The tall girl shrugged. “Cool. Suit yourself. See you at dinner.” And just like that, Bevan was gone. Footsteps to the door, the latch opening, the hinge swinging.
Mae exhaled a deep breath when she was sure Bevan was gone and rolled over onto her stomach, covering her burning face with her sweaty hands.
Bobby made a sound, like a snicker meeting a purr. An almost snort. Mae guessed that this was as close to a laugh as you could get from a cat. The record had gone silent, and Mae let it hiss there. Bevan had asked her to go to the village. And she had said no. She had missed out on a gal adventure.
But she had played cool. Surely that had been the right choice. Mae groaned aloud. She didn’t like any of this at all. Head wrecked. Fourteen, she decided, was actually terrible.
“Don’t laugh at me, Bobby. That’s not kind,” Mae said into her hands.
Bobby made his way over and lay down by her side, his body seeming to take shape next to her like liquid, his purring a good low tone. “Unrequited love has to be at least a little funny sometimes.”
“Don’t say unrequited, that feels terrible.” Bevan couldn’t see Mae as a person. Like it or not, to Bevan, she was a child.
“Can’t you just enjoy it?” Bobby asked. “It’s a big first.”
“No,” Mae said. “No. It’s not fun. It hurts. I want it to go away.”
“It won’t. It’ll get huge, for a while. It’ll walk around your veins and your stomach. You might even feel it in your rib cage, or your heart, like the songs say. But eventually it’ll get smaller and smaller and will run out of steam, until it’s a tiny thing that you barely remember. It’ll get replaced by other loves.”
“I wish you’d stop saying love.”14 Mae groaned again. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“Well, you’re thinking it, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear it out loud. Makes it more real.”
“Love is the realest thing, Mae. The world around you will become realer the more you feel it. Doesn’t music sound better already? Isn’t there more meaning? There’s a reason you had that song on loop. It’s deepened.”
“I suppose.” Mae sighed. He was right. “I’m still not sure how a cat can be such an expert on, like, emotions, though.”
Bobby nuzzled her. “Don’t think too hard about it. I’m here to talk whenever you need me.”
Mae stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, only periodically getting up to put the record on again. She talked to Bobby a little, but mostly listened to the swell of the music. How it exactly mirrored the new weird rush of color that Bevan had lit in her. How the chorus of voices behind Doris Day’s mirrored the way her bones felt, bright and sad at once. How could songs written so long ago exactly match how she was feeling there on the living-room floor, far away from the world the music was written in?
When Bevan came back into the house, she didn’t stop to say hello to Mae, just headed straight into the kitchen. Mae hoped she didn’t notice that the same song was playing—but then again, what did it matter if she did? Hopeless. The whole thing. Hopeless.
Chapter
Nine
While the rest of the house slept, Rita sat by the fireside, the glow of it crawling over her. Four a.m., wrapped in a shawl, whiskey in her right hand, her rings clinking on the glass. A poker in her left, moving the small hot coals in the furnace this way and that, stoking the heat. Bobby in her lap, purring heavily, ambient with the fire crackling. Both of them wide-awake, as they so often were at this hour.
Bobby leapt soundlessly to the kitchen floor, the fire casting his shadow long on the checkered tiles. There, in the strange light, he stood up on his hind legs and grew. A straight back, a shrinking tail, skin. A black suit folded around him then, his eyes yellow and shocking in the night. Rita felt tears on her cheek, and when she lifted her hand to wipe them, her own skin felt smooth, her crevices softening, becoming supple. Hair fell long and straight around her face. She was seventeen, suddenly, in the dark of the kitchen. The years came off her with Bobby’s power. All the stiffness in her bones lifted.
The cat, now a young man, pressed his lips to her forehead. “We are ancient, both of us. A marvel, that.”
Rita said nothing. She had not seen Bobby like this in years. He’d stopped changing for her shortly after Audrey had gone. Since then, she’d always had to ask him to.
Bobby knelt by Rita and she ran her fingers, her rings loose, through his shiny hair.
