interrupts, knowing this speech nearly by heart anyway “Blackwood came to see me- he-“

“Father Blackwood?” Now the frown has deepened into a scowl “Hilda if you’ve had a fit of hysterics in front of the High Priest so help me Lucifer-“

Zelda punctuates this, whether unconsciously or not, by pulling out the knife. Hilda feels warm blood gush down the front of her blouse. The edge of her vision blurs and darkens. She fights. She holds on.

“Zelda-“ she manages, catching her sister’s eye, blue on green, and then Zelda plunges the knife in again, at her throat this time, and Hilda goes to the quiet place. There’ll be time to tell Zelda everything tomorrow.

II

As always, after Hilda needed a lesson scrubbed in, Zelda finds herself overworked.

It wasn’t just Mortuary business that cropped up, that she could handle with a bit of short term time stretching, but the little things. Hilda’s plants began to droop within the hour of their caretaker’s death. Zelda knows from experience that even if she gets her shoes dirty, and grafts growing spells on every single root, they’ll develop the same blight. A spot of brown on a leaf here. A shiver of mold on what should be green and fresh.

Hilda’s spiders are another annoyance. They vacate the house en masse, and will only return to their small cleaning tasks once Hilda, scrubbed and pink from the morgue shower, calls to them.

The more complex organisms in the house don’t do much better in her sister’s absence. 

“Why can’t you talk to her like a normal person?” Sabrina demands over breakfast. “She was going to help me with my botanical drawings. You know I never pick the right colours.”

“She can help you tonight” Zelda says without lowering her newspaper. 

“But the homework is due today!” 

In between turning her page, Zelda stares her niece down. Sabrina flushes. She knows the mortal boy usually helps with Sabrina’s weakest subject and this is nothing more than a flimsy excuse to make a point. 

And besides, it’s Zelda’s duty. Has been since time immemorial. 

Left alone Hilda would wreak havoc. She’s more insidious than Sabrina who just charges into disaster. Trouble has a way of seeping into the space around Hilda. Like someone filling up a warm bath.

She’s gotten too lenient this last year. She’s let things slip. She’s failed to curtail Hilda’s more colourful instincts. That mortal man for example. She clutches the newspaper tighter at the thought of his hands on her sister. Your blood pressure Zelda, she calms herself in a weak echo of Hilda’s voice.

No, Hilda was too much herself for her own good sometimes. Father and Mother had seen it. Even Edward had seemed baffled by their little sister. ‘She’s going to get herself killed by pure accident one day’ he’d carelessly said in the last year of their shared childhood, and Zelda had felt a bolt of fear so primal that even all these years later her heart still speeds up a little. Hilda could be taken away, and had been, if only for three years, and there’s absolutely nothing Zelda could do about it.

“Have you at least practiced your solo?” She asks her niece. “I will not be accused of favouritism.” Sabrina rolls her eyes. “Even if it is the case.”

This at last draws an eye roll and a weak smile out of Sabrina. 

“Yes, I’ve practiced.” She raises her eyebrows “But Fleetwood Mac? Blackwood’s bound to get suspicious soon. There’s only so many mortal songs you can sneak past him.”

“You let me worry about that” Zelda says, knowing full well that Faustus would never imagine anything so melodic came from a non-witch mind. “And it’s Father Blackwood Sabrina.”

*

The Academy of Unseen Arts is strangely lovely in the rainy spring day.

Zelda loves walking through the damp corridors after her lesson, returning the occasional nod from students and staff alike. She belongs here at the heart of her coven. She’s good for it. The strength of this conviction shocked her in her first weeks of teaching, but now she just glories in it. Here is something that leans to her. Here is something that knows she means well and is planning for the best.

The High Priest’s office is dark. The curtains have been drawn even against the weak spring sunlight. Faustus sits behind his grand desk, writing with a quill that looks more aesthetically pleasing then practical. Something like unease twitches near her heart. If the rest of the school is a heart, pumping blood through stone-covered arteries, this office is like discovering a tumour. Zelda pushes this unpleasant thought away. Faustus has his own interests, but they’ve really begun seeing eye to eye lately.

Faustus looks up when she clears her throat. She knows how she must look to him. She took a little detour to the bathroom to make sure her hair fell just right. Her make-up is impeccable and she puts a little angle into her hip as his gaze falls on her.

It works like a charm. He smiles and drops the quill.

“Zelda” He breathes. “You are a vision.”

She only tilts her head at that and bats her eyelashes. It really is too easy. Letting him kiss her hand, she steps lithely around him and leans on the edge of his desk.

“Did you hear our latest piece?”

“I did” He steps slightly closer to her than proprietary should allow. “A masterpiece as always.” His breath touches her jugular. Zelda tilts her head back. 

Never let anyone say that she couldn’t be accomodating when it suited her.

*

After, as she slides her skirt back into place and touches her hair to make sure no disasters have occurred in the last two minutes, Zelda says, in what she would characterise as an airy, careless voice:

“I hear my sister had some words with you?”

Faustus freezes only for a split second. Anyone else less intimately acquainted with the man’s practiced charm would not have caught it. Zelda feels herself go ice-cold all over. What had Hilda said? Why did that little idiot never trust her to take care of things- what in heaven could she offer to remedy whatever awful slight had obviously occurred-

“She did.” The curiously neutral inflection makes Zelda pause. She stares at Faustus. 

“And? I mean is everything alright?” She splutters before she can think better of it.

Here Faustus nods, seemingly distracted with fastening his cravat. Badly. Zelda pushes his hands away and begins to loosen the fabric to start again. He looks up at her and she sees his adam’s apple bob a few times. 

“Why yes.” His coal-rimmed eyes don’t quite seem to meet hers suddenly. “Hildegard meant no harm.”

Zelda stares at him for a moment, before remembering herself and tightening the cravat around his neck. He swallows visibly again. She steps back.

In all their time at the Academy, and all the long years of joint covenhood since, she has never heard Faustus pass any kind of non-critical comment on her sister’s nature. If someone had asked her, Zelda would have bet money that Faustus didn’t know Hilda’s full name.

Something has happened.

The knowledge blooms in her, a little slower than her first adolescent realisation that Hilda could die, but no less terrifyingly.

Something has happened between her sister and the High Priest. Did Faustus force himself on her? It wouldn’t be a first for the coven, and certainly not for Faustus-

“Sister Zelda?”

She remembers herself and schools her features. Faustus actually looks a little pale. Mother had always said to never let anyone see her angry face. Zelda wonders what kind of grimace he’d seen.

“Yes, Father?”

He still looks unnerved, but the smile she wills into being with sheer love for her family’s prospects seems to placate him.

She makes her exit as gracefully as possible. Only once the heavy door has closed behind her does she allow herself to pick up her discarded thread of thought. 

