TWENTY
PERMISSION TO CROSS THE THRESHOLD
Jing crushed her can in her fist, tossed it to the floor, and crossed the room to stand in the center with me. She did a 360, gaze cutting through the crowd like hot razors. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “You seen her?”
“No.”
“Son of a bitch.” Jing cracked her knuckles, ripped her hands back through her hair. “We need to start soon. Call her.”
I curled my lip, shot up my brows. Ha, no. “Call her? Jesus, Jing, call her? Am I her fucking babysitter? If she ditched, she ditched.”
“Fuck that.” Jing took a step closer, cracked a raucous smile, spoke crisply enough to be heard through the sickening bassline. “Ladies and gents, we need ourselves a fearless volunteer. Step up, if you’re not too gutless for us.” She held up one of her hands, and it felt like a rallying cry—people turned away, or else looked on with smirks and awkward glances. No doubt, the crowd was having a mass flashback to last weekend.
The whole thing made me nervous. Ye olde random participant might ruin our whole circuit, shatter my concentration, dampen the magic. Make this whole thing a bust. Thinking about it made me feel like I’d dry-swallowed a AAA battery. No fucking thanks. This mass of flowy fabric felt smothering all of a sudden. It clogged my pores. My body couldn’t breathe. The hair on my arms stood up. I had a distinctive urge to find one of the speakers and stomp it.
The wolf-mask kid sauntered up. Long strides, shoulders forward, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of their Levi’s. I couldn’t really place their gender—shame on me for trying, but fucking whatever—because red flannel shirts do a decent job of swallowing a person’s body. Their jeans were shredded, maybe naturally—they were the kind of holes that came from skidding concrete and snagging chain-linked fences, not factory-reinforced aesthetic tattering. Sharpied high-tops.
Oh.
Wolf-head, who now stood at the edge of our circle, shoulders sloped, one leg crossed over the other, was Madeline. The edge of her sigil peeked out from under her sleeve. What the fuck had she been doing, lurking in the corner instead of saying hi?
I let out a little huff. Smiled crookedly, hoped it wasn’t as anxiety drenched as I felt. Yates’ brows shot up to her hairline, and she pulled her mouth into a dubious horizontal line, but I ignored her when she opened her mouth to comment. Blood was pooling in my temples. I stepped forward, reached out a hand. “Thought you wouldn’t show.”
Madeline gave me an exaggerated shrug. If she said something, it was smothered by the wolf mask, which she wasn’t taking any steps to remove. The big cartoony rubber fangs were motionless. Rubber yellow eyes stared unseeing. After a pause, she took my hand, and I dragged her toward her point on the sigil. Her hands were dry as chalk.
Daisy bounced on her toes like a prize fighter and moved her hands in fluid waves, an arc that curved from her wrists to her knuckles. She jammed the tip of her tongue between her incisors and dove downward, took a seat at her point, and held out her hands to either side of her. Jing and Yates exchanged a look before they sat. Took her hands in theirs. The two of them then reached for Madeline.
For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t play. She sat motionless, hands in her lap. Rubbed a thumb into her opposite palm. Her shoulders bobbed when she breathed. Daisy grinned at her, teeth bared in a show of dominance, and gave Madeline a delirious little nod. The whites of her eyes were enormous.
Madeline took Jing’s and Yates’ hands and the magic began.
It poured like ice down my back. My sides seized up with shivers as strong as convulsions, and my hands shrunk into fists. Copper on my tongue. Copper in my nose, in my jaw, down the seams of my throat. My arms quivered. My arms, then my shoulders, then my rib cage, and every button in my spine. I shook, quaked, thrummed like a plucked string. The robe was too hot. I wanted to take it in my fists and rip it off my spine, to stand mad and naked and panting. My skeleton was swelling beneath my skin, and it needed space to expand. I was like Alice. I was going to unfurl and grow twenty feet tall, bust through the walls and the ceiling with my immensity. My pulse was an industrial drill. It hammered quick enough that my teeth chattered, clacked together in hyperdrive.
I smiled so hard that my face ached.
Magic would be the death of me. I was wholly, unflinchingly fine with this. I cleared my throat, tossed back my head, and threw both my hands toward the vault of heaven.
