by Laure Eve
I was silent with sick horror.
How dare he turn that back on me.
How dare he.
Fenrin went back to the door, taking a key out from his pocket. He opened it and I watched him go, my muscles twitching just once, as if I could leap across the room and fly out of here. But I couldn’t. The door was pulled shut. I heard the clicking of the lock.
I was suddenly furious, rage like petrol fuelling me. I leapt off the bed and grabbed a handful of devil stones from the bowl on the bedside table, those useless powerless stones, throwing them at the door. The noise as they bounced and scattered violently was awful, punching my ears in, but at the same time it gave me a satisfied feeling in my belly.
‘Where’s my food?’ I screamed over the grinding sound of the stones rolling across the floor. ‘I’m hungry! You can’t starve me!’
But no one came back to see me all evening, no matter how much noise I made.
CHAPTER 34
I woke up from a nightmare.
It was mostly a series of impressions. The pearly grey of dawn. Panting. Fenrin’s feet, digging into the sand. The sound of the sea claiming a life in the only violent way it knew how. Violent and beautiful. It was still so beautiful even when I saw it now, and that thought filled me with shame that I found beauty in death.
There were snapshots of memories in the nightmare, things we had done together in the past. They shifted and shuffled, and they were all tainted. That first day in the copse at school, Summer was controlling and manipulative, and we were all her baby acolytes, hanging on her every word like weak rabbits. Fenrin didn’t seem happy any more. He was cruel, tossing hearts aside like sweet wrappers, ignoring the girl he was screwing the previous week in favour of the girl he was screwing now, and her eyes, pinched with misery, watched them all the way down the corridor. At our film night they closed in on me like a pack, mocking everything I said and laughing uproariously. They poisoned my wine glass, and I threw up in front of them all, shaking and ashamed.
I crawled out of bed, covered in a light sheen of sweat, and sat on the floor under the window, the duvet wrapped around me. It was the soft pit of the night, somewhere in between two and three a.m., the time I felt most like anything could happen. The sky was clear, and the moon shone in, stirring something weird and wild in me. It was on nights like this that I used to stare out and wonder if I could just fly away, skipping across the ground like a hare, fleet and silent. Live in the woods, knowing my way perfectly, fitting into the landscape like it was made for me and me for it.
I hated myself for these thoughts because they were the thoughts of a child. But I never stopped thinking them. They weren’t comforting – they made me edgy, erratic.
Earlier I’d cleared the room of flowers. I got methodical, taking each individual flower stem and shredding the petals off. Ripping them up carefully, their soft furriness squelching under my fingertips, making me squirm. I fed them through the gap under the door, taking the empty stems and poking savagely at the heap through the gap until the petal shreds scattered across the hallway.
Thalia was shouting at me to stop from outside the room. Stupid earth witch. She pretended like it hurt her when her precious plants suffered. I told her to stop play-acting. She wasn’t three any more, and she needed to face reality.
She didn’t believe I wanted to bring Wolf back. I could see it in her scurrying little glances, full of nervous hate. She thought she was strong, but her strength came from fear. Fear of her parents, and of her future, which just seemed to get narrower and narrower, a tunnel that shrank until she couldn’t move forward any more; stuck in a dark, suffocating place for the rest of her life.
I used to feel sorry for her, but once it turned out that she wanted to kill me, sorry was an emotion I could no longer afford.
I shifted, rearranging my knees so they didn’t ache in my cross-legged position. I fancied I could feel the moonlight on my shoulders, a cold, gentle kind of touch. I knew it wasn’t real, but it helped my mind to reach down and inhabit that space of make-believe that seemed to go hand in hand with magic. Believe it and it would become true.
Will. You had to will it to be so. That was what Summer used to say when we did our spellcasting. If I was a real witch, I could make the Graces set me free or believe anything about me that I wanted. But they didn’t. They believed the worst of me.
