They waited through the heat of noon and the dullness of a stifling afternoon into the falling dusk, when the air was thick with black gnats. By then an odd silence had settled, something uncomfortable. Still no crows flew overhead. A band of men was sent ahead to flush out the birds, Hathorne in the forefront, for his neighbors were fighting evil on his behalf. Privately, he wished Maria’s crow would simply disappear, and take her along, like a fever dream that vanished in a blink. But just as darkness was about to fall, a huge number of crows came flocking from the north, a thousand or more. At once, the men began to fire their rifles. They shot wildly and blindly, and several grazed their fellow bird-hunters by accident. One fellow was shot through the throat, and he lay in a pool of his own blood, and not even a kerchief tied around his neck could stop the gushing. The men went wild when they could not rouse their fellow hunter, and they set to firing off rounds as if in war. John sank back from them, for he stood out in the crowd; he was the tallest among them, and the wealthiest, and the reason why there had been a death on this day. He knew how easily people could turn on each other, how a man could be a hero one moment, and the cause of resentment the next. How he wished he had never been to that cursed island, or gone to sea, or told Maria about Essex County. And yet he imagined leaping into the blue-green water, thousands of miles from here, in a land where no one followed the rules set forth, where a sin might float like a flower in a fountain and a man was free to do as he pleased.

Maria heard the mayhem. The guns, the echoes of death, the calling of men and of birds. She had no choice but to leave Faith asleep on her pallet, so she might run through the dark, barefoot, in her blue dress. The first of the season’s fireflies drifted by, globes of light flickering among the blades of grass, then rising and falling between the trees. Maria felt danger all around her, burning like salt in a wound. It was then she realized she had not seen Cadin all day. She felt her heart beat as fast as his.

As she came upon the pasture, birds were plunging from the sky, a black rain of feathers. When a crow dies, the others band together and search for the killer, mobbing those responsible. Scores of birds attacked the men from town, diving beak and claw into the fray, their hoarse calls striking fear into the hearts of many of those who had believed themselves brave for the cowardly act of shooting at unsuspecting birds. Maria felt her arm burning, and it was only then that she realized her blood was spilling onto the ground, black and burning. In the mad volley of bullets and buckshot, she had been shot. She backed into the trees, breathing hard, feeling much as she had on the day she hid in the forest and watched Hannah’s house burn. She murmured a spell of protection, in Latin and backwards, quoting from Solomon’s book of magic, and as she did the men’s guns began to misfire. She called to the sky, and banks of roiling clouds appeared in the west, moving in like a wave at sea.