When Reese spoke, I nearly tripped over myself.
“Hey, bumblebee, come and look at this.”
It took a moment to find him, ducked down by the base of the forsythia line marking the boundary into our backyard. I made my way to him and crouched. “What?”
“Here.” His finger pointed at the yellow grass. It was spotty, with whole chunks of earth visible in places. “If you imagine the dirt in a pattern, like this”—he traced his finger in the air over it—“does that look like part of a rune to you?”
“Oh my God. Do you think Dad did it?”
“Yeah. It kind of looks like the triple star thing in the protection spell. And check this out.” He stood, pulling me with him, and backed me up. “See how the dead grass is right there along the bushes? I think it goes all the way around the house. A circle of dead grass.”
My mouth dropped open, and I looked in either direction. It was hard to make out, because all the grass was dying as the season changed. “How did you even notice this?”
“When I was”—Reese flashed a look up at the sky—“flying, I thought I noticed it around the whole house. Discoloration. I told you I saw things differently up there.”
“Go around that way.” I pointed to the south. “I’ll go this way. See if there are more.”
It was like a yellow brick road now that I knew what to look for. A golden path all around our property. Just beside the driveway gate, I found another patchy area. I traced the rune with my eyes.
We met up a few minutes later. My fingers were shaking a little, so I hid them in my pockets. I said, “I found another one a quarter of the way.”
“Me too.” Reese’s solemnity told me he wasn’t any more thrilled than I was about this. “It probably died because he did.”
My knees locked before I fell. He was right. The grass hadn’t been this dead in the spring or early summer. Mom would have noticed and thrown a fit.
“It was to protect us,” I whispered, thinking about the mechanics of the magic so that I didn’t have to think about the dead grass. “It makes sense if it’s the same rune as from the protection spell. Dad was protecting the house.”
Reese was silent, but I know he was thinking, Not well enough.
August 10, 1905
I saw how he looked at her last week, when we tended to her father’s servants.
We were there for an outbreak of influenza, that same sickness that had nearly claimed me, had shown me to Philip. He thought to heal them, as always, but I refused to let him discover a new girl as he had discovered me.
She was the daughter of the house, the only child. Miss Maria Foster. She brought us cool tea and cloths for washing. His eyes lingered on her lips and the long, dark lashes that fluttered on her cheek. When he thanked her, it was with gentler words than he’d ever used with me, and a much too long touch of hands.
And then he did not forget her. I sat beside him, tickling his ear, combing my fingers through his hair, teasing his attention to me. But he would only continue writing in that blasted diary of his. In it, I saw her name. I tore the diary from him and threw it across the room. He lifted me up and said I was improper and unpleasant. I screamed at him, that he’d prefer the soft graces of a stupid rich girl to someone like me, devoted to him and to his secrets.
He said I was right. He did prefer her graces.
I left. I left his house that night and returned to hers. I waited until she was at her window, and when I saw her face, I threw myself into her. My own body fell against the alley wall, and I didn’t care. I was Miss Maria Foster. I stood in her corset and crinoline, in her little boots, and I breathed through her lips with her very own lungs.
When you’re treated differently, you change. I had a maid to come see to my dinner gown and another to serve my plate. I was bowed to and my chair pulled back. Mr. Foster patted my hand, and Mrs. Foster chided me for taking too much, but kindly. And my new brothers—they teased me, and when we retired to a sitting room it was I they asked to play. I cannot play any piano, of course, but I agreed to read them poems from a collection of Tennyson. One of the dinner guests, a Mr. Dunbar, was attentive, holding my elbow and chatting with me about all manner of things. I fear I left them all with the sense that Miss Maria was weary, for I was forced to put off many of the topics. It is no wonder Philip likes her—she is not only graceful but sweet and educated. I can tell by the way she is treated. Everyone admires her.
As I retired upstairs, I was dizzy and overcome with the sensation that I might float out of her body. Quickly, I took her to her window so that I might return to my own body. There in the alley, on all fours, I vomited repeatedly and had to remain for some time.
