When I was finished, I turned to face him. “Why are you going to all this trouble to keep her from finding out you’re hurt?”
For the first time, he looked at me with something like pain. “Because if I don’t, she’ll make sure I never leave the goddamn house again.”
He was doing his best to look angry, but in the middle his voice broke, like he was begging for something I didn’t understand.
I stared at him. His grandmother might be a little terrifying—or a lot, even—but then, so was he. Even slumped over on the edge of his bed, he looked like something to be reckoned with. “You really think she could keep you shut up here if you wanted to leave?”
He started to shrug, then winced when the shirt pressed against his back. “She’s done it before.”
He said it like it didn’t matter much, but his mouth looked pretty grim.
I nodded. The light around him was wavering and agitated, and I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “You have to move so I can make the bed.”
As soon as he was on his feet, the room suddenly seemed much too small. The ceiling was so low it almost brushed the top of his head, and I could see the way the walls seemed to press in around him, like he was trapped just as well and truly as I had been.
“You can’t go down there,” I said, and I said it kindly, even though his invincible act was getting a little tired. “I understand you want to, but you can’t because if you try, you’re going to go flat on your face again. You need to rest.”
Fisher let his breath out like he was sagging under something too heavy to bear. No matter how hard he tried to look all right, his bad arm kept wanting to draw up against his chest. His hands were shaking. Finally, he sank into the rocking chair and slumped forward. The way he bowed his head seemed so hopeless and so private that after a second, I looked away and busied myself remaking the bed.
“Before you do that with the blankets and everything,” he said behind me, “you need to flip the mattress.”
I struggled with the edge of the pillow top, but it didn’t budge. “It’s too heavy.”
“Just pick up the corner and get your knee under it.” Then he muttered something else, but he said it at the floor. It sounded like, How do people survive?
I turned around, fully meaning to tell him exactly how we survived and what he could do about it. But all my temper died as soon as I looked at him, the pale cast of his face, a few dark flowers of blood already seeping through his shirt. It was painfully apparent, suddenly, that all his snarling and glaring was because he didn’t know how to be hurt. That faced with any of the normal dangers of the world, he didn’t even have to think about it, because he could always heal. And he acted like that made him so invincible, or like he didn’t need anything, when the truth was, he’d come to depend on something that wasn’t always going to save him.
I wrestled the mattress onto its edge, but it gave me the devil trying to get it turned around under the sloping ceiling. It thumped on the floor and I waited, out of breath, for Fisher to tell me not to make so much noise, but he just sat there, looking sick and half-asleep.
I made up the bed with fresh sheets, tucking in the corners without speaking to him. His way of being so stupidly cool was maddening.
When he sank onto the mattress though, his jaw was hard, like he was trying not to cry out and I relented a little.
“Can you sleep, do you think?”
He nodded and eased himself down on top of the covers, resting on his side.
“Can I leave you?”
“You can do whatever you want.”
I stood over him for what felt like a very long time, arms folded, lips pressed together. “I’m not fighting you,” I said finally. “So can you just be decent with me for two seconds?”
Fisher closed his eyes and looked away, and I knew then that he couldn’t. He was always fighting everyone.
INK
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
With no place else to go, I walked back to Myloria’s along the Crooked Mile. I was so tired I was nearly tripping over my own feet. It seemed impossible that after everything, it was still only the morning.
As I passed by the Heintzes’, I stopped to look over the fence. Things seemed quiet, apart from the rows and rows of empty cages. Some of the bunnies and the birds were back in their coops and I guessed they just hadn’t had the sense to run very far.
At the Blackwood house, I let myself in and trudged straight to the bathroom, keeping one hand on the wall. I found some rose-scented salts under the sink and took a bath, but even soaking up to my neck in the powder-pink water didn’t do much to wash off the way things weren’t all right. It just made the air around me smell more like flowers and less like poison.
When I’d finished, I sat on the edge of the tub, wrapped in a towel, and considered all that I’d seen and found out since yesterday. The whole predicament was so big and messy and strange, though, that I didn’t know where to start.
Maybe Fisher had made the creatures of the hollow come for him, the same way he’d made the dogwood bloom. Or maybe everything that had happened was simply because I was there with him, and I was the one who had called the hell dogs out. The one who had made the whole world crazy.
And then there was the reckoning star. The creek fiend had told me to see to it, but the only star I knew of was the one in the huge, splattery painting that hung over the front of the bank building—the five-pointed symbol of the humors.
After I’d sat thinking over all the possibilities so long it felt like I was going in circles, I left it and got up. I changed into another one of Emmaline’s dresses from the box in the hall. The folds of the skirt were full of dust and the print was faded, but it fit like it had been made for me, and that was a consolation at least—that something in this world seemed like it could have been made for me.
As I started back through the house, I heard a thin, electric buzzing noise. It seemed to float in the air like a song, and I followed it down into one of the dark halls. A door at the end was propped open with a metal statue of a cat, and I let myself in.
