Our Crooked Hearts(83)

“Death is too easy,” she said. “Death is a milk bath. I thought the worst thing I could do to her would be to take you. Make you mine. Help you become so bright she could see from anywhere what she’d tried to kill in you. What she’d lost forever. But now.” Those otherwhere eyes ran over my face. “Now I think the worst thing for her would be to lose you. I mean really lose you.”

I willed the women in this room who loved me to stay out of this, to be still. “Are you gonna kill me, Marion?”

“I could.”

“Maybe.” I took a step closer, then another, close enough that she could reach me. We could reach each other. “If you didn’t, though. If I … if I went with you, where would we go?”

Her jaw shifted. She didn’t speak and didn’t speak, then the words all came abruptly. “There are legends about matriarchal societies that still exist. In lost places. On islands or deserts or deep in the trees. Little worlds with ancient roots. Places where women work and magic is revered and you can live your whole life without going farther than a mile from home.”

“Is that what you want?”

The slow cold thing that wore her face peered at me. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything anymore,” Marion replied almost before I’d finished talking. She pushed a fist to her sternum. “But I can still feel the place where I wanted.”

“I think,” I said softly, “that what you wanted was to save me. And you did. You did it right. You put me inside water, you held me in your arms. You talked to me when my mind was going to pieces. You didn’t let the magic blow up my brain.” I held out a hand to her. “You saved me.”

“Don’t patronize me,” she said.

I didn’t move. An endless second passed, then she reached out and took my hand.

I dug my nails into her skin with all my strength, until I was sure I’d broken it. Before she could twist free of me, or cast, or wrap us back up in some terrible dream, I stuck my other hand into the pocket of Billy’s jacket, pulled out the golden box, and pressed it to the place I’d drawn blood.

Marion laughed. Eyebrows up, a laugh of true surprise. She looked like a teenage girl then, a real one, flawed and gifted and magical and incomplete, just like me.

“I didn’t think—” she began, but the box opened its hungry mouth and she stopped and I never would know what she’d meant to say.

As she gazed into its empty heart I spoke over her the incantation my mother once spoke over me. Then I told the box, “Let her forget us. Take from her Dana Nowak and Felicita Guzman and Ivy Chase. Let her forget…”

And I stopped, because I didn’t know what else to give to it. What would be a mercy, what would be a punishment. What Marion might be longing to lose.

So I handed her the box. She couldn’t take anything back now, my words couldn’t be unspoken. She looked like she wanted to slap it to the floor but she took it instead, bringing her mouth in close and whispering something I couldn’t hear.

The box began its work. It was horrible to see, but sometimes the only way to show your reverence is to witness. By the end of it I was holding my mother’s hand, and my aunt’s, all of us watching together as the golden box snapped shut and Marion lay down to sleep.

We took the box and left her there on the moonlit floor. Stripped of her vengeance and who knew what else. It didn’t feel good to do it. We didn’t know whether we were abandoning an amnesiac or a round of live ammunition. Maybe both.

And maybe I was finally old enough for magic, because I was starting to reckon the costs of it. That I’d carry around this guilt, and a piece of the witch who’d forgotten me, until I was dead.





CHAPTER FIFTY



The suburbs

Right now

Billy and I lay on our backs in the creek, watching the stars. The water was just this side of too cold, glowing Pop-Ice blue.

That was Billy’s idea. He showed me pictures online of a bioluminescent bay, so I could put one into the dream.

“Are you ready to wake up?” I asked.

“One more minute,” he said, squeezing my hand. “Hey. Look.”

He pointed to a place where the stars were bending closer, too close, as if they wanted to watch us, too. My shoulders tensed and gently I pushed them back into their places.

Sometimes my dreams did things I didn’t ask for. I figured it was my subconscious at play. But I knew it hadn’t happened that way before the golden box.

Outside the dream our bodies were asleep in Billy’s tree house. None of our parents had caught on yet that it was back in use, the one place that was just ours. My dad had been overprotective of everyone since the morning I returned home with Mom and Aunt Fee, all of us shell-shocked, smeared with scrapes, sweat, bruises, blood. And Billy’s dad still hadn’t forgiven me for ditching his son five years ago. Since we couldn’t tell him what really happened, I was trying to win him back over slowly.

For now, we had the tree house. Billy’s car. And my dreams.

I held his hand in the luminous water, closing my eyes as it eddied around us, lifting me up.

“Ivy.” His voice was level, but sharp enough that I dropped my feet to the creek bed—disgusting in life, paved with green river stones in the dream—and looked to where he was pointing.