Our Crooked Hearts(54)
They hung in the air like a sparkler’s trail. I smelled dark sugar and burnt hair and felt a silky tautening beneath my soles, as if the rocks I walked over were smoothing themselves into a hot glass road. I yelped, jumping back, before I realized it wasn’t the path. It was my feet.
I lifted one, then the other. When I tapped a nail against my callused right heel I heard an audible glassy click.
“Holy … how did you do that? What did you do?”
Marion looked at me blankly, like I was interrogating her for breathing. “You’re welcome,” she said.
I high-stepped down the road, lifting and resettling my feet like a dog in snow boots. Such a small change but it made my whole body feel foreign to me. Separate from me, my form and my consciousness never more sharply defined. My brain rebelled from what she’d done, from being near her at all. But my skin was awake, attuned to her every motion, and the shimmering possibility that she might do something impossible again.
We hit the turning. The gravel broadened, giving way to clean pavement. A long driveway that ended at a house, big and white and silent. All the windows were dark, but the front door hung wide open.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The city
Back then
When I walked into our apartment my dad was asleep on the sofa, a whiskey tumbler balanced on his chest. There was ice in the glass and the record he’d put on was still turning. The Flamingos played eerie and sweet, tinting the stale air gold.
He lifted his head groggily. “Dana?”
“Go to sleep, Dad.” My throat was raw as meat.
“Where’ve you been?” He sniffed. “Jesus, what have you been rolling in? Is that blood on your shirt?”
“I said go to sleep!”
Intent thickened my words into a roux. He fell back against the cushions, out cold, and stayed that way.
* * *
We’d scrubbed the round room. First on our hands and knees, because we were stump-stupid with shock. Then, when she woke up enough to do it, Sharon used a scouring spell. The occultist’s book was gone, fallen through the mirror with Marion. We took everything else that had been hers and fled the library, sliding through the waning dark. By three a.m. we were gathered beneath the scratchy overhang of a parking garage.
“Not ever,” Sharon was saying. “You got me?”
I watched her like bad TV. I could hear her, but I couldn’t make her words connect into anything with meaning.
“You don’t even know my last name,” she went on. “Let’s keep it that way. You saw nothing, you know nothing. They’ll make their way to you, once her parents report it. If you send them to me I’ll make sure you regret it.”
Them. “Who?” I asked.
“The police, you doorknob.”
A breeze blew over us, lake-water cool. The scent of it flushed something crucial out of the great blank in my head.
“Eighteen,” I said dully. “It’s Marion’s birthday today. She’s … she was…” I blinked my sandy eyes. “She’s eighteen.”
Sharon brightened right up. “Seriously? Holy shit, that’s lucky. We might actually get out of this. They won’t even put her down as a runaway.”
“You’re horrible,” Fee said. Her arms were jacketed tightly over her ribs. “Horrible. I hope you … I wish you…” She pressed her lips together tight before anything dangerous could escape. “I do not wish you well,” she finished.
“How nice to be sixteen and blameless,” Sharon said. “What a luxury to think regret can wipe your slate clean. That girl built her own casket, honey. And the blood on your hands is as red as the blood on mine.” She shook her head. “My hand to god, I wouldn’t be sixteen again for the world.”
* * *
In the days that followed, pieces of what Sharon said came back to me, like bits of tape I hadn’t known I was recording. It all played out like she’d told us it would.
First came days of nothing. No supernatural visitations and no police, either. A peace so false and sinister it almost broke me.
Then, right when I thought it would never happen, a cop. A full two weeks had passed when a man with hound-dog eyes and an ill-fitting suit showed up at the fish shop to talk to Uncle Nestor. Fee was working that day and he talked to her, too.
Maybe my uncle knew more than he let on. He’d seen the maze of deep cuts on my left hand, already settling into scars, and the changes in Fee, invisible but impossible to miss. But he never asked us. He underplayed our friendship with Marion, and the man’s interrogations were perfunctory at best. Sharon was right again: Marion was eighteen. It wasn’t their job to care what happened to her.
We looked on from a distance as they drew a silhouette of a girl and colored it in: Delinquent. Depressed. Disappeared. A girl who left home the day she was legal to do it, and dropped out of sight.
That’s how Marion vanished twice. The first time it happened because of me. The second time, it was the world that buried her.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The suburbs
Right now
I followed Marion over moon-drenched pavement, toward an open front door that felt less like an invitation than a warning. Like a house from a fairy tale, drawing you in with food and rest before you realize you’re a prisoner.