by Laure Eve
‘Thalia?’ said one of the partygoers, peering at me with mistrust as we approached. ‘Something going on?’
I opened my mouth to snap back – I was their friend, I had every right to be there – my mind whirring with an explanation.
Thalia raised her head and gave a little laugh. ‘Oh god,’ she said, embarrassed, with barely a trace of alcoholic waver in her voice. ‘These idiots from school were trying to gatecrash. You know how it is. They get jealous. They smashed up a couple of Esther’s pots, though. They looked pretty drunk.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the guest. She was smooth and oiled, slicked-back hair, all in black. ‘We’ll get her some more tomorrow. Go enjoy your birthday.’
She smiled. ‘Thanks.’
I felt her shift beside me, and I walked her on, concentrating on the back door. It was incredible, really, watching her put on a show like that. As soon as we were out of sight of them all, her face dropped and her eyes half closed.
We reached the hallway toilet without incident. I pulled Thalia in and locked the door behind us. She went straight to the toilet and sank to the tiles, placing the athame next to her. I took the hand towel off its wall peg and laid it over her lap – I couldn’t bear seeing that beautiful dress get ruined. It looked like the kind of delicate thing that wouldn’t withstand a drink spill, never mind a good vomiting. She kept her hair back from dangling around her mouth with one hand and leaned over the bowl. Small neat movements, as if it was a routine she’d grown used to.
After all, you do it a lot, I thought. Isn’t that what Fenrin said that night? Did he mean drinking, or something else?
The only light was over the sink, and it cast a soft, dark glow over the small room. The tiles echoed with the sounds of retching, and I tried very hard not to listen. I rubbed her back with one hand and held a long strand of her hair away from her mouth with the other. That was what people did, so I did it. I distracted myself with thoughts of Fenrin. Where was he right now and what was he doing? Probably not, let’s face it, helping someone puke.
It took me a while to break the silence. I looked down at her head. It was shaking very slight, fast shakes. Then I heard the sound people make when they’re crying really hard but don’t want anyone to hear it.
I cautiously took my hands away from her and sat back against the wall. I always did this kind of thing in private. I guess she did, too, but the drink had punched through her defences. I could never have imagined Thalia crying in front of me before this.
‘Can I get someone?’ I said at last. ‘I can go find Summer.’
She shook her head.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Don’t want your fucking sympathy,’ she snapped, her voice blotted and wavering.
‘Fine.’ I got up to leave.
‘Don’t.’
I stopped. Sat back down again. Listened to her shudder.
Her tears turned to coughs, and then she retched again, and I turned my face away to give her privacy. Eventually, the sound of movement drew me back to her. I watched her bend to the sink and run the tap, washing her mouth out and spitting. The weak set of her body was gone, flushed down the toilet with everything else, but I thought I could see her fragility now, running like spiderweb cracks underneath the glossy finish.
‘What are you going to do?’ I said, quietly.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? What kind of a solution is that?’
‘The only kind.’ Finally, she sat on the floor and rested her back against the wall, her legs drawn up. She was greasy and pale. Earlier, her hair had looked sleek and glorious. Now it clung to her scalp in strings. ‘River, just drop it. It’s got nothing to do with you.’
‘Wow. That attitude must really solve all your problems, mustn’t it? For your information, it’s got everything to do with me.’
‘Why?’ she shot back.
Because I’m trying to break your stupid curse.
Because if I can do that, I can be a Grace. I can fix me.
‘Because I care about you guys, okay?’ I said. My chest was tight with growing, blooming tears. Not here. Never in front of them.
Thalia laughed. It was a bitter, withered sound. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you’d have an easier life if you just left us alone.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. It was all I could say, and it was the stark, simple truth.
I loved them. Maybe I was like Marcus now, too. Maybe I was under their curse.
Too many curses going around, I thought grimly, and stood up.
‘Come on,’ I told Thalia. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I have to go back out there. It will look bad.’
