Lillian Pickard

I did not regret befriending Malachi Rivers until the night we invoked her magic to seek revenge.

Four of us sat in a circle on the floor of an abandoned cabin in the Piney Woods, twine looped around our girlish wrists, binding us together. A grimoire lay open upon tender sprigs of herbs and bones of woodland creatures. Segments of text had been violently crossed out and revisions crammed into the margins.

Malachi Rivers was indeed that powerful; her edits and improvisations increased the potency of every charm, hex, curse, and conjuration.

Until that fateful night in the summer of 1921, our foursome, led by Malachi, had performed harmless magic for entertainment and empowerment. Dorothy Hawkins, Johanna Mead, and I revered Malachi's magic and wanted to participate. While we were bound together, we could channel it. The powerless could become powerful.

We called ourselves "Pagans of the Pines" in a spirit of cheeky rebellion. The magic had been a girlhood game to me, the grimoire nothing more than a mass-produced, curious collectible pilfered from the parlor of my cosmopolitan aunt.
But everything changed that night. Childish rebellion turned to sinister retribution.

Dorothy, Johanna, and Malachi had endured trials I could not fathom. Malachi's father was controlling and oppressive. Johanna Mead's abusive father and uncle had beaten the boy she loved nearly to death out of a twisted sense of protectiveness. A lynch mob had murdered Dorothy Hawkins's older brother over a false accusation that he had attempted to murder a white man. Her sharecropper father had lost his land, and the family relied on charity from their church to scrape by.

Now that Malachi had nearly mastered her magic of earth, bone, and blood, the three of them wanted to claim vengeance commensurate to their suffering.

We did not mean to kill. Malachi concocted a curse that would reveal the deep evil within the hearts of the men who had wronged them, so that society would no longer accept, respect, or enable their dark deeds. Malachi had spoken the curse over the Communion wine in the sanctuary of her father's church. We watched her, witnessed her slender body rocking with power, her wrists and hands trembling. She dusted the wine with herbs, dipped her fingers into the chalice, and painted her mark on the white cloth of the Communion table--the mark we had created to represent the three elements from which she drew her power.

"The Devil's supper," I recall her whispering in the candlelight.

We returned to our consecrated ground--the cabin nestled in a forgotten forest glade--to finish our work. We would use magic to lure the men to Communion at the witching hour. They would drink the cursed wine, and their darkness would be known to all.

But as soon as we split the flesh of our fingertips and dripped blood over our preparations, I felt Malachi's magic spinning out of control, like a toy top whirling fast enough to lift off the ground and bounce about unpredictably. The other girls' anger fueled it, giving it a will of its own.

I was afraid. I wanted to stop it. But our hands were already bound, and to break the bond before our work was complete would be far more dangerous than even the darkest conjuration.

I have undoubtedly lost many a reader already with my earnest talk of magic. But I have no other pen with which to write this biography.

Any tale about Malachi that excludes magic is not about Malachi at all.
Excerpt from Pagans of the Pines: The Untold Story of Malachi Rivers,

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Excerpted from The Bitterwine Oath by Hannah West
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.