Then she was gone. Her sister was gone.
Ingrid knew what had happened the minute she had seen the rope burn at her sister’s neck. Gallows Hill, 1692. When the two of them had hanged for witchcraft. It was happening all over again. Somehow, someone wanted Freya back there. Back to Salem Village and all its horrors.
Ingrid pulled the rubber band out of her hair to lessen the pinch at her temples. She anxiously scratched at her scalp. “I keep saying sorry, Matt, because I mean it. You know I wish I could be spending my time with you instead, but I can’t, not until we find her. But don’t worry, I think I’m getting closer.”
“The dreams?”
“Yeah, I had another one,” she said, and shuddered.
“Ingrid? You okay?” asked Matt.
No, she wasn’t. She had drifted off again while talking to him. “You know, I don’t think it’s fair to you to be with me when I’m so distracted.”
Matt let out a breath. Ingrid wished she could feel the warmth of it against her face and neck. She felt herself almost give in and tell him to pick her up so they could spend the night together. Instead a silence hung between them, fraught with tension.
Her love for Matt had not waned. If anything, she loved him more than ever—for his patience and always being there when she needed a shoulder to lean on, solid as a pillar. He encouraged her when she lost hope of finding Freya, and was as helpful as a mortal could be in this situation. He didn’t understand everything about her background or her family, but he had accepted her for what she was. A witch.
“Why don’t you give me a call when you’re wrapping things up?” Matt said. “I’ll pick you up and drive you home.”
She stared at the books piled on her desk, all different sizes, stacked in towers, then the one open under the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. “I don’t know… I’m not sure when I’ll be finished. I wouldn’t want to hold you up or wake you if you’ve gone to bed.”
He laughed. “Come on, I just want to see you. Anyway, I’m still at the precinct doing paperwork. We just wrapped up a case.”
“While I didn’t even ask how you’re doing… I’m so sorry.”
“There you go again. I’m fine.”
“I really miss you,” she said, but even as she did, she’d grown distracted by the pile of books in front of her.
Matt was silent. “Let’s talk later,” he said.
“I promise this will get better, and we can spend more time together.”
“Sure.” He remained on the line but was silent.
She waited a little longer but that was it, so she said good-bye, and they hung up without saying their usual “I love you”s. Ingrid felt empty and awful from the way the conversation had ended. Their relationship was constantly being stalled by something or other. She lowered her head and began to read, then realized she had read an entire page and not retained a word. Because what if Matt grew used to her absence and stopped missing her altogether? The poor guy couldn’t wait forever, could he? He couldn’t wait forever for her to… well, to sleep with him, for one. They weren’t teenagers. She wanted him as much as he wanted her. She wanted him more than anything. He was the one for her. Except, there was just one thing.
He was mortal.
He would only get hurt, or she would, there was no getting around that. She would only pretend to age, but he would die, leaving her alone forever. While Matt seemed to accept her differences easily, it was a revelation to Ingrid to find she was the one with doubts, perhaps because she knew exactly what their relationship would mean for her in the end. So she had pushed him away, using Freya’s disappearance as an excuse.
She thought about the dreams. In the first, Freya stood alone in a field of wheat. She saw the village in the distance and recognized it. Salem, with its dark square homes, beneath gigantic clouds moving fast through a blinding blue sky. The sleeves of her sister’s saffron-yellow blouse beneath her dark mauve bodice rumpled in the wind. Her cap fluttered against her sun- and wind-kissed cheeks, as she held it in place, her palm against her crown. Her sister looked so young, she couldn’t be older than sixteen. There was panic in her eyes. The dream ended there.
In the second installment, Freya stood in the field again. She was whispering something. Something Ingrid couldn’t hear.
In the third dream, Freya was screaming as the wheat field went up in a great whoosh of orange flame, black smoke licking at the great blue of the sky. The fire consumed the field, moving quickly behind her sister. Freya came running, closer and closer, larger and larger, until she passed Ingrid, but they didn’t touch.
Ingrid had woken in a hot-cold sweat.
That had been the last dream.
Freya was trapped in Salem Village. Freya was in danger and there was nothing Ingrid could do about it.
Her eyes ached. She squeezed them shut. In Salem, witches had been hanged, never burned. In fact, no witch had ever been burned in the Americas. However, the flames meant something. The fire expressed urgency. Time was running out. Little progress had been made.
The Beauchamps’ magic had grown feeble, Ingrid knew; it was a candle at the end of its wick. Her mother, Joanna, could not muster the strength to reopen the passages of time however much she tried. Freya was trapped in seventeenth-century Salem while Ingrid and her family were trapped here, unable to return to the past and rescue her.
Ingrid began reading her book again. The Salem witch hunt in 1692 had been an anomaly in its intensity, concentration, scale, and death toll. It lasted one year and ended almost as abruptly as it began. Nineteen had been hanged. One man was pressed to death by stones. Four perished in jail awaiting trial. More than one hundred people in Salem and its surrounding communities (mostly women, but there were men and children as well) had been accused and forced to languish for months in prison under horrific conditions in dark, wet, cramped, stinking, rat-infested cells. They were hungry, thirsty, dirty, shaved, manacled to walls, pricked and prodded for “witches’ teats”—nipples or birthmarks or moles where one’s familiar supposedly suckled, proof one was indeed a witch.
How could she help her sister? Was there a way to prevent the crisis that spread like wildfire from happening again? What had caused it? What was the spark? It had all begun in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris, when his daughter Betty and young ward, niece Abigail, began having strange fits. That was the beginning. Ingrid would start there.