Her amber eyes burned candle bright. “You think that was my idea? You think I’m not pissed that you know about us, and Cece doesn’t? Between you and Cece, if I was gonna trust one of you with our secret? Yeah, you’re not the one I’d pick.” Talia shoved Ruby aside, her anger a living force crackling the air around them. “Dov doesn’t think, but he’s a good guy. The best. You . . . I don’t even know what you are.” Like a hurricane, she swept off to the kitchen, leaving Ruby stunned in her wake. She hadn’t even turned off the bathroom light behind her.
And she’d left her purse right on the sink counter.
Quickly, Ruby ducked into the bathroom. She reached for the little black purse and pulled back the flap, sifting through hairpins and thick elastics and tubes of ChapStick inside. Any of it might work, but she stopped when she found the thin silver bracelet tinkling with charms—a butterfly, a rose, a hamsa, a heart-shaped lock. Thinly beaten metal, nothing expensive, but she’d seen Talia wearing it before.
The more personal, the better.
Ruby slid it inside her coat pocket, then slipped back into the hall.
Her mother had said they needed a token from their enemies for the ritual, something belonging to a Volkov woman.
She hadn’t specified which.
• Twenty-Eight •
The elusive Petey lived on a wooded, narrow back road, the kind that was rarely plowed, so they drove over inches of tire-packed snow to get to it. Apparently, it hadn’t stopped her classmates from forging on toward the “thing” like moths to a porch lamp, nor had the fact of it being a Monday.
Petey’s house was cozy, cabin-like, with lots of throw blankets and dark couches and wood-beamed ceilings, the stone fireplace lit. It was also crowded and loud, music and slightly wild voices competing with one another. The girl who’d come in before Ruby was snared by a group around the sofa, shrieking as they tugged her into their midst. She and Dov plunged forward. Except for a pause to drop their coats in a pile at the foot of the overburdened coatrack, he hadn’t let go of her hand.
In the kitchen, they found his people. A clump of flannel shirts and uncombed hair, the boys bellowed indistinctly when they saw Dov, arms tossed up, Solo cups sloshing. A boy with uneven beard stubble slapped his knuckles against Dov’s chest, and did a sort of double take when he saw who was with him. “Hey . . .”
“Ruby,” she shouted over the music, impossibly louder in here.
“Oh right. Let me get you guys something!” He turned and fought his way across the room toward the fridge.
“That’s Petey!” Dov leaned in so she could hear him, lips brushing her earlobe. The song that thumped through the kitchen was a whispery woman’s voice over insistent bass, cranked until it rattled the cups on the counters, the furniture, the floorboards. She imagined she felt it in Dov’s hand, pulsing through his body into hers, as if she held a beating heart.
Petey came back with a red cup for each of them. “Rum and Coke,” he yelled, handing them off. “Have fun!” Then, in a great gust of body spray and beer breath, he was absorbed back into the flannel hydra.
Dov drank and grimaced. “Careful, I don’t think that’s rum.”
Ruby took a sip that spiraled hotly down her throat. “I don’t think it’s Coke, either.”
He led them out of the kitchen to a staircase that descended into the basement. It was packed as well, and coolers of all kinds were set up beside a pool table, on top of which sat sticky-looking bottles. She scanned the selection of whatever strange drinks that wouldn’t be missed from parents’ cabinets—Grand Marnier, peppermint schnapps, the largest bottle of Fireball she’d ever seen.
Ruby set her half-full cup delicately into a paper bag bulging with empties. Dov set his on the pool table (Ruby doubted the felt would survive the night) and dipped his free hand into a cooler. He fished out two dripping Sea Dogs, one of which Ruby took. It was better than their mystery mixes.
They wound through kids she half knew in search of a quieter spot. In the corner by a set of steps leading up to the hatch, there was another door. Dov opened it tentatively. She saw his lips shape around a “whoa,” and then after raising an eyebrow—she shrugged—he went inside.
The room was empty. Of people, anyhow. There was a workbench along one wall, but the small room’s most prominent feature was one whole golf cart, parked right in the middle of the concrete floor.
“Why?” she asked, bewildered.
“I don’t know.”
