“Poor Gremlin? He’ll be running around eating garbage when we’re all in the ground. Sometimes after he eats my shoes or whatever he leaves the pieces in my bed. Like he’s the Godfather.”
I laughed and Billy smiled a little shyly, raising his brows.
“You ready to call the cops yet?”
“Not yet.”
“You ready to go to sleep?”
“Who needs sleep?”
“Do you wanna go do something instead?”
I paused, mouth half open, and did a split-second audit of myself. Chapped lips, stretched-out tank top, my freshly bleached hair pushed back with a headband. It felt freeing to look so crap.
“What’s there to do in Woodbine in the middle of the night?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Go to Denny’s? Walk around the Super Walmart, eating baked goods?”
I looked up at him, at his freckles like stars. I didn’t want to be alone. And no part of me wanted to go back inside my house.
“Okay,” I told him. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The city
Back then
What Marion did on the beach was the first real thing she’d ever done. A flare of wicked intent, shaped by words she hadn’t known she possessed.
“It’s you,” she said. “It’s us. The three of us together, that’s why it worked.”
Alone, she told us, she’d almost done lots of things. With the three of us combined, all those almosts could become ways of remaking the world.
But first we had to wake ourselves up.
You couldn’t look for things in the occultist’s book, couldn’t read it cover to cover. If you tried, it would show you blank pages, or black ones. Lines of tangled characters, rhymes that scratched at your ears. Densely inked images, sometimes, that left purple aftereffects on your vision. The way it worked, she told us, was like a tarot deck, delivering the pages you needed to see. And since the beach it kept showing her a single spell, opaquely titled and built for three practitioners. To turn your hand toward working.
It began with a purification ritual. For three days we stayed inside, playing sick so we could avoid mirrors, direct sunlight, and human touch. We drank herbs steeped in spring water, briny with rock salt, and performed ablutions once an hour between sundown and sunup. By the end of it I felt so fragile I wondered if that was part of the spell. You could’ve told me anything right then, and I’d have believed you. Including that I could do magic.
At sundown on the fourth day we gathered the spell’s ingredients—some at the store, the rest harvested from Loyola Park—and went to my empty apartment, our fingers resinous with growing things.
Marion was edgy, withdrawn, her unwashed hair skimmed back into a ponytail. She wouldn’t let either of us touch the book. She kept checking our work, again and again, until there was nothing left to prepare.
I can still close my eyes and summon up the shy, hallucinatory feeling of sitting down with Fee and Marion to perform that first spell. Shallow breaths syncing, hearts up high, nobody sure where to look. Marion was tight as a tuning peg, Fee rippling with nervous laughter. We moved haltingly through the steps, and I was sure it wouldn’t work.
Until Marion completed the final incantation and the air clarified like butter in a pan. Inside that flue of vivid air we fell back, hands entangled, heads thumping hard to the floorboards.
I didn’t feel it. I felt nothing, because my consciousness was rising up, up, and away.
I saw my own body and the bodies of my friends laid out like starfish. I saw the roof of my building and the flat scatter of our street and still I rose higher, until the whole city sprawled beneath me like a spider’s web, like a dragnet of white gold, black water lapping at its eastern rim and the suburbs biting down its ribs to the west and the downtown a hard metal knot so dazzling you could weep.
From up here I could see we were small, we were specks, we were cosmic dust off a god’s left shoulder, and the discovery filled me with an electric joy. The air was thin and the stars sang their elliptical star song and didn’t care that I heard it. I was less to them than the drifting exhalation of a seed head.
At the apex of my flight—Venus burning at my left hand, Mercury to my right—I felt the very beginnings of fear. It was heavy and it drew me down again, whistling through the black and the silver, through layers of untouched sky, then the manmade haze of pollution and light, the dizzying Escher entanglements of radio waves, until I hung over my body again.
I felt such tenderness for its flawed skin and tangled hair, its angry geometry. But I wasn’t ready to be human again, to breathe and sweat and ache and thirst. So I left it there on the boards.