Our Crooked Hearts(80)

I walked on.

Everything I’d cast so far had been by instinct. I’d reacted, I’d panicked, I’d reached for what was right there. I had this idea that I would use an unlocking charm to get into the library that had once been the occultist’s house. Now that I didn’t need it the magic gummed up in my head like gauze on a nosebleed. I spent it on a charm for clarity of sight.

It made the moonlight brighter, turned the volume up on all the edges of things that wanted to lie flat in the dark. I stepped into a foyer scented with old books. As I stood there getting my bearings a headache began to form, so dispersed and metallic it felt like I’d breathed in silver dust.

Another old/new memory shouldered its way to the front of my brain: I knew this feeling. I was bobbing in the wake of someone else’s bad magic.

I followed it. My mother had made this walk, or something close to it, the night she’d pushed Marion through the mirror. A dreamer’s version of this place had been Marion’s cell for more than twenty years. I felt their footsteps alongside my own as I walked over dusty inlaid floors, past bookshelves, beneath stained-glass windows casting eerie shapes on my skin.

I ascended two flights of stairs on the trail of the awful feeling, my headache blooming into a full-body tremble. At the bottom of the third flight, I looked up. I saw nothing but drifting dust motes and moonlight but the thought of climbing filled me with a deep-space terror. I took three breaths and began, shoulder set against the raw edge of recently worked magic.

All was silent, all was still, but my heart beat in quick hard pulses, like the steady squeezing of a fist. I came to a halt below a trapdoor cut into the ceiling. Up there was the source of everything, and still I couldn’t hear a sound.

The trapdoor popped free with a shotgun bang and a ladder rattled to the floor inches from my head. When my heart had descended back into my chest I looked up.

More dust. More moonlight. I set a foot on the ladder and climbed. It was quiet. My head broke even with the ceiling and I saw their bodies lying on the floor.

I hauled myself up and staggered to them. My mother and my aunt lay on their backs. Aunt Fee’s right eye was bruised and my mother’s face was covered with what looked like rug burn along one side. Their hands reached toward each other but didn’t quite meet. Their eyelids jittered with dreams.

It wasn’t a natural sleep. Even before I touched them, shook them, pleaded with them, I knew they wouldn’t just wake. The whole room was filled like a cup with enchantment. When I tried to get an arm under my mother her body was stone-heavy, sodden.

I touched their faces and thought of the sleepers in the house in the woods. This spell wasn’t so breakable: I reached for its edges and it had none. I plumbed for its bottom and felt deeper water than I could dive through.

But if they were sleeping, there was a chance I could reach them. I could fall asleep right here and pull them out of Marion’s nightmare, and into a dream of my own. One they could wake from. I had no time for it—Marion couldn’t be far—but no better ideas, either.

I lay between them on the attic floor. Eyes closed, I reached for the lucid dreaming that had waited for me across five long years, locked with all the rest of my magic inside a golden box.





CHAPTER FORTY-NINE



The suburbs

Right now

Three sleeping witches, lined up in a row. Two twitch in the grip of an uncanny slumber. The third—slotted between them, her head lying below the almost-grasp of their outstretched hands—is just now drifting away.

Below them, but not too far, a fourth witch is on the move. She runs over clover, she sprints beneath rows of stately trees, setting their branches to rattling. She was young in this place, long ago, a little girl with a lonesome, devouring heart. If she has a heart now it’s impenetrable. A black-lacquered curio that bends the light away.

As she runs she passes a car at the curb with a boy inside it. His heart is the kind you can almost touch, lit up with fear and love and a dozen kinds of anticipation. He doesn’t see the fourth witch passing. She chooses not to be seen, and he only has eyes for the girl with bleached hair.

The fourth witch is coming. She’s almost there.



* * *



Here’s how it was, falling asleep on the attic floor.

I closed my eyes and dwelled a while in the dark, coaxing it closer, asking it to steal over and displace the sour fog of Marion’s magic. The dark softened to my will. It sifted, it stirred, it turned lightly over into sleep.

I knew how it should go next, how it had always gone, when I was young and dreaming was my kingdom. The dark would unpack itself like a trunk of costume clothes, spreading out into colors as soft as watercolor on an eggshell, drifting like curtains in a breeze. I could walk forward and touch them, all these sea and sky colors you couldn’t name, that shifted in your mouth when you tried. An infinite number to walk through, into a dream.

But this time when I fell asleep there was only one curtain waiting for me. It wasn’t misty or stormy or sunrise-tinted, it was pure oxidized red, not drifting but boiling. It looked like the entrance to Hell.

I could feel them behind it, two kinds of heat. My mother’s self-contained layer of cobalt fire and Aunt Fee’s mellow autumn sun. So I walked through the bloody curtain and into the dream Marion had put them inside.

In the dream she’d made we were in the attic still. But it was transformed by spellwork into a nightmare.