Our Crooked Hearts(75)

It’s done. You know every last secret.

Now. Open your eyes.





CHAPTER FORTY-SIX



The suburbs

Right now

I woke up screaming.

Someone was touching me. Their lips were close to my ear. “Ivy. Ivy, are you—”

I screamed again. Words this time, charged with terror and the need to not be touched. The speaker’s words cut to a shout and I heard the awful thud of a body meeting an obstacle.

I tried to turn toward the sound but there was no ground beneath me. I thrashed until I realized I was in a pool, floating bodiless in water like blue light. I made the mistake of looking up and the stars were so god-awful close. I knew they were looking at me, a thousand thousand silver eyes I couldn’t hide from. I sucked in a breath to scream them away and took in a mouthful of bright water.

It tasted like death. I tried to cough it out, to breathe, but my neck didn’t work right, no part of me did, and I swallowed more water. I was under it now and kicked for the surface, but I went down instead of up, my cooked brain turning tile into sky. I beat my palms against the bottom of the pool like it might give way.

I was drowning. Too airless to float, too weak to swim. My body turned and I gazed through the chlorinated blue dome that would kill me. The golden box had closed again, fallen to rest on the tile. I wrapped one boneless hand around it. The other drifted above me. My fingers moved, my mouth formed a word I didn’t know, and I shot to the surface with such force I was out to my ribs before I splashed down again.

This time I kept my eyes on those horrid, orienting stars, breathing to cleanse myself of the taste of drowning. The water that would’ve killed me now held me like a flower in a cup, but I’d never forget what it tried to do.

The blue was veined delicately with red. The red drifted and became pink clouds and it was so pretty I didn’t understand why my whole body had gone electric with warning.

Then I saw the girl floating in the pool. All the pretty sunset clouds were coming from her head. I remembered the terrible thud and knew I’d done this somehow, that the words I used to force her away from me had thrown her straight into the wall.

The realization worked on my brain like an adrenaline shot, making room for my name, and hers, and that of the boy I’d loved when I was twelve years old and of my mother, who had taken from me more than I even knew I had.

My throat was too ravaged to scream again, so I paddled to the side and dragged Marion’s body out.

The instant I was clear of the pool, I understood why she’d had me open the golden box inside it. When I could feel my body again—the sodden weight of it, the exhaustion, the old bug bites and new abrasions—everything in the world turned up to eleven.

The sky spun like a disco ball, the pool glittered like diamond dust. I smelled grass, chlorine, rain. But I also smelled the gasoline in my dad’s car on the other side of the property and the plastic torso of that far-off Ariel doll and the shallow breath of the three sleepers in that big, silent house. There was confetti under my skin, my blood was seltzer water. I wanted to unzip myself and float away.

I could jump back into the pool or I could do something else, something faster, that would purge the effervescence from this oversized night.

I could cast.

I didn’t think, I reached, and what reached back was the cottony border of the sleeping spell Marion had laid on the house. Now that I could really feel it, it no longer seemed drowsy and sweet. It was a stale blanket, heavy as stone, laid over people’s brains. All because they were unlucky enough to have a house in the woods with a swimming pool.

I caught hold of that gnarly blanket between fingers and teeth, and I ripped that fucker in half.

Now. Marion. I turned her over, naked back to gritty concrete, feeling carefully along the dark gash at the back of her head. My CPR was rusty, like, only seen it in the movies rusty, but I figured if I pushed hard enough, the water would come out.

I pictured the liquid caught in her chest like a tributary map. As I pressed the heels of my hands into the gaunt V below her breastbone, that map glowed in my sight. Out, I thought, placing a palm lightly over her ribs.

The water bubbled from her mouth in a gummy stream. Marion coughed, explosive, and rocked onto her side. For a minute she lay there, gasping, as I tried to get my head around what I’d done. Then she swiped a hand over her mouth and raised it to the back of her head.

“Stitch, stitch,” she said.

I couldn’t see the wound closing but I could sense the disturbance around her skull. There was a busyness to her magic. It skittered like a rat king, a thing of too many limbs and unnatural motion. My mouth dried.

As her magic worked she watched me, fingers probing her healing scalp. When it was done she sat all the way up, a naked witch with a crown of blood.

“I’m sorry,” I said breathlessly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Her face was keen as an unsheathed blade. “Do you remember now?”

There was so much to remember. But I knew she was asking if I remembered her. The scrying glass and the dark room and the tales she told. “I remember.”

“And you understand how strong you are.”

I nodded, but I didn’t. Not really. I couldn’t take in everything I now knew about myself. All the fragile restored pieces of knowledge and thought and experience moved in and out of focus. I had the sense my head would be blooming with things lost and recalled for a very long time. Maybe the rest of my life.