Crouched down on the bare dirt of the root cellar floor, listening carefully for the scuttle of a rat, she went over everything that had led her there to that moment. The root cellar was the only thing left from her mother’s family home, which had burned to the ground, killing Jane’s grandmother years before Jane was even born.

“Someone from town started that fire,” Mama told her once, when Jane had asked about the fire that had killed her grandmother, destroyed everything her mama knew and loved, leaving nothing behind but a cellar hole lined with rocks, some charred wood, lilac trees in the dooryard. And the old root cellar off behind the house. The fire didn’t damage that at all. Over the years when she was growing up, Jane would go there and just sit, look at the jars of canned goods her grandma had put up long ago. It was like going to a museum. The museum of What Came Before. Of the Breckenridge family house. Of glass jars full of applesauce and string beans labeled in her grandmother’s careful hand. She never stayed long and never closed the door, because there were spiders and rats living down there.

“Why did they start the fire, Mama?” Jane had asked.

“It was me they were trying to kill.”

“But why?” she asked. “Why would they want to burn you up?”

“Fear is a funny thing,” her mother said.

“Why are they afraid of you?”

“People fear anything different, anything they don’t understand.”

Jane knew this to be true, even at a young age.

Her mama had a gift, but not everyone saw it that way. It was funny, though—even the people who spoke ill of her, called her a witch and the devil’s bride, they’d come sneaking out to the bog, asking Mama for love charms, healing spells, asking her to tell them their future or looking for a message from a spirit who had passed. People were afraid of her mother, but they also depended on her, sought her out in times of need (though they would never admit this out loud).

Jane herself had been ridiculed, called the devil’s daughter. She’d been held down in the schoolyard, stuck with pins to see if she would bleed. Jane had none of her mother’s powers. The spirits did not speak to her. She did not see signs of what was to come in tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. She longed for the voices, the signs, but they did not come. What she did have, what she held on to fiercely, was fury. Fury that she had not been born special like her mama. Fury at the way she and her mother were treated. Fury at what the people in town had done to her grandmother.

All her life, she carried a box of matches in her pocket, waiting.