“How did they even get this in here?”
“I don’t know!” He laughed. He dropped her hand to circle the cart, examining its tires, the yellow-and-black-striped upholstery, the driver’s seat and a back-facing bench mounted to the rear. They climbed up onto it; Dov had to duck under the rippled awning, and his hair nearly brushed the roof once they were aboard. He slid his hand back into Ruby’s, and they sat side by side, taking in the view of the workbench, its scattered tools.
“It could be like a project,” she suggested. “Like a DIY golf cart he’s building with his dad. Or his mom.”
“Yeah, those DIY father-son golf cart kits you see everywhere.”
“Or mother-son.” She drank her beer, letting it wash away the pucker of the mystery mix and warm her stomach. “Does, um, your mother know we’re together? Tonight, I mean, not—” Another frantic sip for courage. “Wouldn’t she be mad?”
“I don’t know. She’d probably be disappointed. Maybe she’d say I’m being selfish.” He shifted subtly so his arm was against Ruby’s arm, his hip against hers, hands still clasped. “I probably am. But I never expected to find someone who was okay with . . .” He gestured broadly to himself with his beer can. “Everything. All of this. I mean, like, I hoped, but I wasn’t holding my breath. And now I have, and it’s kind of hard to believe you could be this cool. And pretty, and smart, and fuck, I have to stop talking.” He knocked the beer can against his forehead, eyes pinched, an embarrassed flush beneath his brown skin.
“No, it’s sweet. It just proves you don’t really know me,” she reminded them both, but with a grin. Now she pressed closer to Dov, breathing in the same square inch of air as him.
“Do you want—”
She kissed him. This time, she was definitively the kisser, he the kissee, and if it wasn’t as electrical as their first touch, it was heat and breath and heartbeat, and the identical taste of beer on their tongues, though neither of them minded that.
His hands were on her hips, but she steered herself, shifting to straddle his lap.
“Are you sure you want to?” he asked.
She nodded. “But I should probably say I haven’t done . . . anything like this.”
Dov paused with his fingertips at the hem of her sweater, an old one of Dahlia’s, soft gold, big enough so it slouched off her shoulder. “With someone like me?”
“No, with anybody.” She plucked at the top button of his flannel, in the hollow of his throat. “Have you?”
“Yeah.”
“In Saltville?”
He jerked his head to knock his hair back—her eager fingers had dragged it out of place. “In St. Pete’s. And, uh, Virginia, before that. But just twice.”
She considered this. “Did they know you were a Volkov?”
His hands bunched in her sweater, and he pecked his lips against her bare shoulder. “I’m not. I’m a Mahalel. Plus I figured being trans was, like, the more pressing issue.”
Nobody had known Dov the way she did, and that thought sweetened the moment again. She shivered under his mouth. “You have to tell me what to do, okay?”
Dov pulled back. “So do you.”
Was this really happening? She resettled herself in his lap. “Deal. Should—can we take our shirts off?”
He laughed. “Yes please. But so you know, I’m wearing a half binder. It’s . . . kind of like a long sports bra, but it has this thick panel that flattens you in front. It’s gonna be rough, if you feel it, because I’m wearing it inside out. Otherwis
e it’s not that comfortable.”
She remembered the panic that had cleared Dov’s eyes when she went to lift his shirt that first night. “Is that why you wanted me to stop?”
“Yeah. I should’ve told you before that,” he said. His leg jumped anxiously beneath her.
“I think you tried.”
He frowned. “I don’t even know what got into me.”
But Ruby did. They still hadn’t spoken of the Spark. The Annihilation Event, she tried not to call it. Nothing without a price.
She’d have to talk to Cece, ask her how it had felt the first time she’d touched Talia. The first time they’d kissed. That was safe territory without explaining everything—they were cousins, best friends, and could talk about things like that, even if they’d never had occasion to before.
