Page 105 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The suburbs
Right now
Three sleeping witches, lined up in a row. Two twitch in the grip of an uncanny slumber. The third—slotted between them, her head lying below the almost-grasp of their outstretched hands—is just now drifting away.
Below them, but not too far, a fourth witch is on the move. She runs over clover, she sprints beneath rows of stately trees, setting their branches to rattling. She was young in this place, long ago, a little girl with a lonesome, devouring heart. If she has a heart now it’s impenetrable. A black-lacquered curio that bends the light away.
As she runs she passes a car at the curb with a boy inside it. His heart is the kind you can almost touch, lit up with fear and love and a dozen kinds of anticipation. He doesn’t see the fourth witch passing. She chooses not to be seen, and he only has eyes for the girl with bleached hair.
The fourth witch is coming. She’s almost there.
Here’s how it was, falling asleep on the attic floor.
I closed my eyes and dwelled a while in the dark, coaxing it closer, asking it to steal over and displace the sour fog of Marion’s magic. The dark softened to my will. It sifted, it stirred, it turned lightly over into sleep.
I knew how it should go next, how it had always gone, when I was young and dreaming was my kingdom. The dark would unpack itself like a trunk of costume clothes, spreading out into colors as soft as watercolor on an eggshell, drifting like curtains in a breeze. I could walk forward and touch them, all these sea and sky colors you couldn’t name, that shifted in your mouth when you tried. An infinite number to walk through, into a dream.
But this time when I fell asleep there was only one curtain waiting for me. It wasn’t misty or stormy or sunrise-tinted, it was pure oxidized red, not drifting butboiling.It looked like the entrance to Hell.
I could feel them behind it, two kinds of heat. My mother’s self-contained layer of cobalt fire and Aunt Fee’s mellow autumn sun. So I walked through the bloody curtain and into the dream Marion had put them inside.
In the dream she’d made we were in the attic still. But it was transformed by spellwork into a nightmare.
It was, I understood, a memory.
In the center of the room a dream version of Marion incanted over a mirror. A slaughtered rabbit lay beside her, bleeding over the boards. My mother and Aunt Fee, teenaged and terrified, had their backs pressed to the walls. A fourth, black-haired woman stood between them, with a face like a flint.
I’d hoped to make a dream of my own, to catch them in. But this dream was soinsistent,so desperate with the odor of blood. There was no room in my head for anything else.
I’d heard the story of the summoning once, from Marion in the scrying glass. It was different when I saw it play through.
I witnessed Marion’s attempt to bind the occultist, and its fallout. I saw Astrid Washington, solid malevolence crowned with fairy hair. Mom and Aunt Fee’s battle to save Marion, which ended with all three in the circle. Fee’s courage, Marion’s catatonia. And my mother’s decision, so fast you couldn’t see it coming, to push Marion over the lip of the mirror.
I saw at last how she got the scars that covered her hand. And I measured the gap between the portrait of her that Marion had painted—monstrous, deliberate—and the furious, agonized girl I watched banish her friend from this world.
By the end I was frozen. Transfixed by horror and the wicked math of it: four witches then three, without even a body to show. I put my hands to my mouth as I comprehended the cruelty of what Marion had done: she was making Mom and Aunt Fee relive the very worst night of their lives.
I had barely caught my breath when the dream reset and began again. Blood, wax, smoke, and misery vacuumed away, four witches reset to the start like gameboard pieces.
As with any horror movie, it was less awful the second time through. I could think now, I could move through the room like a spectator in a haunted house. The longer I was inside this dream the more I could make out its contours and its rules. Marion had built it edgeless as an egg. My mother and auntwere living it, inside their younger forms, but I couldn’t make them see me.
I tried to extinguish the flame of Dream Marion’s lighter, smudge the salt circle, pinch my mother’s arm. Marion’s incanting took on a locust drone, and everything I touched was smoke or porcelain. I looked frantically for a weakness and what I settled on was the rabbit. Before the poor thing could be sacrificed again, I scooped it up.
It was solid, it was soft, it was kicking wildly in my grasp. I pushed the creature into my dream mother’s arms.
It bit her. That beautiful piece of dream magic, feral even in its re-creation, sank its teeth right into her forearm. She was sixteen when the animal lunged butherself,Mom-aged and familiar, as the bite came down.
The pain had shocked her real self out of the shell Marion put her in. She dropped the rabbit, which zipped into a corner. Before she could recede, transform, I grabbed hold of my mother like she was Tam Lin, like only my grip could keep her from disappearing. I held her, feeling her body trembling, saying, “Mom, Mom, it’s me.” The dream melted to smoke until only we remained, and my aunt wrapping her arms around herself, sitting on the misty ground.
My mom backed away from me, talking to herself. “It’s not her,” she was saying. “It’s another dream.”
“It’s me, Mom. It is.”
“You’re a phantom. Or maybe it’syouunder there.” Her voice went venomous. “Marion.”
“You need to see me,” I said shrilly. All the times shelooked right through me clawing at my skin. “You need to believe me.”
