Our Crooked Hearts(63)
The occultist’s house was a realm between life and death, made rotten by its own changelessness. Marion was on the eve of eighteen and Astrid was thirty and the hour struck 8:46 and the eggplant light of a long-ago night still fastened itself to every window. There was no center to anything here, no heart. The liquor didn’t make you drunk, the music didn’t move your soul, the food evaporated on your tongue. Even the flavorless fruits of the conservatory had no pits in their middles, just black cavities.
The exception was the library. Whether Astrid dreamed them into being with a staggering grasp of their contents, or whether they possessed their own enchantment, her books were complete. Tangible, legible, brimful of the only sustenance Marion still longed for: information.
Among the flaking grimoires were histories, spell books, myths and legends. A witch’s garden of poisonous blooms. It didn’t matter in the dreamhouse whether Marion was a natural, whether she had meet intentions or the strength to bear the costs or a coven to back her up. This place was magic. She absorbed its dreadful atmosphere. It thinned and hardened her, it turned her over time into something as juiceless and hollow as the conservatory’s damson plums.
Into the hollow place she tucked charms and curses and cantrips, incantations and celestial bylaws. She used to welcome any chance to prove herself worthy of magic, ready to suffer or die or kill for it. Now she was simply practical. Knowledge and faith are all you need, plus will tempered by time into steel.
And when she wasn’t working, Marion kept her jealous eyes on Dana’s expanding world. She honed her fury, kept its light alive. Rage and time were the only currencies left to her, and she used them. Knowing that when the moment came, she would be ready.
* * *
Time in the scrying glass moved triple-quick. Dana got pregnant, she got married, she gave birth to a boy who slipped out quick as a fish, with a thick mist of hair and eyes that stayed blue. Her belly was just starting to swell again when she left the city for a dustless house in a suburb with a witchy name. Woodbine, whispered Marion’s nimble brain. Honeysuckle, false grape, Virginia creeper.
Her second pregnancy was harder than the first. She was big in the middle but spindly everywhere else. Nothing she ate stayed down. Marion felt no pity, not ever. But as Dana’s time drew nearer she did feel something. An electric anticipation, a pleasurable dread. Marion knew something Dana did not: this one would be a girl.
The pain began in the night’s raw center, plucking Dana from sleep and reducing her to a keening animal. The mile between house and hospital was a beaded string of red lights. They rushed her through the halls in a wheelchair, a shrieking tick with chopstick limbs, then laid her flat in a green-walled room.
Astrid scorned Marion and her spyglass. But here she was at Marion’s shoulder, watching alongside her. All that interested the occultist anymore were the bitter rules of life and death. Marion knew she was lingering to witness Dana dying.
When Death walked in, Astrid hissed through her teeth. It took the form of a smoky, dark-furred dog, purling in the room’s sterile corners, one sly eye on the woman on the bed.
Yes, thought Marion, and No. Her breath caught, her heart knocked against its cage. She felt—human. Almost, again. Her eyes ached and Astrid hovered at her shoulder and they watched the skin of the water to see who would win.
Dana looked boldly back at Death’s hound. She seemed to recognize it. Her mouth was moving but you couldn’t hear her over the machines, and the blunt, frightened efforts of the people working to keep her spirit inside her skin. None of them understanding that all that really mattered was her mutinous staring contest with Death’s dog.
Dana’s skin was porridge-colored against her garish hair. She took great hanks of it in her hands and pulled, pulled.
She pushed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The suburbs
Back then
There was a moment just before Ivy came when the whole world went porous. When the weave of it stretched and I could see the great yawp of nothing behind and I stopped being afraid because I could feel her. She needed me to be brave.
There’s object magic, sympathetic magic, spells you cook or coax or speak into being. Luminous magic and magic so cruel that to wield it is to wrap your fist around a blade with no hilt. And there’s magic born out of pure will, voiceless. No, not pure: will muddied and thickened with grief and terror, and love in all its forms.
With all my compromised will, and all my callused heart, I reached for the creature swimming, struggling at the center of me.
Come, I said to it. Little one, come.
The thing—baby—twitched in its casing. It was afraid. I knew what it was afraid of and I glared again at that panting black-eyed dog. Not yet, I told it. The force of the thought made it cower in its corner. Someday, someday. But not yet.
The creature turned once on the floor. Then it slipped, smoke-like, through the world’s loosened weave. When it was gone I spoke again to my child. Come. I’ll keep you safe. If you’ll come.
Ivy came. With a rooster-red comb-over and the scathing eyes of someone looking to lodge a complaint about all this, everything, the big and the bright and the cold. She couldn’t cry right away, the cord looped around her throat like a two-strand necklace, but I knew we would live.
When they finally put her in my arms I thought of wishbone halves and walnut shells. Loosen your grip, I told myself, on reflex—never wanting Hank to feel smothered, never wanting Rob to worry I’d die of it if he got fed up and left me—but she was so new she couldn’t even see me. I held on as tightly as I wished.