Page 54 of Our Crooked Hearts
Hungry smiles, glass apples. “‘My heartbeat nested in your heartbeat,’” I said. I pressed a hand to Fee’s chest, feeling the same wrong ripple I felt in my own.
Five days until the summoning. They ran together like candies in a pocket.
The hours flickered past, or crawled in an endless dream. We avoided mirrors but Astrid found us anyway: in the rinse sink at work, the oily surface of a cup of black coffee. Herfingers curled in the steam of our showers and turned them cold. We played music to drown out her seashell sounds. My peripheral vision swam with mist, my footsteps crunched over fallen bluebottles.
And everywhere, dead rabbits. On the fire escape outside my window, curled inside Fee’s rosemary pot. A fresh and bleeding rabbit foot stuffed into my knockoff One Star, squishing beneath my bare arch when I put it on without looking.
We couldn’t sleep, we didn’t dare cast, but we could stillsearch,spending every minute we could muster looking for a way out that wasn’t Marion’s. Fee combed through her books and I visited everyone I could think of, all the practitioners and magical layfolk who might talk to me.
I started with a clairvoyant on Clark Street, who practically broke my fingers slamming the door in my face. “Over you hovers a darkness,” he called through it, above the sound of a deadbolt hitting home.
“Why do you think I’m here?” I hollered, driving my fist into the door.
I let myself into a Cramps show at the Metro because I wanted to talk to this girl, Linh, who tended bar there. She had an affinity with the dead and a sideline helping the recently bereaved find things their departed left hidden—wedding rings, wills, car keys. If she knew how to open her mind to the dead, maybe she could help me close mine. Even before she saw me she had her face screwed up, looking around like she was trying to find a gas leak.
“That’s coming fromyou?” she said when I bellied up. “Oof, babe, you look bad. What happened?”
“Long story, not good.” I put a bill down on the bar. “Any advice on how to make a spiritstoptalking to you?”
Linh moved her head back and forth like a radio dial. “Not really. I mean…ugh.” She drew her chin down like a turtle. “That’s like bleach poured into my ears. Myotherears. Nuh-uh, no way.” She flicked my twenty off the bar. “Keep your money. And stay away from me until you’ve got this resolved.”
That was Wednesday night. Forty-eight hours to go.
