Our Crooked Hearts(50)
“Me, too,” she said, and cinched an arm around me. “My one and only sister.”
I think we really believed that love could work that way. That we could hold each other fast to the surface of the spinning world.
* * *
We shaved the hours away, minute by endless minute, until seven p.m. came and time started melting like a sno-cone.
It was eight and we were trying to fill our stomachs, enough so we wouldn’t be trembly but not so much that we’d barf. Nine p.m. and the sun was gone. We blinked and it was 10:30 and we were waiting for the bus, so twitchy a woman waiting with us—clear vinyl backpack, green powder to her brows—offered us some pretzels. Half past eleven and we were lost in the scented shade of the occultist’s house, combing the grass for four-leaf clovers.
Sharon arrived just behind us. She saw what we were doing, dropped onto the grass, and joined the hunt. None of us found any luck before Marion showed.
Her bruises had faded to ugly smudges of yellow and green. She looked brittle as a candy stick, with a raw vitality to her that made me think of a frayed and sparking wire. I stared at her until I understood: it was Astrid’s gift. While Fee and I were making ourselves sick trying to suppress it, Marion must’ve been tending her portion of power like a strangler vine. My stomach gnawed on itself. It would be hard for her to give that up.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said.
We retraced our steps, trooping through the dust and the dark. The library’s antique air made me feel like I was breathing through rough cotton. Astrid was with us, a presence at our backs, ahead of us, pressing in from the sides. We scaled the attic ladder.
The moon was just right for our purposes, leaner now but satiating in a way I could feel to the bottom of my witch’s soul. Now that the moment had come, now that we were here, I felt curiously calm. As if everything that was about to happen already had.
The hour turned. Marion kneeled. The working began.
The spell unfolded with the gripless texture of reenactment. Blue flame, gray mirror, white wax. Until Marion snapped her knife open and lifted the rabbit.
It was wild this time, and skinny despite the season, sides heaving beneath its mottled coat. It fought and fought, twisting in Marion’s grip, finally jerking its head into a broken angle to bite her. Even through the pain of its yellow teeth she was silent. The rest of us hissed in dismay as her blood hit the wax.
With a decisive stab her knife went in. But it must’ve been too dull, or the creature’s neck too sinewy. Dying, it twisted free; Marion wrestled it back. She held it more efficiently this time, sawing away so fiercely a spurt of arterial blood hit my knuckles. I dropped my needle and had to scrabble in the dust to find it.
The spell went on, but the chain had come off. The magic felt loose and messy, a drafty house where any kind of weather might come in. When Marion began the incantation it sounded different than it had the first time. Harsher vowels, cruder consonants. She laid the salt circle with her bleeding hand, lit the waxed mirror. The entire room wobbled with spiking heat, and that was wrong, too. There must’ve been an error somewhere, a gap. It’s not gonna work, I thought. Glad and terrified at once. But no, look: there was Astrid Washington, her gold-dust eyes peering up through the glass. She smiled, lips drawing back from teeth as white and uniform as seed pearls.
I tasted acid and apple. This was where the summoning would make its hairpin turn into banishment. If Marion could pull it off.
Her eyes were vacant with effort, her shoulders slumped beneath the heat. She signaled to us and we sliced our palms, dropping to our knees to press them to the floor. I felt compacted grit loosening beneath my blood.
Marion laughed. A sound so high and wild I felt it shuddering through all three of us, connected by an invisible net of blood magic. And we knew. Right then we knew Marion was going to betray us.
She spoke Astrid’s full name, her voice filling like a wineglass with rich red satisfaction. She took a deep breath.
And she made a terrible mistake.
Dipping her hand into a hidden pocket, Marion pulled out something that pooled brightly over her fingers, glinting in the moonlight like one of the devil’s golden hairs. Below the glass, Astrid stopped smiling.
I craned to make out what Marion held, pinching my needle tight. She worked her fingers like a cat’s cradle, the thing unfolding between them into a veil fine as fog.
Sharon charged the circle, but this time its borders held.
“Don’t do it,” she cried desperately. “Marion, no!”
Marion paid her no mind. Holding the drifting veil above the manhole of mirror, she began to speak.
“I charge you, Astrid Washington, to do my bidding. To serve me. I charge you to bind yourself to me. To be my helpmeet and my—my familiar.”
Fee gasped. Sharon cursed with such ferocity she was making a spell of it, the words spilling out in a cool blue mist. Even Marion stumbled over what she’d asked for. A mediocre witch standing in a table salt circle, her hopeless plan revealed: not a banishment, but a binding.
Marion dropped the veil. I blinked and saw how she meant it to go. This delicate piece of fey magic, god knew where she’d gotten it and what currency she’d paid, would fall over the silver-blonde crown of Astrid’s head. It would fix itself to her, sticky as cobwebs, and bind her.
That wasn’t how it went.
Almost before the veil left Marion’s fingers, Astrid was raising her own to meet it. Its translucent weave clung to her skin, glowing as it made contact. And if I were Astrid, I would’ve done exactly what she did next. Which was this: