Fiendish

  “I’m taking her down to the Blackwood place.”

  Right away, the other two began to argue, talking over each other. “No, no way. You can’t go messing with hexers and fiends. It’s no business of Myloria Blackwood’s that we found some crooked girl down in some burned-out house.”

  Fisher slid his hands underneath my back. “It’s Myloria’s sister that lived out here, and by my count, that makes it her business. So I’m taking this one down there, and if you’re going to help, then help. If you’re not, you can find your own way home.”

  Without another word, he scooped me up, one arm hooked at my knees and the other around my waist. When he lifted me, the shoulder of my nightgown split wider. The air felt damp and cool against my skin.

  “Here,” he said, jostling me higher against his chest. “Grab on around my neck.”

  “Why don’t they like me?” I whispered, getting my arms up, feeling around for his shoulder. “What’s wrong with me? I never did anything to anyone.”

  Fisher was quiet for a second and when he answered, he sounded strange.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “They’re just nervous about how your eyes are sewed shut.”

  THE BLACKWOOD HOUSE

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fisher carried me out of the cellar.

  At first, I was so overcome by the rush of sunlight and good air that it was hard to think of much. But even as Fisher reached the top of the stairs and stepped down into the yard, my wonderment was fading and I needed, more than anything, to look around.

  I wanted to see the pastures behind the house, speckled blue with morning glories, and my special corner of the garden where I was allowed to dig, and the tupelo tree that shaded the porch, and if the little green birdhouse I’d painted to look like our own house was still hanging in its branches.

  I tried again and again to open my eyes, and the harder I tried, the more decidedly I knew that Fisher had been telling me the truth.

  “Well, that’s a vexing thing,” I said, and I’d meant it to sound brave, but all that came out was a whisper. “They really are sewed shut.”

  “I think once the thread’s out, they’ll be fine,” he told me, but he was quiet a minute before he said it. The way he stopped to pick his words only made me sure that things were very bad. “You’ll be fine. Just hang on. I’m taking you to someone who can figure out who you are and where you come from.”

  I wanted to tell him it wasn’t that complicated, that I came from the cellar, from right where he’d found me. That this was my home.

  “My aunt Myloria,” was all I said. “That’s what you mean. You’re taking me to Myloria Blackwood.”

  He didn’t answer, but hitched me higher in his arms and walked a little faster.

  The only way I knew what direction we were headed was by the sun on my face—the patches of shade as we moved in and out of the sycamore trees that grew along the ditch. I could tell by the crunch of his boots that the driveway out to the main road was grown over with weeds.

  His arms were warm and he held me tight enough that I could feel him breathing. My face was against his shoulder and he hadn’t put his shirt back on. His skin was slick against my cheek, and even when my neck started to hurt, part of me was perfectly fine to keep smelling the warm, dusty smell of him.

  But there was another part that wanted to get down. The way his arm moved when he walked was rubbing the side of my face. My legs ached now. My feet were tingling like they’d been crammed into church shoes for too long.

  When we finally stopped, Fisher bent and laid me down on something metal. It was smooth as a piece of hard candy, warm from the sun. I felt around for the edges with my fingertips and understood that I was lying across the hood of a car.

  I could hear him nearby, crunching around in the weeds, jingling keys and opening doors. Then he scooped me back up and arranged me in the passenger seat.

  As soon as he’d dropped down in the driver’s seat, there was a low rumble, coughing and snarling, getting louder. The engine roared and we lurched forward, then the whole world seemed to fall away and there was only the wind, whipping by with fantastic speed, tearing at my hair. Almost too much air to breathe.

  The drive took a long time, or else no time at all. The darkness of the canning closet had made me confused about things like time, like I couldn’t feel it passing or count the minutes anymore.

  When Fisher parked and hauled me out of the car, I tried to tell myself that I only liked the feel of him because it was so good to not be walled up in a canning closet, but it was other things, too. He smelled like green and sun and goodness, and there was plenty to like about the way his shoulder fit against the side of my face.

