Neen Cohen

Prologue
Four Rabbits
When they ran Belladonna Mason out, it was literal. They chased her into the woods wearing nothing but the shift her lover had bought her, so she could better play the part of the adulteress. And when his cuckolded wife caught them in the act—sinning against her and God in equal measure—he shed his loyalty to her just as easily.
Because “bewitched” sounded so much finer to his ears than “weak”.
Though they’d cast her out and her home was gone and her name was ruined, she pushed on. Living was an awful difficult habit to break.
The woods had no love for her either. Stones cut her feet and every tree limb whipped her arms and back and thighs bloody and raw, like the preacher had when he found out. She was angry before, but the cold of the night and the lengthening shadows stole the heat from her. Even rage couldn’t warm her.
And, when she fell in the mud, the last drop of strength trickled from her. They had bled her dry—this world and all the people in it. She had no more tears to cry.
In the depths of the forest, beyond the limits of hope, was a fire crackling and the smell of meat cooking to put the edge on her hunger until it sliced across her belly. Slowly, she stood and walked and wanted. The human died there in the mud. The animal took over.
Funny how things worked out. She’d fled the fire, and fire was all that awaited her. She’d fled a man and there, upon a fallen tree, a man sat.
“Take a seat,” he said. Not a request.
Belladonna’s eyes didn’t leave the meat—looked like rabbit—spitted over the flames. Not until she was sat, and the pain of her wounds and the warmth brought her back alive, did she finally see the man.
Handsome? Enough, though she’d tired of handsome men somewhere in the woods back there. Lean and muscled, furred with coarse, black hair. Eyes in shadow, reflecting the flickering firelight, or maybe just matching it. Stripped to the waist, dressed only in sack cloth. Staring.
Now, the cold had already made Belladonna quite aware of how thin her shift was, and this man was taking pains to remind her that the dangers of the woods weren’t limited to things that howled and hissed.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She nodded. Words had betrayed her already, so many times. He didn’t ask her to speak, just lifted a spit from the fire and pressed it into her hands. She tore flesh from bone and sobbed around every mouthful.
Still staring.
“You’re not going to eat?” she asked, because betrayal hadn’t ever taught her a lesson before.
He smiled. “Not yet.”
Belladonna had never been under the presumption that living in the woods was easy, but that smile had an ease to it that it shouldn’t. And it was sharp, not just around the eye-teeth.
“You’re awful far from home.”
“I don’t have a home.”
She thought she heard a growl from the tree line. Something hungering for what she held in her hands. God told them not to covet but his creatures coveted plenty.
Then she realized it was him. Chuckling.
“You knew he was married,” he said. “You knew she was spiteful. No one to blame but yourself.”
Her turn to stare. He welcomed her gaze like a valley in spring. Oh, she could look around all full of wonder if she liked. When winter came, she’d never be able to leave.
“H-how do you know that?”
“I know a lot of things.”
“Why are you talking in riddles?”
“Because you’re not paying attention.” He leaned across the fire and pulled the spit from her unresisting hands. The rabbit was bones now. He replaced it with another. Her hunger demanded another sacrifice.
“Who are you?”
“Not who.”
“What are you?”
“A better question.”
Of course. Because a man would need furs in this cold wilderness. A man would need a sword or a dagger. A gun. He would need a bedroll, a shelter. All this creature had was fire and meat.
Belladonna tossed aside the second stick, heard the bones rattle among the leaves like dice, and took a third. “Are you…human?”
“Not as such.”
“Then why take a man’s shape?”
She was of the opinion that there were more flattering shapes to take, but the recently burned were most afraid of flames. Frankly, she’d rather have been anything else in that moment. A bird could fly away. A wolf could run without fear of cutting its pads to bloody shreds. A fish could swim wherever the river carried it.
Maybe not a rabbit though.
“There were no shapes for me to take in nature. I’m not the grass, trampled beneath your feet. I’m not the trees that shelter you. I watch all that passes, but I’m no raven. I hunger, but I’m no wolf. But a man? A man has needs he can’t explain. A man needs to be worshipped. A man needs to stretch himself to fill all that surrounds him. A man needs to be a master. So, when your people breathed my air and stirred my soil and slaked their thirst from my rivers, I sat in their lungs and their hearts and their bellies and realized…I am a man also.”
She had started and finished her fourth rabbit when he rose from his log and walked to her. His feet trampled embers. His eyes still glowed. The spit fell between her feet. Bones in the soil.
“And a man needs a woman.” He reached for her cheek.