“Who wants to see some fucking magic?”
A collective cry from the crowd. Nervous laughter, roars of approval, snickers and sneering and faux-cynicism—I relished it. My hair fell out of my hood, snarled around my cheeks, absorbed all the evil energies that flooded the corpselike room. Dancing had stopped, but the rush of it hadn’t—all the kinetics of thrashing and grinding alchemized into something else, something unearthly. The shadows glowed. The Scapegracer girls around me, gripping each other and Madeline tight, looked up in tandem. It wasn’t choreographed. Three faces split with enormous, monstrous smiles—even Yates, ever pretty, looked ooky and ravenous—and the rubber mask over Madeline’s head took on a shade of realism it hadn’t had before.
Drugs could not accomplish this. Nothing chemical could make my heart twist and deform and metamorphose into something this strange, this volatile. I was silly with it, enthralled. My voice didn’t sound like it should. It sounded like the voice in my head, like how my thoughts sound, like the whisper roll that plays when I read something.
“We are the Scapegracers, and the cosmos belongs to us.” I rolled my shoulders, wiggled my fingertips. “When we want something to happen, it happens. When we want to grab physics by the throat and shake it to death, we do. Fuck your perceptions. Forget about reality. Gravity isn’t relevant anymore, not to us.” Damn, did hubris taste nice against my tongue. I flared my nostrils. Cleared my throat. Spoke a little louder, diaphragm all in knots, and the girls joined in. “Higher.”
The chant was high and harsh. Jing and Yates and Daisy’s voices were distorted, only audible where the fricatives struck. Their consonants were clipped, discordant, bouncing between savage sopranos and low, wicked sighs. My vision splattered red. I was swaying, but I wasn’t sure how—the chant had a current and it rocked me. My organs threatened to burst out of my bones. I was too big for a human body to hold anymore. I was too swollen—magic marrow deep and throbbing, oozing glitter into my bloodstream, into my consciousness. “Gravity isn’t real. Gravity is optional. Gravity is a lie they told us when we were kids.”
Cameras flashed like a thousand dancing eyes in the darkness. They stung like pinpricks on my skin. I liked it. Every gasp, every curse and overexaggerated gesture from the crowd melted together into a single, dripping force. It was a mirror to bounce off of. My voice rattled my skull, echoed off the ceiling and the walls. “Scapegracer girls are impervious to gravity. Higher, higher—this whole house can’t manage us anymore. The world can’t manage us anymore.”
Something flittered in the corner of my eye, a liquidy movement blooming in silver, lavender, and baby blue. The robes. They dangled in a circle around me, loose and rippling, unhindered by legs, which were still crossed, floating somewhere around rib cage height.
Under my feet, the spray paint glowed like crimson floodlights. It illuminated the ceiling in a gory, glorious red, and it sparkled and waved like the glare off a swimming pool. People clapped and hollered, but that was far away, way on the other side of the world. All I could see were my Scapegracer girls, suspended in space. Chanting, grinning, glistening.
I could only see Jing’s face properly. Her eyes were rolled back, her mouth agape with chanting, her face flushed and flawless and raw. Was that what I looked like? Jing, whispering magic, breathing it, was a different kind of beautiful. A kind of beautiful too sharp to describe as beautiful. There was a magnitude of power in her, in how simultaneously relaxed and tense she was. Her hair twisted around her shoulders with no regard for logic, moving fluidly, floating like a bleach-kissed hal
o. Her lips were crooked, hiked higher on one side.
Beside her was the wolf-head. Fake teeth didn’t snap, rubber eyes didn’t blink. If Madeline was rapturous under there, she didn’t show it. Tendrils of inky black hair crept from underneath the mask, drifted upward like vines that twined up the rubbery neck and around the pointed ears. The body underneath was still, sneakers hanging limp from its ankles.
Then the wolf-head turned sideways. Madeline stayed like that, head whipped back, rubber snout jabbed out into the darkness, for just a second before she wrenched her hands out of Jing’s and Yates’ and curled them to her chest.
The spell snapped.
