Page 48 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The city
Back then
The occultist sits beside you on a green bench, beneath a stained-glass window shaped like a compass rose. In the glass is a girl, an apple in one palm and a knife in the other. Her smile is hungry.
The occultist is hungry, too. In life she loved the rare, pink-fleshed apples that grew in her garden, bone broth slippery with marrow, bloody sweetmeats, and eggs barely cooked. Food that slid and coated and crunched. In her half-death she longs for few things more.
This is what she whispers to you, in the dream.
The work is not yet done, she says. Why did you stop the working? 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—
I sat up gasping, mouth thick with pennies and salt. I ran my tongue over my teeth but couldn’t find anyplace where I was bleeding.
Fee sat on the floor surrounded by open books. “Bad dream?”
I pressed a hand to my chest, where my heart moved with an eerie double-time flutter. “I can’t remember.”
“Same.”
“Do you feel… how do you feel?”
“About as good as you look.”
“Hah.” I moved my hand from heart to head. “I feel weird, though. Almost like…” I sat up, reaching for the feeling, then lay back fast. My brain sloshed in its pan, every part of me singing with blowback.
“On the table,” Fee said, running her finger down a page.
There were two mugs waiting, vinegar tea and lukewarm coffee. I downed the one and sipped at the other. “Find anything promising?”
“Not really.”
The clock read 8:06. “Are we going to the shop?”
Now she focused on me. “What do you think?”
I lifted a shoulder. Even that hurt. “We can’t trust either of them, but at least we know it. And we could fix this faster with four.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Marion is… I think Marion’s pretty much gone, you know?” She sounded wistful. “The person she was before.”
“I don’t know that there was a before. I think we never actually knew her.”
“It wasn’t all fake,” Fee said definitely. “But it doesn’t matter now. At this point she’d eat our hearts if she thought it would make her stronger.”
I was hit with a slippery, split-second vision of a womanholding something ripe and terrible to her lips. The occultist. She’d been in the dream I was struggling to remember.
“Sharon, though,” Fee went on. “She didn’t know any more than we did. Plus she has akid.Good reason to want to fix this quick, right?”
“You’d think.” When I blinked I saw fish bodies, cracked mirrors, smudged-out circles of salt. The occultist’s face. It took me too long to notice Fee swiping tears away.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“I know,” she told me, raising a hand. “But if I hadn’t broken the circle…”
“Stop.Marion’s not that strong. She was gonna lose control no matter what. At least this way the occultist isn’t walking around on two feet. Doing god knows what.”
“Devil knows what. God’s not looking.” Fee pressed two fingers into her temple. “Fucking Marion.”
