Our Crooked Hearts(40)

“I don’t know that there was a before. I think we never actually knew her.”

“It wasn’t all fake,” Fee said definitely. “But it doesn’t matter now. At this point she’d eat our hearts if she thought it would make her stronger.”

I was hit with a slippery, split-second vision of a woman holding something ripe and terrible to her lips. The occultist. She’d been in the dream I was struggling to remember.

“Sharon, though,” Fee went on. “She didn’t know any more than we did. Plus she has a kid. Good reason to want to fix this quick, right?”

“You’d think.” When I blinked I saw fish bodies, cracked mirrors, smudged-out circles of salt. The occultist’s face. It took me too long to notice Fee swiping tears away.

“Hey,” I said softly.

“I know,” she told me, raising a hand. “But if I hadn’t broken the circle…”

“Stop. Marion’s not that strong. She was gonna lose control no matter what. At least this way the occultist isn’t walking around on two feet. Doing god knows what.”

“Devil knows what. God’s not looking.” Fee pressed two fingers into her temple. “Fucking Marion.”

“Fucking Marion,” I repeated, with feeling.



* * *



Fee stepped out the street door first. Promptly she stepped back, fist to her mouth. I slipped past her to see.

On the step lay a dead rabbit. Paws curled, belly to the summer sky. I knew what it was by the tail and the back legs: its head was gone. “Oh, god,” Fee said, pointing. The head was a few steps down, where the stoop met the sidewalk.

I used a stick to scoop the remains into a section of last week’s Reader and ran it to the dumpster. On the way to the bus stop my eye was drawn to every dead thing. Broken-necked birds, the cracked shell of a robin’s egg. The roadkill carcass of an outdoor cat, pounded to leather by passing cars. Flies were everywhere; my sneakers squished over the remains of heat-stricken flowers.

We rolled into the shop around ten, nursing milk-white, sugar-blitzed Dunkin’ Donuts coffees. Henry Rollins was screaming through fuzzy speakers and the air was dense with nag champa. The off-kilter feeling I’d woken up with was spiking, sharpening. I was taking in too much information, too much texture and color and sound. It carried me back to that very first spell, to my trip through a shining city I still longed for and would never see again. Right now it just made me want to curl up tightly and block out the light.

I caught myself on a jewelry case stuffed full of low-rent trinkets. Cheap mood rings, their stones the red-black color of anxiety. Leather cords strung with yin-yangs and peace signs and psychedelic mushrooms, and those silver claddaghs the shiny girls wore.

Fee put a hand between my shoulder blades. “I feel it, too.”

“Hey. Are you who Sharon’s waiting for?”

The girl behind the counter—hoodie pinned with punk-band patches, inflamed piercing in one blonde brow—looked us over shrewdly. We nodded and she jerked her chin toward the back.

The music was quieter there, the EXIT door propped open to the alley. There was a cot pushed against one wall and a pup tent on the floor, blankets spilling out of it. Beside it a little boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt sat cross-legged reading a comic book, hair wisping into a rattail that stopped between his shoulder blades.

“Morning,” Sharon said without turning. She was heating SpaghettiOs on a hotplate. She tasted one, then scraped them into a plastic bowl and handed it to the kid.

Fee watched this nervously. I could feel her clocking the kid, sensing the nourishment he actually needed. I didn’t think it came from a can.

“Morning,” I said, before Fee could say something off topic. “Where’s Marion?”

Sharon sat at the mint-colored table. “Marion’s your girl, I figured she’d be coming with you.”

“Nope.” We’d called her twice that morning and gotten her parents’ answering machine. “Did you figure anything out?”

“Since I last saw you I showered, slept, and woke up screaming. Then I spent the morning dealing with this one.”

The kid flicked a mistrustful gaze our way. His eyes were the same space-age blue as his mother’s.

“Hi,” Fee said softly. “What’s your name?”

He rolled those pretty eyes and went back to his X-Men.

“Don’t bother,” Sharon said dismissively. “He barely even talks to me.”

The room was claustrophobic, even with the open door. I wanted to leave this place and never see Sharon again, never again breathe the hopeless tin-and-tomatoes scent of canned spaghetti. But we were stuck with each other for now.

“Right,” Fee said after a pause. “So I’ve been looking into banishing spells. I’ve got some ideas, places to start.”

“Not sure an off-the-shelf banishing would work.” Sharon folded tattooed hands over her stomach, rocking her chair to its tipping point.

“Okay. So what might?”

“We need Marion here to figure that out. She’s a weak witch, but she’s the only one who knows what we’re unpicking.”

Marion’s voice came from the doorway. “Weak witch, reporting for duty.”

She looked even worse than I did. Baggy dress and scarecrow limbs, and massive sunglasses that looked new. “I know what we have to do,” she said.