Prologue

This is an island of witches.

In the beginning, there was one family with two sisters who lived on the farthest tip of the peninsula with their mother and father. The first sister, Helen, was a pure soul who believed with such vigor in the bible and in the Lord that she baptized herself in the darkness of the lake every morning. The second sister, Lucille, was a prophet, a medium, and a witch.

The Circle Bell peninsula—so skinny, long and detached from society that it was often referred to as an island—had only one road. Lucille was cast down that road, thrown to the ground by her father, mother and sister because of her talk of spirits. Holding a cross deep in her palm, Helen thrust it towards her sister.

“You are not welcome here anymore, witch.”

“Aye. Be gone for ye has infected our ears with devil speak.” The father stepped forward, his boots kicking small stones into Lucille’s face. She crawled backwards, the skin of her hands digging into the gravel road, carrying her away from her family.

“The Lord has seen you as you are and he rejects you.” Helen moved the wooden cross up to the sky and back down, shoving it into the face of her sister. “Crawl back down to Hell, Satan’s whore!”

Lucille stood up from the ground, palms bleeding, and her face covered in a thin layer of dust.

“Today you make the decision to cast me out-”

“Child of the devil!” Helen interrupted.

“Speaker to the dead!” Her father screamed.

“Today you make the decision to cast me out…” Lucille began again, yelling over the cries of her family. “You send me to darkness because of fear. Your fear. You tremble before the power of the underworld, before spirits. Is it not the Lord that has given us these spirits to converse with? He has given me this unforeseen competency to speak beyond worlds, and you renounce me for it. You will be punished. You will send for me. When the days are full of torment and your fields have burned, you will send for me.”

Lucille turned away. The wind blew hard; the cedar trees rattling together like their branches were made of loose bones. The smell of the lake carried in the air, floating and latching onto the wool of their clothes.

She walked down the road, the screams of her sister and father still at her back.

It took her only an hour to reach the end of the peninsula. Then she turned around, heading back to the woods of Circle Bell. Her feet ached. Her stomach groaned. Her fingers, numbed from the wind.

Far in the thick of the woods but close to the rock-covered beach, she found a small hunting shack and a man inside. In exchange for her body, he fed her roasted fish and let her sleep on the shack floor.

In the night, she slit his throat.

With his knife, she built, mutilated and consumed.

Decades passed in the small hunting shack, in her new home. Lucille recruited young women like her and taught them the ways of the seeing. And as she predicted, her father came to her, seeking her counsel and remedies for the cancer that filled his wife. Lucille, merciful and tired, gave her father her best medicine. She gave him all that she had remaining, knowing her followers would suffer.

When the medicine didn’t work and Lucille's mother succumbed to her illness regardless, her father and her sister headed down the road, stakes, knives and fire in hand.