The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  Her mother strummed her fingers across a small fray in the thigh of her jeans. “I told you our relationship with our aunt was complicated.”

  Ruby groaned. “People use that word whenever they don’t want to explain.”

  “Then I’ll explain, if you have a question.” Her tone was patient, her soft smile inviting, but the words blew Ruby back like a billow of heat from an oven door.

  She rooted her legs to keep from retreating, and didn’t even bother slow-rolling her question—she was sure, by now, that her mother would know exactly what she meant when she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me the widower was a Volkov?”

  Evelina set her teacup down on the coffee table with a hard click so she could fold her hands in her lap. “Why didn’t you tell me who Dov Mahalel really was?”

  “I did.”

  But her mother shook her head. “Not the whole truth.”

  Then, Ruby understood. “Because it was none of your business,” she snapped, face aflame, though she couldn’t say why she was so angry. She wrapped her fist around the bracelet until its charms bit into her palm, fragile but sharp. “How did you even find out?”

  “I didn’t just leave to gather supplies. I needed information. So, like I told Dahlia, I visited an old friend while I was away. An old contact, anyway.” Her green eyes shone. “A psychic.”

  “Right,” Ruby snorted.

  But an almost-wicked smile danced upon Evelina’s lips.

  “You’re serious? An actual psychic? Those exist?”

  “This is a big world, Ruby. A big country, even, with hundreds of millions of strangers, and some of them are stranger than most. Some of them are like us. If there can be Chernyavskys living in Saltville, Maine, why can’t there be a psychic in Cape May, New Jersey? Honestly, at this point, I’m a little surprised that you’re surprised.”

  Ruby shook her head as if to rattle the thought into place. “All right, there are legit psychics. Good to know. What did this one say?”

  “‘Your enemies are strong in number, but far away—the wolf at your door prowls alone,’” her mother closed her eyes and repeated. “‘She’s been chasing your scent for years. She hopes to return with blood on her muzzle, and win back her place in the pack.’”

  “How . . . mystical.”

  “Very. When I asked about her weaknesses, he saw two children. Pups, he called them.” Ruby couldn’t help but roll her eyes, but her mother pressed on. “I got the gist—two children, seemingly both girls, but then not. He saw the she-wolf hugging her pups to her body all the same, and said for that, she was cast out, and her son and daughter with her.”

  This was no more than Dov had told Ruby, but it was no less painful to hear a second time. “So,” she said, clearing something rough from her throat. “Mrs. Mahalel thinks if she gets vengeance on us, her family will take them back?”

  Evelina tipped her head. “That seems to be the translation. But you didn’t answer my question. Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered,” Ruby said honestly, calmer now.

  Her mother looked skeptical. “You weren’t trying to protect the boy?”

  “Maybe,” she admitted, because this was also true. “So what?”

  “You asked why I didn’t tell you the whole truth about the widower. I suppose I was trying to protect Polina. At least, your memory of her.”

  “From what?” But Ruby didn’t require an answer. At least, not one she didn’t already have deep down. “Pyotr Volkov didn’t die of an asthma attack.”

  “Not so. That’s what killed him.”

  Ruby squinted down at her mother, trying to read between the lines; Evelina looked up at her expectantly, as if demanding she do so. “Okay, that’s what killed him. Who killed him?”

  Again, she didn’t need her mother to answer.

  “I . . . why?”

  Evelina spread her hands. “He was our enemy, Ruby.”

  “But . . . That’s why we were here. Why we didn’t know of our powers. So they—whoever they are—couldn’t find us.”

  “And Polina made sure of that.”

  “He didn’t have any powers. Or he couldn’t use them,” she amended, thinking of Dov.

  “As if a man needs powers to be a threat,” her mother scoffed.

  “Fine, but why would she live in his house for so long if he was dangerous? Why did it take her ten years?” Though they were discussing murder, Ruby felt strangely detached from the conversation, a little cloud floating above herself, watching tiny lives unfold below.

  Her mother regarded her, then nodded slightly, as if deciding. “Because her Time was approaching, just like yours is.”

  All at once, she sunk back to earth and into her body, finding it heavier than she remembered.

  “When she sensed it was near,” Evelina continued, “she performed a ritual, like the one I did for Nell, but . . . more intense. She wasn’t asking for days or weeks, she needed something more powerful—and she knew how to get it.” Her mother saw that Ruby understood, but she pressed on. “We need something powerful as well, for you, zerkal’tse. More time than your sisters could ever buy you. That’s what all of this is for—the supplies I left town for, and a personal belonging. A sacrifice.”

  The word triggered a memory—Nell pulling a towel from her bag, encrusted with something dark. Something personal, apparently.

  “So the bracelet is our sacrifice?”

  Her mother sighed, as if they were discussing a book Ruby had been assigned, but neglected to read. “It’s a symbol, of the true sacrifice.”

