“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 a crumb…” 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 so fun to 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 say No, 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.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The suburbs
Right now
I never knew the streetlights let off a pale buzz until I walked beneath them, alone, at half past three in the morning. Across the street between subdivisions, past the old playground, its rusted merry-go-round glinting septically in the moonlight. A breeze came up and set all the trees to sighing, like old women coming in from the heat.
Walk long enough through the snow-globe world of the middle of the night and even familiar things get corrupted. The houses where porchlights shone seemed like friendly liars, the unlit ones like lockboxes for secrets. I felt an obscure relief as I escaped the suburban grid, breaking onto the road that rolled past the elementary school and the park district and the strip mall with the all-night 7-Eleven, its clean corporate lights looming against a sky the color of grape candy.
The store’s insides were lit like a stage set, empty except for a clerk leaning over the counter. I swayed at the lot’s edge, feeling around in my pocket for change. I was about to step onto the pavement when a girl slid into view from the side, down the row of closed storefronts. As she pushed through the 7-Eleven’s door I shivered, imagining the chill of its AC, its odor of mop water and soda syrup and liquid cheese. I stared after her, but I didn’t feel true surprise. It didn’t seem so unlikely that I should find her again in the dark.
She was the stranger Nate and I had followed to the water in the woods. I knew by her bunker-white skin, her certainty of step. Her face that, even in profile, made me think of an ancient flaking painting done on wood, its subjects blunt-featured and arresting. Also, she was still wearing my shirt.
I dropped to a crouch behind a Subaru. I had a line on the door, so I could see it when the girl came out holding a two-liter of Mountain Dew and a hot dog. A goddamned 7-Eleven hot dog! Even Hank wouldn’t eat one of those. Amina and I liked to joke that it was always the same hot dog, spinning in its little tanning bed, begging people to eat it in an Oliver Twist voice.