Our Crooked Hearts(81)

It was, I understood, a memory.

In the center of the room a dream version of Marion incanted over a mirror. A slaughtered rabbit lay beside her, bleeding over the boards. My mother and Aunt Fee, teenaged and terrified, had their backs pressed to the walls. A fourth, black-haired woman stood between them, with a face like a flint.

I’d hoped to make a dream of my own, to catch them in. But this dream was so insistent, so desperate with the odor of blood. There was no room in my head for anything else.

I’d heard the story of the summoning once, from Marion in the scrying glass. It was different when I saw it play through.

I witnessed Marion’s attempt to bind the occultist, and its fallout. I saw Astrid Washington, solid malevolence crowned with fairy hair. Mom and Aunt Fee’s battle to save Marion, which ended with all three in the circle. Fee’s courage, Marion’s catatonia. And my mother’s decision, so fast you couldn’t see it coming, to push Marion over the lip of the mirror.

I saw at last how she got the scars that covered her hand. And I measured the gap between the portrait of her that Marion had painted—monstrous, deliberate—and the furious, agonized girl I watched banish her friend from this world.

By the end I was frozen. Transfixed by horror and the wicked math of it: four witches then three, without even a body to show. I put my hands to my mouth as I comprehended the cruelty of what Marion had done: she was making Mom and Aunt Fee relive the very worst night of their lives.

I had barely caught my breath when the dream reset and began again. Blood, wax, smoke, and misery vacuumed away, four witches reset to the start like gameboard pieces.

As with any horror movie, it was less awful the second time through. I could think now, I could move through the room like a spectator in a haunted house. The longer I was inside this dream the more I could make out its contours and its rules. Marion had built it edgeless as an egg. My mother and aunt were living it, inside their younger forms, but I couldn’t make them see me.

I tried to extinguish the flame of Dream Marion’s lighter, smudge the salt circle, pinch my mother’s arm. Marion’s incanting took on a locust drone, and everything I touched was smoke or porcelain. I looked frantically for a weakness and what I settled on was the rabbit. Before the poor thing could be sacrificed again, I scooped it up.

It was solid, it was soft, it was kicking wildly in my grasp. I pushed the creature into my dream mother’s arms.

It bit her. That beautiful piece of dream magic, feral even in its re-creation, sank its teeth right into her forearm. She was sixteen when the animal lunged but herself, Mom-aged and familiar, as the bite came down.

The pain had shocked her real self out of the shell Marion put her in. She dropped the rabbit, which zipped into a corner. Before she could recede, transform, I grabbed hold of my mother like she was Tam Lin, like only my grip could keep her from disappearing. I held her, feeling her body trembling, saying, “Mom, Mom, it’s me.” The dream melted to smoke until only we remained, and my aunt wrapping her arms around herself, sitting on the misty ground.

My mom backed away from me, talking to herself. “It’s not her,” she was saying. “It’s another dream.”

“It’s me, Mom. It is.”

“You’re a phantom. Or maybe it’s you under there.” Her voice went venomous. “Marion.”

“You need to see me,” I said shrilly. All the times she looked right through me clawing at my skin. “You need to believe me.”

“Ivy-girl.” Aunt Fee’s voice was a balm over my heart. “How are you here? Dana, it’s her. Can’t you feel it’s her?”

My mom’s face stained with a complicated hope. “Ivy,” she whispered.

We didn’t have time for anything but getting ourselves out, but I was too angry to stop myself. “I know everything,” I told her. “The golden box and Billy and—everything.”

“Everything.” Her face was a study in contrasts. Twisted mouth and glistening eyes and cheeks red as a slap. “Everything?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” The word was a cry, pressed into her palm. Eyes squeezed shut for a beat, then she looked at me. “Do you remember … that day in the forest preserve, with the deer and her fawn?”

I gritted my teeth. “Yes.”

The dream shifted, shaping itself into something new. We stood together on gray grass beneath a nothing-colored sky. Aunt Fee pulled up a few blades and held them to her nose, watching us like an edgy referee.

“The bounce house,” my mom said. “Remember that?”

“Don’t try to manipulate me.”

“That rash you got brewing a luck charm. And, oh, my god, Ivy. Do you remember the hazel tree?”

Lips mashed together, I nodded.

She looked like a political prisoner. Radiant with purpose, circles around her exhausted eyes. “Writing your first—your first cantrip. Staying up all night at midsummer, drinking coffee milk.” She laughed, wet and brief. “Finding your fairy stone.”

“Forgetting Billy,” I said. “Lying to Hank. Losing half my mind.”

Her radiance dimmed. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“If you know everything, you know why.” Her voice not challenging but hopeless. Then her eyes widened. “Oh, god. She put you here. Marion.”