“Do you think she’ll be pissed off at me for long?” Mae couldn’t even bring herself to look at Bobby; she still stared at her hands.
“She’s not. Neither of us is.” Bobby padded over to Mae and settled down into her lap, purring deeply. “The last thing we need is Sweet James getting out of there again, trying to feed. There isn’t enough of you to go round. Shh now, though. They’re about to arrive at the door.”
And he was right—Rossa and Bevan rolled into the house laughing, rustling bags of groceries.
“We got pastries. Pastries are basically cake for lunch!” Bevan announced as she strolled into the kitchen, brandishing a croissant, flakes coming off it and catching in her hair, on her sweatshirt.
Rossa carried two big bags. “And we got two absolute skulls of cauliflower, you should see the size of them, Bevan’s going to roast them for dinner.”
The two continued to announce each item they pulled out of the shopping bags, capering around, distraction distraction distraction. Mae knew immediately something had happened between them. Sometime recently enough for them still to be slightly embarrassed, fresh in new knowledge. Their nervous energy, their laughter at nothing in particular, a secret neither could quite manage to hide—Mae could read them. This was no psychic signal. This was plain as day—boring, obvious fact. Her brother had laid down with the girl she couldn’t get over, and he was so happy he couldn’t contain it.
Why did this feel worse than Rita’s disdain? Than being caught out? Mae stroked Bobby’s fur and said nothing. Their energy was sickening to her. Fear flipped jealousy flipped rage flipped defeat, a flatter and heavier color than any other feeling. She was suddenly too tired for this. She looked at her hands, their new tiny white pattern. A delicate protection that would do nothing to ward off the toxic flare of Bevan and her brother. Why couldn’t Rita have cast a spell to prevent this feeling?
They flitted about the kitchen, using each other’s first names twice a sentence: “Rossa, would you like a cup of coffee, Rossa?” “Bevan, look, Bevan, can you reach this? I can’t get this jar down!”
Mae scooped Bobby up, unwieldy and soft. She quickly stepped out the big glass doors to the garden.
They didn’t even hear her go.
“Are you all right?” Bobby whispered. Mae just nuzzled the top of her head with her nose.
She didn’t say anything until they got very, very far away from the house. The garden was exceptionally long that day, twisting in strange directions. It felt convenient to Mae, a grace: like nobody would ever find her, if they came to look. It took her ten minutes to reach the bench.
When she eventually started to talk, Bobby grew a little bigger by her side, his eyes marigold and beaming. Maybe he was feeding off her, but if he was, she didn’t care. She told him exactly about the jealousy and rage and the flattening of defeat. And Bobby drank up every word. The old crush was shaped enough like love to give him exactly what he wanted.
Chapter
Seven
A fat book of crystal analysis sits open in front of you at the kitchen table. The radio buzzes classical. Rita sits across from you, working her way through a birth chart for a new client. Rossa’s at the end of the table, drawing something you can’t quite make out into his sketchbook. Hushed evening time. Mae nowhere to be seen, Bobby missing with her.
Not that you aren’t well used to lying, but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t actually quite happy. You enjoyed your day with Rossa. He made you relax in a way you aren’t used to at all. Even Gus had never paid you attention like Rossa, listened wholeheartedly to everything you said. Believed you. You could maybe tell him everything, couldn’t you? It is so pleasant having him sit there at the table with you and Rita. He’s a lovely addition, his energy gentle.
You hadn’t intended to kiss him, let alone do anything else to him. With him. You’d just thought it would make your case for him to stay a little stronger. And it wasn’t like all parties weren’t willing and enthusiastic. You hadn’t expected to like him more afterward. To spend most of the day laughing. You aren’t sure if you’d do it again, but the memory and the potential of a reprise will keep him here, won’t it? It will keep all those gorgeous feelings alive in him, and you are sure now that how he feels is making you stronger and stronger. That owlish thing is awake under your bones again and you can’t stop yourself. Sweet James will be very proud—or at least you hope so.
