Our Crooked Hearts(57)

You couldn’t die here. When she first arrived Astrid used a particularly ruthless magic to remove the net that bound them; in another place it would’ve killed them, too. Some things weren’t meant to be undone.

Not that it mattered much. Bound or not, they were stuck with each other.

Astrid was an inconstant captor. The madness of long confinement had stolen over her like a powdery decay. After a period of towering rages she left Marion to her own devices. Sometimes when they came upon each other in the house’s halls Marion could swear the woman had forgotten who she was. She grew to despise Astrid the way you’d despise a sun that only shows itself once a week, for an hour, leaving you colder each time it goes away.

The occultist’s twilit kingdom was a place that stripped from you every nonessential thing. And after all of that was gone—Marion’s grip on reality, her earthly desires, all the flesh she could spare, and the last bit of color from a sun that was lost to her—what remained was this: an endless IV drip of rage. It warped her sight and made her fingertips tingle.

But rage wasn’t useful. So Marion tended it until it grew into something that was: ambition. A furious desire to escape this place and make Dana pay for what she’d done. Marion had the will. Now she had to discover the means.

Often she held the cheap gold necklace in her fist, a once-broken heart united, swinging from three chains. The fine file of the heart’s edges was caked with a dried rind of reddish brown where it had scraped across Dana’s neck. Marion scratched the blood off with a nail, collecting the flakes in a snuffbox.

And later, when she found the spell inside one of Astrid’s books, she knew why she’d held on so carefully to Dana’s blood.



* * *



It was a scrying spell.

Steadily Marion poured water into a heavy silver bowl. She sprinkled its surface with Dana’s blood and spoke the words and waited to see what would come. There was a haze, pearlescent, then a figure came into view: Dana’s red hair. Her angry mouth.

Bent over the peephole of the scrying glass, Marion watched.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO



The city

Back then

The last of summer burned itself away. The leaves turned and fell in what seemed like a single weekend, trampled into sludge and then gone. Fee and I were still together all the time, but it was different, the space between us filled for the first time with things we didn’t dare say out loud. Maybe if my dad hadn’t been sick we would’ve had the fight we needed to have. Gotten it over with, figured out who and what we were on the other side. But he was, and we didn’t.

We stopped doing magic cold turkey. Though our abilities were our own again, Astrid’s power-up stripped away, we didn’t dare use them after Marion.

The world on the other side of magic was so flat, so gray.

When we were sophomores nobody noticed us. But we went back junior year reeking of elsewhere. By then Fee topped five feet ten, with a brick shithouse build that affected the general population like a stupefying gas. Burgundy mouth, black clothes, this waving mass of hair that gave you the impression of an angel’s fallen sister.

Within a week she had a secret girlfriend, a Polly Pocket–size blonde who cornered me in an empty girls’ room to thank me for covering for them. It took me a second to realize she was thanking me for being Fee’s public girlfriend, the fake one who’d take the heat.

“No problem,” I muttered. All the garbage I’d thought would happen—the slurs written in lipstick, the hallway shoulder checks—never materialized. I moved through school the same as I always had, in a bubble of my own making. And nobody was about to mess with Fee.

I paid a tithe for what I’d done to Marion, of course. I paid it out in sleep. My dreams were an endless round of salt and blood and broken mirror, soundtracked by a rabbit’s death cry.

But I had other things to worry about. My dad was dying. First he was functional sick, shuffling to the corner for Pringles and tallboys and Nicorette. Then he was housebound sick. Then Uncle Nestor was holding my hands, talking about a future I refused to look at straight.

My dad hung on through a miserly spring that softened grudgingly into June. I opened my eyes one pale blue Tuesday and knew, just by the plasticine quality of the quiet. I called Uncle Nestor before I’d even opened my dad’s door.

My uncle held me tightly as the EMTs carried him out. My dad. My dad’s body, that he’d used too hard and loved too little.

Uncle Nestor was talking to me.

“You’ll always have a home with us,” he said. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll have a father.”

I tried to focus on his face. “Thank you,” I said.

I felt like a girl in a storybook, packing my bag. That’s the fantasy, right? Your parents need to be eliminated for your life to change, so you can go live in a boxcar or a cottage in the woods or a magical school for the broken. When I unzipped my suitcase on Fee’s bed, later, I knew by her expression I’d done it all wrong. I’d grabbed odd and senseless things and it made her worry about me.

My father died on a Tuesday and I moved in with Fee and Uncle Nestor that Thursday. I turned seventeen a few weeks later. It didn’t take long for my entire childhood to feel like a dream.



* * *



The fight Fee and I were putting off happened one year after the second summoning. The day before Marion would’ve turned nineteen. Fee woke me when the sky was still silver, whispering into my ear. Let’s go to the lake.