Page 63 of Our Crooked Hearts
And if ever the trio should part
Let the river swallow them up.
It wasn’t a spell. Not a real one. It was a rhyme Marion made up on a day we harvested water from the river at sundown, the brawny silver city stretching over our heads. We’d been happy and hopeful and a hundred years younger, our silly broken-heart necklaces clasped freshly around our throats.
I was still wearing mine. Despite everything, we all were. Fee chanted the rhyme again, and this time I joined her.
All of this—Astrid’s escape from the mirror, Marion’s binding, the chant—seemed to happen at once, boiling into one burning-metal minute. Fee and I were screaming now, repeating the rhyme.
Marion’s eyes met mine across the salt line. Then her lips were moving with ours.
That was when it began to work. The chant, multiplied bythree, fizzing with the unwieldy charge of Astrid’s borrowed magic. My broken piece of charm grew hotter, every cut edge simmering against my skin. Fee’s and Marion’s were glowing like the center of a flame. The heart’s divided pieces drew toward each other, chains straining around our throats as they tugged us right up against the circle’s edge. Like calling to like, something broken longing to be whole.
Together we spoke the final piece of the rhyme. A fractional breath and then an explosion, submerged and soundless, as the three of us fell together in a tangle.
Everything was heat and hair and a neon confusion, my vision scribbled over with streaks. Marion’s skin was sour against my lips and I laughed with relief, because we’d done it, we’d pulled her out.
Then I blinked the light away and realized she hadn’t left the circle. We’d been dragged in.
Fee, Marion, and I lay together, bound by the healed heart, and Astrid stood above us. Her yellow irises had eaten the whites of her eyes away. She had the two-toned glare of a bird of prey.
Being looked at by Astrid Washington felt like being studied by two entities. One was a woman, an occultist, a human being who had walked and breathed and lived. The other was a thing of steel or living stone, hammered by time and magic into a terrifying flatness. A cynical, efficient being that wouldn’t think twice about breaking us down for parts.
Astrid took the knife from where it lay on the floor. She looked into each of our faces—one, two, three—then bent, knife in hand, over Fee.
“No!”I writhed in an attempt to protect her, cover her. Astrid laughed, flipping the knife so its blade was in her hand.
“You’ve got a traitor in your coven,” she said, giving it to Fee hilt first. “Needs must.”
Fee took the knife, not limply but with slow focus. Marion’s face was a void, her eyes blank as eggs. If Fee had gone for her then, I think she would have turned her neck willingly to the blade. I was babbling terrified lies—Fee, Fee, you don’t have to—my own voice an irritant I couldn’t make stop. But Fee was quiet.
She looked at Astrid Washington and spoke almost steadily. “You and Marion are bound now. You bound her, with that net. Which means if I kill her, you’ll die, too. Right?”
For two raggedy heartbeats Astrid’s face was perfectly composed, and I thought Fee had overplayed her hand. Then the occultist’s eyes widened and she screamed, a sound too wretched and raking to have come from a human throat.
She grabbed her head in both arms and folded in half at the waist, so her hair dragged over the floor. As soon as her eyes were off us I ripped myself free of the bonded necklace, its broken links dragging bloody beads across my neck.
Marion’s mouth was loose, her eyes unfocused.
“Break the circle,” I told her in a savage whisper. “You laid it, you can break it.”
She didn’t speak or move. I wasn’t sure she heard me.
“Marion, you idiot.” Fee shook her by the shoulders. “Wakeup! Break the circle and we’ll figure out the rest. We can still fix this. We can still end this.”
Marion jerked to life, her hollow eyes burning. She spoke through clenched teeth. “You think I want this toend?”
The occultist straightened. In a sinuous dart she snatched the knife from Fee’s hand and stood above us, her hawk’s eyes shining like reverse moons.
“What to do, what to do,” she whispered, eyes switching between Fee and me. She tapped her temple with the tip of the blade.
My head roared and rattled. She was looking at us like a cook considering her kitchen. We were nothing but the ingredients she had at hand: one witch she couldn’t touch, two that she could. And a knife. She would pulp us if that was what it took to devise an escape hatch. My thoughts raged, all my joints went putty-soft with terror. Then a thought cut through the clamor, cool as river water.
I could kill her.
Not Astrid. She would fillet me faster than I could lift my hand. But Marion. Maybe I could steal just enough time to kill Marion. If she died, Astrid died, too. The circle broke. We were free.
In a freight-train flash I saw my arm on her throat, pressing down; my needle remapping her arms’ undersides; the heavy salt bowl coming down on her head. Celluloid squares from a horror film. And I knew I couldn’t do it.
