The First Midnight Spell Read Online Free PDF

thought of Rebecca Hornby’s death. She knew the very thought should repulse her, disgust her, but it didn’t. When she imagined it, she only saw the empty place in the world where Rebecca would have been—the place in Nat’s heart that Elizabeth could then fill.
    What scared her was the knowledge that black magic belonged to the One Beneath.
    The stories about the One Beneath came down to children in whispers, the most secret of all the many secret truths of witchcraft. He presided over the realm of demons. He gloried in death, destruction, and ruin. Some said the One Beneath was only one of the many names of the devil; others said that he ruled a place even darker than hell. As he strengthened black magic, so did black magic strengthen him—to cast such a spell was to take the first step toward worshipping the One Beneath. It came dangerously close to breaking one of the First Laws.
    Even a few days before, these thoughts would have been enough to sway Elizabeth from her course of action. Now, however, she had seen what happened to Goodwife Crews when she broke one of the First Laws: practically nothing.
    Tentatively Elizabeth thought of the ingredients for a spell of strength. How best could she reverse them?
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    A hand twisted into helplessness by age.
    Something killed by the first frost.
    A person exhausted beyond the ability to endure.
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    The jade charm seemed warm against her skin—surely only an illusion, but one incredibly vivid to Elizabeth as she closed her eyes.
    Her grandfather attempting to tell her good-bye before they sailed to America, his liver-spotted hand unable to hold hers, only able to manage a feeble pat as their final farewell.
    The lamb from three springs ago, the one she’d become so attached to and called Snowy, which had been ailing already, and then the early frost came and left her dead in the field, dark eyes frozen wide open so that Elizabeth had screamed to see them.
    Her mother lying in bed that first terrible winter in the Rhode Island Colony, skin gone waxen, grief-stricken from the death of Elizabeth’s father just five days before, and her eyes growing dim as she stopped fighting the fever and just gave up, leaving Elizabeth behind.
    Elizabeth opened her eyes, looked down at the cap in her hands and—struck by a sudden inspiration—deliberately pricked her finger with the needle. Her blood beaded up; quickly she pressed it against her black skirt, where the stain wouldn’t show. But she threaded the needle back through the cap; though it was not bloody enough to stain, it had pierced her flesh, then the fabric, and that would strengthen her spell.
    It had worked. Elizabeth sensed that immediately. Impossible to say precisely how she knew, but she knew it as certainly as she’d ever known anything in her life.
    And in her heart she felt something new, an emotion that was not her own. The feeling didn’t come to her in words; she didn’t hear whispers, imagine a voice, nothing like that. Yet Elizabeth knew that something else, someone else, was feeling this, and that if the emotion could be put into a sentence, it would be this: I’ve been waiting for you.
    She trembled, but she refused to think of what might have waiting. Instead she kept stitching the cap.
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    The next day she gave the cap to a grateful Nat, and so far as anyone else could tell, life went on as usual. Spring continued to warm into summer. Elizabeth kept doing her chores, looking after her younger cousins, and practicing magic with the coven.
    (Not once in all those nights did one of the other witches realize Elizabeth had performed black magic. Not once. None of her other spells were affected in the slightest, Pru even mentioned how much stronger she was becoming, and Widow Porter smiled approvingly every time Elizabeth joined in their work.)
    Elizabeth behaved as though she had not a care in the world, and even pretended not to notice Nat Porter when