The room I stepped into wasn’t a normal room at all, but a long glass-paned greenhouse, with pale sunlight shining down on all kinds of flowers.
I could feel the hum of the place, the same way the plants in my mother’s garden had always hummed, full up on all her love and pride and care. Myloria’s plants were different, though—the hum was wilder and thinner. It shook instead of sang.
Everything about the greenhouse seemed so much more carefully tended than her kitchen and her daughter and her black, ruined house.
The air was fresh in a way that made the fake-rose smell of my wet hair smell faker, and it was filled with another, louder kind of buzzing, this one high and electric.
At the back of the room, Myloria sat on a wooden stool with her bare feet hooked on the spindle. She wasn’t alone. A blond-haired girl lay face-down on the table, shorts pulled halfway off her hip. Myloria was leaning over her with a tattoo gun, carefully marking out a trail of dogwood flowers.
When I came closer, picking my way between the rows of plants, I saw that the girl on the table was Davenport Heintz. I was surprised to find her there, but it relieved me to no end to see that she was okay after the way her father had gone crazy on her at the zoo.
On a little shelf next to Myloria’s elbow were a lot of bottles and jars and a row of tiny pots that sat along the back of the workbench. In her right hand, she held the tattoo gun. In her left, she had a little plastic cup balanced between her two smallest fingers. She dipped the point of the gun into the cup and it came away covered in ink.
It made a certain kind of sense—of course Myloria would have to do something for a living. When she bent over Davenport the snakes on her back rippled as she moved, their scales almost seeming to shine like something living.
Davenport’s
hair was flopped over her so I couldn’t see her face. All the way down her hip, the dogwood flowers fell in a fluttering spill. The ones farthest up her back faded pinker and pinker until they seemed to catch fire. Above them, something else was taking shape but was still only in outline, like a picture that was planned, but not drawn yet.
“Is it okay if I stand and watch?” I said to Myloria. “I won’t touch anything.”
She didn’t look away from the little garden of branches and blossoms, but she nodded. The air smelled like blood and electricity, noisy with the buzzing of the gun.
When she ran the needle along Davenport’s hip, tiny dots came up, round and red and slick. Delicate. Myloria wiped them off with a rag as she went. Davenport gasped each time, but didn’t move. The flowers were pinker and more lovely than the real thing, with a certain ragged edge to the petals so that they almost seemed to flutter.
“Those are nice,” I said, watching them unfold. “But why are they all catching on fire?”
Myloria looked up this time, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I just do the tattoos like the ink tells me to, and sometimes it comes out meaning things, and sometimes it doesn’t. Only time will tell.”
Davenport was gripping the edge of the table, making little breathless noises, like sobbing.
I climbed onto the edge of the workbench and reached for her hand. “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble with your dad,” I said, letting her squeeze onto me as Myloria went over her skin with the gun.
“It’s all right,” Davenport whispered. “If it wasn’t for that, it would have been for something.”
The way she said it was so hopeless that it wasn’t even like she was asking for help, only sure that help was never coming.
“Why do you stay there with him?” I said, watching Myloria fill in the delicate veins on a leaf. “If it’s so bad?”
She rolled her head toward me, and her face was red and puffy with crying. “Where else am I supposed to live? Anyway, he’s been like that my whole life.”
“You could go somewhere else, couldn’t you? What about your mama? Doesn’t she have people?”
Davenport shook her head. “My dad won’t say anything about her except she’s dead. I mean, I think he won’t talk about her family because he knows I’d go there in a heartbeat, but whatever.”
Her voice wavered and I squeezed her hand harder.
I started to tell her that it would all be okay and not to cry, but Myloria was wiping away the last of the blood, covering the ink with a pad of gauze. “That will be enough for today, I think.”
Davenport rolled herself off the table and yanked her shorts up. Her face was still red and puffy, streaming with tears.
After she had gone, Myloria sighed, packing away her tools. “That poor, silly little girl.”
“I think she’s nice,” I said.
Myloria nodded. “So nice she doesn’t know what to do with herself, and right now, maybe the ink is it. I suppose she’s got to find some earthly way to drive her daddy crazy.”
“He wouldn’t want her to get a tattoo?”
Myloria shook her head. “That man would be happiest if she never left the house. This’ll be her way of getting back at him, and he won’t be able to do a thing about it, ’less he cuts it out of her skin.”
She said it lightly, but her mouth was tight. My hair was dripping down my back, soaking through my dress, and I shivered.
* * *
“Hey,” Shiny said, glancing up as soon as I came into our room. “Where were you last night? I kept hoping you were going to come home.”
I stood in the sad little slot of a bedroom, feeling heavy and sticky. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I was so tired suddenly that my eyes hurt, and everything about the room felt strangely off-balance. Shiny was sitting in the middle of the bed, with a plastic tray of paints and a deck of big, painted fortune-telling cards spread out all over the quilt. The floor around the bed was a sea of crumpled paper.