It sucker-punched me like a freight train through plaster. The world inverted, flipped red and crooked, and my insides wrenched around, rearranged. My hands found my knees. Fire quaked through my esophagus, flooded my shoulders with a sour feeling, and my tongue, suddenly too big for my teeth, tasted bitter and sick. The music was too loud. It closed in on my skull like a vice and squeezed, threatened to crack through bone and flatten my brains and send gore flying everywhere. I was about to splatter. People were screaming. I think they were happy, but I could barely make out the crowd.
Through the chaos, someone grabbed me. I still couldn’t see anything, but I could feel their nails in my wrists.
Something kept trying to lurch me forward, but I didn’t want to go. I dug my heels into the hardwood, but the pulling was desperate. Fingers gripped hard enough to leave marks. There was a yank, and my weight gave way. I crashed forward in the direction of the person pulling me. My vision spun. Monster-painted teenagers, half-cackling, half-horrified, kaleidoscoped everywhere I looked. Faces warped, distorted. I couldn’t recognize anyone, couldn’t match the beastly faces to names. My feet moved without my permission, one falling after the other.
We rounded a corner, and everything was dark.
Whatever force was dragging me did so faster. There were fewer bodies to navigate around, fewer wires to toe and jump. This part of our corpse house was cold. It smelled sweet, like rot and drywall. Whoever was pulling me stopped, and I stopped, too. There was a scraping, a clatter—the chairs we’d blocked the staircase with, they’d moved them aside. I was shoved up a set of stairs, boots smacking the planks unceremoniously, and they dragged the chairs back behind us. Put their hands between my shoulder blades and pushed.
Stillborn magic had stolen my center of gravity. I pitched forward, nearly smacking the floor, but they grabbed a fistful of my robe and caught me, hauled me upright. Put a hand on my shoulder to steady me, and kept it there as they climbed, bringing me with them.
It felt like I’d swallowed honeyed sawdust. My throat was raw, sticky thick, and my voice had to knife through the gloom to be heard. It was too hoarse, too raspy to sound like mine. I tasted copper on my teeth. “What are you doing?”
They didn’t say anything back. We’d reached the top floor, and they put an arm around my waist, hoisted me down the hall. My eyes were adjusting, but there wasn’t much to adjust to. We were going somewhere darker than where we’d been. A black hole in the shadows. A doorway.
They let go of me and my knees shot out. The floor came up around me and I smacked hardwood, mashed my floating ribs. My tongue swelled up, tasted red. I jerked myself up onto my hands and knees. The floor was clammy, slick with wet decay and tufts of something itchy.
They shut the door. They must’ve pulled a phone out, or a flashlight—the brightness stabbed my eyes and I shrunk back, tossed an arm over my face.
My eyes adjusted.
The wolf knelt in front of me. I could hear denim rustling against the floor, the squeak of folding boot leather. Then, they—she—spoke. “I’m sorry.” Low alto, melodic, rough around the edges like she was on the verge of tears.
I recognized the voice.
My heart lurched. I coughed and managed, “Madeline?”
She put down the phone. Pulled off her wolf mask and shook her head, let all that black hair fly loose. The blackest black I’d ever seen settled around her shoulders, split her face in odd places, looking like cracks. Eyeliner ran in rivulets down her cheeks. Her eyes were huge and splotchy, harsh pink framed with spider-legged lashes, and her brows knotted up in the center of her face. “I am so fucking sorry.”
“Madeline,” I wheezed, wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve, “what the fuck are you doing? What’s wrong?”
“I was gonna wait. I was going to wait and do this when we were alone. And, God, when I saw his car, I nearly bailed. It’s too dangerous, me being here. It would be easier to do it later. And, I mean, I wanted to spend more time with you. I like you, Sideways. God, I fucking like you.” Madeline spoke out of the corner of her mouth. She didn’t blink, didn’t look away, didn’t move those huge eyes off my face, but she started to shiver. Her whole body trembled, shuddering like a weathervane in a storm, and she reached out, put her hands on the back of my neck. “But he’s here, and that means he’ll be after you, too, and I couldn’t let that happen. I need you too much to let that happen. I need this for both of us, for every girl like us. Just, just know that I’m sorry. I mean that.”
