ASH

October 1986

Massachusetts, USA

The smell came first.

Esther stood behind the counter of the bookshop, studying the stain on the ceiling that looked like a map of Africa. She did this every morning, settling onto the stool by the cash register. The stain hadn't changed since August, when she'd started working here, and that comforted her. In a world where everything flowed and changed—music, fashion, the faces on the news—the stain remained motionless.

At first she thought it was a passerby's cigarette, seeping through the gap in the door. But no. It wasn't tobacco smoke. It was a different kind of smoke, heavy, resinous, with a taste of burnt grass and... wool? No, hair. Burnt hair.

Esther gripped the edge of the counter. Her fingers went white.

"Hey, you okay?"

She blinked. A guy in a studded leather jacket stood before her, a Burger King bag in one hand and a battered book in the other. He looked at her with that mild irritation people reserve for strange girls in antique shops.

"Yeah," Esther breathed. "Just... the smell."

"It smells like mold and decay in here," he shrugged, placing the book on the counter. "How much?"

She rang up the purchase without looking at the numbers. When the door slammed shut behind him, Esther raised her hand to her face. It was shaking. Not just her hand—her whole body. Inside, in her chest, something white-hot turned over and lodged sideways between her ribs.

She knew this smell.

She remembered it.

Andover, Massachusetts. The year 1692.

The night smelled of pine and fear.

Esther stood in the center of the circle. The earth beneath her feet had been churned by peasants. Around her stood Sarah and Mary. Mary was trembling, her white nightgown soaked with dew and clinging to her bony shoulders. Sarah was still as a statue from a church crypt, only her eyes burned—like two embers in the dark night.

"Soon," said Esther. Her voice did not tremble. She would not allow herself to tremble. "Remember the words. No matter what comes after. The words must be spoken."

"They're coming," Mary whispered. "John said they're already in the woods. Twenty men. With torches."

John. Mary's husband. Or the man who had been her husband until last week, before the night screams began and rumors spread of an "unholy gathering by the brook."

"Don't think about John," Sarah cut in. Her voice was dry. "Think about what we agreed upon."

Esther nodded. She held a knife—not a kitchen knife, but a ritual one. Iron forged on Samhain night, a handle of raven bone. She knew the price. She knew that to survive did not mean to stay alive. They had made a vow. Three years ago, when they had found each other—a herbalist, a widow, and a runaway maid with burns on her back from her master's iron—they had sworn: no one would be left alone.

"Three drops of blood into the earth," she intoned. "Three words in a language older than the oaks. Three breaths into one ash."

Mary wept silently. Sarah squeezed her hand so hard that her knuckles turned white.

"I don't want to die," Mary sobbed.

"You won't die," said Esther. She didn't believe her own words, but in magic, belief was fuel. "We will sleep. And wake when fire is no longer something to fear."

From the forest came the baying of hounds.

Esther raised the knife. The blade flashed like a mirror, and in it she saw her face—young, too young. Twenty-four years old. In another life she could have been a mother, a grandmother, an old woman by the hearth. Instead she was the head of the coven.

"Ready?"

Sarah nodded. Mary closed her eyes.

Esther plunged the knife into her palm. The pain was a flash, and then a roar. She squeezed three drops onto the roots of the ancient oak. The earth drank them like water in a drought.

"Asharath vel mire. Kharon sevai. Ut nemur, ut resurgam."

Everything around her became bright and sharp.

Esther saw the torches burst from the thicket. Saw the faces—familiar, neighborly, twisted with hatred. Saw Mary soar into the air—no, she was being lifted, grabbed by the hair, by the arms. Heard Sarah's scream cut off so abruptly it was as if someone had ripped her tongue from her throat.

And then she saw the fire.

It was not red, like hearth fire. It was white, blue, cold—like an icy wind from the deepest hell, which does not burn but freezes. She felt her hair catch fire, felt the skin crack on her forehead, felt the smell of burnt flesh—her flesh—fill the air.

But before the pain became unbearable, before the cry could tear from her lips, she heard a voice.

Not human. Something from beneath the oak's roots, from the cracks in the earth.

"Thrice shall you die. Thrice shall you be born. And the third time, I shall come to collect the debt."

"Esther!"

She opened her eyes. She lay on the floor behind the counter. Her cheek burned—she must have struck the edge of the shelf as she fell. Around her smelled of dust and old wood. Not smoke. Not burning.

Mr. Gordon (the shop's owner) bent over her.

"You fell. I've been calling you for a minute. Are you all right? Should I call a doctor?"

"No," Esther sat up, feeling the world sway as if after a long bus ride. "Just... dizziness. Low blood pressure."

She didn't know where those words had come from. "Low blood pressure." She had heard them on the radio yesterday, in a commercial for pills. She had lived here for twenty-three years. Been born here. Grown up in the Garrettson foster family, gone to school, worn jeans and sneakers, listened to Madonna like everyone else, and thought her biggest problem was choosing between college and finding a job right away.