‘God, fuck appearances, for once in your life,’ I said sharply.
She glanced up, startled. I thought she’d fight me, but she was too tired. She just nodded.
I helped her up.
CHAPTER 21
‘Hello?’ I called into the hallway.
The Grace house was quiet. It was almost a week after the party, but the last of the extended family had only gone the day before, leaving a cavernous silence in their wake. Gwydion had taken the opportunity to travel to the city with a cousin who lived there and wouldn’t be back for another couple of days. Esther was holding court at Nature’s Way and would be holed up in her workshop there until very late, Summer had assured me. I found it easier to be here when they weren’t. Easier to breathe.
I dropped my bag at the foot of the stairs and wandered into the kitchen. The fridge purred gently, underlining the quiet. Outside the sun sparkled over the patio stones, but in here it was calm and cool. A huge bowl of strawberries sat in the middle of the table, gleaming red. Fruit in this house always looked like it would burst open on your tongue and fill your throat with clear, fresh juice.
‘Eve and the apple,’ said a voice behind me.
I flinched, turned. Fenrin was in the doorway, watching me. Sometimes it still hurt to look at him and have him look right back. I should have been used to it by now.
‘Huh?’ I said. Evocative. Eloquent. As always.
He pointed to the strawberries. ‘You looked like you were undergoing some kind of struggle with temptation. Forbidden fruit.’ He misinterpreted my expression as alarm at being caught and laughed. ‘Relax. You know you can eat them. You can have anything you like.’
Can I?
Was I making this conversation seem loaded, or was it him, talking temptation with that flirtatious slant to his mouth?
‘I haven’t seen you since my birthday,’ he said, coming in closer and picking up a strawberry from the bowl. ‘Did you have a good time?’
A good time? Yes, up until the moment it all started going wrong.
See, Fen, I wanted to say, the plan had been for us all to sneak out of there together, go upstairs and hole ourselves up with alcohol and music. The plan had been for me to watch you dance to ‘Footloose’ and cheer and clap and hug you and feel your hand lightly skating my back in a way that didn’t say ‘friends’, and then later, when everyone had finally fallen asleep, the plan, Fenrin, had been to just lean forward and kiss you with no warning, and feel your hands around the back of my head, pushing your mouth into mine as if you couldn’t get enough of me and had been twisted up inside waiting for this for so long.
The plan had not been for Fenrin to completely disappear for the rest of the evening without any kind of sorry or why. The plan had not been for me to spend my time getting Thalia upstairs to her room without any adult partygoers seeing us, and helping her into bed. She’d asked me not to tell anyone about Marcus’s visit, and I hadn’t, but I couldn’t keep it secret for long. How far would he go next time? Would it be my fault if something happened? I had to tell Summer, at least. The closer I got to her, the harder it got to lie to her. I liked the way she trusted me. I wanted to be the kind of friend who earned that trust. Now that she was no longer preoccupied with her visitors, I could get her on h
er own and we’d work out what to do.
‘Yeah, it was fun,’ I said. ‘Thank you for inviting me. Did you have a good time?’
‘I did, actually.’ There was a secretive kind of a smile in his voice. ‘Summer said something about swimming down at the cove today. You up for it?’
‘I have a towel with me and everything.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You are aware that you could just borrow one from us.’
‘I’m aware,’ I said, mock haughtily. ‘But my towel is better than yours.’
He smirked. I watched him take the strawberry into his mouth whole and bite down.
There was a short, sharp, loud shriek that echoed through the hallway.
Fenrin cocked his head. ‘What the hell?’
‘Was that … a cat, or something?’ I said.
‘We don’t have pets.’
‘Bird?’
‘Maybe. It came from outside.’
He disappeared out of the kitchen, and I followed him to the back door. He was standing, his back to me.
He was absolutely still.
I gave it a moment, but the moment stretched and grew strange.
