Page 40 of Our Crooked Hearts
“Have some respect,” Marion hissed. “This spell is a promise. Areward.A piece of Astrid’s power.”
“A reward for what, though?”
She brushed the question away. “We knew she was teaching us with the book. But all along she’s beentestingus, too. Makingsure we’re worthy. And we’ve proven ourselves.” Her eyes shone. “She’s chosen us.”
“How long does it last?” I asked.
“Forever.”
“No way,” I said dismissively. Fee frowned.
“Forever?Plus, what, we die of blowback?”
Marion’s mouth twisted. “This isn’t about give and take andbalanceand whatever you’re on about. This is a gift. Could you seriously say no to this?”
“Hey, come on.” Fee took her hand. “It just… Mar, doesn’t it seem a little too good to be true?”
Marion squeezed back, face softening. “Don’t we deserve something good?”
Sharon was looking between Fee and me with mild eyes. “I thought you two were workers,” she said. “But it sounds like you don’t want to work.”
“Nobody’s talking to you,” I snapped.
“Stop,” said Marion.“Listen.”
The word had weight to it. Texture. I almost wondered if it was a spell. When we met Marion, she’d been soft and ruddy, no grace to her but gravity. Now her color was rinsed out, her curves filed down to bone. The changes gave her the unsettling authority of an ascetic.
“I’ve done my homework. Since I found Astrid’s book I’ve read everything I could find about practitioners, occultists, witchcraft, all of it. No one could do what Astrid Washington could do. If we had just a sliver of her power, just acrumb…”She closed her eyes, as if the idea was a light too bright to look at.
When she opened them, her face was lit with the questing cartographer’s fervor that had made it sofunto let her obsession become our own.
“Just think,” she said. “Think of what we could do.”
My skin prickled with goosebumps. I thought about juiced-up healing charms, my dad’s face free of pain. I didn’t quite allow myself to picture the unimaginable: a cure. When I looked at Fee her expression had gone inward. I wondered what was passing behind her eyes.
“What goes into it?”
I spoke coolly, but Marion knew she had me. She hefted her bag onto the table, an oversize artist’s tote from which she slid a massive disk of mirror wrapped in deer leather, a fat red candle, and the empty lipstick tube she used to hold pins and needles.
“That’s it?” asked Fee.
“And this.” Marion put a palm to the book’s rough cover. “And the right moon—tonight’s moon. And the right place.”
“So it has to be tonight. What if we’re busy?”
“I know your work schedules. You’re free.”
“Fine, but we have lives.”
Marion spun her finger in a circle, encompassing Fee and me. “You are each other’s lives.”
At the start of summer she might’ve sounded jealous, but her eyes weren’t really on us now. They were pointed toward some other horizon. Fee and I proved her point by looking at each other, conferring in silence.
I don’t like it,her face told me.
Me, neither.
But…
Inside our hesitation was all sorts of things. Curiosity and guilt and desire. Optimism, even. And beside them all the ugliest, most vivid parts of ourselves. The pieces magic had sharpened into blades we could use to skin the world. Think of it: sixteen and brimming with power, after being told all your life you were powerless.
Even now, when I try in memory to make my long-lost self sayNo,to imagine taking Fee’s hand and walking away forever—from Marion, from magic—I can’t do it. There is no version of me that was ever going to refuse.
