Our Crooked Hearts(21)

It was probable, the book conceded, that she deserved it: it was generally believed she’d killed her master and altered his will. His former servants claimed they were lovers, or, more shockingly, an occultist and his apprentice. The full truth, claimed the historian, was stranger: Howlett was the apprentice, she a fugitive occultist who’d fled the death penalty in Baltimore and worked from an infamous spell book bound in skin.

If that profane book ever existed—unlikely, per the historian—it would have been burned long ago. But some believed the occultist had hidden it in the house. Servants, other historians, guests of Howlett House, all had searched for it without luck.

Marion read in a state of rising fever. The sounds of voices below, heavy footsteps, the crackle of police radios, none of it reached her. When she was done she turned to the older book, pressing her fingers into its mottled cover. Vision speckling, lips bitten red and white, she opened it.

Outside the windows, the rain began.

She’d walked into the library a lonesome girl fleeing a storm. She walked out with the seeds of her new, true self planted, and an occultist’s skin-bound book tucked into her pack.

Marion clung jealously to its promise of a different kind of life. The thrift-store clothes and the musical taste and the hand-punched piercings running up her ears were expressions of who she’d become, between that day and this one, but they were more than that: they were a lure, baited and cocked. Because what fun was magic if you were alone?

Three years later she walked into her first shift at the fish shop, a job she took in secret to save up for the noncollegiate life her parents would never approve. And she knew as soon as she saw Dana. Just looking at her, she knew she was no longer alone.



* * *



“You found a dead body,” said Fee.

“Professor of occult studies,” Marion replied primly. “Aneurysm.”

“You’re a witch,” I said.

“An occultist. Practitioner. There are lots of names for it. I want to be. I will be.” Her face was vivid. You could almost see the coal of her hungry heart.

“Show us,” I told her.

“Show you the book? Or show you magic?”

“Just … all of it. Fucking all of it.”

“Yeah,” Fee said, grinning now. “Let us in.”





CHAPTER TWELVE



The suburbs

Right now

It was nighttime now, and I was laying out the pieces.

A buried jar, a closet safe. Migraines and dead rabbits and the fate of Hattie Carter. And this: So she was one of Sharon’s girls. I’d googled ’Twixt and ’Tween, of course, and sharon twixt and tween, but there were some things even the internet doesn’t know.

There was a word I kept thinking, kept prodding at like a seed caught in my teeth. A word for what it might mean when you do something—something that might involve a jar of blood, let’s say—with the expectation that, somewhere else in the world, you’ve made something happen.

Hank’s derisive words came back to me. That’s the kind of thing a New Age white lady does under a full moon.

Okay, yes. But what if—for argument’s sake—what if, in my mother’s case, the moon listened?

It was ridiculous. If I believed that, I was as bad as the Small Shop’s most codependent customers, those questing souls who poured money into herbs and crystals and my aunt’s remedies, like shiny objects could stave off the dark.

Except: I pressed my lips together to feel the place where my skin had closed. I’d used Aunt Fee’s salve once and wiped it right off. Still I’d healed up like Wolverine. Even arnica can’t do that. Which meant, if this was real, it was both of them.

Maybe I was an idiot if I didn’t believe it. If I didn’t accept what was right in front of me, what could very well be the reason behind the scars and the silences and the secretive bullshit I’d learned to live with: my mother was capable of unnatural things.

I was alone with my spiraling thoughts. Hank was out, my dad off pretending to be an orc or whatever at game night with his grad school friends. He’d texted around eight to let me know he was crashing in the city. I reread the last text Aunt Fee sent me.

Sorry. Dealing with something but we’re fine. I’ll call you soon, Ivy-girl.

I microwaved a plate of Chips Ahoy! and sat at the kitchen table. The AC cycled off with a sigh and the house was too quiet. At my back was the basement door, across from me the windows. With the sun down and the lights on they’d become a one-way mirror. Inside it a platinum-haired stranger picked at a plate of cookies.

Someone could be standing right there. On the other side of the glass, watching me. They could be yards away and I wouldn’t even know it.

I heard a rubbery thump. Faint but definite, not from the windows but the other side of the house, where the sliding door opened onto the backyard.

The cookie turned to sand on my tongue. That was the sound of something bumping up against glass.

I stood slowly, clutching my phone. As I moved through the house I turned off every light, so I could see out but no one else could see in. The backyard was dark. The light out there had a sensor and turned on if anyone came as close as the patio. That gave me the courage to charge across the carpet, past the black mouth of the laundry room, and throw open the sliding door.