Hilda and Faustus.

On second thought the idea of anything like sex occurring between the two of them is ridiculous. Faustus had made his disdain for her sister’s physical form clear on several occasions in their years at school, and Hilda would have hexed him into next week if he so much as leaned in for a kiss, High Priest or not.

Zelda makes a conscious effort to breathe. Her shoulders relax, and she’s able to loosen her clenched fists. The school corridor comes back into focus.

But still the unease remains. Something has occurred between Hilda and Father Blackwood. And Zelda has no earthly idea what.

Home. That’s where she needs to be. Certainly not wringing her hands next to their plot of Cain earth, but in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. And so what if she just happened to be there when Hilda inevitably stomped through the foyer in search of a bath?

It was her sisterly duty after all.

*

Hilda is angry at her. Or angrier than usual at least.

It’s nearly witching hour by the clock in the kitchen and Zelda still sits next to a severely depleted plate of Hilda’s peach cobbler and starting to get truly annoyed.

When she’s in a particular sulk, Hilda will do this. Once, when Zelda killed her in the middle of her own birthday party, Hilda had waited until just before dawn to crawl out of her patch of earth. Apart from the anger growing in Zelda there had also been fear, and Hilda had known it. She must have known it, for how hesitantly she’d touched Zelda’s tear-stained face upon emerging from her grave, how she’d rested her hand on Zelda’s cheek for a long moment.

But the party had just been too much. There’d been a visiting delegation from a coven in Albania, and one of the women had her hands all over Hilda all night, until the latter witch became a giggling mess and started putting charms on all the paintings. Zelda was only performing her duty. 

When she finally nods off, of course she dreams about that night.

Hilda was wrapped in a lemon yellow dress with a fuzzy white cardigan dotted with pearls. One of the last holdovers from the fifties. She’d been cooking all week. ‘Not every day a witch turns a hundred Zelds’. She’d made all her favourite foods. Perfectly charred steaks, delectable bites of candied strawberries, mulled wine without too much aniseed. Zelda hadn’t quite known what to do with herself.

In her dream, she knows. She charges forward and plasters herself to Hilda, remembering the texture of that ugly cardigan, even though she’d only felt it while dragging her sister’s body to the garden. Hilda laughs, and allows it. Now they’re swaying. Dancing, and Zelda pulls back to look at her face, her dear, irritating, lovely face and-

The front door slamming shut wakes her.

Sabrina tries to sneak past the open door of the kitchen. ‘Tries’ being the operative word. Zelda’s ridden pack horses with a quieter stomp.

“Sabrina.”

She sees the girl’s shadow pause, can almost hear her considering making a run for it. Then she returns.

“Hey” She throws her muddy school bag on the table and drops into a chair next to Zelda. A big chunk of her hair has been singed off near the crown of her head. Zelda knows Sabrina is perfectly capable of minor beauty charms, but nonetheless she flexes her fingers and watches the section gloss into white, unhurt hair.

“Well?” Zelda queries, reaching for her packet of cigarettes “What’s the story this time?”

Sabrina just groans. “You don’t wanna know.” She stretches her arms over her head and Zelda hears the pops in her spine. A little mortal hold-over that will fade in time. “Being Head Girl kinda sucks”

Zelda would say that’s not true, but it is. The job certainly hadn’t looked like fun when Edward did it. Sometimes she thinks her brother spent the better part of his youth chasing after idiot children too powerful for their own good. She’d seen to Hilda of course. Edward would have tattled to their parents if he knew half the scrapes their sister had stumbled into. 

Sabrina drops her arms then frowns at her.

“Did you sleep here?”

“No, I was just waiting for Hilda-‘’

The words catch in her throat. It’s well past dawn. She shoots up, chair clattering behind, ignoring Sabrina’s startled yelp, and stumbles through the foyer. No muddy footprints. Hilda might have cleaned them already, but that usually took until she’d come out of her post-death sulk.

“Auntie?”

Zelda ignores Sabrina standing in the kitchen doorway and pushes through the double doors leading to the morgue. 

Everything is clean.

The stainless steel walls of the shower are dry to the touch. She turns.

“What’s going on?”

She passes Sabrina in the foyer without a word, Taking the staircase two at a time, pausing briefly to glance into the empty bathroom, before pushing into their shared bedroom-

Her bed is slightly rumpled from where she made it the previous morning. Hilda’s is still perfect. The windows are closed and the air is cold. She turns on her heel and is at the front door before Sabrina can even finish her indignant “Aunt Zeld-“

Even through the fine mist of rain she can see that the Cain earth hasn’t been disturbed. Her shovel marks still feather the flat ground. She pushes her fingers into the earth, and searches, knowing she’d be unable to describe the exact texture of familiar warm life force she’s looking for to anyone except perhaps her niece.

Nothing.

But she does encounter Hilda’s shape, her earthly remains, still packed with earth and so very quiet. She pushes her own magic into the biblical earth, strengthening a spell that has never needed it before, and feels...no give at all. It is like trying to move a concrete wall. It’s cold, and unforgiving.

It’s death.

*

Out of all the funerals Zelda has prepared for, this is the first one she doesn’t manage.

The embalming for one. Ambrose, freshly returned from the fourth circle of hell at his cousins summons, had turned pale when she brought it up, and she spared him from having to vocalise that he couldn’t help her. Witch orphans who they’d never met were one thing, but his own flesh and blood was another matter.

In days past Zelda might have considered farming the job out to Monsiuer Bellori at the Miskatonic University. He had prepared Edward and Diana splendidly after the accident left little more than charred remains. But the European warlock had also passed on meanwhile.

And it wasn’t as if there was much to be done to Hilda. The knife wound at her breast was quickly mended. The throat took a steadier hand, and some stitches Zelda hadn’t put to use since Queen Victoria died, but had also been accomplished speedily enough.

But once her sister was on the cold slab, in a fresh cardigan, dress, and blood mopped clean, Zelda couldn’t continue. She knew the cuts she had to make, knew that certain organs were already rotting inside Hilda’s deceptively pink skin, chemicals that had to fill her so the family could say their farewells to something resembling her sister in life-

Zelda couldn’t do it.

At best she could sit in the uncomfortable chair in the cool air of the morgue and smoke cigarette after cigarette, lighting each with increasingly clumsy fingers. Hilda’s serene profile mocked her. She didn’t even sleep like that for Satan’s sake. Her sister turned and tossed and snorted in her sleep. And if she was still, she smiled, even in her sleep.  And she’d had something to tell Zelda just before she died, and now Zelda might never know-

She jabs out the the butt of the cigarette on the chair. When she peers inside the empty packet she sighs. It’s no use. Any of this. The Cain earth had lost its potency after serving the Spellmans since before the trials at Salem. Whether the Dark Lord is punishing her or the family at large she’s uncertain. She can’t seem to think around the loud buzzing in her head. 