Then Ruby didn’t want to think of Cece, or of Talia’s simmering amber eyes, because Dov was tentatively lifting her sweater while she unbuttoned his shirt. Only he was working up at the same time she worked down, so her sweater got tangled around her elbows, but they were laughing as she stopped to tug it over her head. She wore a black camisole beneath, but it was rucked up over her hips, and her skin rippled with goose bumps as he ran his hands across them. Everything she’d normally be self-conscious of—the natural swell of flesh above the waistband of her skinny jeans, or the flatness of her breasts, or the knobbiness of her collarbone, or the permanently dry patches of pink skin on her elbows—she shoved aside as the pads of his fingers drifted up her spine to her bra, touching, but not unclasping.
She tugged off his flannel and, waiting for his help, the white T-shirt underneath. The gray binder wasn’t quite snug against him—the bottom ridged out about a half inch—but when they pressed urgently together, they were still so much skin and warmth, hands in each other’s hair one second, tracing his stomach and her waistline the next. His beer can tipped off the seat and clanked as it spun away across the cement floor, but Ruby only heard it distantly. Mostly, there was the vague bass pounding through the walls and the ceiling, matched beat for beat by the blood in her ears.
It was like the swell of a wave building behind a seawall.
How far they would’ve gone—how far he wanted to go, or who would’ve stopped first (probably not Ruby), if the door hadn’t opened, she didn’t know.
But it did, letting in the music and the sounds of the crowd behind her.
“Oh shit . . . sorry guys . . .”
Ruby craned around to watch a flash of army-green jacket and the heel of a boot disappear as the hapless intruder pulled the door closed behind them.
When she turned back, Dov was breathing as if he’d just finished a long run. He wiped the heel of his hand across his forehead.
“Are you okay?” she asked, remembering he’d only been on his feet for a day or two.
“Yeah.” He let out a puff of laughter. “Maybe I need some electrolytes or something.” He leaned in to kiss her again, sweetly and once, not like the start of something, but like the ending.
For the moment, anyway.
Hopping down from the cart, she pulled on her camisole and sweater, smoothing down the static halo of her hair, massaging her lips with one finger; they felt red and sore, but in a good sort of way. Dov rebuttoned his shirt, a little pale all of a sudden, and seemed to limp slightly as he dismounted. But he smiled as he watched her.
Ruby realized she was smiling, too.
As they melted back into the party, pausing to grab her another Sea Dog out of a cooler, and Dov a Sprite, their togetherness was acknowledged by the people around them in surprised glances and sly nods. She didn’t mind the attention. It was nice to have something all to herself that she didn’t have to take, because a beautiful boy was giving it to her already.
Because by some kind of luck or magic, he wanted her to have it.
• Twenty-Nine •
As March turned over into April, the weather finally began to change. Nothing was green and wouldn’t be for a while yet. But the snow melt kicked off mud season, the stretch of early spring where lawns became shoe-swallowing bogs, and cars floundered on dirt roads as if caught in quicksand. Dov persuaded Ruby to go mud-running with his friends that first Saturday, but the wind was cold and he wasn’t a true devotee, so they spent the trip parked in his truck instead. After briefly explaining the plot and making him promise not to laugh, she let him listen to the latest episode of Solving for X-traordinary through shared headphones—Kerrigan Black was currently in prison, awaiting her own trial for witchcraft.
My cell is predictably bleak, very small and dark. Though there are no windows, I can tell time a bit by the sweltering temperatures as it grows closer to noon, and then the slow break in the heat some while after. It always stinks of dung and tobacco, and I know there must be lice in the straw bedding scattered across the stones. I hear rats in the night. It goes without saying that I won’t have access to anything I might use to make an explosion while I’m wasting away in jail, which could be for months.
Though I try to remain hopeful, I know my history, and I know how these trials went. I will be examined for witch marks, humiliatingly, I’m sure. If they find anything, I’ll be whipped or worse until I confess, and with no friend to testify for me, I’ll likely be hanged, all on the word of a corrupt and horny businessman, delivered from atop his petty throne of lumber.
After all of this, after everywhere I’ve been and everybody I’ve left behind, to never make it back home . . . this can’t be how my story ends.
“She’s right, though,” Dov said thoughtfully.
“About what?”
“Come on, you know she’s going to be okay because it’s a story, and stories don’t work like that. Main characters don’t just die in jail cells in the middle of a random episode.”
Ruby reached over to pinch his cheek. “Oh, you sweet summer child. You’ve never seen Game of Thrones.”
