In the month of June, Abraham Dias went to bed and he didn’t get up again. At first he tried; Samuel and Maria held him under his arms and lifted him up, but he soon sank back down, shaking his head. Abraham had no strength and no appetite for life. He knew this weakness, for he had seen it in others; it came at the end of life, it appeared that a person was giving up, but it was an acceptance of the end. He stopped eating, even refusing a bite of his favorite chocolate cake, and what was even more telling for a man of the Dias family, he stopped talking. That was when Maria heard the deathwatch beetle. She got down on her hands and knees to search beneath the furniture, then investigated the attic and every inch of the damp brick cellar, but she couldn’t find the wretched insect. It continued with its clacking call, for once begun the sound could only be ended by a death in the house. Samuel hadn’t stopped the deathwatch beetle by stepping on it outside the jail in Salem; rather, the beetle’s death had foretold that Maria would not hang. This was not the case now, for the beetle didn’t show itself, always a dark sign. She remembered Hannah searching the cottage at Devotion Field when she heard it, never managing to get it out of the walls no matter how she might try, for it predicted the day of fire and destruction, when she was nailed to her own front door and her house was burned to the ground.

Maria turned to the book, reading the Grimoire for hours, trying every remedy that might help the old man regain his vitality. Vervain, feverfew, nightshade, horehound syrup. None of it worked. As Abraham’s condition worsened, Maria was willing to delve into the darker magic that practitioners of the Nameless Art were taught to avoid, though she could find no death spells in the Grimoire.

That is not our business, Hannah had told her. When you go inside darkness, the darkness goes inside you.

She found the spell she was searching for at the very end of the book, on a page she had never noticed before. It was invisible without bodily fluid, but Maria could feel it there on the page, writhing, ready to be called up. She licked her thumb, then ran her damp finger across the page. The letters appeared in small, perfect script. Do not use unless you must.