He felt chilly under my skin. Delacroix House? Mr. Scratch nestled himself between the rungs of my rib cage. Just my luck.
TWENTY-TWO
ABOUT THAT HOLE IN YOUR HEART
My body wasn’t crying anymore, and I certainly wasn’t running, but my abdomen screamed like I’d just sobbed through a marathon. I was in the passenger seat of Jing’s car, and the world rushed by my windows in a slurry of night-muted color, but I felt far away. Felt myself finally slowing down, panicking about safety, about whether or not he’d find me here, whether or not he could see me, about how long I could stay.
Those weren’t my thoughts. They were Madeline’s. Guess she was having a bad evening, too, huh?
Yates had called Delacroix House as soon as we got in the car. She told the receptionist exactly what we needed—that we were a bunch of witches who’d had a run in with one of their employees and also a witchfinder and now one of us was without a specter; that we didn’t know where else to go, that we needed to talk to Maurice, it was urgent.
The receptionist had apparently gone very quiet, said that she would tell Maurice right away and we didn’t have to worry, that they’d hold the door for us and make sure we got whatever help we needed.
At least, that’s what Yates said they said.
We were nearing the house now. My brain zigzagged between not wanting to focus on being in a car and not wanting to focus on being inside of Madeline Kline. I tried to pick the third option, which was listening to Mr. Scratch awkwardly work his way around my circulatory system, which he clearly thought inferior to flowing between paper signatures.
It’s similar, I think, he was saying, from the inside of the top of my head. You’ve got a spine. And skin—plenty of devils have books made of skin. It’s usually stretched and shaved, and very flat, and without any blood. But it’s similar enough. It’s very nice in here, really.
He hated it. Clearly, he hated it.
Better than him loving it a lot, I guess.
We got out of the car and I took a step onto the gravel like I could support my own weight. Totally could, absolutely could. I didn’t want any more help than I was already receiving. Then my boot made contact with all the baby-tooth stones and I pitched forward. Daisy caught me by the elbow and hooked her arm through mine. She hoisted me upright, used some of that magic cheerleading core strength to brace me while I found my footing.
We walked between all the pumpkins. Their mouths glowed a forgiving orange warmth and made long shadows fall behind us like a train.
Someone opened the door for us before we climbed the stairs.
Maurice and a fistful of other people hovered in the foyer, witches of all genders and ages. Their hands fell over our shoulders and they closed the door behind us, and the motion was one big blur of hushing velvets and satin ties. Somebody with big glittered platform boots led us to a studded leather couch. Somebody else in a baby-blue suit fetched glasses of water and hot black coffee, which they served in a teacup with a pitcher of cream. Daisy answered questions vaguely about our names and how old we were.
The person who’d served us dinner last time whispered something in Maurice’s ear, then cleared most of the people out of the room until it was just the four of us, Maurice, and the saxophonist we saw perform with Madeline. Jacques, I think it was. I remembered being so jealous of him.
I felt sick to my stomach. Inky inside.
Mr. Scratch squiggled all over inside me, seemed nervous about being inside this place again, so I wrapped a hand around my wrist and squeezed, hoping it’d feel reassuring, maybe. At least it might get him to hold still.
“So, what exactly happened?” Maurice looked at me, mostly. Guess it was obvious that I was the fucked-up one here. Or perhaps Yates had mentioned that on the phone?
I chewed on my tongue and then told him everything.
Maurice rubbed a hand over his mouth. He took a moment, rocked back in his seat, and shot a look at Jacques. Jacques didn’t return it, though. He was staring at his hands. After a moment, Maurice took a sip of water, then rested the glass on his knee. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
Daisy blinked. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
“It’s possible to live without your specter, but the extraction process is physically and spiritually traumatic,” Maurice said. His eyelids hung low and glossy. “From what I understand, lots of witches don’t survive it. Most don’t. Ironically, it probably helped that Madeline had you make the extraction sigil yourself. I bet she thought she was being merciful. It at least means the spell fit you, perverse as that is. Kept you from dying during the ritual. Even then. I’ve heard of good witches, strong, healthy witches, dying just weeks after an extraction takes place.” He looked me in the eye, moved his head so that we were level, dead-on. “I would normally be very wary about letting one of the vase devils upstairs out for anything. I would advise you girls to stay away from them. They’re dangerous, single-minded creatures. Pain has made them that way. We respect them for their service to our community, and mourn for them and the violence done to them and theirs, but we don’t get too close. It’s too risky, I’m afraid.”