She shirked back, covering herself with her arms. “Not me.”
Hadn’t she suffered enough at the hands of men? Didn’t her arms and legs and back bear their brutality? She had bled for their sins.
She didn’t want to bleed for his too.
“If not you, then who? Don’t you believe in fate? Don’t you have quaint little notions of destiny and predetermination? And here you are, walking through my woods, sitting by my fire, eating up my rabbits. You’re content to take but you won’t give. That’s not right, is it? Not right at all.”
“M-maybe I’m here for a different reason.”
The greatest portion of Belladonna’s hate had always been reserved for Belladonna. The woman with no prospects who would go to the New World. The woman without a husband, even where the men were plentiful and the women already betrothed. The woman who’d allowed herself to believe it meant something, even when he’d looked away in church.
The woman who couldn’t look the Devil in the eye without cowering.
He tilted his head, curious. Like another man, she had a hook in him. She could only hope it was deeper this time around. “Maybe I can give you something else. Something more valuable.”
“Like what?”
“What if I… What if I bring them to you? Others?”
He didn’t answer. His attention was the held breath before a snare tightened. The moment a neck could break. The heartbeat as a flame caught or guttered out.
Life. Or death.
Her words spilled into the empty space and sloshed and gurgled until it overflowed. “You said you needed to be worshipped. You said you needed to fill this space. You said you needed to be a master. Let me help. I can help.”
“How?”
“I know what to do. I’ve always known what to do, I was just…”
Weak. Always weak.
“I just never had the power. I could borrow some of yours and I could…”
Words dried up before they could nourish the unnamable sin. Her lips trembled and her eyes fell away, but he caught her chin, because she needed to see, and she needed to understand exactly what she was agreeing to.
“You owe me four rabbits,” he told her.
And, because words had betrayed her, she nodded and said nothing.

Chapter 1
When the Luck Runs Out
I don’t know how old Belladonna Mason really is. Only that my grandparents knew a raven-haired beauty who lived in that venerable old house, with heels for walking on folks and a smirk on her ruby lips, and if that don’t sound just like her.
And they used to warn me. You stay away from that house, Loretta Dandridge, and don’t you take nothing from the women who live there. They ain’t no good.
Well, as it turns out, there’s only one woman who lives there. Belladonna. Our coven mama.
They built the Mason House out of the mountain, some good centuries ago. Was she around back then too?
They ground the earth’s bones to lay the foundation, carved its forests to stumps and stains for timber, pressed its slippery flesh into molds and scorched it to erect walls. The ivy and the willows cling to it like children to their mother’s tomb.
Or like parasites. One or the other.
Kind of the same way we cling to Belladonna, I guess. She’s so much older and wiser than us.
Oh, she doesn’t look it—the windows are clear and the veranda’s swept clean and there’s a fresh coat of whitewash on the walls—but it’s there in that old country accent she can’t quite shake. Like when she calls it “the wireless”, or in the way she styles her hair, like Marilyn don’t care no more if gentlemen prefer blonds.
They let Belladonna walk on them. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. Any girl who saw the shit she got away with would want to know how she did it. That was how she got the hook in us to begin with, back in the 90s, when she’d invited us up to the old place for “Bible study”. I drank my first glass of wine in Belladonna Mason’s kitchen. I kissed my first girl—not Belladonna—in Belladonna Mason’s parlor.
We killed a rabbit in the parlor too, crying and shaking from it, and touched each other’s foreheads with bloody fingers. The wine didn’t help. Belladonna had smiled at us, gathered us in her arms, told us to wash up while she finished.
I still wear my rabbit foot. We all do when we’re at the House. I don’t like to when I’m home though. It sends a shiver of agony through my soul whenever the fur touches my skin.
I think maybe Belladonna likes the agony.
“And how are my favorite students this afternoon?” she asks, stepping out onto the veranda—we’d become increasingly brazen since the millennium—with a bottle and a glass for each of us.
Wine, women, and witchcraft. One of her favorite recipes. There were others, of course. Potions to arouse, to repulse, to turn cancer into nothing and nothing into cancer. I’d tried to make them myself—pretty sure we all had—but it didn’t work the same alone. Only the coven had the power.
It kept us coming back. Kept us clutching our feet.
“Anais has a love rival,” I grin.
Belladonna arches an eyebrow, always enthralled by the sordid. “Oh? Don’t keep me in suspense, Loretta.”
“Super Bowl season,” Anais grumbles. “I think I’d prefer if Marty had an affair. At least he wouldn’t be hogging the living room all the time.”