Besides, there’s a scream that’s been threatening her vocal chords since she dug up her lifeless sister. 

She begins applying the final touches instead. Hilda’s foundation, thin and powdery, a hold over from the eighties that no amount of YouTube make-up channel viewing with Sabrina could vanquish. She touches her forehead to Hilda’s before she sweeps the brush. Kisses the cold apple of each of her cheeks. An idea comes to her, silly and washed up like a fragment from all the fairytales they read to Sabrina as a child- but perhaps-

She presses her lips to Hilda’s very quickly. Her heart speeds up a little and she thinks of Mother and Father. It is your responsibility to curb her Zelda. Hilda’s lips are dry and cold. She doesn’t awaken magically, and the shame that cuts through Zelda momentarily eclipses her grief.

The morgue blurs out of focus for a moment and Zelda pinches herself. Hard.

The make-up goes on smoothly after that. Hilda looks much the same as any other day, but Zelda is loath to finish just yet. She rummages in her make-up case and finds one of the nail polish bottles. She applies three coats very evenly to every finger. After a moments thought she does her toes too.

*

“We’ll bury her today”

“What?” Sabrina looks murderous “ But we still haven’t tried the charm of Ak-Ni’ab or the stone of Mikanosis!”

She’s in the sitting room with Mrs Wardwell of all infuriating people to invite. The woman has been strangely quiet all along. She’s looked at Hilda, eyes snagging briefly on her hands. If she had any thoughts on the nail polish Zelda was ready to tear her throat out. But all the woman had just nodded and that was that.

“For the last time” She blows a gust  of cigarette smoke towards Mrs Wardwell. “We will not raise Aunt Hilda by necromancy Sabrina. ” There’s a headache building above her left eyebrow “It will not be her.”

“Well she’d still be here if you had your anger under a little bit better control”

“Whoa, whoa cuz” Ambrose lays a quelling hand on Zelda’s shoulder. It was just as well, she could strike down Sabrina where she stood for those words. The girl was intolerably mortal sometimes. What she had done to Hilda had been calculated, a level-headed consequence that had had predictable results. Until yesterday.

Sabrina looks frightened. Then tears pool in her eyes. When Zelda reaches for her she flinches back. When Mrs Wardwell lays a hand on her arm however she does not. Zelda stares. She could tear that woman limb from limb for witnessing this- for being in Sabrina’s good graces when Zelda desperately needs her support-

“When?” Sabrina grits out. 

Zelda composes herself. “An hour. We’ll bury her in the Cain earth by her vegetable garden- and perhaps” She looks to Ambrose. He’s staring off into space 

“Perhaps a miracle will occur with time.”

*

So that’s where they end up. A sorry small group of mourners by a small grave.

She could have delayed the funeral and sent out invites of course. Her sister had many friends, and even a few admirers. But Hilda was her responsibility. Her constant chore, and constant dubious prize. And now Zelda supposes, her failure as well. Only hers.

She resists the urge to tell the Wardwell woman to leave, if only because she seems to be keeping Sabrina somewhat calm. Zelda’s not some wet-behind-the-ears, century-old witch. She knows a soothing spell when she sees one. 

Still the funeral goes as well as she may hope.

III

Hilda doesn’t wake up in the Cain pit.

She wakes up on a very nice antique dining table. She’s not covered in dirt. In fact, she’s in her very favourite dress and cardigan. Someone has painted her nails. Duck egg blue. As she lifts her hands to inspect this strange phenomenon, she notices the bandages at her wrists, and stranger still, Mary Wardwell, sitting quietly at the head of the table, watching her with cool eyes.

“Where am I?”

“Why in my little cottage in the woods of course. After I saved you from a poisoned apple. A regular Snow White you are.” There’s something shifting behind Ms Wardwell’s green eyes as she says this, but Hilda is not sure it would pass for good intention in any circle.

She sits up with a groan. She feels remarkably well for having just resurrected from the Cain earth. Usually she needed at least a day and a hot bath to feel like herself again.

“Well, this has been ... nice.” Hilda says, unsure how to phrase this politely. “But I’d better be getting home.”

“You’re not going anywhere near the Spellman mortuary” Mrs Wardwell answers, sounding bored “I didn’t dig nine ounces of iron out of your joints for you to waltz right back into the same trap.”

“Trap? Nine ounces of what?” Hilda’s head hurts. She’d kill for a cup of tea right now. Sabrina’s teacher doesn’t look like she’ll be making a move anytime soon. She sits on the edge of the table for another minute, sorting through her memories, the warmth of her coffee in the late afternoon, the cool plastic of the steering wheel, and finally the knife in her sister’s hand. Her head hurts.

“I’m sorry, could you-“ Ms Wardwell looks at her inquiringly. Hilda swallows. “Where’s your kettle? I’m going to need a cup of tea for this.”

*

“Iron nails?”

“Iron nails.” Ms Wardwell repeats, flicking a finger against her untouched cup of tea. It gives off a dull ring.

“Through all your joints, preventing you from resurrecting.” She frowns “Surprisingly subtle for Blackwood actually. ” Now she looks slightly troubled.

“And we are-“

Hilda looks outside the window again. In the late twilight she can make out the surrounding woods, but everything seems oddly tilted compared to home. The trees are bigger than any that grow in New England. The light filtering through their leaves has a golden tinge that unnerves her. The bird song is almost familiar but once in a while a discordant note slips in and Hilda feels the goosebumps ripple across her shoulders.

“We’re on my own little plot of Earth.” Now Mary Wardwell smiles “I’ve carried it with me for a long time. It’s a tad stronger than yours.”

Hilda considers her. She’s like Zelda in a way. Even while draped across a cosy little kitchen chair no one would ever presume to call Mrs Wardwell helpless. Or without designs of her own.

“Why did you save me?” Hilda asks, deliberately pitching her voice up a little higher. Sometimes with witches it was easier to play the lamb card. Let them underestimate her at their own cost.

Mrs Wardwell’s eyebrows lift and her mouth twitches. Hilda flushes. She’s not sure how, but Mrs Wardwell has caught her out in the simplest of her tricks for dealing with coven members.

“I was bored”

“How long until I can go home?” Hilda manages after a silence. Her voice is normal again, though she does allow a sliver of her very real fear to colour it.

“I don’t know.” Mrs Wardwell tilts her head “Curses of this kind take time  to wash out of the body. You will be unable to return to the Greendale coven’s domain without deteriorating significantly.”

“But the coven stretches all the way to Arkham!” Hilda squeaks before she can hold her tongue.

