More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“And you’re here alone? You don’t have a chaperone?”
the poor girl who’d lured a local farmer into sin with seduction and harlotry.
“Isn’t it strange how reading a book is a sin, but locking a girl in the stocks and leaving her to the dogs is another day of the Good Father’s work?”
The dead walk among the living. This is the first truth, and the most important.
Come hither, come hither,
But she didn’t pray. She didn’t have the gall to do that.
She wasn’t just Immanuelle now. She was more. And she was less.
Neither can exist without the other. And yet they can never be one.
his head, severed, bleeding, perched atop a nearby tree stump.
He’d asked her if she’d ever indulged in the sins of the flesh, or if, in the night, her hands had wandered where they ought not go.
“Evil is sickness, and sickness is pain,”
The lie tasted bitter as it skimmed across her tongue. “I promise.”
There was a scribbled signature at the bottom of the first page: Miriam Elizabeth Moore.
Daniel Lewis Ward.
They made me watch the fire take him.
Summer in the Year of Omega. It read: I am with child.
I have seen the evils of this world, and I have loved them.
Lovers, Winter in the Year of Omega. They were the women Immanuelle had seen in the woods.
Lilith.
Delilah the Witch of the Water. Beside the drawing, a note: I have seen the Beast and her maidens again. I hear their cries in the woods at night. They call to me, and I call to them. There is no love as pure as that.
Her blood begets blood. Her blood begets blood. Her blood begets blood.
Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter . . .
Father help them. Father help us all.
but Father as my witness, I feared you.
“You wear it like your mother,”
This was to be the end of them, the end of what they’d shared in girlhood.
Leah had become a woman and Immanuelle had not, and now the two of them would be split apart.
About her neck was a new golden holy dagger much like the ones the apostles wore, though its blade was dull and much shorter.
“So they were . . . foreigners?”
“He has His kingdom, and the Dark Mother has Hers.” “Yet you passed through the Darkwood’s corridors unharmed. That has to mean something.”
licked the blood away.
“The Father, in His divine providence, has seen fit to offer me many wives who embody the virtues of our faith.
Here lies the Father’s first prophet, David Ford, Spring in the Year of the Flame to Winter in the Year of the Wake. Below that, words gouged deep into the stone read: Blood for blood.
Father help them. Father help us all. —MIRIAM MOORE
He took Anna’s bed often those days, rarely, if ever, haunting Martha’s.
while her husband slept in her bed.
This was Delilah, the Witch of the Water.
As the witch drew nearer, she realized she was not a woman at all but rather a girl of about her age, no more than sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at the very oldest.
In Bethel, it was a sin to swim.
Her sin had saved her.
With the bloodletting comes the power of the heavens and hells. For an iron offering buys atonement, in all of its many forms.
Her first bleed.
Her bleed should have been a moment of celebration, relief—against all odds, she was a woman at last—but all she felt was small and wounded and a little sick.
carnal urge
Officials of the Church rarely offered apologies, on account of the fact that they rarely sinned.
“But guilt’s a hard thing to ease.”
Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter. Blood. Blood.
They were warnings of what was yet to come.
Four warnings. Four witches. Four plagues, and the first had come upon them.
And so, the first of the plagues began.