  Then he was jostling me higher, pounding on someone’s door.

  We’d been waiting long enough for Fisher to start shifting his weight from foot to foot when a voice spoke from somewhere deep inside the house, sweet and strange and familiar. “Who is it?”

  “Eric Fisher, ma’am. I’ve got something that you’re going to want to see.”

  For a moment, there was nothing. Then the voice called back, “Come on in.”

  As soon as Fisher stepped inside, the light behind my eyes got darker. His boots echoed on the floorboards as he made his way through the house, and then someone else was with us.

  Her footsteps were light, and she smelled like roses and mint and the warm, dusty smell of attics. “Oh, my word.”

  For a second, no one said anything else.

  Then the woman let out a long breath and stepped closer. “Who is that?” she said. “What happened to her eyes?”

  “Don’t know, but I’m pretty sure she belongs to you. Me and the Maddox boys found her down in the DeVore house. Is there someplace I should set her?”

  For one strange second, the woman seemed to disappear. No movement or breath, no sound at all.

  Then she spoke from across the room, loud and shrill. “And you saw fit to bring her here?”

  Fisher stepped farther into the room and laid me down on something hard, covered in a cloth so rough it felt like a potato sack. “I had to bring her somewhere. What did you want me to do, leave her? Anyway, the Maddox brothers are way too superstitious to go around making trouble. They probably think you’ll witch them or something. They won’t say anything.”

  From across the room, Myloria spoke in a whisper. “Eric Fisher, I do not want this creature in my house.”

  But her voice seemed to fall apart in the middle. She sounded so afraid that it made me frightened too, and I squeezed my hand tight around the little cloth bag.

  Fisher stood over me, resting his hand on the top of my head. “I don’t think it’s got much to do with what you want,” he said, and the rough little tug when his fingers got caught in my hair was like the shiver when a cat licks your hand. I was just so grateful that someone in the world could stand to be near me. “I’m not concerned with what you all are doing out here—that’s your business—but I’m pretty sure she’s one of your people.”

  The way he said the last part was as final as goodbye. Suddenly, all I knew was that I didn’t want him to go, and at the same time, I understood he was already walking out, and when he did, I’d be alone with a woman who could barely stand to be in the same room with me.

  When he left, the house felt hollow, like the air after a thunderclap. We were alone—so alone that the whole kitchen seemed to echo.

  Out in the yard, the car started up, roaring away in a storm of engine noise and gravel. Then, silence. In it, I was suddenly so afraid that I was still in the closet—that I had always been there and would never be anyplace else. I fumbled with my hands, reaching for the bricks, already half-convinced I felt the roots wrapped tight around my wrists. The stillness was so bottomless it made my chest hurt.

  Then, Myloria moved closer. I could feel her standin
g over me, but couldn’t see her edges through my eyelids the way I had with Fisher. When I tried, all I got was a broken clatter, fuzzing at me like a TV, but I couldn’t tell if that meant something special about her or something special about him.

  She made a low, unhappy sound—a breathing out. Then she bent over me and began to pick away the glass from around my eyes. Her hands were cool, and very careful, like she was worried I’d try to bite her. Next there was a cold pressure, followed by two hushed snips, soft as whispers. I tried to hold still, but her fingers were tickling my eyelids. They left a nagging itch, deep in my skin, and then I understood. She was pulling out the threads.

  The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a burst of light so warm and red it could have been the sun or someone’s beating heart. I stared up at it, waiting for the room to come clear.

  Then I blinked and the light above me was just a water-spotted lampshade made of red paper and dried flowers. In the middle, one flickering bulb swung gently on a plastic cord.

  I was lying in a dim little kitchen. The curtains were pulled and only a sliver of light showed between them. At the sink, my aunt Myloria stood with her back to me.