‘Fe—’
I bit his name off as he moved fast, jerking into action, racing across the patio and down the stone path. Startled, I ran, too.
‘Fenrin, what—’
But he didn’t turn around and he didn’t talk. He reached Summer, who was standing in the middle of the garden, holding a mound of mud in her hands. She was looking down at it.
Fenrin took hold of her arm.
‘Summer, what’s wrong? Summer.’
I reached them, trying not to pant.
‘Can you see it?’ Summer said to him. Her voice was normal. Very, very normal and extremely calm.
‘See what?’
‘Look at it.’
She was staring down at the mud ball in her hands.
Fenrin looked at it. ‘It’s just mud. What is it, like a chunk of stone?’
‘It was just lying there,’ Summer went on. ‘There’s that clear patch of soil right at the back, near the oak tree. We don’t plant around that tree, you know? We don’t plant anywhere near it. But the soil was all scattered, and this was lying there next to the hole, as if it had just been dug up.’
‘What’s been dug up?’ said Fenrin, growing impatient.
I stared at the mud ball.
It was kind of elongated, like a mini rugby ball. A dirty red-brown.
‘You don’t see it?’ said Summer, her voice whispery, paper thin.
‘There’s a tube coming out of it,’ I said, getting curious.
‘It’s a heart.’
Fenrin went still.
I looked at it. The more I looked, the more I could see it.
‘No.’
‘Yes,’ said Summer.
‘It’s too small,’ I said cautiously, my body humming with anxious dread.
Fenrin extended a finger, thought better of it. ‘Animal.’
‘Fox,’ said Summer.
‘How the hell would you know that?’ Fenrin shot back.
‘There was a bit of fur. It was orange and white.’
‘Could be cat.’
‘It’s fox.’
‘How do you know for sure?’ I said.
Summer pursed her lips. ‘Because I know what you need a fox heart for.’
We watched each other.
‘Well, for Christ’s sake, stop touching it,’ Fenrin said suddenly, and Summer dropped it to the ground like it scorched her. ‘And you should wash your hands because god knows.’
I stared at the dirty heart on the ground. ‘What do you need a fox heart for?’
‘It’s bad,’ said Summer. ‘Old magic. We don’t do that sort of thing. This is really bad.’ Her eyes widened with a new urgency. ‘If there was old magic working against us …’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That night in the woods. We tried to get Marcus to go away, right?’ She turned to me. ‘Well, what if someone had already tried? But they used old magic to do it. And then we did ours on top. That could really mess things up, two spells working against each other—’
Fenrin scoffed. ‘I’ve never even heard of that. How do you know what would happen?’
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘What does a fox heart do?’
‘It’s about cunning and manipulation. The trickster. You see?’ Summer looked down at her dirt-streaked hands. Dirt plus something else? My insides gave a gentle roll. ‘Thalia cast a spell on Marcus to manipulate him.’
‘You make me sound like a calculating bitch.’
Summer full-body flinched.
Thalia was standing, framed by the house, as we stared back at her. She looked calm, but it was a lie, and if I could see it, then everyone could. Her mouth was drawn and her eyes were too wide.
‘Thalia,’ said Summer. ‘What did you do?’
‘What did you do?’ she snapped. ‘You did a spell in the woods? Without me? On me? How could you?’
‘Thalia,’ Fenrin joined in, gently. ‘Come on. What the hell is this?’ He pointed to the heart on the ground.
Maybe it was the sight of her twin, the sceptic, the hater of magic, asking her. But she broke.
‘I just wanted to not end up like all the rest,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like our aunts and cousins. Like our grandparents, and like Esther.’
‘You tried to break the curse,’ Summer breathed.
Thalia wrapped her arms around herself. ‘No, no. No one can break the curse. I just wanted to make it so he didn’t like me any more.’
There in the sunshine, it sounded so thin and unreal.
‘When?’ said Fenrin. ‘When did you cast it?’ His face was cold. I knew what he was thinking. You kept this from me.