You know that’s bad, but sometimes bad things make the most sense.
Of course he’ll stay. Even as he sits there, just a couple of feet from you, you can feel a little glow of contentment radiating off him. It is delicious. How can he walk away from something as gorgeous as this, this quiet life? He has no propensity for magic whatsoever, which is so . . . healthy, or something. How sane that must keep him, you think, watching his pencil ghost down the page in a deliberate, gentle arc.
You flip your book shut dramatically, as if you’d actually been reading it at all the last forty-five minutes. “My eyes are falling out of my head. I’m going up to sleep.”
Rita nods. “Rest well, girl. I won’t be long after you. You can come in with me tomorrow with the next party of women, if you’d like—take notes. See what you can pull.”
You smile broadly. “Ah, nice one, Rita! Thank you!”
She normally keeps you at a room’s distance from the women who come in—this is a step hard-earned. That’ll give you something to leap out of bed for in the morning, given that it’s a bit too late to make a date for another dawn excursion with Rossa. Besides, that might be too much too soon. Draw it out, even though you don’t want to draw it out, you want all Sweet and all James right now, but you’ll tiptoe, you’ll go soft. By the time the leaves are crisping red on the trees outside, Rossa’ll be moving his things in: he’ll be part of the house. You’ll be able to eat, Sweet James will be able to eat, everything will be delightful.
He looks up at you, those gunshot pupils again, round and black, pushing back a dead-giveaway smile.
“Good night, Bev.” There was something hopeful in his tone. Something trapped.
“Sleep tight, Rossa.”
You wink at him, the bunny in the snare, and whisk out of the room, proud of yourself. Away up the stairs, and to your room, which is still a wreck, you think, still a disaster area with the broken radio. You scuttle along the corridor, light on your feet past the room Mae’s staying in, the noise of her and Bobby having some hushed conspiracy beyond the door—good luck to them.
You notice immediately the radio is back in its place. Did Sweet James fix it for you, a mea culpa for his unbidden return? You run your fingers over it, not even a crack or a loose wire. You hate this room. You wish for neon. For moths. For endless possibilities.
Then you look at the wallpaper and down at your hands. Is it so awful that you wish he would just show up? You’d been doing so well, God, you were almost normal there for a while, but tiny empty cavities in his shape are breaking through you and you need to fill them. You don’t resist it. You let the want roll through you, ugly and sour. It just about undoes all the good energy Rossa had given you, drains his adoration from your body.
For the next hour you sit on the floor with a heap of magazines, contemplate turning your phone back on—but don’t. You do, however, turn the radio on, late-night chatter a distraction. You will interference onto the radio, another voice, a familiar voice, his voice, just his voice even for a second—but nothing comes. You prepare for bed. You listen to the rest of the house moving towards their own, the footsteps on the stairwell, doors opening and closing. Then the house is silent. You’re not even tired. You wonder, just for a second, what you might be doing on a Thursday night if you were in college. If you had stayed in touch with the girls you went to school with. If it was, perhaps, worth having a life outside this house.
Something clicks hard against the window, and you jump out of your skin. You spring up and run to the window, fling your curtains wide, searching
the garden—did something land, did something hit the window in flight—
There. Down in the garden you see him. Gus. His beanie hat, his hoodie, his skinny jeans, flailing his arms for your attention, one hand full of gravel. Alarm flickers through you, on and off, a broken light, your heart races—what does he want?
You push open the window, and lean out.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” you whisper-shout. You can’t wake the house. Romeo and Juliet this is not.
Gus puts his hands on his hips, head tilted up to you.
“Would you ever learn to turn your phone on, Bevan?”
“Would you ever go the fuck home, please?” you hiss.
“Not until you tell me who that dope with a ponytail was. You walked by my shop today! The audacity! First thing in the morning, walk of shame!”
He’s getting a little loud. You blink.
“Are you being serious? We broke up in April. Go. Home.”