“And to Riverdale in the south” Mary adds,  and Hilda feels her smile, even if she can’t see it.

The thought of not being able to return home for days, maybe weeks, momentarily chokes her. What is she to do in the world? She travelled in her younger days, but only because Mother had been intent on marrying her off like a prize sow. She’d seen most of Europe and a stretch of Africa in the same mood. The mood to be at home. To take care of her plants, to walk familiar paths. And the thought of leaving her family on their own worries at her- they were all much too clever for their own health. 

“My home is right in the middle of that” She says pleadingly. At this Mary’s eyes harden.

“Then you have to wait. I’ve got business to attend to. Make yourself useful.” She gestures vaguely behind her to the door to the lounge “My shelves need dusting.”

Hilda barely hears her, real panic drumming through her veins for the first time since she woke up. 

“You have to tell my family I’m alive.” She begs “They’ll be worried, they’ll-“

“I will be doing no such thing Hilda. Blackwood has a plan in place and I want to see how it plays out.”

“But-“

“I could have left you there. Come to think of it- I could still put you back. I’m sure your niece will put the pieces together in time. Your sister is another matter. And all that time you’ll be under the cold earth, because I’ll leave you awake down there. Awake but unable to so much as telepath for help. You’ll be quite insane by the time they reach you.”

The room grows darker around Mrs Wardwell as she speaks. Hilda shrinks, both from the words and the obvious power emanating from the other witch. We underestimated her, she thinks. Even Zelda. She’s not a little schoolmarm at all.

“She keeps her cleaning supplies in the cupboard by the kitchen hallway”

And before Hilda has time to make anything of the curious switch into third person, Mary Wardwell rises, and leaves her alone on the dining table in a strange cottage in the middle of the woods.

*

Spiders are slow learners, but excellent once they’ve internalised an action.

Hilda calls to them, then sets about the house, knowing it will be at least a day till they find her. If this weird cottage is in the woods near Greendale at all. She ties a dish towel around her hair to keep it out of the way and sets about cleaning the pig sty Mary Wardwell calls a home.

Its dreadfully hard going at first. Hilda mucks out the parlour first. Its been used as some sort of make-shift brewing room. There’s rotting newt guts under the carpet, toad eyes in a few of the vases and a large rusty stain on the wood underneath it all. This would all frighten someone who didn’t raise a child with Sabrina’s talent for making a mess. She has to stop occasionally to remember what exact combination of vinegars and herbs will leech out a stain, but by the end her labours the place looks almost fit for entertaining Lucifer himself.

The kitchen scrubs up easier, mostly owing to its less absorbent surfaces than to any especial care on Sabrina’s schoolmarm’s part. The woman likes meat, that much is good and certain, but has no system for storing it. Hilda throws out a carcass-worth of questionable steaks, then sets about skinning and curing the freshly killed deer that Mary has left to drip in the laundry. 

It’s hard work, and she’s taken off her cardigan, and is working up a heathy crop of sweat, sawing through the spine when -

“Well, well” Mary Wardwell leans against the doorway leading to the kitchen “Aren’t you a vision?”

Hilda looks down at herself, gut deep in deer, splattered with gore and still in her very favourite blue dress. The thing even has a sweetheart neckline. A strand of hair keeps fluttering in front of her face. She blows it away. 

“Well someone had to do it” She huffs, irritated and on her way to truly angry “You can’t just kill an animal and then let it go to waste”

Mary smiles at that, and Hilda sees it again. That strange flicker behind her eyes. Like she’s a reptile in human skin, just following stage directions. Her throat tightens, and suddenly she’s frightened for no reason she can put a finger on.

“Let me” Mary says, and takes the saw out of Hilda’s hands “This bit is always the hardest.”

Instead of saying ‘you don’t have to tell me’ or any of the other replies just burning on the tip of her tongue, Hilda finds herself... nodding meekly. She steps back and watches as Mary positions herself. She begins to saw. Hilda holds the carcass for her. The muscles of Mary’s biceps bulge.

“Parlour’s clean” Hilda says after a while. “And the kitchen was” She looks at the deer “Mostly.”

“The bedroom isn’t so bad anyway” Mary smirks and Hilda hears the bone snap. “You should survive sleeping in there tonight at least.”

Hilda swallows. “The sofa looks fine”

“The parlour hosts a few unfortunate visitors at night. No one you’d want to catch you asleep.”

So that is how Hilda finds herself in Mary’s untidy en suite (and Satan she’s going to have to wage war in here tomorrow judging by the thickness of the mould) using her toiletries and wondering what she’s going to sleep in.

The dress is more red than blue. Hilda sighs. Zelda loves to harp at her about her untidiness. ‘Where do you think Sabrina gets it from? Honestly Hilda-

Hilda really should have swiped back just once with ‘And where do you think she gets her high handed morals from’. Just to see Zelda’s face. The pink that would have risen in her cheeks. The murder would have been worth it.

But thinking about Zelda depresses her. She looks at her nails again, at the careful blend of her eye shadow and the becoming curl in her hair.  This wasn’t Ambrose’s handiwork. This was Zelda. Putting her in her favourite dress, picking out her favourite colour, all things that Hilda wasn’t ever sure her sister remembered. 

She peels the dress off and squeaks. She’s wearing a silk liner which solves her night clothes problem but under that-

Had Zelda bought her new underwear? It certainly looks that way. It’s nothing raunchy really, just a trim of lace over some nice cream silk things, but it looks lovelier than anything she’s ever bought for herself against her tanned skin- it looks like Zelda had thought about this, because who knows, off the cuff what their sister would look like in lacy briefs? What kind of sick sister would take pleasure in that, fondling the lace in the mirror, hand moving over the front of their own body-

“Are you alright in there?”

Hilda squeaks again, and pulls the underdress down.

“Just brushing my teeth!” She answers, wondering what Mary Wardwell heard, or if, Satan-forbid, she has warding charms up around her private quarters.

When she closes the bathroom door five minutes later, Mary is awake and laying on the massive bed. Her shoes are gone, red stockinged feet crossed at the ankle. She eyes Hilda with an unnerving amount of focus.

“You want to go home?” She asks

“Yes!” Hilda nods frantically “I need to-“

“The first step is joining a new coven. What will you give to join mine?” Mary asks eyes holding Hilda’s. Hilda stops. Amongst witches this is the most dangerous question of all. What canst thou give? A lock of hair? A promise? A few years of her life?  