Who was this he she was fixated on? “Madeline, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about—I’m not going anywhere. What is going on? Whatever it is, you can tell me.” There was a strange, tart twinge in my stomach. I shook my head, narrowed my eyes a touch, tried not to notice how chilly Madeline’s fingers were against my neck. How her fingertips were calloused as they scraped the base of my jaw. My heartbeat was too fast. I couldn’t pinpoint why. Everything was too much.
Madeline leaned forward. Kissed me between the eyes.
My lungs stopped working.
She hovered by my forehead, pressed her nose into my hairline. Her exhalation was harsh, clipped. Wandering. Whispering—she was whispering something. I couldn’t make it out, but she was saying the same phrase over and over again. The consonants tripped over each other.
The side of my neck burned where she held me with the hand I’d drawn her sigil on. The pain was immediate, electric. I jerked away from her, but her grip was too tight and dead magic made me groggy. She held me in place. I lifted my hands up, shoved at her shoulders, her chest, but my arms were numb and leaden. Flannel slipped through my fingers. The pain sharpened. It seared me now. My whole body recoiled. I spasmed, then thrashed—kicked out both of my legs, got my feet under me, tried to stand.
Pain ripped through me. My skin, at the point where she was burning me, bonded itself to her hand, and when I tried to stand up the skin pulled, threatened to tear. I froze, jaw stiff, eyes wide, fixed on the shape of Madeline in the dark. She whispered faster. I could see her face more clearly now—there was a red glow on her nose and across her shoulders. It floodlit her features in a violent, glittering crimson. It struck her eyes. Maybe that’s why she was crying. Her makeup, black as her hair, dripped down her cheeks, dripped off her chin in toxic, muddy droplets. Drops landed on my neck. She looked at me and curled her lip.
“It isn’t personal,” she said. Stabbed her tongue in her cheek. “I’ll give it back. I’ll take back what’s mine, and then you can have what’s yours. You have my word on that.” Her voice was ragged. Her breath was hot, tainted with an edge of alcohol and something sugary, something that made me nauseous. “Hold still.”
“Stop,” I hissed, and I thrashed again, lurched backward. Her hand was still adhered to my neck, and she came crashing after me. My head smacked the floor, and one of her knees struck my abdomen, slammed the air out of my lungs. I sputtered. I saw spots. I tried to writhe and kick her away, but my arms and legs weren’t moving like they were supposed to. They were numb. Everything was numb, save for the pain at my throat, which lit up my nerves like the Fourth of July.
Madeline scrambled up, adjusted herself, pinned me in place with her legs. She straddled my ribs, kept my breathing shallow. Curved her spine like a candy cane, leaving her face dangling lash length from mine. Her hair spi
lled everywhere, curtaining the two of us in a glossy, brilliant red. She kept one hand, the one with the sigil that was stuck to my skin, on my neck, and grabbed my jaw with the other. Shoved until my cheek pressed the hardwood. All I could see was her hair, her glowing hair, but I could feel where she was looking, regardless. She was watching the place where her fingers met my skin. She was transfixed.
Something flickered off and died. It was like she’d taken a wrench to my sternum, pried my rib cage apart, and tore my sneering, hissing heart out of its resting place. My body stopped feeling like a body. It wasn’t mine anymore. It was nothing.
I rolled my eyes up to see her. Her hand wasn’t on my neck anymore. It was aloft, inches above my face. The sigil I’d drawn on her was bloody red, and between her curled fingertips glimmered a light, brilliant and blinding as a sliver of sun. She looked at it instead of me. Then she tossed back her head, opened her mouth, and lowered the light between her jaws.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make a sound.
The glow slid down Madeline’s throat, illuminating its path from her neck to her chest, where it vanished. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I couldn’t feel my tongue. Madeline let go of me, and I didn’t lash out and strike her, because I couldn’t make my arms move. My body felt crushed, like I’d been hit by a train, or hurled down a well in a bag. If there was sensation, that sensation was the ache, and nothing more.
“You’re prickly,” she said. Her voice was odd. Breathy, silky. Her eyes rolled back in her head. “It feels like barbed fire all the way down. Fire with fangs and hooks and chunks of glass.” Madeline ran her hands down her throat, then slid them down to wrap around her torso. She gave herself a squeeze. “You’re like eating electricity, Sideways.”
The Scapegracers Page 27