It was a stupid, pointless thing, anyway, to try and make people love you. Everyone was alone. We were born alone and we died alone. Whatever we did in between was nothing but a series of attempts to stave off the darkness we knew was always waiting for us. That was weak. We should welcome the darkness in. If you knew a thing, it couldn’t scare you as much. It couldn’t hurt you. I knew darkness. I knew alone.
So I sat there and I willed, willed with my atoms and my molecules. But I didn’t really know what I was willing. It kept changing on me. Faces slipped into each other, and the words became meaningless.
I wanted so many things, I didn’t know which direction to go in.
Then the bedroom door clicked and a sliver of black opened up wide, rushing towards me. For a second, I didn’t get it – had the darkness come for me somehow? But the hinges creaked and I realised the door was opening, and there was no light from the corridor beyond spilling through. It was black and still.
Before I could even think of getting up off the floor (and doing what? said the voice inside me scornfully), something slipped in. The door clicked shut behind it. The key turned in the lock.
‘Oh god,’ said a normal voice, breaking the spell.
‘I’m right here.’
The figure adjusted. ‘River? What the hell are you doing on the floor? I saw the bed empty and thought you were gone somehow.’
I stared up at Summer from my seat under the window. ‘How would I manage that?’ I said. ‘You’ve sealed the window and locked the door.’
She didn’t reply. I watched the figure cross towards me and bend near the bed. Warm, dim gold light flooded the room as she switched on the bedside lamp. I squinted until my eyes adjusted. She was wearing black cotton pajama bottoms and one of her many band T-shirts. Her hair was mussed, but she gave her head a tiny shake and her hair dropped into place around the curve of her cheekbone.
‘Isn’t it, like, three in the morning?’ I said. ‘What do you want?’
She ignored this and sat at the bottom of the bed, curling her feet under her. She had chipped black nail polish on her toes. She had the money for the expensive stuff, of course, but for some reason she always bought the cheap ones that lasted about a day. I wondered why. I’d never questioned it before. I would wonder about all her motives now, forever. That was one of a long list of fallouts from what she’d done.
‘I take it you didn’t like the flowers,’ she said.
‘Was I supposed to? They stank.’
Summer looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Your reaction to them was a bit over the top, though.’
‘You filled the whole room with them. I couldn’t even open the window. It was kind of difficult to breathe.’
‘Do you know why they were there?’
I settled back with a sigh, as if resigned to the interruption. ‘Enlighten me.’
‘They’re a binding flower.’
‘Oh, not this again. What are you going to do, wrap ribbons around me while I’m asleep? Hang another little figure up in a noose?’
‘More than that,’ she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘They’re from our own garden, and Esther’s been growing the bush for years, so they’re pretty strong. Fen has bowls of the petals in his room. He likes the smell.’ Her eyes slid onto my face. ‘Esther makes this perfume mist with them. It’s one of her bestsellers. Like a heavy vanilla, but kind of a wilder smell than vanilla. Fen wears it. Pretty much every day. In fact, that’s his smell. That and sea salt.’
It was his smell. It was a mean trick. I swallowed the sudden burst of fury I could feel blooming in my chest.
She
shook her head, this funny twist of a smile on her face. ‘You know, until recently I was still on the fence about this whole thing. I just thought – it’s not possible. It’s crazy.’
‘And now?’ I said casually, like I didn’t care at all, at the same time as my heart tried its hardest to climb out of my throat. ‘Have you lost your mind along with the twins of evil?’
‘I guess I’m waiting for you to tell me what really happened.’
‘So you can gaze into my eyes and see the truth?’
She shrugged. The shrug meant ‘sort of’.
I threw up my hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to say. You … you drugged me, Summer. What the hell is wrong with you? Why didn’t you just, oh I don’t know, ask me?’
‘Ask?’ she said. ‘Oh, sure. “Hey, hey, Rivs. I’m back in your life again for a teeny little favour. I know this is ludicrous because, well, if resurrection spells actually worked we’d have a serious population problem by now, but I wondered if you fancied trying to bring Wolf back from the dead, for old times’ sake, you know, could be fun?”’
