Page 53 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The city
Back then
I had a shift that afternoon. Dipping fry baskets, making change, wishing I knew a spell that could make my mind sleep while my body kept trucking.
Something was happening to me. I was sure of it now. It wasn’t blowback or hangover or the scum of bad dreams. It was in my body, growing like a virus, making a home for itself inside my skin. What was it the spell had said? I heard Marion’s voice again, reading the occultist’s promises.That I may not die but live in you.
I looked at my hand on the counter and felt the raw red terror of not recognizing it as my own. Not knowing what exactly it might do.
“Dana.Dana.”
One of the shop’s full-timers, Lorna, was snapping her fingers in my face. I didn’t know how she managed it with her nails.Church nails,she called them, long as Elvira’s but painted a pearlescent Sunday color. When I kept staring she clappedher hands for emphasis. “Go.Home.I can’t keep looking at your miserable face.”
She was fifty and one of my dad’s first hires. She got to talk to me like that. On the way out I peed and washed my hands and sprayed down the closet-sized employee bathroom with watered bleach. Then I glanced at myself in the pitted camp mirror stuck to the wall and screamed.
Astrid was there, looking back at me. Pretty face, pretty dolly hair, bottomless golden eyes. I shoved a hand in my pocket. There was a toothpick in there, birchwood. I snapped it and spat a quick curse, the first piece of magic I’d tried since the summoning.
Undo unmake
shatter break.
As the back of my tongue kissed off the finalk,the bathroom light burst. Glass rained over my hair in the dark, but the sound of breakage was bigger than a bulb. I clawed the door open and recoiled from an eye-watering vinegar slap.
Brine and glass covered the floor. The spell I’d reached for—a small thing, good for, say, turning a drink that might be dosed to slivers in a bad man’s hand—had swept through the back room, smashing a shelf of pickle jars. I thanked the gods and saints for plastic condiment containers. Then I saw that the safety-glass pane in the swinging door had cracked.
Lorna gaped at me as I charged out to the counter, her penciled brows climbing toward the burgundy floss of her wig. “What was that? What’d you do?”
I ignored her, scanning the shop. The spell hadn’t reached the shop’s plate-glass front. Nobody was screaming, no one was red with broken pieces, singing a song of lawsuit. “Stay up here,” I said harshly.
When I ducked back into the bathroom, Astrid was gone. The camp mirror was still intact. Of course it was, it was made of stainless steel. The spell was just a panicked miscast that had gone bizarrely wide. Probably. Right?
Before going for the mop, I called Fee.
“Don’t try any magic,” I told her. “Don’t do anything till I’m there.”
We’d ended the summoning midstream. But what if we’d still gotten what we were after? What if Astrid Washington, however grudgingly, had granted us a piece of her power?
We tested my theory using the breaking spell’s opposite. A simple mending charm, white wax poured over the halves of a broken pencil. Do it right and the wax disappears like syrup in tea, sealing the break.
Fee’s room smelled like birthday cake. Scented candles work fine for lots of things, and we’d found a pack of vanilla tealights cheap at the Family Dollar. I spoke the incantation as she poured. The wax disappeared, the pieces merged back into a dull No. 2 pencil.
But the spell didn’t stop. The pencil’s grade-school yellow casing evanesced, revealing the wood below. It roughened, thickened, bark crawling over its planes and sending up a breathof incense cedar. The twig gave a shiver, as with the memory of a breeze, and in a Chia-pet time lapse sprouted a sickening coat of fungus. Out of it wriggled a trio of dull-backed beetles, like little licorice Tic Tacs.
Fee smashed them to jelly with a book.
“Fuck’ssake,” I said, holding my heart.
“‘Finish the job,’” she said in an odd voice, “‘and until you do you will see my hand in all your workings.’”
“What?”
“It’s from my dream. It’s been hanging over me all day, that I couldn’t remember it. But I remember now. I remember Astrid saying that.”
I let my eyelids fall, reaching again for my dream. This time it came.
Finish what you started and until you do I will speak to you at all hours, you will never not hear me, you will see my hand in all your workings and my face in your own face and my heartbeat nested in your heartbeat and my—