“My dear friend,” she whispered. “I’ve missed you like this.”
The light flickered and Rita watched her hand glitch old and then young, something broken in the reality around them.
“I’d suggest we dance, but I think music would wake up the twins.” Bobby chuckled, standing. “Skies above, it’s good to be upright. I don’t like being one of the smallest things in the room.”
“Then why stay a cat? You don’t have to.” Rita laughed, knowing full well Bobby’s preference for invisibility, for sleep, for sneaking. Her voice sounded off to her own ears, unroughened by smoke, juvenile—too pure.
“We have to stay as we are,” he rallied back. “All the power goes to keeping him up there, and even that isn’t working. This shift will knock it back, some. But we’ve to take our graces when we get them.”
Rita shook her head. “Seventy-odd feels more right than seventeen—even if seventeen feels good.”
Bobby shrugged, then pulled his arms straight above his head, cracking his shoulders, exhaling. All the blinds were closed in the kitchen, the truest dark; even the eagerness of summer dawn couldn’t break through. Rita couldn’t have looked for her reflection anyplace in the room, and she didn’t need to. She was always seventeen: that long, bad year—the one that froze in time without hope of ever really moving on. The year that Sweet James caught Audrey for good, the year Rita’s heart left her body with the girl who walked through walls. The year Rita refused to follow her, even when Audrey swore she’d never come back. She never had come back. But Rita knew she would see her again. Everything she’d done in this house was for that chance.
Rita’s parents had died young; her brother had died too. She was the oldest Frost left alive. She’d had adventures outside of Dorasbeg, for a time. It hadn’t been the organic loss of family that froze her, or the monastic centering of her life around this house, or the necessary ritual of keeping the fire burning. It was Audrey. And before Audrey, it was Deborah, but even Deborah’s name wracked Rita with grief, let alone what befell her in the end. Rita was the sole survivor of the three. The only one who knew what had happened.
She drank from her glass. Her young mouth didn’t like whiskey. She and Audrey would mix stolen white wine and lemonade back then. How thirsty for it she was, suddenly, the sugar stupor of her and Audrey O’Driscoll. All this was for her, for Audrey. All the strength she was harvesting, all this keeping monsters in her house.
Here Bobby was before her, all young and man and gorgeous, and yet the misery in her former body left Rita wrecked. She could barely stand to touch him. This body was still in love with the girl who left.
“So, what will we burn for Bevan? She is having a strange time of it lately. James has her almost truly thralled,” Bobby asked, pulling up a chair of his own, pouring himself a teacup of whiskey from the crystalline decanter. He was handsome; the only feline thing left about him was the slope of his cheekbones. She’d open the curtains soon, Rita thought, let the daylight in; then he would disappear into the form she knew best, too-large housecat, a purring thing.
The witch rose and gathered the makings of a spell from her pantry. Four aromatic leaves from the basil plant on the windowsill. A slim wand of dried sage from a tall, dusty mason jar. A barrel of flaky sea salt, blue and domestic. Tiny shards of clear quartz.
Bobby, meanwhile, set about lighting tall, lean black candles all about the stove. The plastic lighter hissed and popped in the quiet as Rita
stood over the table, marking each leaf of basil with the felt-tip pen she usually used for her grocery list. Tiny stars, connected by a ring—pentacles, Rita thought, Bevan and her pentacles. What an awful thing to be a psychic child. How large a power for a creature with no lived experience. Rita could never protect her, not truly. She sighed as she marked the soft leaves, precise. A folly, all this. There was something inevitable ahead. But she wove the leaves together, still oozing life, with a piece of twine and tied them tight to the wand of sage all the same.
From her pocket, Rita retrieved a black silken pouch, then placed the sage-basil moth inside. She doused the bag with salt and crushed the almost-candy shards of quartz between her firelit young fingers.
“It’s made,” she said over her shoulder to Bobby, tying the drawstring tight, trapping the protection spell as it began to flutter against the fabric.
