I stood too fast, lunging to yank the laptop from her hands. Just as quickly, I was bent over my knees, gut neon with pain.
Ivy crouched beside me, grabbing my hand. “What is it? What hurts?”
I showed her with my fingers, gasping.
“Uh-oh.” She looked scared and a little thrilled. “I bet it’s your appendix.”
She wanted to try a healing charm and I said absolutely not and she was still sulking when a neighbor showed up to drive us to the hospital. Ivy stayed until late showing me videos on her phone, then got a ride home from another neighbor. I had to stay overnight, my appendix so thoroughly ruptured my whole gut was shot through with poison.
“People die from this,” a nurse told me, with too much relish. She was pissed because I fought everything they wanted to do. I needed Fee here, running interference. I needed Rob to come take me home. I was furious at them for being so far away.
Rob couldn’t get a flight home until the next morning, but the kids were old enough to keep each other alive for a night. It was fine. It should’ve been fine.
When I got home, I knew right away that it wasn’t.
CHAPTER FORTY
The suburbs
Back then
Ivy’s mom was a total freaking hypocrite.
She talked all the time about balance and responsibility and being careful what you put into the world and blah blah blah, when all along you just knew she’d done some bad, bad things.
You could see it in her refusal to talk about the web of scars on her hand. The abrupt silence that fell when Ivy walked into a room where Mom and Aunt Fee were talking. The stormy weather that blew through the house at random, and made Dad say, Guys, give your mom some space.
Most of all it was in the look on her face when Ivy pulled something off. Ivy was so good now, so strong, her mother’s pride should’ve grown accordingly. Instead she seemed to shrink as Ivy expanded, becoming more watchful, more controlling and afraid. If she could’ve lassoed Ivy’s ability and broken it like a colt, she probably would have.
Ivy was certain it had to do with the thing she wouldn’t talk about—the thing she’d done. She waited for Mom to let something slip, or Aunt Fee to spill the secret. And when neither happened, she made other plans.
She was waiting for a night when both her parents were out. If it made her feel a little guilty that it finally happened because her mom was in the hospital, well, guilt was rarely a useful emotion.
It was just past eight. Hank was on the other side of the wall watching Battlestar Galactica and her room was soft in the gloaming.
Ivy propped a mirror against her footboard. She pressed a blend of clarity oils into seven crucial places. She looped a thread of dark hair around her right ring finger—spirited off of her best friend Billy’s shoulder—and incanted as she used that fingertip to trace a sigil over the mirror. Mist spilled into the glass, displacing her reflection. She made her voice cool and commanding.
“Show me what Billy’s doing right now.”
Out of the mist, like a photo dipped in developer, a boy with freckles and wet dark hair appeared. When she made out what he was doing—pulling a shirt over his head, damp from the shower—Ivy squeaked and yanked the strand off her finger.
The boy in the glass gave way to a many-toned nothing, a galactic vista that tinted the room with gauzy light.
Ivy counted breaths, waiting for them to slow. She could smell her own sweat beneath the bright spice of frankincense.
It had worked.
But that was just a test, to see if she could. Now it was time to do it for real. It might not work the second time, she reminded herself. The question she wanted to ask was fuzzy. But she didn’t know enough to ask a better one.
Ivy took another strand of hair and twined it around her finger. This one was the same color as her own. She’d pulled it from her mother’s hairbrush.
She retraced the sigil. Her door was locked, Hank had headphones on, and still the words came in a heavy whisper.
“Show me Mom’s secret.”
This time the mist caught the question like a pond catching a rock, an impact then a widening ripple. When it smoothed out what Ivy saw in the mirror was a girl.
She darted back, bare legs catching on the humid wooden floor. She just barely kept herself from ripping the red strand free. Through her panic the girl hung motionless in the mirror, odd and definite, framed like a portrait somebody dug up from a thrift store. Fish-belly skin and blonde hair and a look of forbearance. It almost seemed like she was looking back, but that wasn’t how scrying worked. Ivy gathered her nerve and moved closer. When she did the girl followed the motion with her unsettling eyes.