Sabrina’s face flashes in front of her eyes. Sabrina sitting at dinner right now, eating her meal, probably in a terrible sulk with her other Aunt- 

And then she sees Zelda. Proud and impervious to Sabrina’s tantrum, but so very dependent on Hilda to keep everything running smoothly no matter how much she’d deny it. Zelda, angry with a knife at her throat. Zelda, tongue pointed between her teeth, slotting in a difficult puzzle piece. The tears on her face, and the scars on her back. The feeling of her adolescent kiss pressing into Hilda’s hair all those years ago-

“Anything” Hilda says, then ruins her stoicism by gulping “I’ll do anything”

“Well then, would you like to kiss me Hilda?”

Hilda stares at her. Her face must be brighter red than the woman’s stockings. She regains control of her neck last, and shakes her head.

“No- no I don’t think so.” She gulps again “There - there must be something else you’d like-“

“Really” Mary interrupts, sitting up and beginning to open the buttons of her blouse. “Are you sure?”

Hilda watches the olive skin uncovered. She shakes her head again. Slower.

“Even if I pretended to be someone else?”

Mary reaches to her. Something coils itself around her limbs and tugs. Hilda walks forward in a daze. Mary comes up to her knees and clasps her hands on either side of Hilda’s hips. Leans in to whisper conspiratorially - “What if I pretended to be mean?”

Hilda shakes her head, because she’s not really sure her voice would work at this point. This has to be a joke, or a kind of nasty trick that will get her later-

Mary bites her neck. “What if I pretended you were in need of discipline? What if I pretended-“ And here she shakes her head, and lets new blonde hair cover Hilda’s face “That you were my own personal burden?”

When did Hilda end up lying down on the bed? She can’t remember. Not when Mary Wardwell’s knee nudges her legs apart. Not when the same knee presses-

She must inhale sharply, because Mary emerges from her neck, smiling, her make-up is changed, she doesn’t favour that shade of lipstick, that’s someone else’s shade-

Mary’s knee presses down.

“Zelda!” Hilda breathes, whines really and something ripples through her, stronger than it ever was with Cee, but not overwhelming enough to override the wave of shame that immediately follows.

“Get off me” She growls, all but shoving Mary away. The other witch doesn’t move. She’s stronger than she looks, because she pins Hilda’s hands above her head, and kisses her, open mouthed, pushing her tongue in.

When she pulls away Hilda stares at her. There’s a smudge of blood on the edge of her mouth.

“Welcome to my coven Hilda Spellman”

*

“Lilith?”

“Hmm”

“The Lilith? Cast out of The Garden Lilith?”

“You know I could still kick you out of our little coven of two”

“I’m just- it’s going to take a minute that’s all. Why are you even here? In Greendale of all places.”

Mary just looks at her.

“Oh Satan’s hoof it’s something to do with Sabrina isn’t it?”

“Look you can have your” She gestures at Hilda vaguely “Breakdown or whatever this is while I get some sleep.”

“I-“

“Not a request dearie”

Hilda lays next to the original witch, Adam’s first wife, Satan’s second lieutenant in silence for all of three minutes.

“What are you planning to-“

“Sleep.” Is all a supremely irritated voice will say.

IV

The old oak tree is on fire. It’s tall, perhaps the tallest she’s ever seen. At least twenty meters high. And it’s dying.

Zelda walks towards it, sure in her nudity, eyes on the other naked witches floating around it, like so many garlands blowing in a summer breeze. The night is full of laughter, the crackle of the tree and the occasional far-off explosion.

All these things do not interest Zelda.

Hilda stands at the base of the tree. She is unfortunately not nude. She’s wreathed in flowers instead. Her eyes reflect in Zelda’s. She looks at her sister in a way she never did in life. Without fear.

Zelda reaches out her hand and the fire burns forward and consumes Hilda.

*

“How many times do we have to go over this?” Dorcas groans, and Zelda resists the urge to slap the girl.

“Until you get it right” She grits out instead “If it suits your busy schedule Dorcas” She regrets, with every fibre of her miserable being, whatever hubris had made her assign the Choir this particular song last week.

She might have been a completely different witch then. Full of fire and ambition, overconfident that she had it all balanced out just right-

“Uh Madame Spellman?” One of the boys asks in a small voice

“What?” She hisses.

“Our next class began like five minutes ago so...”

“Go!” She waves them off and the choir scampers out much too quickly for her taste. 

Sabrina of course isn’t amongst them. She’s at home, either in her bedroom or squatting next to the Cain earth, attempting whatever moronic half-baked ritual she’s found this week. The worst part is that Ambrose is probably out there with her.

Zelda retreats to her office and begins on her own stack of reading. Someone somewhere must have the answer.

*

It’s not that life without Hilda is unmanageable. 

Zelda’s a grown up witch, very much capable of cooking dinner, and shepherding two adolescents prone to thinking that they’re smarter than her. The business will need some re-arranging, but again nothing that a little ‘help wanted’ ad in the right papers would not solve. Hilda’s greenhouse will not survive the month, but Zelda has already had a stern word with herself about not taking the plants death as a personal insult. She’s perfectly capable of keeping the pale orchids in her study alive which is all she ever needed anyway. It’s all very manageable. 

It’s just that life without Hilda is unbearable.

Of the five mornings she’s woken up, alone in her room, not even with the knowledge that Hilda was down the hall, Zelda has had to spend every one of them talking herself into getting out of bed.

Then there’s the gauntlet of the rest of the house. Her niece still isn’t speaking to her, and it’s starting to feel permanent. Sabrina has been sulky with her before - heavens - Sabrina has been sulky with her for most of her teens, but this feels deeper. A broken bone, not set, and healing all wrong.

Ambrose is only marginally better. He talks to her, but after a day or two she notices that he can never quite meet her eyes anymore. He barricades himself into the attic on the rare occasion that they’re alone in the house together.

And even if her charges were to wake up and want to have long conversations with her tomorrow, Zelda isn’t sure there’s anything left in her to say.

Losing Edward had been hard. Had left her grieving well into Sabrina’s childhood. But it was a manageable wound. One she could look at in between nappy changes and broken bottles of her favourite perfume, and think yes, she would recover from this.

Hilda’s death feels like someone has gouged a hole in her that has no discernible bottom. It’s a pit, and Zelda balances on the edge, wondering if any part of her old self lies below. 

It’s your duty to curb her, Father had said in the parlour all those years ago, right after Mother had said a great many other things, mostly about the inappropriate way Zelda behaved to her younger sister. The way you look at her sometimes! Zelda feels her cheeks heat all over again at the memory. We are not in that century anymore daughter, you will grind out your desires elsewhere.

And she had. Had practically fucked her way along the Trans Siberian express route. Had tried everyone, whether they were British girls, round and blonde and Hilda-like if you squinted, beautiful Mongolian noblewomen or tough craggy old Russian warlocks. No one had made any accusations of her looking a certain way ever again.

