Our Crooked Hearts(76)

Marion misread my silence as awe. “You can do anything,” she said softly. “It’s okay that you can’t control it yet. I can help you. We can … Oh, Ivy.” Her eyes shone. “Just think. Think of what we could do.”

“We,” I repeated.

“If you want.” Her chin came up. “If you want, you could come with me.”

“Where?”

She looked, I thought, uncertain. “Where do you want to go?”

“I—I don’t … I need…” I stammered, shook my head.

I needed time alone. To let the sharp edges soften, the new information settle. She wanted me to think about what came next, but all I could see was my mother’s face sizzling above me, underlit by the glow of the box. And what about everything that came before that night? All the tenderness, everything we were to each other before she took it all away. Those memories were still too radiant to look at, too hot to touch.

And Billy. All those years with him, all those wasted years without. I was twelve when I forgot him. Can you really fall in love when you’re twelve years old? Even thinking the word turned my stomach to melted ice cream.

And magic. Magic? Fucking magic!

The bitter, the sweet, the shining. I tried to breathe but the newness hammered at my head and suddenly I was gasping.

“Shit.” Marion moved closer, but didn’t try to touch me again. “Get back in the pool. Or, wait. Cast something.”

“Like what?” I rubbed frantically at my head. It spun like a carousel, I couldn’t focus on any one spell.

“Just, anything.” She looked around, spied her clothes on the ground. “Here, I’ve got matches. We’ll do an energy spell.”

She grabbed her jeans and when she did a phone dropped from their pocket with a smack. It fell glass-down, so I saw its case. Klimt’s Judith, wear-faded to white across her belly, so familiar to me my eyes were tearing before I recognized what it meant. It was my Aunt Fee’s phone.

I looked at the case, then at a suddenly silent Marion. She was waiting to see what I would figure out, and what I’d do.

Again I recalled standing in front of my aunt’s house after visiting the shop, that sense of eyes crawling over my skin. Now I knew it was Marion who’d been watching me. Clear as a movie playing out I saw her standing in an upper window, blunt fingers tapping out a reply on my aunt’s phone. A text that made me believe—made me want to believe, allow myself to believe—that my mother and aunt were together and fine and just being selfish.

“Where are they?” I said. “Where’s my mother?”

“Do you care?” She said it so swiftly. “Now that you know what you know, do you honestly care where she is?”

My voice was shaking. “Did you hurt them?”

“They’re not dead.” Her mouth showed a slip of humorless smile. “I’m not that merciful.”

“My god, Marion, what did you do to them?”

“Your mother crushed you,” Marion hissed. “Forget what she did to me. Since you were a child she’s been trying to kill the witch in you—the powerful fucking witch in you, whose abilities make her look like a birthday magician. But I was watching you, too. And I was proud. And I dug my way out of Hell to return what she stole, to turn you back into that Ivy, a witch who was questing and hungry and true. And here you are, wasting your breath on the woman who gutted your magic like it was a mackerel.”

My hands went up like I could keep the words from reaching me. But I must’ve thrown something at her, too: the pain in my head, the resentment of knowing what she said was at least halfway true. She rocked back, a queasy expression rolling over her face.

“Okay,” she said tightly. “You get one for free.”

But maybe she saw something in my face that told her more was coming. Her fingers pinched the air, I could feel the approach of her magic on little rat feet. I was too new at this, my current and former selves still crashing into each other like ball lightning. I wasn’t gonna be fast enough even to duck.

Then a hard square of yellow light fell over her, leaving me in the dark. In the second-floor windows, one of the sleepers I’d roused had turned on a lamp. Marion looked toward it, blinking.

I ran.

Straight down the sloping lawn, into the trees. I broke through them and remembered I was still naked, plunging through a civilized suburban wood transformed into a brambly hell. The only thing I’d grabbed in my panic was the golden box. It was sickly warm in my hand. By some miracle my feet didn’t hurt, then I remembered: Marion had charmed them.

Don’t see me, I thought as I ran. I’m Nobody. See me not.

I used to read so much poetry, old and new. A fluency with language and metaphor and outdated forms of speech was good for magic. A memory rose like an apparition: my mom reading a hypnotic bit of Tennyson aloud and then laughing, telling me a story about how she and my dad met.

I physically shook the memory away. Sorrow wasn’t speed. Pain wasn’t invisibility. I sensed Marion could follow the drift of grief, the perfume of anger.

I heard her, not far behind. Then closer, so close the edges of the leaves I raced through were whitened by the light she carried. Some kind of glowing wizard orb, probably. Or maybe just a flashlight.

I’m Nobody. See me not.

I wasn’t just running away. I was running toward something. I felt an unnamed destination pulsing ahead, with a sense of nightlight safety and reaching arms, and when I got there it was a hazel tree.