“Okay,” she said tightly. “You get one for free.”
But maybe she saw something in my face that told her more was coming. Her fingers pinched the air, I could feel the approach of her magic on little rat feet. I was too new at this, my current and former selves still crashing into each other like ball lightning. I wasn’t gonna be fast enough even to duck.
Then a hard square of yellow light fell over her, leaving me in the dark. In the second-floor windows, one of the sleepers I’d roused had turned on a lamp. Marion looked toward it, blinking.
I ran.
Straight down the sloping lawn, into the trees. I broke through them and remembered I was still naked, plunging through a civilized suburban wood transformed into a brambly hell. The only thing I’d grabbed in my panic was the golden box. It was sickly warm in my hand. By some miracle my feet didn’t hurt, then I remembered: Marion had charmed them.
Don’t see me, I thought as I ran. I’m Nobody. See me not.
I used to read so much poetry, old and new. A fluency with language and metaphor and outdated forms of speech was good for magic. A memory rose like an apparition: my mom reading a hypnotic bit of Tennyson aloud and then laughing, telling me a story about how she and my dad met.
I physically shook the memory away. Sorrow wasn’t speed. Pain wasn’t invisibility. I sensed Marion could follow the drift of grief, the perfume of anger.
I heard her, not far behind. Then closer, so close the edges of the leaves I raced through were whitened by the light she carried. Some kind of glowing wizard orb, probably. Or maybe just a flashlight.
I’m Nobody. See me not.
I wasn’t just running away. I was running toward something. I felt an unnamed destination pulsing ahead, with a sense of nightlight safety and reaching arms, and when I got there it was a hazel tree.
Beneath the tree’s summer crown I pressed my hands to its bark, breathing its good green breath and feeling the rootless pieces inside of me settle. All the Ivys I was or used to be. Marion was so close I saw the hard arc of the light she carried, but it didn’t penetrate the circle of the tree. My tree, that had called out to me in dreams when I was ten. Seven years ago my mother and I untangled it from a piece of bad work some other witch had woven; now it would protect me. I palmed its trunk and closed my eyes and heard Marion run right past us.
When she was gone, I said my thanks and set off again.
I’m Nobody. See me not.
I fell into a rhythm of words and the tattoo of my toughened feet. I felt my path corrected by an awareness of the moon, and tasted like sugar in my molars the places where human things cut through the trees. I followed that ache back to the road.
Don’t see me, I thought, as I dashed onto black asphalt.
And screamed.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The suburbs
Right now
The car that almost hit me swerved madly but stayed off the grass, coming to a halt about thirty yards away. Somebody kicked open the driver’s door and stepped out.
“Ivy, what the fuck!”
Nate’s eyes were moon-size, one of them circled by a yellowing patch of bruise. I could hear Haim spilling out of his car radio.
“Nate.” I thanked, kind of, whatever forces had sent him my way. “I need a ride.”
He stalked over and gripped my arm, fingers digging in above the elbow.
“Are you insane? Is there a cult of naked effing forest women in this town? And you’re all trying to get me locked up for vehicular manslaughter?”
Then he yanked his hand away with a yelp. I wasn’t sure what I’d done, but my temples throbbed and I knew it was something. I stepped forward. He took half a step back.
“Don’t grab me again. Ever.”
“Okay,” he said dazedly, looking between me and his fingers. “Sure.”
I darted a glance back at the woods. “Look, I really need a ride. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
He gave a short nod and I followed him up the road. There was a girl in his car, gaping at me. A sophomore, I was pretty sure, with a dark red bob and this spare Charlotte Gainsbourg kind of beauty.
“Hi,” I said, climbing in, then turned to scan the woods. As Nate took the car out of park, Marion broke through. Low to the ground, like she’d been creeping.
“Hey,” the sophomore said thinly. “Do you see that?”
“Drive,” I said. “Drive.”
Marion was up now, watching from the shoulder. It was awful to see her and worse when she was out of sight.
I perched between their two seats, watching the road. The thin spits of white line soothed me, issuing at intervals like pages from a printer.