Our Crooked Hearts(41)

“Oh yeah?” Sharon let the legs of her chair drop. “What’s that?”

Marion slopped her bag onto the table. “Redo the spell. This time, we finish it.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “No way.”

“It’s the only way.” She pulled off her sunglasses. The room went so quiet Sharon’s kid looked up.

“Gross,” he said. “What’s wrong with her face?”

All around Marion’s eyes, over her temples and the tops of her cheeks, were little bruises. She was speckled with them like a piece of bad fruit. “Astrid won’t let me sleep until it’s done,” she said dreamily. Not crush-dreamily, but like a person talking in their sleep. “She pinches me awake each time I try.” Her eyes cleared, went suspicious. “Did she let you guys sleep?”

“Like a baby,” Sharon said. “Till I woke up with blood in my ear and my kid’s hamster dead on my pillow.”

“What?” the boy squeaked. “You said she ran away!”

Sharon closed her eyes. “Oh. I’m sorry, baby. Here, take this.” She rummaged in her pocket, then held out a crumpled bill. “Get an ice cream, okay? Take yourself to the movies. Just be gone for a couple hours. We’ll get you a new pet next week.”

He rose slowly, shoulders clenched, leaving his comic book propped beside the untouched SpaghettiOs. He looked too young to go anywhere by himself, but I’d been about that age when my dad stopped keeping tabs.

“Kids,” Sharon muttered, after he’d snatched the money from her fingers and stomped off into the sun.

“Vengeful spirits,” I said. “To get back to the matter at hand. She killed your hamster?”

“Beheaded it.” Sharon made a guillotine of her hands to demonstrate.

Marion dropped heavily into a chair. “I was wrong. About the spell and what it would cost. There’s more to it than I realized.”

“Oh, well spotted,” Sharon said caustically.

“Let her talk,” Fee murmured.

Marion took out the occultist’s book and lay beside it a thicker volume, stamped in gold lettering. Howlett House: A History.

“Last night I reread all the parts about Astrid. Lots of slanderous stuff and old wives’ tales, but information, too. She—” Marion shook her head sharply, started again. “In Baltimore she was accused of killing four men. It was this massive story, probably because of the way she looked. She got all these marriage proposals, she was basically a celebrity. Right up to her escape she denied doing it. But one of the servants at Howlett House claimed she’d overheard Astrid talking about the killings with John Howlett. She said Astrid told him she’d used the men to test a theory she had: that there was a way to beat death.”

Marion massaged one bruised temple. Black Flag melted into My Bloody Valentine on the other side of the door.

“This is secondhand, the word of a woman who also claimed Astrid turned into a white cat at night to ride the devil. But Astrid and Howlett were definitely obsessed with immortality, and this servant claimed Astrid had figured out a way to keep her spirit intact when she died. Intact, and close.”

“Like a haunting?” I tried to say it coldly, but it came out in a whisper.

“Like a dam.” Even now, Marion spoke of it with wonder. “A stopping place for her spirit between life and death, attached to the house itself. She figured out a way to catch herself, to build a place where she could wait to be summoned. Then she hid the spell where she knew it would be found.”

Sharon was raking her nails through her hair as she listened. Sparks gathered in their wake, sizzling on her fingertips and scenting the air with cordite.

“Whoops.” She shook the sparks to the floor. “Okay. Let’s recap. What we’re dealing with is a dead occultist who has spent the last however many years in magical solitary, losing her undead mind, and who will now be haunting us till we give her what she wants. Which is another go at the spell that will reanimate her. Is that everything?”

Marion jerked to her feet and pushed open the door to the shop, gesturing at us to follow. She stopped right below the speaker and drew us in, draping our four heads in a crimson throw.

Her breath was warm and sour and barely there. I almost couldn’t hear her over the wall of dreaming sound. “Everything I said—it’s true, but it’s not the point. Astrid’s here. She’s listening.”

Our hair crackled against the cotton. Everyone looked seedy in the red-dyed light.

“We have to be very careful now,” Marion said. “We have to do just as I say. We’re gonna do the spell again, to draw her out—but this time we’ll end it with a banishing.”

“You think we’re gonna trust you again just like that?” I hissed. I wished I had a new penny to hold between my thumb and my left ring finger. Penny bright, penny true, tell the lies that are told to you. If the copper tarnishes, you know you’re being taken for a ride.

“Look at me.” Astrid’s marks stood out on Marion’s face like grains of black rice. “She’s gonna hunt me till this is through.”

Then the cloth was ripped away, trailing constellations of static shocks. It hovered over our heads before being flung to the floor with force.

The punk girl goggled at us from behind the register, hands up. “Holy shit.”