Page 45 of Our Crooked Hearts
Marion had stopped sniveling. Her lashless eyes were wide. “Wait. Are you saying it worked?”
Sharon stared at her. Then she flicked her smoldering butt in Marion’s face, lip curling as she skittered back, her ass drawing a contrail through the blood.
“My fault for working with schoolgirls,” Sharon said. “If I end up dying because of you I’ll haunt you in Hell.”
We crept down the ladder, through the halls, beneath the picnicking foxes. It seemed a year had passed since I’d first seen them. I was aching and terrified and thirsty as a desert wanderer for the sky, the garden, the world outside the nightmare. I hadn’t grasped yet that the nightmare wasus,that it clung like wet denim to our skin.
Through the years I’d find myself back there, retracing our path through the library’s nighttime corridors. Walking the hall in the middle of the night, past the bedrooms where my children lay asleep, my foot would rise off bland suburban carpet and come down on age-stained parquet. My heart would seize, my blood burn with warning. Then I’d close my eyes and stand very still, waiting for the flashback to pass.
Here, now, back in the garden. Marion locked the door behind us and nudged the key through the crack. Sharon had done something to take care of the mess in the attic.
“What now?” It was Sharon I looked at when I asked it. She was older, her body scarred with bad knowledge. I thought she would be the one to save us.
She shrugged, thumbzip-zipping over the wheel of Marion’s lighter. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do, but I have to get home to my kid.”
“You have a kid?”
“Yeah,” she said shortly. “Look, come to the shop tomorrowmorning, we’ll start trying to fix this. Till then, you know. Stay alive.”
She disappeared into the tunnel, leaving the three of us alone. Fee watching Marion, Marion watching the garden, fingertips pressing white indents into her scalded skin.
“You completely fucked us,” I told her.
She twitched her head. “Okay.”
I took a step closer. “Were we ever even friends? Were you always just planning to use us?”
“Oh, stop it,” she said raggedly, looking up. “If you’d let me finish we’d all have what we want. I wasn’t lying. Shewouldhave increased our power.”
“You’ve seen that spell before.” Fee spoke with cold certainty. “Before you met us, even.That’swhy you pulled us in. You’ve been hating us, haven’t you? Because magic makes us happy, and you’re still fucking miserable.”
Marion was quiet a minute. “Yeah, well. Nobody’s gonna be happy now, are they?”
She slipped off after Sharon.
We went home to Fee’s. Nobody on the bus at that time of night cared that we were covered in blood. We took showers and drank 7 and 7s and walked over to Jarvis Beach.
The lake was the same color as the sky. We stripped off our clothes and walked in. It was August but the water was so cold and thin it felt like swimming in chilled gin. We bobbed and gasped, looking back at the surreal curve of thecity. The attic room and Sharon’s dark warnings felt too far to touch us.
Maybe it would be okay. Maybe this—Seagram’s and the small hours and the scouring cold—were as good as a banishing charm. Magic had always been good to us, fluid beneath our fingers. Why should that stop now?
I thought these arrogant thoughts right up until the fish bobbed to the surface beside me. Long and skinny as an eel, its teeth wicked and its eyes bone white. I splashed back, gulping dirty water as another fish joined it. Then another.
We stroked clumsily to shore, fish bodies boiling up around us. Our knees scraped sand and we dragged our bodies out, looking back at the spreading arrow point of silver corpses. Like Astrid had dipped one misty finger into the water and stirred.