“Christ’s sake, Bevan! Ignoring my texts, walking around with someone else right in front of my shop? In front of the whole village? That poor young fella’s going to find out you’re a crazy slut in no time, you mark my words—”
Slut. Crazy.
Crazy slut.
The words are out of his mouth at a pitch slightly higher than the rest of his tirade. Those words raise something in you and in the room behind you. You don’t take your eyes off him. He’s still talking but you’re not listening. His imperfections are amplified to hideous now. How could you have ever wanted him? Maybe you never did want him. Maybe you just let him distract you from the only thing you’ve ever really wanted.
The air turns to molasses around you. The radio flickers, the lights dim and rise—oh, here we go. Here he comes.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?” the boy in the garden yelps, pathetic.
You pause, let the demand hang limp in the air.
“What do you want me to say? Why are you here?”
Something electrical warps your voice as you speak, but Gus doesn’t notice. He’s here to prove something to himself, not to prove anything to you.
He starts talking again, so absorbed in his own perceived injustice that he doesn’t notice that the lamplight glowing from your room turns neon. That a breeze takes up. He talks and talks and you can’t hear him anymore at all because out of the corner of your eye the swarm of moths is gathering on the surface of the wall. The warmth of Sweet James’s presence flicks through you. His voice isn’t in the room, but in the conch of your ear. Just for you, an unearthly whisper.
do you want me to help you?
Yes is an impulse firing through you. You were never over this, you were never clean of him. How could you ever be when he made you feel this alive?
Gus is crying now, his anger turned vulnerable.
“You can be so cold,” he insists.
But, no, you are a lantern in the window. Your skin is golden and your eyes heavy with light. Your palms feel hot and strange, but any semblance of pain is in the distance.
Gus finally ends his monologue on a question.
You do not have an answer. You were not listening.
He finally sees you, an unholy idol glowing from what Sweet James is doing through you, and he gasps and swears. You laugh and your laugh erupts eighteen colors into the atmosphere and all of these colors are a shade of gold. The sound of your scorn ripples.
You raise your hands over your eyes and the marks you once asked Gus to make on you shine like your veins are running rich with liquid star. He falls to his knees. You can feel the molten crystal ink beneath your skin change from circle to triangle. Like Sweet James’s eyes. Like your eyes. The owl is laughing. The boy is afraid. You love this. A conjuring of sickness.
Words like “crazy” and “slut” mean nothing. Language means nothing. His terror is so satisfying. Somewhere in the distance, you hear him whimper, “Please, no—” Then, “Bevan, you’re scaring me,” and you repeat these phrases back down to him from the window, no longer afraid of being caught by Rita or Rossa or Bobby or Mae.
Call the cops. Call your mother. You dare them. You’d shatter each one of them—you could split the air open, and Gus, poor stupid Gus who really believed that he had any power over you, is there on his knees, bawling in the grass like he’s seen God and God is the girl he walked away from and she is beautiful, she is vengeful, she is laughing.
“Go home, stupid boy,” you roar. “Do not come here again.”
He scrambles to his feet, his knees stained and his hands dirty from clawing the lawn. He runs and you wail a gorgeous and sickening cry into the night. For years to come, the residents of Iona may say it was the banshee herself warning them that there was worse, much worse to come. But the house eats your roars. Even if the neighbors rouse, nobody within these walls can hear a single thing.
The luminescence and power begin to leak out of you when Gus is clear of the garden, vaulting over the wall at breakneck pace. He doesn’t break his neck, though. You hear him land with a thud and begin to run again until his footfall becomes nothing in the sable of night. Your flesh comes back to being just flesh. Your eyes, just membrane and blue. The comedown is so steep it knocks the breath out of you. You slump away from the window, doubled over, your ears beginning to ring, your hands—you look at your hands.
They are blank.
They are the soft girl hands they were before. Before you were burned. Before the inky, rebellious reclamation. Just your same old hands, all recent history eaten out of them. Healed.