But I have gone back every day this week, and borrowed Miss Maria Foster. She has told no one of her blackouts, but that will not last long. I must use her while I can.
In her, I am admired by all.
NICHOLAS
Dad and Lilith sat on the back patio drinking margaritas. After stashing the spell book behind some dried-out flower bushes, I headed for them.
The margarita pitcher glinted neon green in the sun, and they had a small plate of salt and limes. Lilith was, as far as I could tell, staring off into space while Dad skimmed through a pile of paper with a red pen and highlighter. I hoped he was reading testimonies and not editing a manuscript for her or anything so cute and couple-like. “Hey,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand. It didn’t alleviate any of the tension tightening around my skull.
“Nick. How was your afternoon?” Dad set the pen down.
“And your car?” Lilith added, skimming a finger around the rim of her margarita glass.
“Fine, and yeah, it’s all fixed.” My voice was tight because my head hurt. It wasn’t the magic, either. It was memory pushing behind my eyes. Mom pushes her fingers against my forehead and says, “I banish thee from this body.” A snap-pull in my stomach and I’m sitting on the floor looking at Mom with her hand covering a dog’s face. Our dog Ape. From my goddamn dream.
“Oh, good,” Lilith was saying. “But if we ever need to, we can tow it up to Cape Girardeau and avoid the local color.”
I scowled. “Isn’t that why we’re here? Local color?”
She eyed me over the rim as she sipped.
“Dad, I need to talk to you for a minute.”
“Sure, Nick, what’s up?”
I paused meaningfully. “Um. Alone?”
Lilith slid out of the patio chair. “I’ll get some bruschetta. I was just thinking how lovely tomatoes sounded.”
After she vanished through the glass doors, Dad and I just looked at each other.
Dad, even in his Saturday, relax-around-the-house state, could have walked into a courtroom and not been out of place. Ironed jeans, button-up shirt, hair combed. And he waited for me to speak. God forbid he waste words prodding me.
Spit it out, Nick, Christ. Where to start? My throat was dry. I didn’t want to talk to him about this. But I couldn’t talk to Mom or Grandpa, and surely—surely—he knew something about what had happened to me here. Either that or he sucked even more than I expected. I rolled onto the balls of my feet and then back onto my heels. “Why didn’t I know Grandpa?”
His brow lowered. Was he scowling? “Your mother didn’t speak to him.”
The sun warmed my shoulders and neck as I stood there, trying to boil my thoughts down into a question Dad could possibly understand. “I know, but why? What happened that time she brought me down here? When I was seven?”
“What do you remember?”
“Dad.”
“You were sick the whole time, Nick. Your mother told me that her father acted as though you’d been cursed or something. Went crazy, she said. Cut your cheek with his knife, and she brought you home.”
But it had been Mom who cut me. I remembered that clearly enough. Her comforting smile, her promises, as the blade sliced my cheek. What had she been doing? The cut on my finger itched.
“Nick,
what’s wrong, son?”
My distress must have been scrawled over my face like I was in a made-for-TV movie. “Don’t you know how she got all those injuries?” Was he lying to me? Or had she kept it a secret? Why the hell didn’t he know? Hadn’t he cared?
“She was very clumsy, which you fortunately didn’t inherit. She always cut herself in the kitchen and on whatever little sharp surface was poking out. Paper, nails, splinters—you name it, she managed to get her fingers sliced up with it. Why?”
He didn’t know. Hadn’t wanted to know. So he would never have to try to help her. “I just remember all the Band-Aids.”
Dad’s lips bent down. “She stopped with all that when you were very little. Before—”
“Before the first time in the bathtub,” I supplied. Right after we visited Grandpa.
He nodded once. “This is a strange conversation for such a nice day, Nick.”