Rita brought it to the hearth as Bobby lit a fat cone of frankincense, heady and rich. She sat amidst the arc of candles, humming to herself, pulling blessings forth for Bevan. Rita did not have a prayer, only a single plea. She whispered to the bag, “I need a little more time. Keep her close to him, but do not let him eat her. Keep the want-to-leave in her.”
She placed the bag into the fire, and it flared, hungry for this new taste of magic. The bag burst and shone, the winged-moth spell dancing, fluttering above the flames. A tease, refusing to be fully eaten. Rita slammed the door of the furnace, a little too loudly for the quiet of the dawn. Bobby looked at her, sad eyes. She took his hand and he lifted hers to his soft, human mouth.
“This is all we can do,” he said. “One last try.”
“We should rest. I don’t want to be too tired in front of the children.”
Bobby sighed, leaning his head into his hands. “I’ll see you this way again soon.” He looked hopeful, somehow, in a way that broke Rita’s heart a little.
“Of course you will.” And he folded back into the big cat he usually was. Rita took him in her arms and left the kitchen, her familiar age washing over her as she drew away from the fireside, all the while thinking steady on loop, It is happening again. It is happening again.15
Chapter
Ten
You roll the tooth between your finger and thumb. It feels too light to be what it is, too blunt. A piece of chalk. A penny sweet. You have been sleeping heavy and long these last few nights, unmoved by dreams. Maybe there was black water, but nothing more than that. You stand before Sweet James’s wall, the piece of Rossa in your hand, but you can’t feel a thing.
He’s not coming.
You whisper into the paper roses. “Sweet James, I have something for you.”
You are talking to yourself. The silence is long and embarrassing. You are immediately angry at him—what is the meaning of this? Has he found some other girl to—to . . . whatever the hell he’s been doing with you? Is it Mae? Has he been talking to her? How dare he send you off on an assault mission and then ignore your return. Hot tendrils of hysteria rise in your gut, your breath accelerates, and you swear, dragging your nails against the wallpaper.
“Come on,” you urge. “What do you want?”
You sink to the carpet and hold your face in your hands. He’s never refused to show up like this. Not a trace of him in the air. Your head spirals questions: Did you do it wrong? Is it not enough? Do you need to go and get a piece of Mae before he responds again? Is this offering so unacceptable to him that he won’t even deign to breach the atmosphere of the house for you? You don’t remember when your room was last so void of his static presence.
He has to come back at some point, right? Right. Too much is at stake. Well, for you there is. Maybe not for him. You’ve always had this paranoia lurking on mute that he was merely entertaining himself with you—that the paper-glass-bone-mirror owl who took up so much room in you was a strand of something bigger, just toying with you. A tooth between the fingers of something so big and terrible that if you wondered too hard about him, your temples started to ache.
You haven’t brought him any meat in a few days. You used to feed him every day. Maybe if you brought him some extra sustenance he’d come back? It feels feeble after all you’ve been through with him lately. This isn’t like forgetting to feed a goldfish. He doesn’t really need the bones, does he? Oh god, what if you’ve starved him out?
You pull yourself up off the floor and swiftly switch pajamas for shorts, your hoodie, your pink sneakers with the flames on the side. You turn away from the wall as you change, but glance over your shoulder. It’s not like he hasn’t seen you before, but you don’t trust this absence. What should Sweet James care for your naked body anyway? It’s not like he has the same gaze as a human. It’s not like he’s a man. He’s a something else. A monster, you think. A monster, you are sure.
Your legs are rough and unshaven. You prefer them this way, the hair just a texture, barely visible though this year’s tan. You grab your little coin purse, your phone, big pink sunglasses, and bound out of the room, a girl on a mission.
You knock through the hallway to see if Rita wants anything from the village, but her side of the house is eerily quiet. Rossa has been avoiding you since the weirdness of the other night. You smirk to yourself. That, now—that had been delicious. He was so afraid.