“What’s different in here?” I said, blinking in the arrows of light that filtered through the plank walls.
Shiny gave me an impish little smile. “I did it for you,” she said, pointing down at the bed, which was in pretty much the same spot as before, only I saw now that it was jacked up on four cinder blocks like a dead car. “I figured if you were going to be sleeping under there, you’d want a bit more room.”
I sat down on the corner of the mattress, taking care not to disturb the row of witch cards and trying to look more excited than I felt. “It was nice of you to think of that.”
Shiny shrugged and looked away, and I understood that this was her try at a real apology. She chewed her thumbnail, looking shamefaced. “What I said yesterday, about the—about the thing. I didn’t mean it.”
I fiddled with my damp hair, trying to work my fingers through, but it was like wire. “No, you did. But it’s okay. Maybe you should have.”
The cards were spread out in front of us, and when I reached for one, I saw it was handmade. Witch cards were usually the kind of knickknack you saw in tourist shops or movies about Gypsies, and I hadn’t known such a thing could be made by a regular person.
The picture on the card was a girl in an orange vest with a hunting knife in each hand, five others arranged in a ring around her head, their points all facing toward the center.
I held it up, feeling how heavy the cardboard was, how rough the edges were. “Did you make these?”
Shiny nodded, scraping them together in a stack. “Some. Not the ones of the old-timey people. Those belonged to Rae’s great-grandma, back in like the thirties. We found them in the Daltons’ Tuff shed last year, down in the bottom of some crate and wrapped in a wedding dress. A bunch were missing, though, and what was left was half-ruined with mildew. I told Rae I could probably fill out the missing ones.”
The cards were lovelier than they had any right to be, considering they were mostly scenes of the most everyday things, but they’d been made magical by Shiny’s way of seeing, and by the light, perplexing lines of her paintbrush.
“They’re pretty,” I said as she stacked them carefully and tucked them in the top of the dresser. “They’re really pretty.”
She smiled and cupped her hands over her shoulders so that her fingertips covered the places where Myloria had inked the wings. The gesture made her look uncommonly shy and not like normal, flashy Shiny at all.
“Did you want those?” I said suddenly. “Those tattoos. Did you ask Myloria to draw them?’
Shiny didn’t look up. “No one asks Myloria for any kind of tattoo. She just gives it to them. She does a picture of what she thinks they’re supposed to be.”
“She thinks you’re supposed to be an angel?”
Shiny smirked and shook her head. “She was just trying to make me not so fiery and figured I needed some air to soften me up.”
“Did it work?”
She raised her eyebrows but didn’t answer.
“So, Fisher didn’t ask for her to draw that tower then?”
Shiny threw back her head and let out a long, howling laugh. “Are you kidding? No one in their right mind would just walk out into the Willows and ask for a full-back tattoo of the tower of ruin. That’s practically the worst card in the witch deck. It’s like making some special request to be branded with bad luck and destruction.”
I thought about that. “Well, he does like to break stuff.”
She laughed again, but this time it was more of a giggle, and I felt glad to be able to say something about Fisher without her getting mad about it.
“Does that mean he needs destruction, or that he is destruction?”
“You’re stuck on him,” Shiny said, shaking her head. “Destruction is destruction, and either way, you’ve got that boy on your brain every minute.”
There w
as a stubborn streak in me that wanted to argue. I had a lot of other things filling up my head too. But since the moment he’d carried me out of the canning closet, they all came back to him in their various ways.
“I can’t help it,” I said finally.
Shiny rolled her eyes.
“What I mean is, I didn’t just decide to think about him. I’ve been thinking about him as long as I can remember. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been thinking about him forever.” I kicked my way through the drifts of crumpled paper that lay spread over the floor. “All those years I was down there, I was dreaming. And some of the dreams—or memories, even—were about a boy with muddy eyes and a light around him, and when he came to get me, it was sort of like I already knew him.”
Shiny leaned closer, watching me with her fingers twined together. “You dreamed about him before you knew him?”
“It wasn’t just him,” I said. “By the time I got out, I’d had so many dreams, it was like I already knew lots of things.”
She studied me with a worried line at the corner of her mouth. “Where did you go last night, really?”
“I went to his house, but it’s not like you think.”
Shiny raised her eyebrows. She didn’t say anything, but her expression was so doubtful she didn’t need to.
“He was hurt,” I said. “We were down in the hollow yesterday, and something bad happened. Like you said—like the world was coming apart. Like everything grew teeth.”
Shiny’s eyes were big and unblinking. “He took you with him, down in that place, with all the craft and the fiends and everything?”
I nodded, feeling wrung out and like I needed to curl up and sleep for a year. “And then got ruined for it when the hell dogs came out.”
“Well what does he expect, messing around down there?”
Her tone was brassy, like she was saying he’d gotten exactly what he deserved, but her eyes were scared, and I knew she was thinking about the fish, with its dripping spines and its teeth.