Faustus was the final cherry on top. Once upon a time Mother had wanted her to marry him. Father and Edward had only scoffed at the idea, and Zelda felt no better than a piece of meat. It was only when they started making noises about Hilda never managing the business on her own- that she’d sent a letter to her sister inviting her to Paris. They’d had a dreadful time there: Hilda mooned at the young mortal lovers littering the streets, and attracted a few admirers of her own. Zelda had been forced to spend a great deal of time with her sister inside her cold apartment, just itching for the Cain earth.

She has trouble sleeping until the early hours of the morning most nights, so she’s taken to sitting beside Hilda’s grave. It’s melodramatic and Zelda would have laughed at herself a week ago, but now come sundown she’s shifting aside Sabrina’s sloppily made scryes and taking a seat on the damp earth.

During the day, Sabrina keeps up a running commentary while she experiments. Zelda’s heard her, on the way out to the Academy in the brief moment before the girl spots her and clams up “I’m trying a variation on an Akkadian sleepwalking spell today Auntie, I’m not sure if I’ve parsed the vowels correctly but there doesn’t seem to be any problem-“

Zelda cannot do that. Cannot chatter inanely about the minute details of her day. That’s not who they are to each other.  She manages at best to lean down, touch her lips to the damp Cain earth.

Her ‘come back’ is pitiful and muted by black soil.

V

The oak tree burns behind her, but now Hilda is floating with the other witches.

Mary Wardwell spins towards her and catches Hilda’s face with fingers full of roses.

There’s a wail. She looks down to see Zelda, naked in the light, moon and fire. She glows like a rare pearl on the bottom of the sea. If only her face weren’t set in an awful grimace, her arms reaching for Hilda. 

The fire fire roars louder and-

*

Hilda wakes, breathing in sharply, flailing before taking in her surroundings.

She’s in Mary Wardwell’s quiet old bedroom. This is the third morning she’s woken up here, and the third time Mary or the shell of Mary Wardwell, now expertly piloted by Lilith, has not been next to her. 

She’s there at night all right. She seems to delight in teasing Hilda about her shameful desire. She flicks her hair blonde, blows cigarette smoke in her eyes, and bites and prods until Hilda opens her mouth and lets herself be kissed and devoured. Then Lilith falls asleep, happy as an innocent child, clutching Hilda to her who is still red-cheeked in the face of her desire.

And then the dreams. Always the burning tree. Always the heavy flowers, and discovering Zelda, beautiful Zelda, in more pain than her heart can take, reaching for her-

It’s good that her spiders finally arrive that morning. They’re tired. Hilda scans the scuttering horde and sees limbs missing, not enough baby spiders to account for the time apart-

“Come to me”

She lets five of them at her breast where her witches mark is hidden. The rest drink from the shallow dishes of milk and honey she’s put on the bench. Mercer bites down and her blood begins to flow.

She’s like that until lunch time when she finally peels them off her. They stumble around the kitchen, well fed and clumsy with sleep now. 

“Spin your webs and rest”Hilda whispers to them, using language picked straight out of a book of Victorian grammar. Familiars have an easier time if you don’t dump too much slang on them “I have use of you tomorrow”

Mary Wardwell’s garden had been something of a revelation. After fighting her way through the bathroom, bedroom and deciding to completely ignore the attic, Hilda had been braced for the worst. Mouldering vegetables, maybe a few rotting animal corpses, overgrown hedges-

And it had been that to some degree. She hadn’t had to prune so liberally in many a year. But underneath all that the garden was wildly, shockingly verdant.

Pumpkins the size of truck tires sprouted on the far field. The apple tree ready with candy red fruit ripe for the picking. Carrots, mint, pomegranates, breadfruit, cantaloupes, wild garlic- all of it so fabulously out of season and location, that Hilda was tempted to accuse Mary Wardwell of hiding the greenest thumb in Greendale.

“It’s the earth” Lilith explains over their dinner of wild greens and grilled steak. “It came from the garden”

“Wait the garden?”  Hilda squeaks not believing her ears. “As in Of Eden?”

Lilith nods, thoughtfully spearing a caramilzed parsnip. “I stole it. This is quite good by the way.”

“Thank you” She doesn’t let herself get that easily distracted “So that’s how you were able to do it?”

Lilith looks blank.

“To resurrect me?”

Now Lilith looks annoyed. “Partly.” She scowls at Hilda “There was also the tiny matter of digging out six splintered iron nails from your joints. No measly feat for any witch.”

“Thank you” Lilith just rolls her eyes at that “But may I ask why?”

Now Lilith stares at her “Why did I save you?”

Hilda blinks back. “Well” She gestures to herself “Yes.”

Lilith considers her for a long time.

“Sabrina is important to the Dark Lord and to myself. Thus her family is of importance.”

Unlike Zelda, Hilda doesn’t feel pleased at this admission. It makes her nervous. 

“Why?”

“She will come to no harm” Lilith says “As long as I have something to do with it.”

They hold each other’s eyes until Hilda is satisfied.

“Faustus is a problem. He lets vanity steer him. This-“ She gestures to Hilda’s wrists “Was another one of his little solo misadventures.”

“But why?” Hilda stares down at her empty plate, then back at Lilith “Just so he could hurt me? Humiliate me a little?”

Lilith’s face softens for the first time in their acquaintance. Hilda can see why she was Adam’s first wife. Even through the cloud of Mary Wardwell’s human features, she sees the pure beauty Lilith had been gifted. She is of the garden as much as their Dark Lord is of heaven.

“ I wouldn’t take it as an offence.” Lilith says, with the air of soothing a hurt child. Hilda has not been on this side of the equation for decades. It feels surprisingly nice.  “Faustus has correctly identified you as the lynchpin that holds the current Spellman generation together. In a way his coming after you is a compliment.”

“So he wants to destabilise the family?” Hilda scoffs “Look I’m sure they miss me, but they’re all perfectly capable of going on without me”

Lilith just tilts her head. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

A ripple of fear jolts through Hilda. “Is it Sabrina? You need to calm her, she always gets fiery in the heat of the moment, but it will pass- just dont let her do anything dangerous-“

“Sabrina is being very Sabrina” Lilith rolls her eyes “But she is not who I was referring to”

“Ambrose?” It seems unlikely. Her nephew was the most level-headed out of all of them. But perhaps the boy was more attached to her than she realised-

“You k know for all your centuries, sometimes witches are the daftest creatures in creation. There is only one who loves you best in this world.” Lilith picks a poesy out of the arrangement on the dining table. “Who wilts every second that she believes you dead.”  The flower droops under Hilda’s gaze.

“Zelda?” 

Now Lilith smiles. “She’d do it you know” She says, dropping the blossom and leaning back into the shadows she becomes her evening rendition of Zelda.

