Our Crooked Hearts(60)

“You want to talk about why?”

I shook my head.

“Fair. But.” She held up a hand, violet nails cut to the quick and rings studded with chunks of blue kyanite. “Before you say no, listen to my pitch.”

“You’ve got a pitch?”

“And I’m buying you breakfast. Have more coffee, the refills are free. So. Magic.” She cupped her chin in her hand. “It is the loneliest thing in the world.”

A dozen different memories hit my head at once, an overlapping movie montage of the way it was when I was in a coven of three. No, I thought. It’s not.

Or was Linh right? Even when we started together and ended in the same place, there was a point in each spell in which you had only yourself and the magic. It’s like giving birth, a practitioner had told Fee once. If you’re lucky, you go in with a partner and come out with a child. But in the middle, you’re alone.

“Almost no one in this city can do what I can do,” Linh went on. Not bragging but getting it out of the way. “So I don’t have a circle, you know? Not a power circle, at least. What I have instead is a business.”

“A business for practitioners.” I crossed my arms over my chest, leaning back on the wooden bench. “But I don’t do that. You need a secretary?”

She looked me up and down, like she was fitting me for something in her head. “Some of the stuff we peddle is real, but some is just theater. I need someone who knows what it looks like when it works, how it feels. Someone who can make people believe they’re seeing the real deal.”

“You need a faker.”

She crinkled her nose. “I need someone who can appreciate the theatrical side of magic, you know? Make people want to believe.”

“Oh. You need a bullshitter.”

She grinned at me.

Briefly I turned my eyes to the pressed-tin ceiling. “I’m not wearing any pointy hats, Linh. Also I’m allergic to cats. I don’t own a single cape. You sure you want me?”

She laughed. “You’ve got that red hair, man. It’s, like, red. My grandmother would’ve chased you down the street to take your picture. Hundred bucks a gig, and you’re never there more than two and a half hours. Sometimes less than two.”

I unfolded my arms. “Hundred bucks?”

“That’s after my cut.”

“What’s a gig? How many in a week?”

She only answered the second question. “Realistically, two. Sometimes three, though. Our busy time’s about to start—May through September. I’ve got one tonight, you can come with me. Decide after you’ve seen how it works.”

I’d already decided. I didn’t even ask what I’d be doing. I’d learn soon enough.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR



Elsewhere

Marion spied on Dana without pity. She glutted herself on Dana’s life, the way she drank tea and scuffed her boots through fallen leaves and let her temple rest against the scratched windows of the train. Real tea, real windows. Dana slept and ate and pissed and bumped up against other people, and even when it looked miserable it also looked real. It stropped Marion’s anger to a diamond point.

Seeing everything she’d lost almost broke her. It did break her, and when she pulled herself back together she understood everything with an aftermath clarity.

Dana had the whole world. A city full of strangers and colored lights and her hand on a pit bull’s satiny skull, kneeling on the sidewalk to pat it with its owner standing impatiently by. The rattle of the elevated train shaking rain into her hair. Hash browns eaten hot with ketchup dregs, showers.

She had every single thing but this: the foresight to be ready. The ability to see Marion coming, before it was too late.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE



The city

Back then

Bachelorette parties. That was my new gig. Linh farmed me out to tell fortunes, to read auras and palms, to do spooky little party tricks for drunk girls sipping cosmos through scrotum straws, crowned in glitter dicks.

I thrifted a long white dress someone had probably died in, and before each gig painted on two sinister circles of blush and combed my hair down my back like a Waterhouse print.

“Very Victorian plague child,” Fee said when she saw me. She didn’t fully approve of my crab walk back into magic—or its shady cousin—but she stopped with the eye rolling pretty quickly.

Because the weird thing was, I almost liked the work. I wasn’t bad at it, either. The magic I pretended to wield was so campy, everything I did was with a wink. Sometimes I caught hold of some true insight—the beaming bride with the frigid feet, the maid of honor with poison in her heart—and leaned into the feeling like an ex-smoker coasting off secondhand fumes. But nothing I touched in those days bore more than a passing resemblance to the scorching white searchlight of true magic.

Working parties turned my nocturnal tendencies into a full-on lifestyle. I ate dinner in the middle of the night and slept the day away with a T-shirt over my eyes. It was good in summer, waking up to the golden hour, but once October hit I never saw the sun. When Linh reminded me the work would be slow for a while, I knew I had to figure out something to get me through until spring. I started filling out applications at places around my neighborhood, the bracing void of the future pressing in.