  Her hair was so dark it was almost black, arranged in a messy knot on top of her head. She had on a checkered halter top that tied at the neck and a pair of men’s undershorts with an ivy pattern. Her back was bare, so covered in tattoos that her whole skin seemed to be crawling with a tangle of blue-green snakes. Every inch of her was skinny, skinny, skinny.

  I braced my hands on the table and sat up. “Myloria?”

  She turned. Her collarbone showed and she had shoulders like a skeleton. Her face was beautiful, but in a sharp, unhealthy way, all jaw and cheekbones.

  “How do you know my name?” she said, and now her voice was a long way from sweet. “What were you doing in my sister’s house?”

  “Don’t you know who I am?” I whispered, gazing around at the peeling wallpaper and the chipped porcelain sink. The faucet was rusting, and underneath, there was a wet-looking rag tied around the bend in the pipe.

  Myloria stared back at me—a blank, awful stare. I didn’t know what to do or say. I was dressed in a raggedy nightgown, sitting on a kitchen table, and my elegant, glamorous aunt now just looked used-up and hungry.

  “I’m Clementine,” I whispered. “I’m your niece.”

  She looked at me like I’d told her I was the president. “How dare you. How dare you come into my house and dishonor my sister. How dare you profane her memory.”

  Her voice shook. I understood that people only talked about dishonoring someone’s memory when that person was dead.

  The weight of it sat in my chest like a stone. I knew that it should hurt. And it did, but it wasn’t a breathless, skinned-raw hurt. It dug and bit at me. It ached.

  I’d spent so many days—years—in a fog of sadness for my mother, knowing with a slow, ugly certainty that she was gone, but I hadn’t really known it in my heart until now.

  Myloria stood with her arms around herself. In one hand, she still held a little pair of gold-colored sewing scissors.

  “Don’t you remember me?” I whispered, and it sounded pitiful.

  But she didn’t have to say a word. It was all there in her eyes. She didn’t.

  “Please, you have to. I used to go around with Shiny all the time. I used to sleep over in the summer and make waffles and lemonade in your kitchen!”

  “You’re a devil and a liar,” she said in a thin, shaking voice. “But you can’t work your tricks on me. My sister never had any children.”

  I didn’t know how to argue. The fact that I was sitting there wasn’t a thing that needed to be argued. I was looking across the kitchen at my own aunt, and still, she was acting like I didn’t exist.

  “Where’s Shiny?” I said. “Is Shiny here?”

  Myloria only backed away, toward the other side of the room where an ancient round-cornered refrigerator hummed softly and a dark, narrow doorway led out of the kitchen.

  I swung myself off the table, keeping my hands out to steady myself.

  “Shiny!” I yelled. “Shiny, are you here?”

  Myloria stood in the corner by the refrigerator, still clutching the scissors. “Stop! Stop it right now! Don’t you even talk to her!”

  I was about to yell again when a voice answered from the dark little hall behind Myloria. “What in the hell is going on?”

  A girl was standing in the doorway. She had high, savage cheekbones and a face like a movie star. She looked like Myloria—not Myloria now, but a memory I had. Her hair was dark and glossy, making wild spirals all the way down her back. Her eyes were like two hot black cinders. Everything about her seemed graceful and long-boned, all wrong against the crooked walls and the cracked plaster.

  For a long time, she just studied me. Then she said, in the flattest, slowest voice, “My God.”

  Her voice was terrible, like someone at the edge of a high cliff staring down into the wondrous nothing.

  “Shiny?” I said. But I sounded slow and full of doubt.

  The girl in front of me couldn’t be my cousin. My Shiny was eight years old. My Shiny was bossy and bratty, but sweet, too. She made dolls out of cornhusks and set them floating away down the creek in summer and tied grasshoppers and cicadas to strings for me so I could fly them like tiny buzzing kites. My Shiny was a little girl, and I’d missed all the minutes and the years between then and now.

  She nodded, but there was an emptiness in her eyes that filled me with despair. I’d been saved from the dark, only to come home to a world that didn’t even know me. I had no people, no family. Nothing.

