Our Crooked Hearts(82)

“I put myself here. I found her, and I found you, too. For god’s sake.” I stamped my foot before I could stop myself. “When will you ever stop underestimating me?”

The sky broke open over our heads. The raindrops that pelted us felt like cottony hail, and dried on our skin like rubbing alcohol.

“Protecting you,” she said, eyes huge. “Badly, foolishly. Getting it all wrong. But never … never without love.”

“Does love count if you can’t feel it?”

“I messed up. But I always loved you. Always.”

“Loved me,” I said harshly. “You took half of me away from myself and stuffed it in a shoe box, then you didn’t even like what was left.”

Her chin trembled. “That can’t be what you think.”

“Five years, Mom. Five years of trying to get you to look at me.”

“I was ashamed, Ivy! I am ashamed. I—maimed you. But I was gonna fix it. Eighteen, your dad and I agreed. When you turned eighteen, we were gonna tell you everything, open the box—”

“Marion fixed it. And everything’s still broken.”

“I’m so sorry. For all of it.”

She was crying. My mom, who never cried, not even when Hank accidentally slammed the car door on her fingers. And it was what I needed to hear. It was what she owed me. But it was so little, so late, I couldn’t bear it.

“Just stop,” I said angrily. “We don’t have time for this.”

Her face was so tentative, so un-Mom-like. “It might be all we have time for.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The cottony rain was thickening, hardening. It pelted our skin like bits of sea glass.

Aunt Fee put a palm out to catch some, brow furrowing. “Ivy, is this your dream?”

“Still mine,” said Marion. She was standing a little ways away, holding an open umbrella.

My mother moved so her body was between mine and Marion’s. Her breathing was audible, terrified. I winced as the raindrops started to hurt, not sea glass anymore but slivers of freshly broken bottle.

Then I breathed in sharply because I realized I was making it rain. It was my hurt and anger doing it. And once I knew that, it wasn’t so hard to turn Marion’s umbrella into a massive black bird that clawed at her, making her shriek. She changed it into a cloud of black smoke that drifted away.

Now all four of us were cowering beneath the vicious rain. I knew it was mine but it was harder to change than the umbrella, because it came out of a fury I was stuck with. I couldn’t disappear it, so instead I stopped it in midair, all the cruel little drops shining and still. Then I drew them together. I think I wanted a piece of offensive magic, some big glass dagger to cut our way out of this piece of shit dreamspace. But the dream was still of Marion’s making, I was only working within it, and what the drops formed instead was drawn from her head: the great circular mirror from the summoning, the one my mother had pushed her through.

It was already the size of a manhole, and the air still teemed with glass rain. The drops kept adding themselves to the mirror, its surface making a crystalline gnashing as it grew.

“Oh, hell, no,” Marion said as it crawled closer to our feet.

She broke the dream.

As soon as I felt its borders give, tipping my consciousness back into my body, I was rolling to my feet. Staggering, dizzy, but up. I’d not been in it for even an hour, while Mom and Aunt Fee had been lying flat for god knows how long. It took them time just to open their eyes.

Marion could’ve killed them then. My body was primed for her to try, my head pulsing with the risk. But she could’ve killed them all along, and hadn’t. I watched her watching them with utter disdain as they moved weakly on the floor.

“Are you okay?” I said.

My mom coughed. Dusty air in a dry throat. “Marion,” she said. “Please.”

“Don’t you dare,” Marion snarled. Her face looked more human with anger in it, but it flared fast and was gone.

My mom said her name again, so quietly. “Do what you want to do, but do it to me. Not Ivy. Not Fee. You’ve got nothing to punish them for.”

Marion’s smile was audible, lips pulling wetly back from white teeth. “My god, Dana, when did you become so fucking mediocre? You can’t even tell a solid lie. I watched you. I never stopped watching you. A year after you pushed me I watched you and Felicita sit on the sand and agree between you that I was dead. You both knew that wasn’t true. You both decided not to save me. What was it you were doing instead? Oh, right. Giving fake palm readings to drunk girls.”

“Just us, then,” my aunt said. “Let Ivy go. However you want to finish this, let’s finish it.”

I stepped forward but Marion spoke before I could, her words an eerie echo of what I was about to say.

“Listen to yourselves. Ivy is a better witch than both of you put together. She’s here to save you. Stop pretending she’s the one who needs your protection.”

“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “Just stop.”

My mom flinched at my tone, but I ignored her. I had eyes only for Marion.

“What is it you want?” I asked her. “What did you come back for? What are you here to do—kill us?”

I got the strangest feeling, when she looked at me, of being looked at by something I couldn’t entirely see, that was using her eyes as peepholes. Something cold and slow and utterly lacking in some crucial human thing.