Sweet James flickers on the wall now. He is ivy leaves, not roses, but all the same he is like the old days. An old friend: you suppose you’ve earned that by now. You are buckled and exhausted on the carpet. “How did you know I needed you?” you say to the owl. He says nothing.
“Thank you, for—for that.” You gesture weakly to the window.
i am sated. we have dined and shared. tell me how it felt.
You don’t need to say it felt good. You can feel Sweet James in your head so you just think it. Good, good, so good. The owl laughs, a song you have missed.
this does not have to be the last time.
You still don’t have to say anything at all. He knows.
i expect you to bring me the boy twin’s heart. all of the rewards i offer you—you are such a lucky girl, bevan.
His thunderous voice fades as the wall restores. You lie on the floor, spent and charmed. On your hands black ink crawls back across your palms. Nobody will notice anything is amiss. A new hunger already gnaws at your belly. You are ready for trouble.
Chapter
Eight
Mae lay in the grass, sun beating down on her. She imagined this was what it must be like to be Bobby, a solar panel, soaking up light. She’d laid out some of her tarot, the Major Arcana, on the grass in front of her, spinning out the centuries-old lore, as it always had. An ancient storyboard. Sometimes she enjoyed just looking at them, memorizing the details of their legend, something slightly new arising for her each time. The Fool walks off a cliff and look at all the things that happen to him as he goes down, down into the world.
She was still trying not to think about what had happened in Bevan’s room the other day. But pushing it out of her mind was exhausting, and nothing could quite distract her from replaying it over and over again. She let her cardigan sleeves fall over her hands, just in case Rossa, sitting cross-legged beside her, noticed her new matrixes of scars. But Rossa wouldn’t notice. He was absorbed in his drawing. He’d barely spoken to her all week, he and Bevan locked in some new camaraderie that she was excluded from.
But for now, he sat with his unwieldy, thick sketchbook in his lap. He’d sketched a disembodied hand, suspended on the page, clutching a bouquet of wildflowers. He was just beginning to touch them with color.
The garden was large today, an expanse of green, turning the lawn more meadow. Rita had her clients in the living room with Bobby and Bevan. There had
n’t been much point in hanging around the kitchen, getting in the way, and it had seemed like such a shame to miss the sunshine. Yet even in all this fresh air, Mae felt stifled.
“What do you think we’d be doing if we weren’t here?” she asked. “Would we be at home just doing normal stuff?”
“What even is normal stuff?” Rossa answered, eyes still keenly on the page. “It’d be dull at home. I’d be having cans with the lads. I don’t know what you’d be at. Probably . . . having cans with the girls? We’d be dealing with Mam and Dad all the time and our heads would be wrecked. It’s nothing to be homesick25 for.”
Mae shifted onto her side. Was this the moment to ask him exactly what the hell he was doing sneaking around with Bevan when he was supposed to be in all of this with Mae? Her stomach lurched. She swallowed the argument. No use in making it awkward. Tread soft, she thought, breathing calm back into herself.
“Since when are you so fond of it here?” she asked instead. “You didn’t like it so much the last time. The house freaked you out.”
Rossa still didn’t look up; rather, changed his pencil to an earthier green. “Don’t you like how calm it is? How nobody’s yelling or crying? How we don’t have to pretend everything is normal to our mates? It feels like a blank slate. A clean page. Sure, it’s weird. But weird I can manage.”
“I mean, yeah, but we’re getting a blank slate when we go to college,” Mae said.
There had been no talk of college until now. Not a word. It left an ugly silence.
Mae plucked blades of grass and rubbed them between her fingers. Their parents’ crumbling marriage had brought both twins up against a hard wall of not caring when the time came to study. Mae had only written her name on her math paper, not a single number, just sat there for hours until the bell rang, staring into space. College was no certainty.
“I’m just finding it hard to distract myself out here, Rossa, that’s all.”
“Keep at those card tricks then.” Her brother shot her a wink, and she threw a clutch of grass at him. His pencil dragged on the page, and he said, “We could probably stay here, you know, if we wanted. If we asked Rita.”
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