Page 71 of Our Crooked Hearts
PART II
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Elsewhere
Dana pushed Marion and watched her fall, down and down through the wind-colored corridor of mirror world. The last thing Marion saw before closing her eyes was Dana’s fist coming down on the glass.
Good,she thought.
But that was when she believed she would die.
Marion was right. Astrid Washington was an extraordinary witch. The realm she had created for herself, this catchment for her soul into which Marion fell, was the image of the house she’d died in down to its last lintel.
Its halls were lined with doors that opened onto rooms full of books and bedding, chess sets and hand mirrors, bone-china cups and sugar lumps pitted like old ivory. Its windows framed a flat plane of ominous sky: the house was forever snared on the violet edge of the late August evening when Astrid Washington had died.Mostlydied. There was a ballroom below where awinsome tune played, a billiards room and a conservatory and a dark-wood bar, the bottles behind it intricately cut and their contents bottomless.
Marion drank from every one of those bottles eventually. Their liquors were bitter or treacly or sharp as a lightning bolt, lancing her tongue and making her remember a time when she’dlived,beneath a true sky, out in the teeming world.
She couldn’t get drunk, but she drank anyway. She played games alone, like a child left to its own devices. This was when the worst of her grieving had passed, the first spate of desperation at her entrapment. It came in waves, the horror of what had been done to her—ejected from the world and set down in this afterlife waiting room. In between were long periods of a kind of surreal peace. She ran through dim halls and tried on clothing dug out of trunks. She lay in wait for a sleep that never came, she spun over the polished boards, dancing alone to that deathless, maddening music. Alone, alone.
You couldn’t die here. When she first arrived Astrid used a particularly ruthless magic to remove the net that bound them; in another place it would’ve killed them, too. Some things weren’t meant to be undone.
Not that it mattered much. Bound or not, they were stuck with each other.
Astrid was an inconstant captor. The madness of long confinement had stolen over her like a powdery decay. After a period of towering rages she left Marion to her own devices. Sometimes when they came upon each other in the house’s halls Marion could swear the woman had forgotten who she was. She grew to despise Astrid the way you’d despise a sun that onlyshows itself once a week, for an hour, leaving you colder each time it goes away.
The occultist’s twilit kingdom was a place that stripped from you every nonessential thing. And after all of that was gone—Marion’s grip on reality, her earthly desires, all the flesh she could spare, and the last bit of color from a sun that was lost to her—what remained was this: an endless IV drip of rage. It warped her sight and made her fingertips tingle.
But rage wasn’tuseful.So Marion tended it until it grew into something that was: ambition. A furious desire to escape this place and make Dana pay for what she’d done. Marion had the will. Now she had to discover themeans.
Often she held the cheap gold necklace in her fist, a once-broken heart united, swinging from three chains. The fine file of the heart’s edges was caked with a dried rind of reddish brown where it had scraped across Dana’s neck. Marion scratched the blood off with a nail, collecting the flakes in a snuffbox.
And later, when she found the spell inside one of Astrid’s books, she knew why she’d held on so carefully to Dana’s blood.
It was a scrying spell.
Steadily Marion poured water into a heavy silver bowl. She sprinkled its surface with Dana’s blood and spoke the words and waited to see what would come. There was a haze, pearlescent, then a figure came into view: Dana’s red hair. Her angry mouth.
Bent over the peephole of the scrying glass, Marion watched.
