“Are you okay?” I said.
My mom coughed. Dusty air in a dry throat. “Marion,” she said. “Please.”
“Don’t you dare,” Marion snarled. Her face looked more human with anger in it, but it flared fast and was gone.
My mom said her name again, so quietly. “Do what you want to do, but do it to me. Not Ivy. Not Fee. You’ve got nothing to punish them for.”
Marion’s smile was audible, lips pulling wetly back from white teeth. “My god, Dana, when did you become so fucking mediocre? You can’t even tell a solid lie. I watched you. I never stopped watching you. A year after you pushed me I watched you and Felicita sit on the sand and agree between you that I was dead. You both knew that wasn’t true. You both decided not to save me. What was it you were doing instead? Oh, right. Giving fake palm readings to drunk girls.”
“Just us, then,” my aunt said. “Let Ivy go. However you want to finish this, let’s finish it.”
I stepped forward but Marion spoke before I could, her words an eerie echo of what I was about to say.
“Listen to yourselves. Ivy is a better witch than both of you put together. She’s here to save you. Stop pretending she’s the one who needs your protection.”
“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “Just stop.”
My mom flinched at my tone, but I ignored her. I had eyes only for Marion.
“What is it you want?” I asked her. “What did you come back for? What are you here to do—kill us?”
I got the strangest feeling, when she looked at me, of being looked at by something I couldn’t entirely see, that was using her eyes as peepholes. Something cold and slow and utterly lacking in some crucial human thing.
“Death is too easy,” she said. “Death is a milk bath. I thought the worst thing I could do to her would be to take you. Make you mine. Help you become so bright she could see from anywhere what she’d tried to kill in you. What she’d lost forever. But now.” Those otherwhere eyes ran over my face. “Now I think the worst thing for her would be to lose you. I mean really lose you.”
I willed the women in this room who loved me to stay out of this, to be still. “Are you gonna kill me, Marion?”
“I could.”
“Maybe.” I took a step closer, then another, close enough that she could reach me. We could reach each other. “If you didn’t, though. If I … if I went with you, where would we go?”
Her jaw shifted. She didn’t speak and didn’t speak, then the words all came abruptly. “There are legends about matriarchal societies that still exist. In lost places. On islands or deserts or deep in the trees. Little worlds with ancient roots. Places where women work and magic is revered and you can live your whole life without going farther than a mile from home.”
“Is that what you want?”
The slow cold thing that wore her face peered at me. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything anymore,” Marion replied almost before I’d finished talking. She pushed a fist to her sternum. “But I can still feel the place where I wanted.”
“I think,” I said softly, “that what you wanted was to save me. And you did. You did it right. You put me inside water, you held me in your arms. You talked to me when my mind was going to pieces. You didn’t let the magic blow up my brain.” I held out a hand to her. “You saved me.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said.
I didn’t move. An endless second passed, then she reached out and took my hand.
I dug my nails into her skin with all my strength, until I was sure I’d broken it. Before she could twist free of me, or cast, or wrap us back up in some terrible dream, I stuck my other hand into the pocket of Billy’s jacket, pulled out the golden box, and pressed it to the place I’d drawn blood.
Marion laughed. Eyebrows up, a laugh of true surprise. She looked like a teenage girl then, a real one, flawed and gifted and magical and incomplete, just like me.
“I didn’t think—” she began, but the box opened its hungry mouth and she stopped and I never would know what she’d meant to say.
As she gazed into its empty heart I spoke over her the incantation my mother once spoke over me. Then I told the box, “Let her forget us. Take from her Dana Nowak and Felicita Guzman and Ivy Chase. Let her forget…”
And I stopped, because I didn’t know what else to give to it. What would be a mercy, what would be a punishment. What Marion might be longing to lose.