“Everything I’ve done to you and more.” She lowers her voice into Zelda’s  New England accent “If it only meant you’d come back.”

*

Hilda leaves Mary Wardwell’s cottage the next day.

She assembles her spiders, charts a course towards where town should be and begins walking. She wonders at herself for not having tried this before. The simplest route is sometimes the best right?

The pain hits her at a grove of birch trees. It’s feels like someone is jamming daggers into her wrists and ankles. She’d warned the spiders about this. The scouts travel on. With any luck they’ll reach her family before the day is out. She lets the rest carry her a littler farther. Then she calls halt. 

“Take me back” She says, feeling the defeat more the than the blood from her bitten tongue.

Lilith waits by a conifer tree deep in the woods. Hilda can walk again by this point.

“I warned you” Adam’s first wife says, arms folded and something very much like pity playing across her features.

“I had to try” Hilda answers. 

VI

Zelda calls a family meeting after Sunday dinner.

“We’re digging Hilda up” Sabrina stares at her round eyed. “I’ll risk necromancy if it means finding out what is keeping her from returning to us”

“Whoa whoa” Ambrose says “It’s nothing to mess around with” But she feels like he’s only playing a part, much the same way they’ve all been playing the last two weeks. 

Sabrina is looking at her, really looking for the first time in days, and that alone prompts Zelda to say-

“Get the shovels. We’re doing this now.”

*

Digging up a coffin has felt like the first normal interaction they’ve had in weeks. Sabrina touches her arm, and they both help lower Ambrose down to dig out the sides of the coffin. Zelda turns to Sabrina.

“You might not want to see this” Sabrina looks up at her, and for a moment Zelda thinks she’s going to disagree, then she closes her eyes and steps forward into Zelda’s arms. She even tucks her face into Zelda’s fox coat, just like she did as a little girl.

Zelda hears the sound of wood splintering, hears Ambrose grunt as he flips open the lid-

“I think we might have a problem”

*

“I don’t think she resurrected cuz”

“But maybe- just maybe Ambrose- and then she was too shellshocked to come home. Like death PTSD or something- right Auntie Z?”

Zelda takes a long drag from her cigarette to avoid answering.

“Look Sabrina, even if that were true- there’s no marks on the inside of the coffin. Not even a scratch. I mean did I show you Kill Bill for nothing?”

“Aunt Zelda- please just say something” Sabrina turns to her imploringly. 

“I think-“ Zelda doesn’t know what to think. Something’s been at the grave powerful enough to spirit Hilda away without tripping any of their household alarms, to say nothing of her own affinity for her sister. Was this what Hilda had been trying to warn her about? Was there something more dangerous afoot to witches than petty infighting? 

And then there was the matter at the heart of it. It was worse in some ways than knowing Hilda was dead and packed in earth. Now she was gone. She could be enduring any amount of torture right now. And Zelda had no hellish idea how to start looking for her.

“We need to scry the grave again.” She takes a drag of her cigarette “And the surrounding woods. And the woods beyond that.” She’d spend the rest of her days looking for Hilda if that’s what it took. She looks up into Sabrina and Ambroses worried eyes.

“But you two need to sleep. It’s late” Well past three in the morning in fact.

“But-“

“No excuses Sabrina” She smiles at the girl, and it feels like a grimace. Sabrina looks more worried than ever. “You can be well rested for when we begin our search tomorrow”

Ambrose face is set. 

“Gather help if you must” Zelda waves her hand at him “You’re a grown warlock I can’t stop you”

Once they’ve both retired she sits a minute longer. Then she goes into her library and finds a book that’s been on her mind since they opened the empty coffin.

The spell is simple really. Cut out your heart and it will lead you to the one you love. Except a body is not meant to live without a heart for any amount of time. The last two witches who tried this, an Elizabethan princess and a Regency gentleman in Byron fever, both died with their life’s blood gushing out.

Zelda has a blood freezing charm ready. She’s not looking forward to the physical aspect of the ritual. The heart has to be removed with an object of value to the loved one. The sharpest thing she’s been able to find that Hilda had shown any kind of preferential treatment to are her sewing scissors.

But needs must, and Zelda is so sick of living in world without Hilda.

“Auntie?”

She looks up from her vanity, shoving the book and the scissors in a drawer. Sabrina stands on the threshold of her bedroom, Salem in her arms, and dressed for bed.

“Can I sleep in here tonight?”

Zelda nods. She turns down the coverlet of Hilda’s bed. 

Then she lays down in her own bed. It’s a nice surprise when she actually falls asleep.

*

She never reaches Hilda in time. The oak tree always flares up and consumes her sister with it.

*

Morning rolls around and Zelda wakes to a parlour full of scruffily good looking warlocks. “My friends” Ambrose says a little stiffly “I put the call out and they came”

Zelda eyes them, knowing full well what her nephew is neglecting to mention, these are the same boys that were happy to let him rot and take the blame for the Vatican just a few short decades ago. If he’s comfortable with calling in such a big favour on Hilda’s behalf, then who is she to stop him?

They form a picket line, walking into the woods to the west of the house, the obvious dark wall of trees from which the Hilda-thief must have approached, while the other half take the north side. Sabrina idles, then darts into the woods to the east of the house before Zelda can tell her to put another layer on.

She’s about to follow the larger group when she sees a spider stop and ditty in front of her feet.

She follows it down the drive, plunging into the tree line a good mile after the turn to town.

This part of the woods is all but deserted as far as Zeldas concerned. 

The light is what gives her pause. It flickers between the trees, moving further along as she follows. If this is a trick, the witch who thought of it will be a long time dying. She used swamp lights herself as a child to lure Hilda away from her hiding spots while they played. Hilda always laughed and followed them. She was never very cross with her sister once they ended up in whatever pretty meadow Zelda had picked out.

Zelda is absorbed in these thoughts when she sees her.

Hilda is kneeling in the dirt, carefully helping a vine of snow peas attach to a rigging system. She’s wearing her big straw hat. She’s not dead.

“Hilda.” She gasps. She can’t quite reach her somehow. This is like one of those nightmares, where she’s forever running and forever late. Hilda doesn’t look up. “Hilda!”

“So you got her little love note”

Mary Wardwell leans against a tree. Zelda stares at her, not understanding, then frowning as multiple possibilities start to flood her brain. Mary Wardwell with a shovel, Mary touching an earth covered hand- leading Hilda away from her usual route- but none of that makes sense. The woman’s a third-tier witch at best- no match for the thick web of protective spells crafted by generations of Spellmans, but there is one thing Zelda is sure of-

“This is your doing.” She snarls.

