Queasily I watched the girl uncap the pop bottle and start to drink, head dropping back and back, throat working like a python’s until it was drained. When she was done she ate the hot dog in three bites and dropped all her garbage on the ground, even though a trash can was right there. She cut left at the end of the lot, walking in the direction I’d come from.
“What in the actual fuck,” I whispered, and followed her.
Her pale hair fell to the middle of her back. She was wearing faded, badly fitting jeans and the light blue button-up I’d tossed to her by the creek. She should’ve shone in the dark like a white-furred dog, but right away I lost her. I made a lucky guess at a turning and saw her again.
I kept losing and finding her, block by block. The shadows she walked through seemed sticky, fond of her skin. I stayed well back but she never turned nor hesitated. We walked past the playground, across the arterial road that ran through the neighborhoods, into my own subdivision. The closer we got to home the farther back I hung.
She turned onto my street. I held my breath, thinking walk, walk, keep going, don’t turn, right up until she stopped at the end of our drive. Dead still, arms at her sides, looking at my house.
I tucked myself into the shadows alongside Billy’s place. “Pick up, Hank, you jackass,” I muttered, phone pressed to my ear, but my call went to voicemail. Then the girl came sharply unstuck, striding up the drive and around the side of the house.
“Hey!” Panic ripped the word right out of me. I sprinted across the street, through the weird violet air. The side of our house was a wilderness of raspberry canes, their fruit boiled jammy by the heat. I almost expected to find her trapped among them like a fairy-tale prince, but they were empty.
The backyard was empty, too. I kept going, tongue running sour, darting toward the fence on Barbie toes, then over it. Past the kitchen windows, the room behind them the indistinct color of lake water. I circled back to the driveway, but the girl was gone.
Or—I thought of the cookies I’d left on my plate, a neat bite taken from each—or maybe she’d let herself in.
I stepped into the front hall and listened. I didn’t think I was imagining the unfriendly texture to the quiet, the feeling of wrongness as palpable as a smell. I circled the first floor, then went upstairs. Hank was in bed, safe and snoring, one hand up under his chin. My room was empty, the bathroom, too. I saved my parents’ room for last.
Nothing inside it looked out of place. But the air itself felt ruffled and staticky. I checked the closet and the bathroom, then dropped to my hands and knees to check beneath the bed. As I scanned the dust, my phone lit up with an unfamiliar number.
I shot upright. No one stood in the doorway. Across the room, the window was a box of empty sky. Still I imagined the strange girl could see me, that she was waiting for me to pick up the phone. I clattered swiftly down the stairs and back out to the driveway, answering after the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
A long silence with a rushing sound beneath it. Like traffic, or the ocean. Something about it made me grip the phone in sudden hope. “Mom?”
“Christ, no,” the voice said. “This is Sharon. You left a message for me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The city
Back then
The spell had to happen at midnight. Because while some supernatural clichés turned out to be crap, plenty were true.
We left the shop just after eleven. The lake had pursed its cool blue lips and blown the humidity away. It wasn’t late for the city, but it felt late in this sleepy summer town.
The people who were out kept an eye on us as we passed, or looked away fast. Together we’d become fearsome, a bouquet of night-blooming flowers. Fee was a plum-mouthed goddess, Marion a shattered-glass witch. Sharon was a barely reformed Manson girl, and then there was me. You can’t ever really see yourself, but I liked the feel of my red hair down my back, the afterparty ache of my insomniac’s eyes.
Marion led us into the campus’s heart, through shadows cast by ugly cement buildings named for dead men. Down a tricky pathway lit orange with old lights, over a fairy bowl of lush clover, and up to the steps of a baroque fever dream of a house.
“Is that…” Fee began.
Marion faced the library that had been the occultist’s house. “We’re going inside.”
“What?” I glared at her. “You didn’t tell us we’d be breaking and entering.”
“We’re not breaking. We’re just gonna enter.”
You could easily miss the little gangway in the lake-facing wall, unless you were Marion and you’d already cased the place. It was an architectural quirk I’d never seen before: a winding interior corridor so narrow we walked single file. One sharp turn, and another, and another, then it ended in a garden that smelled of basil and tomatoes and rampaging mint, bleached gray by the moon. Under sunlight it must’ve looked like something found on the grounds of a medieval nunnery. Fat bees, syrupy herbs, nodding flowers. Fee ran a gentle hand over a sage plant, releasing its scent.