Mr. Scratch seethed in my skull. It must have left a trace in my face. Darkened the vein in my forehead, or something like that. Jacques was looking at it with a mix of horror and something darker, something crushingly sad.
“However,” Maurice said as he rested his chin on his fist, “your circumstances are unique. A book devil has more than enough magic to keep a witch alive, provided that it wants to help. If you’re serious about forming your own coven, you’d need one, too. It’s just that this one”—he closed his eyes, took a deep breath through his nose and out his teeth—“is complicated. There are fresh book devils you could summon. Ones that have never had a coven before, have never been a book at all. Or, even better, you could find an older, established coven and let them take care of you. That would be the responsible thing to do.”
“We can take care of each other, thanks,” Jing said.
We can take care of each other, Mr. Scratch repeated. He curled ribbons of himself around the inside of my head. I will take care of you and your sisters, and you will take care of me.
“Mhm.” Maurice nodded like he thought she’d say that. “In that case, I’m not going to risk any exorcism attempts, because Sideways’ life is more important than my discomfort. Just be safe, is all I ask.”
“Madeline,” said Jacques. “I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t know that she’d— I didn’t think she could do something like this. I knew she had a bad ex-boyfriend, but I didn’t know who, and I definitely didn’t think it’d be a Chantry boy.” He ran a hand over his head.
“Can Sideways grow a new one?” Yates shrank a little, as though her question might not be allowed for some reason. “Her specter, I mean. Or find a new one?”
Maurice and Jacques looked at each other, then looked at Yates. Maurice said, “I think a better use of your time would be finding Madeline.”
“Her specter must’ve been taken out for her to need mine.” I sucked my cheeks. “Are you going to do something about that?”
“We’ll tell the Sisters Corbie,” Maurice said. “She’s a formal initiate of that coven. It’s in their jurisdiction what happens to one of their own. They’ll find her.”
“Please. If you ever need anything, come to the Delacroix. We’ll help you out,” Jacques stressed. “Anything at all, and we’ll do our best.”
“We’ll remember that,” Jing said. She stood up. “Come on, guys, it’s late. We should head home.”
“Thank you,” Yates said. “Thank you so much.”
Daisy didn’t say anything. She and Yates stood up on either side of me. Yates held a hand out to me, and I took it. Put my boots on the red carpet and made my knees extend.
Once the door had shut behind us and we were a fair ways into the lines of jack-o’-lanterns, Jing let out a breath through her teeth. “Jesus, that place gives me the creeps. Let�
��s crash at my place, guys. I’ll make spaghetti.”
Jing’s lilac rug felt like a thunderhead. I crackled, sizzled with the devil’s ink, and the faux fur was too fine to be real. My Ghastly robe was balled in my fists. The fabric was a tactile hell. It rubbed between my fingers and lingered there with phantom softness, red as the specter in Madeline’s teeth, and it made me sick. It was like holding a bloody rag. It was like I’d poured my insides out and it had soaked up all my red and stained that way. My soul was somewhere else. It wasn’t in my body and neither was I, not properly. The lilac rug and I were far away, on the flip side of the universe. Jing and Yates and Daisy, sitting around me in a ring, they weren’t beside me at all.
But when Yates touched my wrist, I felt it.
Mr. Scratch thought a joke in the stupid cartoon we’d turned on for white noise was funny; he laughed so hard that my whole body fizzed like pop.
I was here. I was right here.
“I’m gonna rip Madeline’s throat out with my fucking teeth.” Jing said this unblinkingly. She ghosted her fingertips across my temples, rubbed circles against my skin. Our empty bowls of spaghetti hung out by our ankles. Still smelled good. “We’re getting your specter back, Sideways. We’ll get it back if it means torching the entire town. The entire state. The fucking nation. You’ll get what’s yours, I swear it.”