‘A while ago. After the thing at Christmas.’ She swallowed. ‘I didn’t want him to end up like all the rest of them from our amazing family history. Dead or mad. It’s him or me, isn’t it? That’s how the curse works. I liked him too much, okay? He didn’t deserve that. I wanted to save him. But it didn’t work.’ Her voice had a quiet wail to it. ‘He’s gone crazy anyway, hasn’t he? So I’m screwed. It’ll play out like it always does.’
‘But … it’s better,’ said Summer cautiously. ‘I thought he was better. It’s working. Isn’t it?’
Thalia’s eyes met mine.
Tell them.
She sighed. ‘No, it’s not. He was here at the party. He was … he was not okay.’
Fenrin threw up his arms to the sky, turning his back on her. He rubbed his hands over his face, there in the bright sunshine, and it looked odd because we’d all been brought up to believe that sunshine and darkness couldn’t exist in the same place, but they did, they did.
‘That crazy – What did he do?’
The athame, gripped in his hand.
A blood pact.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Thalia. ‘All that matters is that the curse exists, Fen, you have to see it does, because nothing we do works. It’s stronger than all of us.’
‘Come on. That’s twice he’s tried to attack you,’ I said. Her heavy, tragic fatalism was starting to grate on me. ‘Are we just going to sit back and see if third time’s the charm?’
‘Twice?’ Fenrin echoed, baffled. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Well, the first time was in Thalia’s bedroom.’ Fenrin was blank. Thalia’s eyes were on the ground. ‘The thing that started all this? Your parents throwing him out?’
‘They threw him out because Esther walked in on them having sex,’ Fenrin said coldly. ‘They actually threw him bodily out of the house and told him he was never allowed to even speak to Thalia again. And she went along with it – she’s utterly ignored him ever since. Our crazy ex-best friend. Why, I hear you ask? Oh, because she was risking the curse by being with a non-witch, wasn’t she, the good old non-existent curse, and let’s not forget that Marc
us isn’t the one they’ve chosen for her. Is he?’
They were staring at one another. I felt the undercurrent of something unsaid all around us, pulling and tugging, but I didn’t know what waters we swam in now.
‘So,’ I said, in my most reasonable voice. ‘You, what. Told everyone at school that he attacked you? Why? To save face?’
‘I never said that,’ Thalia tried to snap, but her voice wavered with unshed tears.
‘But you didn’t deny it, either, did you, when the rumours started?’
She looked away, her mouth trembling.
‘What rumours?’ Fenrin demanded.
I rounded on him. ‘How the hell can you not know? It’s all anyone at school ever talks about when he walks into a room. They’ve made up all these lies about him because none of you ever told them what really happened. He’s practically a rapist in their eyes. That’s really unfair. At the least, he’s some kind of creepy stalker—’
‘Well, that part’s true,’ Summer said, and then she held her hands up when my eyes landed on her. ‘Look, he is. You can’t deny how he’s been recently. And I didn’t know about the rumours, not really. I mean …’ She paused, uncomfortable. ‘Maybe I overheard something one time. But no one talks about anything to do with us around us, River. They all get this look on their faces, like we’d take their heads off if they so much as breathed a word of it.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ I said.
‘No one’s.’ She shook her head. ‘We didn’t ask them to be like that. It’s just the way it is.’
No. You never ask, do you? People just part for you, and bend around you, and flock to you, and it’s not like you encourage it. It just is.
But you don’t discourage it, either.
Why would they, though? Who would discourage power? It was all anybody ever wanted. Power got you through the day when everything seemed grey and bleak. I knew this.
My anger drained away, leaving me tired.
Summer was staring at her hands. ‘What are we going to do about this?’ she said.
I nodded at the brown, withered heart on the ground. ‘We’re going to take off this fox spell. Have you even thought about the fact that Marcus’s recent behaviour is because of it?’