That same night, she and her sisters celebrated Dahlia’s twenty-eighth birthday. The three of them lounged in a pile on the sofa watching Practical Magic, eating chocolate cake for dinner and blueberry pie for dessert. Ruby swooned along with them at the retro sundresses and broom skirts and rippling hairstyles, but half-heartedly. It had been almost two weeks since Evelina had left town, and with no way to contact her mother, she was trapped in limbo: making excuses to avoid Talia and Mrs. Mahalel while sneaking out to meet Dov—and making excuses to herself to avoid all thoughts of what might happen between them once her mother returned—and scheming with Cece while the secret she still kept from her cousin clawed at her. She’d slipped Talia’s bracelet in between the pages of the fairy-tale book in her backpack, but when she and her cousin were together, she imagined she could hear its cold tinkling with every step.
When the end credits played and they set their scraped-clean plates on the floor, Ginger draped her leg over Dahlia’s and nudged Ruby’s shoulder with her slipper. “Okay, present time! Mine’s in my room. Can you go get it?”
Ruby thrust her socked foot in Ginger’s face, jostling Dahlia between them. “I thought I was banned.”
“Congratulations, I’m lifting it temporarily. Go get my present.”
“Sure.” She smiled sweetly. “Be right back, Dahlia, going to get your exciting new desk planner.”
From the way Ginger’s eyes pinched, Ruby supposed she wasn’t far off. She had made Dahlia an unstable jewelry stand in wood shop, wrapped in magazine paper and masking tape. Their big sister would pretend to be thrilled by both gifts.
Dropping her plate off in the kitchen sink instead of the dishwasher—a passive-aggressive present for Ginger—she trudged to her sister’s bedroom. It was as she remembered: her bed perfectly made with edges sharp enough to cut a throat, her books organized alphabetically and by subgenre on dustless shelves, and the faint, fake scent of orange blossoms from a fabric spray bottle. Ginger’s was the only room in the house where multicolored strands of hair didn’t collect in the corners. Even Dahlia’s pristine
ly wrapped present sat dead center of her little office desk. The only hint of a mess was a thick stack of papers beside the gift, the page on top brittle and wrinkled. Ruby glanced down at it: a certificate of title for a 2005 Volvo V70, Maroon.
Polina’s car.
Curious, she sifted through the pile, careful to keep everything in order. Insurance policies, bank statements, a copy of Polina’s social security card. It all must’ve come from the fire safe in her library—she remembered that Dahlia and Ginger were taking care of the house for the time being, until the estate was settled. Her heart quickened, but none of it seemed very interesting or important, except to finalize affairs for the dead. Polina had saved a list of the medications she’d been taking—not many for a woman of ninety-five—and paper-clipped documents with the note “for renovations” attached . . . though not in Polina’s now-familiar handwriting. Among them was a City of Saltville electrical permit, dated 1946. After the Chernyavsky sisters arrived in Maine, but before they’d inherited the house.
Sure enough, the name under “Owner” read “Pyotr Volkov” in faded ink.
“Hey!” she barked aloud to nobody. Setting down the stack, she pulled out her phone, searching “Pyotr Volkov Saltville Maine.”
The first result was a public records site that announced a death record had been found. Ruby tapped the link and scanned the limited information given for free. His last location—Saltville—a short list of relatives, no Mila among them, and his age at the time of death: thirty-eight.
“Ruby!” Ginger bellowed from the living room. “Are you lost?”
Grabbing Dahlia’s present (roughly the size and shape of a desk planner), she texted Cece as she made her slow way back to her sisters.
Ruby: Is your mom going to MoM tomorrow?
Cece: Yeah why?
Because none of this made sense. First Galina’s tampered entry in the Recordings, and now this knowledge: a Volkov had lived in Saltville before the Chernyavskys even got here.
That wasn’t how the stories went. The Chernyavskys had fled Russia to escape their enemies, not to meet up with them again in America. Her mom had never mentioned that Polina had inherited the house on Ivory Road from one of them. And while it was true that the story of how Polina came to settle in the house for good didn’t specifically state that the widower had died of old age, it didn’t say otherwise.
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