“That could be arranged.”
I snicker as Belladonna hands me a glass. Witchcraft is the solution to all our problems, even when the problems don’t exist yet.
It feels wrong, to come to Belladonna’s and not work some magic. Even after I landed that book deal, even after Anais snagged Marty and then he snagged his promotion, even after Triss and Elaine moved in together and everyone in town couldn’t stop remarking what good friends they were, we still felt that hunger. Magic is its own reward.
Last week, we stopped my exhaust from rattling.
“Maybe we should try our hand at matchmaking again,” Elaine suggests. She took a glass of wine in the hand that wasn’t holding her wife’s. “It was fun last time.”
“For us,” I mutter.
Not so much for Bob and Gina, or Bob’s fiancée. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who’s spoken to Gina since—not for long, because it was hard to watch her cry. Fixing up two random folks from town had seemed like such an interesting idea at the time.
A moment of madness, Bob had said. If only he knew. The madness wasn’t his.
“Perhaps we should just…savor this time,” Belladonna suggests, pouring her glass last and then pouring herself into her wicker throne.
I lock eyes with Anais over the burgundy. “You feeling okay, Bella?”
“Fine,” she sighs. “Don’t I seem okay?”
“You seem…”
“Like you already put away a bottle,” Anais says. “Seriously, why are you talking like that?”
“We’ve known each other a long time. We’ve accomplished a lot together, haven’t we? I’m entitled to let my guard down a little among friends. I just want to sit here and enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the company. Enjoy the wine. It’s not too much to ask, is it?”
This time, the coven shares the look. Belladonna closes her eyes and hums a few bars to herself. A song I don’t recognize, like a lullaby.
Anais mouths, What the fuck?
“Ah, leave her alone,” I say. “I’m going for a smoke.”
They don’t try to stop me. Looks like we’ll be taking our time with coven business today, so I’ve got a minute.
I walk a way down the path, fishing my coffin nails out of my jacket. I stop beside the car, check myself in the wing mirror. Teenage folly inspired me to dye my hair black—Gee, who could I possibly have been emulating?—and now I’m muddy brown in a way even magic can’t seem to fix. I’m starting to gray now too. Maybe I can get away with it. Aren’t novelists supposed to be distinguished?
None of us have ever talked about how we’re catching up to Belladonna every year. Pretty soon, we’ll be gray and grizzled and she’ll be as perfect as the day we met her. I find myself wondering what she’ll do when we’re too old to make it up the hill to the House.
I light up and puff a while in the shade of an elm. I wonder, not for the first time, why Belladonna built her house so goddamn far from town. The place is practically part of the forest. Roots lift slabs, and flowering shrubs poke through the fences, and ivy swarms on everything, like it wants this piece of itself back.
Something skitters in the leaves. I jump, cigarette tumbling.
“Fucking rabbits.”
At least, I think it was a rabbit. It sounded…bigger.
I swat the butt off my jacket, smearing ash down my chest, and swallow a bubble. I start coughing.
I can’t stop coughing. I smother a hand over my mouth and hack until I’ve thoroughly scratched that itch. By the time I’m done, my chest aches.
“Jesus…” I go to wipe my hand on my jeans. Then I see the blood. “Oh my God. What the fuck?”
I check myself in the car’s mirror again. Blood on my lips too. A trickle to the point of my chin. I scrub it off with my jacket sleeve. How…
Dangling from out of my shirt, the rabbit’s foot. The white fur has withered gray and shriveled. The flesh has turned paper thin, mummified bones jutting. I snap the cord and hold it the fuck away from me.
I stare up at the house, the veranda. I march back up the path.
I pass Anais on the way. She’s shouting into her phone, and I realize I can’t remember the last time any of us had to raise our voice. There just isn’t enough to be angry at these days.
I shuffle on, and hear Anais shrieking, “Don’t you dare fucking hang up on me, Marty Gibson!”
Elaine and Triss are standing at the veranda’s edge, listening to Anais spitting venom, concern flickering in their eyes, wine forgotten. They stare at the red in my hand, the rotten rabbit’s foot in the other. They fish out their own feet and recoil in unison.
No doubt Anais’s is the same.
Belladonna is still humming that lullaby. I throw shade on her until she opens her eyes.
There’s only one question on my bloody lips. “What the fuck is going on?”
Belladonna sighs. She sets her wine down. “I’m sorry, Loretta. I’m afraid it looks like luck has run out. For all of you.”