“I can’t believe she set you up like that. It was premeditated. It’s just. You shared your magic and she snatched it up and ran.” Yates sounded distant. She rubbed her thumb between my knuckles. In my mind’s eye, her lip quivered, and she bit it, held it in place. Or maybe she didn’t. I wasn’t sure of much of anything right now. “What she did, it’s like a kind of murder. I never thought girls did this kind of thing. In my head, it’s always boys. To think that stealing specters like that is how the Chantry boys attack witch girls—if Chett had known about me, do you think he would’ve taken mine before I even knew I had it?”
“Probably,” said Daisy. Her voice floated over from behind me. “That’s probably what they were planning when they dragged Sideways to their mansion. They were gonna rip her fucking soul out, just like Madeline did. What kind of a traitor does that make her?”
“The lowest,” said Jing.
“Her ex-boyfriend pulled her soul out,” Yates said.
“Was that fucking sympathy?” I imagined the way Daisy’s face must look right now, how taut it must be stretched. “I don’t give a singular fuck about her and what might’ve happened to her. Fuck, if she’d fallen in Sideways’ arms and asked for help, I’d be torching the Chantry house right fucking now. Whatever she needed. But she didn’t. She ripped Sideways’ insides out, and now she’s dead to me, completely dead to me. If I see her, I’m hooking my fist through her jaws and clawing around her throat until I find Sideways’ specter, and I’m knocking all her teeth out when I drag it back up.”
“Daisy, stop,” Yates said. She gripped my wrist a little tighter, tight enough to hurt. “Just stop.”
I heard Daisy scoff, mumble something fanged and poisonous under her breath, but I couldn’t make out any words. Then silence.
Jing broke it. “Let me see this sigil, Sideways.” She spoke slowly, like I’d hit my head and was only just now floating out of a coma. Gathered the hair out of my face.
I rolled my head to the side, stretched my neck to show off the brand, the lines that’d seeped from Madeline’s hand into my skin. It stung when touched by open air. Stung like an uncovered burn. There was a vague worry in the back of my head that it’d fester when exposed to light, but I didn’t know how microbes and magic mixed. I avoided eye contact.
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Why does it look so charred? Is that the Sharpie, like with our Chett curse?”
That’d be me.
“No.” I swallowed, swept my tongue over my hard palate and my teeth. It felt like my mouth had been gathering dust, and the grit clogged between my canines and my incisors. I felt chalky. “That’s the ink. Mr. Scratch’s ink.”
“Right,” said Jing eventually. She ghosted a fingertip over the sigil. It wasn’t as abrasive as it should’ve been. “Right. Send our thanks to Mr. Scratch.”
You’re very welcome.
I snorted, passed along a nod.
Say—I have something to say, Sideways.
I opened my mouth and let him speak.
“Helping Sideways is only natural. After all, you three and Sideways helped me.” It didn’t sound quite like my voice. It was stilted, the kind of brassy mid-Atlantic accent that only ever showed up in black-and-white movies. I closed my eyes, but my mouth kept moving. “I was a spell book once,” Mr. Scratch said from inside my mouth. “I was the most glorious spell book. My leather glistened like oil on water and my tips were edged with plated gold, and I weaved the loveliest spells for my brood. I kept their histories and their philosophies. They read from me, wrote in me every day. My old coven was filled with performers, dancers and sword-swallowers, divas and poets and heretics, wonderful girls, the whole lot of them. They were called the Honeyeaters. I taught them how to slow time and sculpt light. I recorded what they taught themselves. They gave me a school and I poured magic into them. I loved them very much. Then witchfinders burned my body and robbed the souls from my children and all of them were dead. I fought for them in the way that I can, but books are bound to the pulp we reside in. Pulp is not designed for violence. There was nothing I could do.
