Our Crooked Hearts(51)

You summon me to do your bidding?

We couldn’t hear her, but her lips moved so crisply there was no question what was being said.

You summon me to serve you? To bind myself to your worthlessness and be your helpmeet? Would a lion put her head down to be bound by a mouse? Would the lightning bow to the lightning bug?

The whole time she spoke, she was smiling. It was worse that way.

You would have me be, she said, “your familiar?”

The last two words we heard. We heard them because in one smooth motion Astrid hefted herself through the glass, crouching on its edge with her toes still dipped into mirror world. The room became so small with her inside it, so vivid with the scent of witching.

“Stupid girl.” Her voice was a crow-feather scratch, hoarse and glimmering. “I and my book have been your only teachers. You have no magic you didn’t take from me.”

Marion was shaking. “I—I charge you—” she began, and with a languid hand Astrid flung the binding veil.

It stuck to Marion like cling wrap, visible for an instant then drawn into her skin. She pulsed the color of yellow gold before it was absorbed completely. The room’s odor of blood and sweat bent beneath the stench of big magic, well water and bitters and clove. Marion reeled against the circle’s edge but couldn’t cross it. It was a prison that held them both.

Fee was at my shoulder reciting her Hail Marys in three languages. Sharon paced the edges of the salt, looking for a weakness. Seeing them trying shocked me into motion, into remembering something I’d nearly forgotten: we weren’t entirely helpless.

I grabbed Fee, pressed my mouth right up to her ear. “We still have a piece of her power,” I said frantically. “If we can just get Marion out of the circle…”

Fee’s eyes widened. Some idea had struck her. “Broken,” she said. She turned to face me, putting a hand to my heart—to the place just over my heart, where my necklace charm hung. “All broken things wish to be whole again.”

She began to chant.

Draw tight the power of three



Add blood to a loving cup

And if ever the trio should part

Let the river swallow them up.



It wasn’t a spell. Not a real one. It was a rhyme Marion made up on a day we harvested water from the river at sundown, the brawny silver city stretching over our heads. We’d been happy and hopeful and a hundred years younger, our silly broken-heart necklaces clasped freshly around our throats.

I was still wearing mine. Despite everything, we all were. Fee chanted the rhyme again, and this time I joined her.

All of this—Astrid’s escape from the mirror, Marion’s binding, the chant—seemed to happen at once, boiling into one burning-metal minute. Fee and I were screaming now, repeating the rhyme.

Marion’s eyes met mine across the salt line. Then her lips were moving with ours.

That was when it began to work. The chant, multiplied by three, fizzing with the unwieldy charge of Astrid’s borrowed magic. My broken piece of charm grew hotter, every cut edge simmering against my skin. Fee’s and Marion’s were glowing like the center of a flame. The heart’s divided pieces drew toward each other, chains straining around our throats as they tugged us right up against the circle’s edge. Like calling to like, something broken longing to be whole.

Together we spoke the final piece of the rhyme. A fractional breath and then an explosion, submerged and soundless, as the three of us fell together in a tangle.

Everything was heat and hair and a neon confusion, my vision scribbled over with streaks. Marion’s skin was sour against my lips and I laughed with relief, because we’d done it, we’d pulled her out.

Then I blinked the light away and realized she hadn’t left the circle. We’d been dragged in.

Fee, Marion, and I lay together, bound by the healed heart, and Astrid stood above us. Her yellow irises had eaten the whites of her eyes away. She had the two-toned glare of a bird of prey.

Being looked at by Astrid Washington felt like being studied by two entities. One was a woman, an occultist, a human being who had walked and breathed and lived. The other was a thing of steel or living stone, hammered by time and magic into a terrifying flatness. A cynical, efficient being that wouldn’t think twice about breaking us down for parts.

Astrid took the knife from where it lay on the floor. She looked into each of our faces—one, two, three—then bent, knife in hand, over Fee.

“No!” I writhed in an attempt to protect her, cover her. Astrid laughed, flipping the knife so its blade was in her hand.

“You’ve got a traitor in your coven,” she said, giving it to Fee hilt first. “Needs must.”

Fee took the knife, not limply but with slow focus. Marion’s face was a void, her eyes blank as eggs. If Fee had gone for her then, I think she would have turned her neck willingly to the blade. I was babbling terrified lies—Fee, Fee, you don’t have to—my own voice an irritant I couldn’t make stop. But Fee was quiet.

She looked at Astrid Washington and spoke almost steadily. “You and Marion are bound now. You bound her, with that net. Which means if I kill her, you’ll die, too. Right?”

For two raggedy heartbeats Astrid’s face was perfectly composed, and I thought Fee had overplayed her hand. Then the occultist’s eyes widened and she screamed, a sound too wretched and raking to have come from a human throat.