Our Crooked Hearts(71)

Her mouth squished into an embarrassed line. “You’re being weird,” she whispered.

The bathroom door swung shut behind her.



* * *



Ivy’s friend Billy came by to see her an hour after we returned from breakfast. For days she’d been too busy locked inside her room to spend time with him, and I’d felt sorry for the kid. Now the sight of him filled me with terror. He was the only person besides me, Rob, and Fee who knew. What would happen when he tried to talk to Ivy about stuff she couldn’t remember?

I turned him away. He came back the next morning. It was early and I told him Ivy was asleep, but when I turned she stood behind me on the stairs.

“Who was that?”

“Billy,” I said without thinking. She had a clear line on the door and would’ve seen his face.

“Who’s Billy?”

My body processed a single moment of compressed white shock. Then horror seeped in.

I’d wondered what Billy knew, and for how long, and I guessed I had my answer now. Magic must’ve been a part of their friendship from the start. It must’ve been at the very root of them. Her best friend and everything he was to her, fed to the golden box like another ripped-up weed.

“He’s nobody,” I said. “Just a boy on the block.”





CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR



Elsewhere

Escape had passed Marion by, so swift and close the heat of it kissed her skin. She could have raged at the loss, but what truly grieved her was what Dana had done to Ivy.

That surprised her; she wasn’t built for sentiment. But Marion had watched Ivy all her life. From the day she was born.

Marion curled into herself like a boxer protecting her head. She drifted a while, disarmed by sorrow. She dreamed the deep-sea dreams of a thing that doesn’t truly sleep.



* * *



It took her a long time to look again into the scrying glass. When she did the girl was older.

Who was this remade Ivy? Her lips pinked with drugstore gloss, her features gawky. Without magic to shape it, her restlessness had curdled. She was fretful, armorless, wandering.

Marion watched Ivy stumble, unprotected, through the worst years to be a girl. She watched scar tissue form over the broken places in her head. Still clever but robbed of her confidence, still curious but deprived of her faith in the world’s ability to truly surprise.

Ivy was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Then, in a blink, seventeen. The age Marion was when she met her disastrous coven.

Time could pace and blow outside the walls of Astrid’s house and never find a crack. The place was Tupperware-tight. But when Ivy turned seventeen, Marion’s mind leapt the walls and sang like an arrow through the future.

Dana would die. Ivy would die. If Ivy had daughters they, too, would die. Would Marion hang over her glass like a spider through it all, glutting herself on their shadows? Would she remain deathless, forever almost-eighteen, sealed in a dreamhouse that smelled eternally of rose dust?

No.

Marion found the occultist lying on a fainting couch the color of blood on ice, hair puddled over its velvet like a saint’s penumbra. Her eyes were open but a great distance away.

Marion jabbed a foot into the deadish woman’s side. “Wake up.”

Astrid’s eyes focused with a reptilian snap.

Marion held out the spell book. The occultist’s book she stole from a dead scholar’s handbag, long ago. She dropped it with a thump on Astrid’s chest.

“It’s time.”

Astrid blinked slow, contemptuous blinks. “Time,” she said dismissively.

Marion curled her lip at her jailer, her fellow prisoner—she never could decide which—and dragged her onto the carpet by her saintly hair.

“It’s time,” she repeated.

“Flea-shit speck,” the occultist spat. The air around her was heating with a summery wobble but nothing had happened yet. She was slower than she used to be.

Marion kneeled to pick up the book from where it had slid. She was in reach now and the occultist slapped her hard, twice. Marion absorbed it, pressing the book into the hand that had struck her. “Open it.”

The book had a sick sense of humor, just like the woman who’d bound it in the skin of a charlatan clairvoyant. Marion used to believe it showed you the spells you needed to see, but of course it was only ever showing what Astrid wanted to give you.

She remembered clutching it in trembling hands right after she’d arrived here. Her last source of hope, and she’d felt so brilliant to have held on to it through her tumble. Fireworks popped in her temples as she opened it, seeking some cure for her imprisonment. Smearing fingers over her swollen eyes, she’d leaned close to the page.

To purify lanced boils, it said.

When Marion looked up the occultist had been watching her with the merry feline hatred of the meanest girl at school. She’d opened the book a dozen times since then, and found one mocking spell after another.

But Astrid hadn’t opened it. And Marion would bet her unnatural life she knew what kind of spell Astrid most wanted to see.

“You come to me with orders and with talk of time,” said the occultist, as sneering and sure as the queen of a fallen country. “Remember that I rule this place, and you are bound to me.”

Alone among her attributes, the occultist’s thrilling, razorbacked voice still held the power to magnetize Marion’s spine, to make her draw in small and tight and afraid.