Mary has the temerity to smile. If she had any sense she’d see that she’s about one smirk away from Zelda ripping her throat out. She turns back to Hilda, still tucking little pants up to get more sun, taking not the least bit of notice of either of them. 

Zelda’s eyes scan her form. She’s an expert in almost all things that have hurt Hilda in their shared time on earth. But Hilda is red-cheeked and to all appearances marvellously whole. 

Zelda longs to check her over, to run her hands over her frame, and to be really sure in a way she hasn’t needed since the first time she murdered her sister, sneaking in later at night to check that she was in fact alive and breathing in their old bedroom-

“Let me through” She says again, ready to strike the Wardwell woman down where she stands if she refuses.

“She’s a part of my coven now.” Mary eyes her coldly “You really must take better care of your possessions, dear. Blackwood nearly broke this one.”

“If you do not explain within the next five seconds I will-“

“Yes, yes you’ll rip out my throat I heard you” Mary says “Now actually listen to me. Blackwood did this. I set it right, but you might want to create some consequences.”

When Zelda takes step towards her as Mary Wardwell holds up a hand. Two things happen at once. One Zelda’s feet are locked to the ground. Two, she’s underestimated Mary Wardwell terribly.

“I promised someone quite high up that I wouldn’t get involved in all this, but here’s a hint. Put the High Priest in Cain earth. Then you can get your sister back.” 

Zelda holds her tongue, taking in the other witch properly for the first time. Now that she’s looking for it, she sees the faintest glimmer of irregularity. Of something not right about the whole person pretending to be Mary Wardwell. Mary waits a moment, then makes a gesture that plainly says ‘well?’

“How can I trust you?” Zelda asks. At this Mary throws her head back and laughs.

“You can’t. I could snatch Hilda away, move my little cottage to somewhere you’d never find us. Just tell her we were still in Greendale. Even Witches have such poor sense of time.”

And Zelda feels it. Her own primal bolt of fear. Three years. Edward’s raised eyebrows ‘she’ll get herself killed by pure accident one day’, Hilda baking lemon tarts every other week because she knew they were Zelda’s favourite- all of that- taken away from her at last because she had never deserved it, had never earned it, all that love boiling away inside of her- 

“Or you could do this one thing for me and quite frankly for yourself. You’re allowed you know.” Mary says, and for a brief second her outline shivers, ands Zelda sees someone in Mary, no behind her, someone more powerful and elemental than even their Lord -

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously wasn’t just an empty offer. You offend me by not living it fully Sister Zelda.”

*

Getting Faustus over for tea isn’t hard at all.

She orders the children out of the house and tells him she’d like one of their special sessions. She tells him to bring his own cat of nine tails. She’s not seen hide or hair of him since the whole Hilda business started. That alone should have set off warning bells. I was distracted, Zelda tells herself uneasily. That will stop now.

“Sister Zelda” He breathes, and she knows. He did this. The foul little worm has always disliked Hilda, and here he is, thinking himself victorious and her more receptive to him than ever.

“Faustus” She smiles, willing him not to see how her hands are shaking, how his wine warm breath disgusts her-

“I heard you were in mourning” She almost strikes him dead for that. But no, she’ll wait. She wants him as frightened as Hilda must have been.

“Never for this” She breathes, holding out her arms to him, letting him lift her, kiss her neck until she gets the angle right and-

She was right.

Gouging out someone’s heart with sewing scissors did take a long time. And it looked and sounded very painful. She draws it out, reviving Faustus each time he fades.

“You will pay for this” He husks the last time she brings him back to consciousness.

“We’ll be ready” She hisses back, then snips the last artery connecting his heart to his body. 

Buries him in Cain earth.

Then she sits down and waits.

VII

This time, Hilda can move. She runs towards Zelda, feeling the heavy petals dropping behind her.

But Zelda disintegrates under her touch.

*

When Hilda wakes everything feels different. She feels lighter, as if she’s put down a weight she wasn’t even aware of carrying. Outside the birds sing their weird song, and the light is still golden. And the curse is gone. She’s sure of it.

“Do you like our coven?” Lilith asks, tearing at the fluffy pastries Hilda baked for them the night before. She’s set Hilda’s favourite flowers on the table. Buttery yellow roses. Hilda wonders what part of the garden she raised them in.

Hilda glances at her. “It’s nice as far as covens go”

“Would you like to stay?” Lilith asks, and Hilda notices that she isn’t eating as much as ripping her breakfast to shreds. “It’s been - like something out of an old life. To have you here. To just live on a little bit of earth.”

Hilda warms at that. But she knows her answer.

“If it means there is an option that I can go home?” She takes the other witches’ hand “No. I’m sorry Lilith, but no.”

Her features harden a little, but Lilith seems understanding enough as she says. “You’ll visit me again I hope?”

Hilda nods, even though she’s not sure she’ll ever get the courage up to just casually drop in on Satan’s second lieutenant. But perhaps-

“You know what they say.” Lilith touches her chin “You can’t go home again. Especially true for me. But not for you now the spell is broken. Go home to them. To her.”

The woods are a blur. Hilda’s never run this hard in her whole life. Her spiders will be hours behind her still, but for the first time she has no patience for them.

They are waiting for her.

Sabrina dashes out to the edge of the garden to meet her. She gets her hug, then Sabrina is off to fetch Ambrose ‘and his weird friends’.

Zelda stares at her when she’s out of her niece’s arms at last. She’s beautiful in the morning light, mist catching around her ankles, and hands held stiffly by her sides.

She looks like her sister of all those centuries ago at the harbour. The one she couldn’t wait to be reunited with after three long years. The one who loved her more than anything on Satan’s green earth.

“Hilda, I-“ But before Zelda can say anything Hilda steps forward and kisses her. She kisses her hard, hard enough that it makes her teeth hurt a little and prays that Lilith was right, because if Zelda laughs then she might have to return to the cottage in the woods sooner than she thought.

Zelda pushes her back. She looks troubled, emotions flit across her face faster than Hilda can catch them. Her hands stay on Hilda’s shoulders, and Hilda braces herself-

“I missed you” Zelda says. Hilda smiles a watery smile, and answers in their old childhood shorthand.

“I missed you more”

Zelda kisses her then, lightly, drawing back with pink cheeks. Her hands are rubbing up and down Hilda’s side, as if confirming that she’s really there. 

Hilda touches her face and draws her down for another kiss. They have things to talk about, but that can wait as far as Hilda’s concerned, especially when Zelda just groans and complies easily enough. Hilda opens her mouth to feel her tongue for the first time- and then her eyes slide to the freshly tilled earth on her turnip beds.

She draws back from Zelda with a wet pop. Her sister’s eyes are glassy and Hilda instantly longs to kiss her again. But her eyes snag again on the ground-

“Is someone buried in the Cain patch?”