‘Well—’
‘Also,’ she carried on over me, ‘let’s look at this hypothetically. Would you ask someone’s murderer to try and resurrect the person they killed?’
A hysterical laugh bubbled up out of my mouth. ‘I can’t believe we’re really having this conversation. No, hypothetically, I guess not.’
‘They’re afraid of you,’ she said quietly. She wasn’t laughing. ‘They figured you’d never do it. They thought kidnapping you was the only way.’
But why did you go along with it? Why are you doing this?
Summer, please, please don’t be afraid of me too. I don’t think I can take it.
‘And what do you think?’ I said out loud.
She ran her hands through her short hair in a tight, frustrated gesture. ‘I don’t know, River. I thought I knew you. That’s the thing that’s really screwing me up about this.’
‘You did. You do.’
‘Do I? But you kept lying to me, so how the hell could I? No, actually, you don’t lie so much as just leave really, really important things out. You never bothered to tell me, for example, that you were totally, loopy in love with Fenrin.’
‘… What?’
I started to panic. Of course he’d told them. I’d thought he would, hadn’t I? I’d always known he’d humiliate me like that.
She held up a hand. ‘Well done, by the way. I had no idea. I thought you liked me for me, not because I was a way to get close to him. I mean, it’s not like it’s so unusual, most of the girlfriends I’ve ever had were the same. I’d just thought you were different, that’s all. Shows how stupid I am, doesn’t it?’
‘Summer, please, that’s not true. You don’t understand.’
‘The second thing you left out,’ she continued, ignoring me, ‘is what you said to Wolf just before the wave took him.’
I was mute now. Mute was my last remaining defence.
‘Maybe you don’t remember,’ she said. ‘But Fenrin does, now. You said to Wolf, “If I wished you gone, and the sea just came and took you away right now, what would happen? Would he want me instead of you?”’
She was paraphrasing.
But okay.
‘And the third thing you left out,’ said Summer, with a faint and strange smile, ‘is what you did to Niral.’
‘What?’ I was mystified. ‘I didn’t do anything to her! She bullied me!’
Summer hugged herself, wrapping her hands around the tops of her arms.
‘It wasn’t until her that I really got it,’ she said. ‘Thalia believed Fen right away. She was the one who got people to do that stupid binding crap to you in school. I tried to get them to stop. It was all so petty.’
She paused, and I felt an expectant dread like falling gently push me back.
‘But then there was that spell you did on Niral that day,’ she said. ‘You wanted her to stop talking shit about you, didn’t you? I guess there’s no time limit on these things because nothing happened at first. But she was ill, on and off, do you remember that? And then, after Wolf died, she was out of school a lot. Lou told me on the phone that she’s still missing whole weeks all the time, even now. She might have to drop out.’
My breath was coming up short. I didn’t want to hear it.
‘She keeps losing her voice,’ I heard Summer say.
‘So?’ I managed.
I could feel her eyes on me, assessing every little movement I made. ‘Chronic laryngitis, apparently. They have no idea what’s causing it.’
‘She could have throat cancer or something.’
‘They tested for all that. I told you, they don’t know what the problem is. But then, they wouldn’t. They don’t have hospital tests for binding spells.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, urgently. ‘You’re seeing things that aren’t there. It’s coincidence, that’s all.’
She sounded amused. ‘Yeah, you said that yesterday. You know, I remember telling you a long time ago that real magic wouldn’t need chants, or the right clothes, or any of that pointless stuff. Real magic would be about will alone. You must have been laughing at me. You must have just sat there and thought what a colossal idiot I was. River, I wanted real magic so much to be true, sometimes I hoped so hard for it I felt like my guts were coming up. I wanted to believe, but I never have, not truly. Not until you.’
Her pale cheeks were patched red, like she’d been slapped.
I was trying to keep my voice steady. ‘Are you telling me you’re a fake?’