You throw your head around the door to the kitchen. Mae is sitting at the table, lost in a video game. Bobby is lying on his back in a beam of sunlight sliced diagonal across the table. You sigh.
“I’m going for a walk. I’m wasting the summer in these walls,” you lie. Mae looks up at you with her big, perpetually distressed eyeballs.
“Can I give you a fiver for a chicken-fillet roll? I’ve been missing them. Back home I used to get one every couple of days as a treat.” She’s nervous. The sap.
“Chicken-fillet rolls make you fat.” You deliver the statement flatly, more just to see her face than because it’s true. Bobby snaps his eyes open and looks straight at you, furious.
“Oh.” Mae’s voice is all warbled. “Never mind.”
Eyes back to the screen.
Bobby kneads the tablecloth, claws on the vinyl, staring you down hard. “Get a slice pan if you’re in the village,” he says. “The bread in the cupboard is gone all stale. Rita would appreciate it.”
How is it that the wretched cat can just stay around, but Sweet James disappears? You stomp to the door, fumbling with keys and earbuds. Maybe someday Sweet James will be for you what Bobby is to Rita, a companion, a familiar. A friend.
That was, though, if he hadn’t found some other house to corrupt by then. Some other wall to lurk in.16 She should have moved more quickly. Shouldn’t have held back from him, should have given him the tooth gift immediately.
Nothing feels right on the warm morning walk to the village. Everything is his absence. I’m a fool, I’m a fool, you think to yourself, your own anxiety blaring over any potential cheer your playlist may have had to offer. You can’t feel the pavement under your runners. You can’t feel the summer on your skin. You can only feel his refusal to come. The potential of never seeing the other world again. The future, in which you forget all of this. In which all of this is just “that one summer,” the years ahead in which you become Susan, who cannot remember Narnia and doesn’t even want to. Susan who was all right without it.
You pass the newsagents and the post office and the shut-down video shop, one of the pubs—the butcher shop is right there. One foot in front of the other. Get the bones.
The butcher’s son, Gus, is smoking outside, reclining against the window. How is his da not taking the head off him for smoking right there, right in front of the shop? You can smell the toxicity of the cigarette: different from the smoke Rita exhales. Lighter. You stand a little straighter as you approach him. Did you even check a mirror on the way out this morning? You are suddenly self-conscious. Well, you don’t need Sweet James’s energy following you everywhere to be impressive. It’s not like you are possessed by him. You are always just you.
Right?
Right. Gus looks you over. Eyes charting you. You can’t read him. Your heart and gut are doing something you don’t like.
“A’right then, Bevan. Here to torment me again?”
Was his voice always so deep?
You nod. “Just looking for bones. For Rita.” You shrug then, rubbing your arm for comfort, aware that you look nervous. You can’t stop thinking about your body, his eyes on it.
“Jesus, what’s up with you?” Gus is genuinely puzzled. “Are you sick or something?”
You don’t know what to say. People don’t often ask you how you are. Maybe you are sick. You feel sick. What kind of person gets sick for monsters, sick with the pleasure of it?
“I . . .” You’re stammering. “I didn’t sleep so well last night.”
“What, were you out tearing up the town till all hours or something? On the lash?”
You blink.
“I’m underage. I can’t go into town.”
You feel very small as he smirks.
“So am I,” he replies. “Doesn’t stop me.”
If you’d had Sweet James’s influence you’d have said, “I suppose you think you’re rapid then, yeah?” But he is gone, gone gone, so you just say, “Cool.”
“Did the high-and-mighty Bevan Mulholland just call me cool?” Gus exclaims in mock surprise. You giggle—a noise you barely recognize from your own throat. You’re mortified. He stubs out his cigarette, victorious looking, takes his phone from the pocket of his starched white apron.
“What’s your number, Bev?”
He’s bold now that all the nerve’s gone out of you. You say the line of digits. You’re not even a little coy. You don’t ask him for his number. His eyes are piercing. Very blue. You hadn’t noticed before. You can’t believe yourself.
“I’ll bring you the bones, so.”
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