Part One Then

On All Hallows' Eve, when the moon is round, a virgin will summon us from under the ground.

We shall be back!

And the lives of all the children of Salem shall be mine!

— Winifred
Sanderson
October 31, 1693
Last words, as recorded
in the journal of Samuel Parris

Wild Things

SALEM, 1693

The world was full of wild things then. It brimmed with oak and hemlock and dark whispering places that turned you round and round until there was no turning back.

The womenfolk said that on early mornings near the harbor you could hear echoes of witchsong, which sounded like birdsong but more bitter. The menfolk said godliness would save them from any witches, but they honed their axes and twisted new rope just the same.

The witches said there was nothing so sweet as the shinbones of little girls. Or perhaps a well-braised scapula with sparrow spleen compote. It was all in the preparation.

They lived near town, the witches, but not so near as to be a bother, until a milk cow died or a child took sick. Then the town would start to mutter about the Sanderson girls — Mary and Sarah and especially Winnie — who had not been girls for a very long time but who did not merit the title "ladies."

Someone always intervened.

They're no bother, someone would say. Just batty girls playing in the woods.

Leave them be, someone would say. Don't you remember how kind their mother was, and how generous?

It all made perfect sense at the time, but once the people of Salem left the town meeting and went back to work, not a one of them could remember who that someone had been.

That is, until Emily went missing.

SALEM, 1993

"Knock-knocks," said Dani, grinning up at her sixteenyear-old brother as she trotted down the sidewalk. Leaves drifted through the air around them — thin slips of yellow and broad, shaggy orange things the size and shape of their dad's hands — and the morning was just starting to break open and turn the world gold.

Max rolled his eyes and swung his bike in a big loop to match her slow progress. "Can you please not?"

It was Halloween, and the houses on both sides of the little neighborhood street were decked out with cobwebs and tombstones, giant spiders and jack-o'-lanterns — some of which were already starting to sag a little with mold.

Dani giggled as she ran through the pale tendrils of a ghost horde gathered in a tree.

"Ta-tas," she said, a little louder. Her pointed black hat sported a thin orange trim around the brim, which matched her sun-patterned jacket and striped skirt. She'd dressed as a witch, but in her own words, "a fancy one." The grin she gave Max, though, was more impish than witchy.

Max glanced behind them to make sure the street was still as deserted as when they had left for school. "Seri- ously, Dani. Not the place."

He should've known better than to talk about Allison Watts to Jack, because Jack still lived in Santa Monica, and Max's house had a shared phone line and a nosy eight- year-old.

"YABOS," Dani squealed.

Max blushed hard, looking over his shoulder. "I'm going to leave you," he said. "Find your own way to school." He spun another loop, catching too much speed on the turn. He stopped short before hitting the curb.

Dani stopped, too, eyes sparkling with mischief beneath the brim of her witch's hat. A few strands of tawny hair stuck to her red lipstick. "Then Mom will ground you forever," she said.

"Maybe that wouldn't be so bad," he muttered.

Dani put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. "Oh, don't be that way," she said. "Then how will you ever see Allison's bazookas?"

Max groaned, leaning forward over his handlebars. "Please stop," he begged. "It's not even like that."

"It sounded a lot like that." She tugged on his sleeve to get them moving again.

Max relented, bike wobbling as he pedaled slowly beside his sister. "That's why you shouldn't eavesdrop on people," he said. "You lose context. One day you'll know what that means."

"Does it mean you saving up to run away to Jack's house and become the next Fuzzy Gauzy? Because I heard about that, too."

"The X-Ray Spex," Max muttered. "You know, I don't have to walk you to school anymore if I don't want to."

It was true: one of the few perks he'd been promised about their family's move from LA to Salem was that they'd live far enough from school that Dani would qualify for bus pickup. But the previous night she'd said the bus made her lonely, and she'd begged him to bike ahead and meet her one stop early so they could walk the rest of the way together. He'd agreed against his better judgment. She was still his little sister, after all, and as long as she'd been going to school, they'd been walking together. But now he was paying the price for nostalgia.

"But you do want to," said Dani, dancing through the graveyard on someone's front lawn. "Or you would've said no." She stepped on a button, and a plastic corpse with matted black hair sat up with a shout, making her shriek and race back to the sidewalk.

As they rounded the corner, Max saw, at the top of the hill, the skinny blond and the no-necked bonehead known as Jay and Ernie. In the two weeks since his family had moved to Salem, Max had avoided any run-ins with the town bullies, but he could already tell they were the kind of boys whose kindergarten teachers, searching for something nice to say during parent–teacher conferences, would've settled on persistent.

Jay and Ernie's lackeys seemed to appear out of nowhere as they swaggered down the middle of the road, the embellishments on their faux-leather jackets glinting dully in the morning light.

"You know," said Max, wheeling around, "I think Mom told me they're handing out candy at the side entrance."

He felt bad about lying to Dani, but she'd get more than enough Airheads and Pixy Stix later.

"Hey!" she protested as they approached the annex door. "There's no candy —"

But her brother was already gone, speeding off toward Jacob Bailey High.

SALEM, 1693

It was not unlike Emily Binx to stray so close to the wood.

Her mother had often scolded her for doing precisely that, though she tried not to scold too hard, for nine-year-old Emily was a serious child, and pious, paging through her prayer book without minding where her footsteps took her.

Emily was old enough to know the rumors about the Sanderson sisters, but she also knew that whenever she ran across any of them in town, they were kind to her. It was rare to see Miss Winnie or Miss Mary or Miss Sarah smile, what with their crooked backs and twisted, dusty faces, but when they noticed her, they beamed and clapped — well, Mary and Sarah, anyway — and praised her pink cheeks and pretty hands. Her mother never praised those things, for fear of encouraging vanity and sin. Even skeptical Miss Winnie would pat Emily's shoulder awk- wardly and tease that she should return to her mother lest Winnie eat the little girl right up.

All this to say that Emily was not afraid of the wood as others were, and was especially less afraid than her brother, Thackery, who, like his best friend, Elijah, was seven years older than Emily and of an age when boys found anything at all to do with girls or women highly suspect.

So when the wood...