Our Crooked Hearts(29)
“What else is there to do?” She put her arms out to encompass the room, the whole twilit city, nothing out there worth doing unless the first-drag burn of magic was in it. “Seriously, what?”
Fee pulled away, fixing Marion with a look. “That was my mother’s. She died wearing that crucifix.”
Marion was all ready to push back, you could see it. Then she made some calculation, and changed course. “Yeah, okay,” she said, and dropped it.
Things were fine after that. We listened to music and read one-card tarot and it was all just fine. But when Marion left the next morning Fee looked at me, and I nodded back, and we both knew something had changed.
* * *
We were done with the occultist’s book. Done with Marion’s jealous doling out of its darkening gifts, like ghostly footprints leading us deeper into a fog.
Astrid Washington wasn’t the only teacher. Her magic wasn’t the only kind.
Without a word to Marion, we started looking elsewhere. We combed through witchery handbooks and herbalists’ guides and one-off necronomicons dug out of bookshops the size of a closet. We picked up smudgy xeroxed witchcraft zines from Quimby’s and Myopic. We met some people that way who invited us to gatherings in parks and basements and daytime bars, where we hovered together at the edges. We found plenty of dead ends, but flickers of true magic, too.
And it felt so good to work without Marion watching. Fee discovered she had a keen herb-sense. Under her hands her dad’s potted kitchen garden grew preternaturally lush, carpeting the wooden porch that overlooked a weedy back lot. She spoke with curanderas in Pilsen, coming away with herb bundles and recipes written on squares of butcher paper.
Magic was a rougher, cheaper currency than we’d thought, the city a great living library of secret mystics, civilians with ancient knowledge embedded in their bones. We riffled their pages in search of information: tantalizing scraps of shtetl magic gleaned from a Rogers Park stoop sitter; a cracklingly uncanny Norwegian jumping rhyme recited by a waitress in Andersonville; a hair-raising anecdote about effigy magic teased out of a West African cabbie. It was good to be reminded magic had denser, older thickets than the occultist’s book.
We pulled away from Marion. But she was pulling away from us, too. There was no blowup, just a slackening. After the love spell we heard from her less and less, then not at all for days. She started skipping fish-shop shifts. We’d made up our minds to go to her house to check on her when she came to find us first.
She showed up at the shop in a faded black dress and a copper cuff stuck with a hunk of raw citrine. There was a new edge to her, a bad radiance. Something had changed since we’d seen her last, and she looked all at once like the witch she wanted to be: famished and startling.
We thought she’d ask what we’d been up to, but instead she went on and on about a ritual given to her by the occultist’s book, meant to increase the body’s magical potency: the strength of your blood, urine, spit, nails, all the cheap ingredients you can harvest from yourself. Her bag clanked with hellish-looking roots steeped in dirty city rain, the teas she fed herself in place of food. Her skin smelled piney and metallic.
And there was something else, she said. Something she had to show us.
Neither of us wanted to go. We’d been up late the night before, dealing with my dad, and were brittle with exhaustion. But when we got off work we trailed her to the bus stop anyway.
It was late August and the vibe among us was as suffocating as the weather. When we got off the bus we didn’t go to her parents’ house. She led us through campus instead, past university buildings and green spaces so verdant they felt sinister, to a Disneyland downtown of shops.
We stopped in front of one of those Clark and Belmont–type places where wannabe witches shopped: blown glass pipes and cheap fetishwear, jewelry embedded with fake lapis or mother of pearl. It had the dorkiest name—’Twixt and ’Tween—and I felt embarrassed going inside, because the cool record shop boys from next door were on the pavement having a cigarette.
The shop smelled like sandalwood and was stuffed with stuff, one-hitters and hesher tees and tie-dyed wall hangings. Then a woman came out from the back and wrapped Marion in her arms. “Hey, pretty girl.”
She was a white woman in her late twenties, I’d guess, but she vibed like an old punk. Her skin was sunbaked hardpan, her eyes a quartz blue. She had a dandelion of black hair and triangles and stars tattooed over the backs of her hands. She didn’t look at Fee or me. Still holding Marion, she said, “Did you bring the book?”
Fee and I glanced narrowly at each other as Marion fished around in her bag, then took out the occultist’s book. The woman laughed softly, hands up like Marion might give it to her. When she didn’t, the woman finally looked at me and Fee.
“So this is your coven.”
I ticked my chin at her. “Who’s she? Why are we in her crappy store?”
The woman laughed again, but Marion tensed. The cords in her neck were unnerving. “This is Sharon. She’s another practitioner.”
“You can say witch, honey.” Sharon tongued her lip ring. “It’s not a bad word.”
“It’s limiting, though,” Marion said earnestly. Always so humorless around magic, all her borders down. “We’re more than that. I want to be more than that. Don’t you?”