She was evasive. ‘I’m telling you that nothing is as black and white as that, okay? Nothing is as easy as that.’
‘No shit, Summer. No shit. Think for a second. If I truly had real magic, don’t you think I could have made myself a better life than the one I have?’ My voice was rising but I didn’t care. Let her see my pain, for once. Let her be convinced. ‘I could have just magicked myself pots of money, and fixed everything wrong in my life.’ I could have brought my father back. ‘I could have made Fenrin love me. The love spell in the copse – it was for him. You were right. I did like him, okay? But it didn’t work, did it?’
‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘It worked. He was so into you back then. He thought you were great.’
‘Just shut up!’ I shouted at her. ‘No, he didn’t. He loved Wolf!’
‘He saw you as a baby sister, River. He told me.’
‘Well, that’s great. That’s just what I wanted when I did that spell.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ said Summer, incredulous. ‘He saw you as a sister. Not someone to wear for a few weeks. Don’t you get how much more that means?’
She hunched, her lips thinning.
‘And you betrayed him,’ she went on. ‘Don’t you get how much more that means?’
I had nothing for that.
‘I think you can undo what you did to Wolf. You can bring him back.’
I felt like cradling my head in my hands. ‘Summer, I can’t.’
Summer’s face dropped like I’d never disappointed her so much before. ‘Look, I’m sorry we did it this way,’ she said, and she sounded like she genuinely meant it. ‘I wanted you to want to help us. Just … River, please. We were best friends.’
Yes. We were. Never to be again.
I felt only shame when I remembered how she’d made me feel. Because with the Graces I’d felt special, but with Summer I’d felt human. All the endless roaring questions I had that no one else seemed to, the relentless scratching in the core of me that made me wonder why, why, why, what is the point of us, why do we yearn when we’re nothing but animals, why do I love and hate the dark things, why must I push against the life I’ve been handed, why can’t I be normal like everyone else? Well, Summer could answer all that with just a narrowing of her eyes that meant ‘why would you want to be?’
But now it was them versus me. I’d come second best to her family. I would always come second best
. Summer looked at me, and all she saw was the one thing I’d worked so hard not to be for her: a freak. A lonely, lying freak. I’d never wanted to see that look on her face, and I’d never let myself think it could come to this. But it finally had, and now that we were here, all I felt was numb.
‘Summer,’ I said, ‘whatever you think I’ve done, whatever you think I am … I can’t bring Wolf back. He’s dead, okay? He drowned, and I saw it. And that’s it. The dead stay dead.’
She stared at me for a moment more.
‘You’re lying,’ she said abruptly. ‘God! I didn’t want them to be right.’
‘Summer—’
She pushed herself off the bed, her bare feet landing noiselessly on the rag rug. ‘It’s like you hate us. Like you want to punish us. You’re not this person, River. You’re not. But you’re trying so hard to be.’ Her hands came up, hesitant, helpless. ‘And I don’t see any other options left.’
I watched her go with bright, wet eyes.
*
A couple of hours until dawn.
All I did was sit, staring at the wall.
I just wanted it to be over.
CHAPTER 35
In the morning, I had a shower. They’d left towels, and Esther’s soaps, in the en suite bathroom. I let the water run over me and tried to think. When I was dressed, I examined the bathroom window half-heartedly, but it was tiny. I might have been able to get my head and one arm out, and I’d read in a book once that if you could do that, you could get out of even the smallest-seeming of spaces. But I was too tired to try. I just wanted to lie down and disappear into nothing.
Fenrin brought in breakfast without a word. Just unlocked the door, came in, deposited the plate of little pastries and a cup of coffee on the floor, and left. Like I was their prisoner. Like I was their pet dog.
I ate it. At first I had thought about refusing dramatically. Grinding pastry flakes into their stupid rag rug or pouring the coffee onto the bedclothes. But it would just bother me more than them – I was the one stuck in the airless room with it. It was childish, anyway. Better to keep my strength up so I could be ready.