Page 30 of Our Crooked Hearts
My relief was so great and instant it swallowed the fear. And I almost—almost—forgot how it felt to lie captive to magic’s rules, waiting on Marion to release us.
We opened our eyes. And with them oureyes,the ones we hadn’t known we had. In the moment before joy came in, I shuddered. Because we’d gained something, but we’d lost something, too. It would take a long time for me to work out what that was.
We sat up, looking at each other, and started helplessly to laugh—Fee and I did. Marion, though, she cried. Still crying, she put her arms out and pulled us into a rare hug. Her mouth was in my hair but I think what she said was,Thank you.
When I looked back on that night I wondered whether that stretch of frozen abandonment was our first true glimpse of what magic would make of Marion. Later, when my head was filled with the odor of witching and my left hand bloodied on broken glass, it was one of the things I thought about. Our first neon sign that her hunger had a double edge.
It took time for the effects of our awakening to fade. For a handful of disorienting days, everyone we looked at wore a halo of colored light. Soft, mystical, unmistakably there, unmistakablymagic.Fee was limned in fresh green like an elf princess. Marion’s aura was the color of brick dust. A lonesome, hard-road color. Fee told me mine was blue, that I looked gift-wrapped in sky.
Twice I tried taking the train and had to step right off, the car such a riot of overlapping colors I could almost hear it. By the end the feeling was like a high that went on too long. Even after it was gone I received occasional flashes of useful sight: the good-looking man smiling at me from across the train, his aura the color of dried blood. The girl dancing at the show, crackling with the contagious, brushfire shade of damage.
I’d always had that extra ounce of perception, always moved through a world in which I knew by instinct which streets not to turn down, and where small treasures hid. But the spell in theoccultist’s book caught like a fishhook on that quiet part of me, reeling it up until it bobbed against my skin.
“Your wedding ring is stuck in your pocket lining,” I told a woman ordering food at the fish shop. She didn’t look grateful. Fee, too, had to readjust. It was uncomfortable, she said, to stand in crowds. “Everyone’s thirsty all the time. I’m drinking gallons ’cause it’s hard to convince myself it isn’tme.”
But these were small prices to pay. The spells the book served us were small, too, at first. They pointed inward, spells for good luck and good sleep and good skin. We boiled herbs to sludge on Uncle Nestor’s gas stove, we etched incantations into candles with a safety pin. We chalked complicated shapes onto Fee’s bedroom floor and whispered into a mirror unwrapped from a length of white linen. We learned the many uses of moonlight. Every piece of magic the book gave us worked like a gateway drug, until we couldn’t imagine our lives without that thrill, that bend, that shock of the world giving way beneath our hands.
We didn’t wonder where the magic came from, or why it worked. We never asked ourselves,Is this ours to take?We were three damp ducklings, green as leaves, believing with all our crooked hearts thatwewere the ones writing this story. Even as a dead woman’s book paved the road beneath our feet.