  Then, with a high, breathless scream, Shiny launched herself across the kitchen and threw her arms around my neck, heedless of the state of my nightgown, or the glass stuck to the front of it, or the way I was covered in soot.

  Her hair smelled bright and sticky like hairspray, but she smelled like candy, too, like the times we used to walk into town for saltwater taffy from Spangler’s. Like the memory of a smell, or maybe even the actual thing, and nothing that had happened all morning mattered at all, because her arms were fierce and warm, and her cheek was pressed against mine.

  With a shaky breath, she let me go, holding me at arm’s length. “Oh my God, this is real. It’s really real.”

  Over in the corner, Myloria only hugged herself tighter, shaking and shaking her head. “Bastiana,” she said. “Go to your room.”

  Shiny took her hands off my shoulders and turned to face her. “What is wrong with you? This is your family.”

  Myloria stood against the wall, looking like someone had slapped her. “This is some kind of ugly business, baby. We’re looking at the worst kind of craft, and you act like you can’t even see it, like you don’t know the trouble it will bring, people spreading all kinds of lies and gossip, so happy to talk their heads off over any crooked doings in this house.”

  Shiny tossed her hair out of her face, looking ferocious. “I’m not an idiot, Myloria, but we are not throwing her out. This is my cousin.”

  Myloria drew herself up, tall and frail. “You have no cousin.”

  Shiny gave her a scorching look that seemed to last a lifetime. “I have been telling you for ten years that Clementine was real—that she was a real person—and now that she’s right in front of you, you still want to go around acting like I made her up?” She turned her back on Myloria and reached for my hand. “Come on, let’s get you fixed up. And ignore her. She’ll be better in a minute.”

  “How do you know?”

  Shiny sighed and looked away. “Because she mostly is. And if she isn’t, sometimes I just have to pretend she will be.”

  Her hand was so warm it was almost hot, tugging me along. The little cloth bag was still sitting in the middle of the table and I reached for it, not trusting it, but not wanting to let
it go, either.

  SHINY

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Whereas the kitchen had been shabby, the hall was entirely ruined. It was papered in a striped pattern that might have been nice once, but was now burned black in huge smudges, peeling down in strips. The floor slanted under my bare feet and the paint had blistered up from the baseboards and started to flake off in ragged scales, like a snakeskin.

  I followed Shiny through the house, wondering how anyone could live in a place like this. Doorways interrupted the burned walls now and then, but all of them were boarded up.

  We turned a corner that led nowhere except to the end of another useless hall. There was a heap of cardboard boxes sitting piled in the corner, and Shiny dug through them. They were full of old clothes, and not old like the shirts at the back of my mama’s closet. They were old like the antique store, or like something straight out of the movies.

  Shiny pulled out a rumpled green dress and tossed it at me.

  “Most of this stuff used to belong to Grandma Emmaline and hasn’t been in style since about the dust bowl, but it should fit all right,” she said. “But first, you are a pure mess. Before you do anything, you need to get washed.”

  The bathroom was at the far end of the house from the kitchen, little and dark, like everything else. There was no window, only a deep, old-fashioned bathtub and a pink toilet. No mirror and no sink. The tub had long-toed animal feet and took up nearly the whole room in a way that tended to suggest it hadn’t always been there. That this had once been a powder room, but someone had dragged the tub in from someplace else and hooked it up where the sink used to be.

  The blue-fairy nightgown was impossibly small, stuck to my body like another skin. Both the shoulder seams were out and the lacy hem that used to brush the floor only came down to my knees. Shiny wrestled with the zipper, yanking so hard the plastic teeth tore apart. Then she ducked out of the room and left me to deal with the state I was in.

  I ran the faucet and washed. My arms were covered in ash up to the elbows, like I had on smudgy gray gloves. My hair was one big knot, but with no mirror or brush, it was hard to work out the tangles. I wrung it under the faucet until the cherries and the soot washed away and the water ran clear.