Our Crooked Hearts(28)

“Astrid was amazing. She wasn’t just an occultist, she was a healer. She charged society people loads of money for love charms and pennyroyal tea, then took care of poor people for free.

“In Baltimore they called her the Widow’s Nursemaid—she’d off abusive husbands on the cheap, with poisons that weren’t traceable.

“Six days after Astrid was killed, John Howlett’s nephew— her murderer—died in his sleep. He was twenty-five, completely healthy. No apparent cause.”

She told us that one night in a sticky booth at the Pick Me Up, eating brownie sundae off a silver spoon.

Fee looked fascinated. “So her ghost killed him?”

Marion smiled a glassy little smile. “That’s one theory.”

“You told us Astrid was supposed to be executed,” I said. “What’d she do? Kill the wrong shitty husband?”

She shrugged, her gaze going murky, inward. “People blame powerful women for everything.”

I looked at the place where the occultist’s book was hidden in her bag. It was always with her. Neither Fee nor I had ever actually held it, and that was fine by me. I preferred to think of our magic as being drawn from a faceless place, a store of power accessible to brave girls with bright hearts. I didn’t understand Marion’s obsession with constantly reminding us Astrid had been an actual woman. Not a figure but a person, and maybe not a very good one.

I shivered. Somewhere in the future, someone was walking over my grave. Or maybe I was remembering, just for a moment, that magic was a thing with teeth, and a history as old as the world.



* * *



I try to remember how it began, the beginning of the end.

There was an evening I was riding my bike under the El, grocery bags swinging off my handlebars, and almost got clipped by a Ford Fairlane. I swerved to avoid it, food shaking out over the pavement. “Hey, asshole!” I screamed. “You broke my eggs!”

The driver flipped me the bird. “Ah, go fuck your boyfriend!” he bawled out his open window.

The chain had come off my bike. I chucked it onto the sidewalk and took off running, head empty but for a bright white rage. I threw an arm out and his back tire popped like a smashed pumpkin, sending his car fishtailing across Glenwood Avenue.

I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t thought I’d done anything. But my body was quaking with expelled magic, a headache already filing its nails on my brain. Shithead regained control of his car and went sailing on but I couldn’t stop picturing crumpled metal, blood on the pavement.

Right then I didn’t feel like a girl with a gift. I felt like a child carrying around a crate of leaky dynamite.

Then there was the night of the love spell.



* * *



Fee had a loose trigger for falling in love. She liked dirty-mouthed girls, girls with shaved heads, girls on bikes who darted like fish through traffic. But it wasn’t until we were magic that she got up the guts to actually talk to any of them.

She had her first kiss, then her second, with a bartender at the Rainbo Club, pink pixie cut and a collar of tattooed hyacinths. Then the bartender found out how young Fee really was and stopped talking to her.

For the first time, the occultist’s book showed us a love spell. Its ingredients were fit for a wedding bouquet: ribbons, roses, lavender. You could almost believe it was good magic.

“I don’t know,” Fee said, finger-combing the ends of her hair. “How does a love spell even work? Does it trick her into thinking she loves me? Does it tweak her brain so she does? I don’t want someone to love me if it doesn’t count.”

Marion’s voice was icy. “How does magic not count? Love is chemicals. It’s your own brain making you drunk. Magic is a hundred times realer than love. Anyway”—she narrowed her eyes at the book—“Astrid won’t show us anything else till it’s done.”

So we gathered our rosebuds, our pretty scented things. I lurked at the Rainbo until I saw the inconstant bartender sip soda through a straw, then I grabbed the straw and bolted.

It was the first time the three of us weren’t of one mind, and you could feel it in the magic. There was a resistance there, a sulfur-scented headwind that kicked our balance askew.

In the middle of the spell, Fee screamed. She reached under her shirt for the necklace that always nestled just below her throat’s hollow: her mother’s crucifix. She yanked until its thin chain snapped and sent it skidding across the floor.

“Gimme a mirror,” she said, voice wretched.

When she pulled her shirt up to look, there was a fine cross-shaped mark where the crucifix had lain. Not a fresh wound, but a pale scar. It was so pretty, positioned like a charm beside her remaining necklace: a cheap gold-colored chain strung with a slice of broken heart, part of the Best Friends set she’d bought for the three of us on Maxwell Street.

As I hugged her, smoothing back her hair, Marion scooted to the fallen cross and wrapped it in a square of black paper pulled from her bottomless bag.

“There,” she said, placing the parcel in a drawer. “Let’s start again.”

“Marion, no,” I said over Fee’s shoulder.

Her face tightened. “No?”

“It was a bad idea,” I told her pointedly. “Let’s do something else.”