I pressed both hands to my jittering knees. “Just tell me what you want from me.”
“You’ve paid enough,” she said fervently. “If I had it my way, this wouldn’t cost you one single thing.”
A wave of self-pity washed over me, warm as bathwater. “What wouldn’t?”
One of her eyes was in shadow. The other was a cup of liquid light. “Answers. To all the questions you’ve asked, and all the ones you never thought to.”
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m your friend, Ivy. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid. You’ll understand soon.”
The way she said my name—why was that the part that scared me most? Maybe it was how she looked when she said it: like she knew me. Like we shared a whole complicated history. My brain was sodden with fear but busy, too, ticking like a game-show wheel.
“If I want this,” I said. “If I want answers—what happens next?”
“We walk up the path.” Her voice was on the edge of trembling. “We turn, just there. And I take you to a place where you can know everything.”
The car keys were imprinting into my palm. “Why not here? Just tell me here.”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
I looked to the place where the road bent right. It was high summer, the trees too thick to see what lay behind them. I looked back at the girl who knew my mother, and had walked an unfathomable road to sit beside me. “What’s your name?”
She paused, and something shifted behind her eyes. “My name is Marion.”
I had the oddest feeling the name hadn’t been at her fingertips. That she’d had to dredge it up, like she was a ghost who’d already divested itself of the trappings of the living. But I knew that name. I could summon it in my mother’s voice, and Aunt Fee’s. A taint of secrecy hung about it. They’d only ever spoken it at that register reserved for hidden things.
“Marion,” I repeated, and put my hand on the door. “Let’s go.”
The night was still, just the faintest breeze hushing like an endless exhale. This was the way I’d first seen Marion: as a pale shape moving through a nighttime wood. She was clothed now, jeans and a blue peasant shirt that didn’t fit her. I kept her in my sight and one fist tight around my dad’s keys. The gravel was murder on my bare feet. The third time I sucked in a pained breath she glanced down and spoke a few careless words.
They hung in the air like a sparkler’s trail. I smelled dark sugar and burnt hair and felt a silky tautening beneath my soles, as if the rocks I walked over were smoothing themselves into a hot glass road. I yelped, jumping back, before I realized it wasn’t the path. It was my feet.
I lifted one, then the other. When I tapped a nail against my callused right heel I heard an audible glassy click.
“Holy … how did you do that? What did you do?”
Marion looked at me blankly, like I was interrogating her for breathing. “You’re welcome,” she said.
I high-stepped down the road, lifting and resettling my feet like a dog in snow boots. Such a small change but it made my whole body feel foreign to me. Separate from me, my form and my consciousness never more sharply defined. My brain rebelled from what she’d done, from being near her at all. But my skin was awake, attuned to her every motion, and the shimmering possibility that she might do something impossible again.
We hit the turning. The gravel broadened, giving way to clean pavement. A long driveway that ended at a house, big and white and silent. All the windows were dark, but the front door hung wide open.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The city
Back then
When I walked into our apartment my dad was asleep on the sofa, a whiskey tumbler balanced on his chest. There was ice in the glass and the record he’d put on was still turning. The Flamingos played eerie and sweet, tinting the stale air gold.
He lifted his head groggily. “Dana?”
“Go to sleep, Dad.” My throat was raw as meat.
“Where’ve you been?” He sniffed. “Jesus, what have you been rolling in? Is that blood on your shirt?”
“I said go to sleep!”
Intent thickened my words into a roux. He fell back against the cushions, out cold, and stayed that way.
* * *
We’d scrubbed the round room. First on our hands and knees, because we were stump-stupid with shock. Then, when she woke up enough to do it, Sharon used a scouring spell. The occultist’s book was gone, fallen through the mirror with Marion. We took everything else that had been hers and fled the library, sliding through the waning dark. By three a.m. we were gathered beneath the scratchy overhang of a parking garage.