“You girls freed me. You freed me and showed me your talent and cunning and curiosity, your marvelous disregard for authority, your relentless care for one another, and then I watched as your Sideways was stripped of her self like my daughters had been. There was little I could do, being what I am, but I offered myself to her. She accepted, so here I sit and speak.”
Sit up, dear. I need you all to join hands.
I willed my body upward, and I dragged my wrist over my mouth, tried to rub life back into my face. My gums tasted like ink and rust. Yates still held me, so I reached for Jing and Daisy. They all understood, bless them. They locked hands with each other and watched me, weary, wary.
“I’ll get Sideways her soul back. I’ll teach you how—that’s what I’m for. I’ll show you everything you’ll need, my dovelings, but you need to be my coven for that. When we’re through, you four will make a book for me. You will read from me, and you will tell others what you read. You will be witches like there haven’t been for centuries, and I will be a spell book again. Say that I’m yours, O Scapegracers. Say it as one, and it shall be so.”
The voice fell, settled back where it belonged, and I opened my mouth again. There was fear on Yates’ face, and a flash of concern, but her mouth popped open as well, as did Jing’s, and Daisy’s. We all snaked in a slow breath, and on the exhale, we said together: “It shall be so.”
The ink spiraled through my arteries and shot out through my fingertips, coursed into Yates on one side and through Jing on the other. It rushed through Daisy, met itself in her sternum, and then surged around the circle back to me. I could see it in their eyes, in the way they stiffened for a moment, shuddered as it passed. When it slipped back into my limbs it felt lighter, thinner, doused in syrup and lightning. The world flickered for a moment.
Mr. Scratch purred and spoke. “Then Scapegracers you shall be,” he said.
I felt him descend in my chest. I released Yates and Jing, pulled my hands to my belly. My Ghastly sisterhood robe was in a heap on the floor where I must’ve dropped it, and I reached down and took it by the fistful. My body trembled. I bit my lip. Yates reached out and grabbed me around the middle, pulled me toward her. I went slack, pressed my temple to her sternum and heaved a sob that was not a sob. No tears, just the reeling. Just the ache.
After a moment of grieving, I went for more noodles. I numbly scooped some out of the pot. They really smelled amazing. I gave Jing the smallest thumbs-up.
“So. Sideways,” said Daisy. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, sitti
ng strange, with her knees to her chest like a beast might rest. She had one of her hands to her lips, a nail snagged between her teeth. With the other, she tapped on her phone screen. She peered down through her spidery lashes and knotted her brows together, then she looked at me with a twitch at the corner of her mouth. Her gaze was too strident to reciprocate. “It’s trending.”
“What are you on about?” Jing, looking exhausted as the grave, had lost the edge in her voice. She just sounded croaky, now. She brushed her fingertips over my ankle.
“The party. It’s trending. It’s fucking everywhere. Someone uploaded a video and now it’s everywhere. Sideways, your magic is kinda fucking famous. It’s real. Everyone knows it’s real.”
Yates shifted above me, pawed around for her phone. Her thumb danced across the glass and she held it by my cheek, scrolled by post after post until it was obvious that she didn’t need to scroll anymore. #REIGNOFSCAPEGRACE flickered back and forth, and there we were, suspended in midair over a spray-painted sigil. There we were, and there we were again, from a different angle and a different partygoer’s mechanical eye. Yates switched apps, and there was the corpse house, the strung-up lanterns, the girls floating over the crowd. Half the posts were speculating how we’d pulled it off, but I didn’t mind that. There were believers. They believed and they shot that faith into the ether, and now it nestled against my bones and made me think, for a moment, that I was nearly whole again.
“It was a hell of a party,” Daisy said distantly.
“Sure was,” Jing replied.
Yates pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. Her fingers found the nape of my neck and stayed there, and I sucked in a slow breath. There was ink in the grooves of my lungs, and it was acrid and harsh, but it kept them beating in time. Slow and easy, in and out. Breathe like a prizefighter. Broken ribs, but standing.
I sank against Yates and stared down at her phone, at the people who’d been staring at me. The Scapegracers were real now, world as our witness. My magic wasn’t something to snicker about.
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