I sat up gasping, mouth thick with pennies and salt. I ran my tongue over my teeth but couldn’t find anyplace where I was bleeding.
Fee sat on the floor surrounded by open books. “Bad dream?”
I pressed a hand to my chest, where my heart moved with an eerie double-time flutter. “I can’t remember.”
“Same.”
“Do you feel … how do you feel?”
“About as good as you look.”
“Hah.” I moved my hand from heart to head. “I feel weird, though. Almost like…” I sat up, reaching for the feeling, then lay back fast. My brain sloshed in its pan, every part of me singing with blowback.
“On the table,” Fee said, running her finger down a page.
There were two mugs waiting, vinegar tea and lukewarm coffee. I downed the one and sipped at the other. “Find anything promising?”
“Not really.”
The clock read 8:06. “Are we going to the shop?”
Now she focused on me. “What do you think?”
I lifted a shoulder. Even that hurt. “We can’t trust either of them, but at least we know it. And we could fix this faster with four.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Marion is … I think Marion’s pretty much gone, you know?” She sounded wistful. “The person she was before.”
“I don’t know that there was a before. I think we never actually knew her.”
“It wasn’t all fake,” Fee said definitely. “But it doesn’t matter now. At this point she’d eat our hearts if she thought it would make her stronger.”
I was hit with a slippery, split-second vision of a woman holding something ripe and terrible to her lips. The occultist. She’d been in the dream I was struggling to remember.
“Sharon, though,” Fee went on. “She didn’t know any more than we did. Plus she has a kid. Good reason to want to fix this quick, right?”
“You’d think.” When I blinked I saw fish bodies, cracked mirrors, smudged-out circles of salt. The occultist’s face. It took me too long to notice Fee swiping tears away.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“I know,” she told me, raising a hand. “But if I hadn’t broken the circle…”
“Stop. Marion’s not that strong. She was gonna lose control no matter what. At least this way the occultist isn’t walking around on two feet. Doing god knows what.”
“Devil knows what. God’s not looking.” Fee pressed two fingers into her temple. “Fucking Marion.”
“Fucking Marion,” I repeated, with feeling.
* * *
Fee stepped out the street door first. Promptly she stepped back, fist to her mouth. I slipped past her to see.
On the step lay a dead rabbit. Paws curled, belly to the summer sky. I knew what it was by the tail and the back legs: its head was gone. “Oh, god,” Fee said, pointing. The head was a few steps down, where the stoop met the sidewalk.
I used a stick to scoop the remains into a section of last week’s Reader and ran it to the dumpster. On the way to the bus stop my eye was drawn to every dead thing. Broken-necked birds, the cracked shell of a robin’s egg. The roadkill carcass of an outdoor cat, pounded to leather by passing cars. Flies were everywhere; my sneakers squished over the remains of heat-stricken flowers.
We rolled into the shop around ten, nursing milk-white, sugar-blitzed Dunkin’ Donuts coffees. Henry Rollins was screaming through fuzzy speakers and the air was dense with nag champa. The off-kilter feeling I’d woken up with was spiking, sharpening. I was taking in too much information, too much texture and color and sound. It carried me back to that very first spell, to my trip through a shining city I still longed for and would never see again. Right now it just made me want to curl up tightly and block out the light.
I caught myself on a jewelry case stuffed full of low-rent trinkets. Cheap mood rings, their stones the red-black color of anxiety. Leather cords strung with yin-yangs and peace signs and psychedelic mushrooms, and those silver claddaghs the shiny girls wore.
Fee put a hand between my shoulder blades. “I feel it, too.”
“Hey. Are you who Sharon’s waiting for?”
The girl behind the counter—hoodie pinned with punk-band patches, inflamed piercing in one blonde brow—looked us over shrewdly. We nodded and she jerked her chin toward the back.
The music was quieter there, the EXIT door propped open to the alley. There was a cot pushed against one wall and a pup tent on the floor, blankets spilling out of it. Beside it a little boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt sat cross-legged reading a comic book, hair wisping into a rattail that stopped between his shoulder blades.