Our Crooked Hearts(56)

“And there are just so many of them.”

And god, her voice was so light. She laughed at the look on my face and said, “Ivy, they’re inside a dream. Okay? A good dream, all of them together—a mom and a dad and a kid. There’s a photo in the bathroom, the three of them in one of those boats, those fancy Italian boats.” She waited.

“Gondola,” I said curtly.

“Gondola. Yeah. They’re dreaming of the day they rode in the gondola.”

I wiped a hand over my mouth. “So this is what witches do, huh? They just fuck with people’s brains to get what they want?”

“I’m an occultist,” she snapped, “and nobody can do what I can do. Well.” She shifted her jaw, forward and back. “Almost nobody.”

I swallowed, tasting the tease in her words. I had to help these people, and I would. But a few more minutes of sleep wouldn’t kill anyone.

“Who else?” I said. “My mom?”

She made a dismissive noise.

“Who, then?”

“Now that is a really big question.”

She reached behind herself. With a magician’s flourish, she revealed the golden box.

The back of my tongue sparked like I’d just bitten into a lemon. Seeing it in someone else’s hands made my brain hiss, Mine. But when I reached for it, she pulled it away.

“Not yet.”

“What do you mean, not yet? What are you waiting for? Why did you take this?”

“Ask the question you’re not asking. Ask me: What does it hold?”

I swallowed. “Well?”

She slid off the counter. “Come with me.”

I followed her outside, across the patio, to the jeweled lip of the pool. She set the box on the concrete and unbuttoned her jeans.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

“Why?”

“The pool is half the reason I chose this house.” Her shirt went over her head. “It’ll make it easier.”

“Make what easier?” But I was already stripping.

“Into the pool,” she said when I was done.

The water was spit-warm and deeper than it looked. Wet leaves churned around my ankles as I regained my feet. Marion bobbed beside me, blue-lit and unreadable.

“I’ve thought about this a lot.” She sounded a little breathless. “If you’re in water, I think that’ll help.”

She put the box into my hands. Even against the lucent water it held its own light. “It’s dangerous, yeah?” I asked hoarsely. “Whatever’s inside this?”

She nodded.

“How do I open it?”

“Blood.” Marion held something else now: a knife. She must’ve pulled it from the butcher block in the kitchen. Her eyes were wide, their irises flattened to nothing by the moonlight. “Want me to do it?”

“No.”

I gripped the golden box and I was not the girl I’d known myself to be. Not cautious, not full of fear. I was hungry, I was burning, I was ready to dive. I took the knife, gouged its tip into the fattest part of my thumb, and pressed the bleeding place to the golden box. “Like this?”

But I already knew.

The box didn’t glow or hover or hum. It just warmed to my skin, loosening like a tablet of wax. I could see the seam now, and the catch, as easy as if they’d always been there. There was another body treading water beside mine but she was far away from me now, apart. I was alone.

I slid one nail into the seam, my guesses flickering like a shuffled deck: old letters, photos, a notebook written in my mom’s illegible hand. A magic button, colored rings. I didn’t feel like Pandora, I didn’t fully believe I was on the verge. I still thought what lay inside the box was something I could pick up and hold.

I undid the catch and lifted the lid.

And woke up.





PART II





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE



Elsewhere

Dana pushed Marion and watched her fall, down and down through the wind-colored corridor of mirror world. The last thing Marion saw before closing her eyes was Dana’s fist coming down on the glass.

Good, she thought.

But that was when she believed she would die.



* * *



Marion was right. Astrid Washington was an extraordinary witch. The realm she had created for herself, this catchment for her soul into which Marion fell, was the image of the house she’d died in down to its last lintel.

Its halls were lined with doors that opened onto rooms full of books and bedding, chess sets and hand mirrors, bone-china cups and sugar lumps pitted like old ivory. Its windows framed a flat plane of ominous sky: the house was forever snared on the violet edge of the late August evening when Astrid Washington had died. Mostly died. There was a ballroom below where a winsome tune played, a billiards room and a conservatory and a dark-wood bar, the bottles behind it intricately cut and their contents bottomless.

Marion drank from every one of those bottles eventually. Their liquors were bitter or treacly or sharp as a lightning bolt, lancing her tongue and making her remember a time when she’d lived, beneath a true sky, out in the teeming world.

She couldn’t get drunk, but she drank anyway. She played games alone, like a child left to its own devices. This was when the worst of her grieving had passed, the first spate of desperation at her entrapment. It came in waves, the horror of what had been done to her—ejected from the world and set down in this afterlife waiting room. In between were long periods of a kind of surreal peace. She ran through dim halls and tried on clothing dug out of trunks. She lay in wait for a sleep that never came, she spun over the polished boards, dancing alone to that deathless, maddening music. Alone, alone.