Our Crooked Hearts(44)

As the back of my tongue kissed off the final k, the bathroom light burst. Glass rained over my hair in the dark, but the sound of breakage was bigger than a bulb. I clawed the door open and recoiled from an eye-watering vinegar slap.

Brine and glass covered the floor. The spell I’d reached for—a small thing, good for, say, turning a drink that might be dosed to slivers in a bad man’s hand—had swept through the back room, smashing a shelf of pickle jars. I thanked the gods and saints for plastic condiment containers. Then I saw that the safety-glass pane in the swinging door had cracked.

Lorna gaped at me as I charged out to the counter, her penciled brows climbing toward the burgundy floss of her wig. “What was that? What’d you do?”

I ignored her, scanning the shop. The spell hadn’t reached the shop’s plate-glass front. Nobody was screaming, no one was red with broken pieces, singing a song of lawsuit. “Stay up here,” I said harshly.

When I ducked back into the bathroom, Astrid was gone. The camp mirror was still intact. Of course it was, it was made of stainless steel. The spell was just a panicked miscast that had gone bizarrely wide. Probably. Right?

Before going for the mop, I called Fee.

“Don’t try any magic,” I told her. “Don’t do anything till I’m there.”



* * *



We’d ended the summoning midstream. But what if we’d still gotten what we were after? What if Astrid Washington, however grudgingly, had granted us a piece of her power?

We tested my theory using the breaking spell’s opposite. A simple mending charm, white wax poured over the halves of a broken pencil. Do it right and the wax disappears like syrup in tea, sealing the break.

Fee’s room smelled like birthday cake. Scented candles work fine for lots of things, and we’d found a pack of vanilla tealights cheap at the Family Dollar. I spoke the incantation as she poured. The wax disappeared, the pieces merged back into a dull No. 2 pencil.

But the spell didn’t stop. The pencil’s grade-school yellow casing evanesced, revealing the wood below. It roughened, thickened, bark crawling over its planes and sending up a breath of incense cedar. The twig gave a shiver, as with the memory of a breeze, and in a Chia-pet time lapse sprouted a sickening coat of fungus. Out of it wriggled a trio of dull-backed beetles, like little licorice Tic Tacs.

Fee smashed them to jelly with a book.

“Fuck’s sake,” I said, holding my heart.

“‘Finish the job,’” she said in an odd voice, “‘and until you do you will see my hand in all your workings.’”

“What?”

“It’s from my dream. It’s been hanging over me all day, that I couldn’t remember it. But I remember now. I remember Astrid saying that.”

I let my eyelids fall, reaching again for my dream. This time it came.

Finish what you started and until you do I will speak to you at all hours, you will never not hear me, you will see my hand in all your workings and my face in your own face and my heartbeat nested in your heartbeat and my—

Hungry smiles, glass apples. “‘My heartbeat nested in your heartbeat,’” I said. I pressed a hand to Fee’s chest, feeling the same wrong ripple I felt in my own.



* * *



Five days until the summoning. They ran together like candies in a pocket.

The hours flickered past, or crawled in an endless dream. We avoided mirrors but Astrid found us anyway: in the rinse sink at work, the oily surface of a cup of black coffee. Her fingers curled in the steam of our showers and turned them cold. We played music to drown out her seashell sounds. My peripheral vision swam with mist, my footsteps crunched over fallen bluebottles.

And everywhere, dead rabbits. On the fire escape outside my window, curled inside Fee’s rosemary pot. A fresh and bleeding rabbit foot stuffed into my knockoff One Star, squishing beneath my bare arch when I put it on without looking.

We couldn’t sleep, we didn’t dare cast, but we could still search, spending every minute we could muster looking for a way out that wasn’t Marion’s. Fee combed through her books and I visited everyone I could think of, all the practitioners and magical layfolk who might talk to me.

I started with a clairvoyant on Clark Street, who practically broke my fingers slamming the door in my face. “Over you hovers a darkness,” he called through it, above the sound of a deadbolt hitting home.

“Why do you think I’m here?” I hollered, driving my fist into the door.

I let myself into a Cramps show at the Metro because I wanted to talk to this girl, Linh, who tended bar there. She had an affinity with the dead and a sideline helping the recently bereaved find things their departed left hidden—wedding rings, wills, car keys. If she knew how to open her mind to the dead, maybe she could help me close mine. Even before she saw me she had her face screwed up, looking around like she was trying to find a gas leak.

“That’s coming from you?” she said when I bellied up. “Oof, babe, you look bad. What happened?”

“Long story, not good.” I put a bill down on the bar. “Any advice on how to make a spirit stop talking to you?”

Linh moved her head back and forth like a radio dial. “Not really. I mean … ugh.” She drew her chin down like a turtle. “That’s like bleach poured into my ears. My other ears. Nuh-uh, no way.” She flicked my twenty off the bar. “Keep your money. And stay away from me until you’ve got this resolved.”