“Till when? How long do we wait?”
“There’s not a manual, Dana. What did Rob say?”
“He hates me.”
She sighed. “I’m almost at the shop. Stay home today, try to map the fallout. I’ll come by tonight.”
* * *
We waited in blistering silence for our daughter to wake. Finally we heard the creak of the upper hall, the toilet’s flush. Then she was walking down the stairs humming something. She walked in, saw us sitting there like mannequins, and did a double take.
“Whoa. What’s up?”
Rob got up and folded her into a hug. “Everything’s fine,” he said unconvincingly.
“Dad,” she said after the hug had gone on too long. “Dad.” Then, craftily, sensing she held some mysterious advantage, “Can we go to Walker Bros.? I want a Dutch pancake.”
She could’ve asked for the moon.
We were only alone for a minute that morning, washing our hands in the women’s room. All morning I’d been searching for changes in her face. When our eyes met in the mirror, she squirmed and rolled her eyes.
“Mom. Stop staring at me.”
My heart seized. “Ivy.”
Her brows drew down at the panic in my voice.
“Rooibos, lavender, bay,” I recited. “Lead dark hearts astray.”
Her mouth squished into an embarrassed line. “You’re being weird,” she whispered.
The bathroom door swung shut behind her.
* * *
Ivy’s friend Billy came by to see her an hour after we returned from breakfast. For days she’d been too busy locked inside her room to spend time with him, and I’d felt sorry for the kid. Now the sight of him filled me with terror. He was the only person besides me, Rob, and Fee who knew. What would happen when he tried to talk to Ivy about stuff she couldn’t remember?
I turned him away. He came back the next morning. It was early and I told him Ivy was asleep, but when I turned she stood behind me on the stairs.
“Who was that?”
“Billy,” I said without thinking. She had a clear line on the door and would’ve seen his face.
“Who’s Billy?”
My body processed a single moment of compressed white shock. Then horror seeped in.
I’d wondered what Billy knew, and for how long, and I guessed I had my answer now. Magic must’ve been a part of their friendship from the start. It must’ve been at the very root of them. Her best friend and everything he was to her, fed to the golden box like another ripped-up weed.
“He’s nobody,” I said. “Just a boy on the block.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Elsewhere
Escape had passed Marion by, so swift and close the heat of it kissed her skin. She could have raged at the loss, but what truly grieved her was what Dana had done to Ivy.
That surprised her; she wasn’t built for sentiment. But Marion had watched Ivy all her life. From the day she was born.
Marion curled into herself like a boxer protecting her head. She drifted a while, disarmed by sorrow. She dreamed the deep-sea dreams of a thing that doesn’t truly sleep.
* * *
It took her a long time to look again into the scrying glass. When she did the girl was older.
Who was this remade Ivy? Her lips pinked with drugstore gloss, her features gawky. Without magic to shape it, her restlessness had curdled. She was fretful, armorless, wandering.
Marion watched Ivy stumble, unprotected, through the worst years to be a girl. She watched scar tissue form over the broken places in her head. Still clever but robbed of her confidence, still curious but deprived of her faith in the world’s ability to truly surprise.
Ivy was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Then, in a blink, seventeen. The age Marion was when she met her disastrous coven.
Time could pace and blow outside the walls of Astrid’s house and never find a crack. The place was Tupperware-tight. But when Ivy turned seventeen, Marion’s mind leapt the walls and sang like an arrow through the future.
Dana would die. Ivy would die. If Ivy had daughters they, too, would die. Would Marion hang over her glass like a spider through it all, glutting herself on their shadows? Would she remain deathless, forever almost-eighteen, sealed in a dreamhouse that smelled eternally of rose dust?
No.
Marion found the occultist lying on a fainting couch the color of blood on ice, hair puddled over its velvet like a saint’s penumbra. Her eyes were open but a great distance away.
Marion jabbed a foot into the deadish woman’s side. “Wake up.”
Astrid’s eyes focused with a reptilian snap.