The urge to cuss at him pressed behind my teeth. Instead I gave him a suitable excuse, one that his stupid Vulcan brain might pretend to understand. “Well, I’m here where she lived, you know? Going to school where she went to school.”
“That’s true.”
“I think about her here sometimes, and just wonder if she’d have been so nuts if she hadn’t left.”
Without moving anything but his left eyebrow, Dad managed to look sad. But he wasn’t getting pity points from me. “It was this place that she was always looking to escape, Nick. Her history and her family. She never stopped trying to leave her family here, even when she made a new one.”
What had been so horrible that she’d needed to try so freaking hard? Abuse? Had it been Grandpa? Or the magic? Something in the cemetery, like Eric suggested? Me? “She never said anything to you about what she hated?” You never asked?
Dad’s growing irritability was plain in the tight sigh that huffed through his nose. “Nick, what she said only became less and less lucid. I didn’t want to remember. I’m sorry.”
Yeah, you are.
The sliding glass door opened, and Lilith emerged with a platter of toast and chopped tomatoes. “You boys finished with your tête-à-tête? Hungry?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That looks delicious.” Dad stood to pull Lilith’s chair out for her. God.
“Why, thank you, darling.”
I asked, “Which room was Mom’s? Do you know?”
We raised our eyes to the back of the farmhouse. My attic window was open, but all the others hid their interiors with curtains. It was Lilith who said, “That last room there on the right. When you go all the way down the hall on the second floor.”
“How do you know that?” It came out more sharply than it should’ve.
But Lilith’s face remained light. “Her name was painted in the closet. I found it during the initial sweep with my contractor in July.”
I should have apologized. It was a totally rational reason. Dad clearly thought I should. But I ignored it and went around front to grab the spell book before going inside.
All the way at the end of the second-story hall was my mom’s old room. I paused in front of the door, one hand against the wood. Closing my eyes, I leaned my head against it. “You used him, Donna! How dare you!” “Daddy, I had to, I didn’t have a choice.” “You did—he isn’t your familiar, he’s a child. Your child. My grandchild.” “There was no other way.”
My hands shook and my face hurt from the contorted expression holding back all this sudden anger. I remembered crawling out of bed, covered in sweat and shaking, just like I was now, but from a fever. And I’d heard them arguing. Heard Mom crying. Sobbing.
Get out. Take that boy home, and you stop this. You’re evil, girl, what you’re doing is evil.
But they were gone. This was only a memory.
A few deep breaths later, I pushed inside.
The room was empty. Maybe twelve by twelve, with plain cotton-white walls and some old furniture shoved into the corner.
Hoping to find Mom’s name, I threw open the closet door. But the whole interior had been painted to match the eggshell color of the room. What did Lilith have against color, anyway? I flung open the curtains and glared down into the backyard. It was a bad angle for directing my hatred at Lilith, so I looked out toward Silla’s house. But the forest was too high. I couldn’t even see the cemetery from here. Only trees with brownish-green leaves.
I sat in the center of the room with the spell book. It was heavy in my hands. Carefully, I flipped through. Some of the symbols looked vaguely familiar, like versions of spells I knew. Like a slightly different style, based on the same system. The ingredients were mostly the same as the ones in Mom’s lacquered box. Not that I’d really doubted, but this was definitely the same kind of magic.
Robert Kennicot.
The name was signed at the bottom of one of the pages.
I dropped the book, and it hit the hardwood with a crack that echoed in the empty room.
“Robbie Kennicot,” Mom whispers. I lean against her knee, pressing my hands onto the floor next to her mirror. The glass distorts, and I open my mouth as Mom’s reflection disappears into gray clouds. A new face is there, a man’s. I don’t know him. He’s dorky-looking, with little round glasses. I think they’re weird because the lenses are pink. “Oh, Robbie,” Mom says. A splash of water hits the glass, and in a snap like lightning Mom’s face is back. She turns the mirror over and touches my cheek. “My baby. We’re going to save him, aren’t we, Nicky?”