Three days ago, the smells had begun to return.

First—wormwood. She was walking past the flower shop on Barnard Street and suddenly couldn't breathe. Wormwood smelled of bitterness and... protection? Yes. She knew that wormwood warded off evil spirits. Knew that it should be hung above the door on the night of Kupalo. Knew that in 1692 she had gathered it by the brook, when she was still...

Who?

"Are you sure you can work?" Mr. Gordon helped her up. His hands were dry, warm, ordinary. Not like the hands in the memory. Not like the hands that had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her toward the pyre. "You can go home. I'll manage."

"No," Esther brushed off her jeans. "I'm fine. Really."

She couldn't leave. Not now. Because while she lay on the floor, something important had become clear in her mind. Not just a memory. Names. Mary and Sarah.

They were real. They were here, somewhere, in this same world, in this same time. And if Esther remembered, then they remembered too. Or would soon.

Esther returned to the counter. Her hands were still shaking, but now it was a different trembling—not from fear, but from a strange, feverish anticipation. Like before an exam, before a first kiss. Before something that had to happen.

In the evening, when Mr. Gordon locked the door and drove away in his old Buick, Esther stayed behind and didn't go home. She went into the back room of the shop—the place where things not yet put out for sale were kept. Boxes of dishes, broken clocks, stamp albums, clothes of dead people.

And books.

Esther knew where to look. Right now, in this very second, her hands went to the right shelf, though she had never been in this room—or had she?—and couldn't have known what lay there. But the body remembered. The muscles remembered.

Esther pulled out a box. Inside, beneath a layer of yellowed newspapers from the 1950s, lay a book.

The binding was of dark leather, cracked with age. On the cover—not a title, but a sign. Three intertwined spirals forming a triangle. Esther cried out—not from pain, but from the blow of memory. She had seen this sign. She had drawn it in blood on the oak bark three centuries ago.

Esther opened the book at random. The pages were blank. No, not quite. On one of them, near the end, someone had written in crooked letters:

"When you remember, come to the old oak. We are waiting. — S."

Sarah.

Esther pressed the book to her chest. Her heart hammered so hard it seemed about to crack her ribs. She stood in the half-light of the antique shop, surrounded by the things of dead strangers, and for the first time in twenty-three years felt at home.

Not in this town. Not in this body. But in this moment—in this anxious, terrifying, beautiful moment.

She knew she had to find the oak. She knew it stood somewhere nearby—she could feel it.

But before she could take a step, a sound came from beyond the door.

Footsteps. No, not footsteps. A pounding. Running. Someone was running along the rain-wet planks of the sidewalk, running so fast that the doors of neighboring shops slammed shut.

And then—a knocking.

Not at the door. At the window. At the display window.

Esther turned.

On the other side of the glass, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, stood a girl.

She was about twenty or twenty-five, no older. A thin face, enormous eyes, dark hair plastered to her cheeks by the rain. She wore a cheap windbreaker and jeans, but around her neck—on her bare, rain-wet neck—hung an amulet. Three spirals. A triangle.

The girl pressed her palm to the glass. Her lips moved, but Esther couldn't hear the words. She only saw. Saw the tear roll down the girl's cheek. And saw—no, recognized—the eyes.

Mary's eyes.

The same eyes that had wept on the night before the pyre. The same eyes that had looked at her with hope and horror when Esther raised the ritual knife.

"Mary," Esther whispered.

The girl behind the glass nodded. Or simply swayed, barely keeping her feet.

She pulled her hand from the glass and recoiled, staring at something over Esther's shoulder. In her eyes—a wild, animal terror.

Esther turned.

In the depths of the shop, where the box with the book had stood a moment before, a light flickered.

Not a lightbulb. Not lamplight. White, cold, bluish.

And in that light, a figure seemed to materialize like a ghost.

Tall. Male. With hands hidden in the folds of dark clothing. The face was hidden, but Esther knew—knew with every cell of her body, every hair on the back of her neck—that it was looking directly at her.

That which they had made a deal with. That which had given them three lives. Had come for the first payment.

"Thrice shall you die," whispered a voice in her head, and it was not human. "Thrice shall you be born."

Esther grabbed the book. She didn't remember how she rushed to the door, how she yanked the handle, how she found herself outside in the cold October rain. She only remembered the hand—thin, icy—clamping around her wrist.

Mary.

"Run," the girl breathed, and her voice was the same as it had been three hundred years ago—trembling, childlike, but alive. "It found us. Esther, it found us before we found each other."

"Where is Sarah?" asked Esther, and the question tore itself from the depths, from a place untouched by memories of foster parents, of school, of Madonna.

"Sarah hasn't remembered," Mary whispered. Her eyes shone in the darkness, and in them danced the reflections of distant streetlamps. "She's still asleep."

They ran down the wet street, holding hands as they had three centuries ago. Behind them—in Mr. Gordon's shop—the white light slowly faded.