Our Crooked Hearts(52)
She grabbed her head in both arms and folded in half at the waist, so her hair dragged over the floor. As soon as her eyes were off us I ripped myself free of the bonded necklace, its broken links dragging bloody beads across my neck.
Marion’s mouth was loose, her eyes unfocused.
“Break the circle,” I told her in a savage whisper. “You laid it, you can break it.”
She didn’t speak or move. I wasn’t sure she heard me.
“Marion, you idiot.” Fee shook her by the shoulders. “Wake up! Break the circle and we’ll figure out the rest. We can still fix this. We can still end this.”
Marion jerked to life, her hollow eyes burning. She spoke through clenched teeth. “You think I want this to end?”
The occultist straightened. In a sinuous dart she snatched the knife from Fee’s hand and stood above us, her hawk’s eyes shining like reverse moons.
“What to do, what to do,” she whispered, eyes switching between Fee and me. She tapped her temple with the tip of the blade.
My head roared and rattled. She was looking at us like a cook considering her kitchen. We were nothing but the ingredients she had at hand: one witch she couldn’t touch, two that she could. And a knife. She would pulp us if that was what it took to devise an escape hatch. My thoughts raged, all my joints went putty-soft with terror. Then a thought cut through the clamor, cool as river water.
I could kill her.
Not Astrid. She would fillet me faster than I could lift my hand. But Marion. Maybe I could steal just enough time to kill Marion. If she died, Astrid died, too. The circle broke. We were free.
In a freight-train flash I saw my arm on her throat, pressing down; my needle remapping her arms’ undersides; the heavy salt bowl coming down on her head. Celluloid squares from a horror film. And I knew I couldn’t do it.
So I did the next worst thing. As quickly as the idea seized me I took Marion by the shoulders and waist and heaved her body through the mirror.
In my memory it happened in silence. No sounds of effort or surprise. Marion’s eyes and mouth stretched wide, her throat trailed our broken necklace chains. Her body shrank as she dropped into the mirror’s greenish depths and was gone.
Astrid had time only to take a step toward me, both hands grasping, then the strength of the binding pulled her in after. I felt the locomotive huff of the circle breaking, then the empty-socket shock of Astrid’s magic being ripped out of us by the roots. Fee gasped, Sharon swore, and I screamed with relief and terror. My scream set the mirror’s surface to shivering. Not entirely glass, not entirely a door.
I slammed my fist into its center.
It gave against me. My heart sank with my hand, plunging into its dreadful jellied coolness. Then it rebounded and broke. My hand sang with pain and the cracks shuddered outward until the whole mirror was a glittering spider’s web.
I cradled my hand, all gloved in red, and looked at my brave Felicita.
She was staring at me with open horror. She would’ve died before doing what I’d just done. But that was the thing: I wouldn’t let her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The suburbs
Right now
Three girls done up in witch baby drag, their faces challenging or sly. My mother, my aunt, and a girl who’d smashed flat a quarter century of time like it was a pop can, stepping across it untouched.
She’d been here, inside my house. Biting my cookies, creeping through the dark, stealing my parents’ befuddling golden box. Maybe she’d stood right here, looking at the place where her image bent back.
Who was this girl to my mother that she’d held on to her photo this way? There but not there, kept in a place where she would see it every day and remember what was hidden.
My dad turned in his sleep, spoke a muffled word against his pillow, and was still. I slipped from the room.
My panic was cooling, that first jolt of fear drifting away. I could still observe the shock of it, the impossibility, but I’d run out of the energy to feel them. Caught in this state of unnatural calm, I stepped into the bathroom and flicked the wall switch.
I stood off-center in the mirror, sickly beneath the white light. It was scalding, surreal, it flooded every silent corner. The photo was a little crumpled now, but I held it up. In case Sharon was right, and mirrors were dangerous; in case they were a conduit through which I could reach this girl. Maybe yesterday I’d have been self-conscious doing it, but now I looked straight at my reflection and spoke.
“I need to talk to you.”
There was no ripple, no mist, just an exhausted bleach blonde holding a creased photograph.
“I’m coming to find you.”
* * *
I took my dad’s keys from his bedside table and pulled on a T-shirt dress and didn’t realize I’d forgotten shoes until my bare foot was bending around the brake pedal.
The girl could be anywhere. Just the knowledge of her transformed the night, fermenting its air like drifting bacteria. All the cars on the road seemed to be following me, all the shadows clotted like black cream. Lifeguard stands became alien monoliths, looming over the sinister mirror of the public pool. I passed the tinny lights of the Denny’s, the white bubble of the Amoco, the dying mall lording over its empty lots. Slow through downtown Woodbine, where the bars had long since closed and the quaint pools of lamplight were no match for the dark.