I flung myself to my feet and dashed upstairs for the lacquered box. I grabbed a handheld mirror from the bathroom, and matches. Salt from the kitchen and Lilith’s bag of tea candles from the pantry. I knew exactly what spell I was going to do, and I didn’t need the damn spell book for it. I remembered this one.
I remembered all of them.
Like something had blown open, or been torn down, I remembered the lessons from my childhood that I’d tried so freaking hard to forget. Where to buy herbs, how to dry your own, how to draw what I wanted when I couldn’t spell it. That rhyming helped focus the intention. That a drop of blood on the earth anchored you so that you wouldn’t be so slammed after the spell. Mom’s words rushed through me in a huge roar, and I couldn’t hear them all but understood them anyway.
My veins burned. The temperature of the room was a hundred degrees.
I set my spell up quickly. Salt circle, candles at the four corners. I sprinkled dried yarrow flowers into my hand from their jar and crushed them over the mirror.
With Mom’s quill, I pricked my forefinger and smeared the blood onto the face of the mirror in the appropriate rune. Underneath the hand mirror went the last postcard from Mom, which I’d tucked into the lid of the magic box when it had arrived eight months ago. Her loopy writing said, The desert suits me, Nicky, and it’s so easy to get lost—which is nice if you’re used to being lost. I love you. Mama. I put the mirror flat on the floor and stared through the thin smudge of my blood. My hands pressed on either side, just as they had when I was a boy, as I crouched over it and whispered her name onto the drying rune. Like I was trying to see through one of those 3-D images, I unfocused my eyes and my own features blurred.
“Donna Harleigh,” I said. “Mom.”
A breeze brushed the hairs on my forearms. I heard wind through leaves and young laughter. In the mirror, my eyes faded out and were replaced by even darker ones, in a face older and narrower than mine. Her hair snaked over her forehead, and she reached up a hand to sweep it away. The motion pulled back her sleeve, and tiny silver scars shone against her wrist. She was smiling.
The image snapped away.
Only my own angry eyes stared back at me from the mirror.
August 23, 1905
I brought her here, to Philip. He’d gone to see her twice, pretending to bring the house more physick. Both times leaving me at home alone. He was falling in love with her, and I would make it me.
I rang the bell to my own home and he answered, surprise wr
itten plain on his handsome face. I made her smile. “Come in, Miss Foster,” he said, stumbling a little.
I did, offering my hand.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
The awe in his eyes was so overwhelming and ridiculous I laughed. He started back, and I caught his face between my hands. “Oh, Dr. Osborn, I adore you.” And I kissed him.
For a moment, he let me, his hands soft on my waist, welcoming my lips and the sweet smell of Miss Foster’s perfume. Then he pushed back, still gently—he never is so gentle with me!—and said, “Miss Foster, I should speak with your father.”
But before I could get a word out, he froze. “Josephine!” he hissed.
“How did you know?” I was amazed, and danced back, laughing.
“Your eyes.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Your eyes, Josie. How could you?”
I twisted Miss Foster’s face into a snarl. “You would marry her! You would give over everything we have for her. Because she is gentle and sweet and STUPID.”
His fingers tightened on his elbows, the knuckles whitening. “Come with me now, Josephine.”
We returned to the Foster house, and I left Miss Foster there, choking on her own fears for her health. When I opened my own eyes, Philip slapped me. “Never use her again. Never anyone else, Josephine. I did not teach you these gifts so that you might hurt others.”
“You hurt me.” I flung my arms out. “You promise me everything and then drop it the moment you see a lovely girl. Who is everything that I am NOT!”
“You cannot be her; you can only be your conniving, jealous self.”
Before furious tears betrayed me, I left him in the alley.
I gave him several hours to cool off, and myself, as well. Then I brought him a bottle of his favorite brandy. He took it wordlessly and poured us each a glass. We sat down and were quiet for some time. My brandy was nearly gone when I finally asked, “What was in my eyes?”