  Ruby imagined Polina, preparing her own ritual to preserve herself. She’d have done it in the tower, back when it was just a bedroom for three immigrant girls. Before she took the house from Pyotr Volkov, and his life, and . . .

  His time.

  She drew in all the air her lungs would hold. It wasn’t enough, and her voice was weak when she spoke. “Pyotr Volkov was Polina’s sacrifice. That’s how it works.” The words stuck in her throat. “Some innocent person was Nell’s.”

  Evelina picked up her teacup again. “Who says they were innocent? Not many people are, baby.”

  “I won’t kill anybody.” Of that, she was fairly certain. “I definitely won’t kill Talia. She’s—” Dov’s sister. Cece’s girlfriend. “She’s sixteen years old.”

  “And you don’t have to! Talia is powerful. I believe she can spare what we need. You’ve seen how these people spend themselves to practice, then bounce back the next day—you told me so.”

  It was true, Dov had said as much. And Ruby had seen his mother fully recovered. “But Dov wouldn’t,” Ruby pointed out. “Pyotr didn’t.”

  “The men in that line aren’t strong enough. You’ve heard their story. But it doesn’t need to be like that. Nobody has to die. You don’t have to die.”

  With a stumbling step forward, Ruby sank to the couch beside her mother, the wind going out of her. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

  Evelina wrapped her arms around Ruby, pulling her nearly into her small lap. “But this is the way it is. You have to fight for your life, and fighting doesn’t always look like it does in movies, guns and wands and fists. Sometimes we do it in the dark. But everything will be okay, zerkal’tse. You’ll see. By tomorrow night it’ll all be over, and you’ll be safe, and we’ll have plenty of time to put things right between all of us.”

  “We do this once,” Ruby said, “and then what? I die when I’m ninety-five?”

  For just one moment, Evelina ceased to breathe.

  “Was Pyotr Volkov Polina’s only sacrifice?” she pressed.

  “Ruby . . .”

  She tried to squirm out of her mother’s reach, but Evelina pulled her back, thin arms deceptively strong.

  “You’re my daughter,” she said fiercely, “and if it’s them or you, I choose you.”

  “Is them the Volkovs, or anybody who’s not a Chernyavsky?” Ruby muttered into her mother’s sweat
er.

  “Does it matter?”

  “To me it does.”

  “Then I’m sorry. Maybe it’s not what you want to hear, but I choose you over anybody. This is not the choice I want to make—it’s the choice our family has been forced to make, for generations. Not all of the women in our families who have died young have done so in a car, Ruby. There have been dozens of Times where our ancestors have seen themselves killed by those in society who don’t understand them, by men who fear them. They made a choice, to use the power they had to survive. We are only doing the same. Your life is all that matters to me. Yours and your sisters’. Don’t you want a life?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, you can’t get something for nothing, zerkal’tse.”

  As if Ruby hadn’t figured that out already.

  Evelina pulled back to look at her. “Let’s just get through tomorrow, baby, and then focus on the future. We’ll concentrate on becoming a family again.”

  It was everything Ruby wanted to hear, but it didn’t feel like hope; instead of her heart rising through her chest, it sank, settling on the floor of its own dark forest.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Like Vasilisa, she was meant to march into the woods, winning her miracle through cleverness and bravery, walking out again with new power. Of course, Vasilisa hadn’t known the full truth . . . or maybe she had. Maybe Vasilisa knew exactly what would happen to her wicked stepfamily when she knocked at their gate to be let in, bringing fiery death to their door. It didn’t say so in the story.

  But stories lied.

  Then again, perhaps Ruby had willfully misunderstood from the start. The Chernyavskys were thieves and liars. They used people—hadn’t she been using Dov?—and used them up. They kept secrets from the people who loved them most. Apparently, they murdered. What if the Chernyavskys weren’t the heroines, but the witches?

  And maybe witches didn’t get to lead long or happy lives . . . not unless they took them.

  • Thirty-One •

  Once Dahlia returned from the store, Ruby waited in her bedroom until her sister and mother had finished their business. Then, before Dahlia could come and check on her, she announced that she was going to Cece’s, pausing only to lift Polina’s keys from the ring. Though it was a school night, Dahlia didn’t try to stop her from leaving. Ginger thought their big sister was too permissive, but Dahlia became reluctant when she bumped up against the border between Sister and Mother; so often, she retreated. Ruby had always sensed it, and used it, with some guilt. Now, though, her only goal was to be somewhere that nobody could find her. At least, nobody she didn’t want to.

  What she needed was to be around something good. Something she didn’t have to steal. Something that was already hers.

  Ruby watched from the window as Dov’s black truck churned through the slick snow and mud to climb the driveway. Before he’d even parked, she’d thrown open the door to meet him. He wasn’t looking at her as he approached the front steps, but had his head tipped back to take in the whole house. When he stepped across the threshold, toed off his boots, and stood in his socks on the mat, his dark jeans were soaked to black above the ankles from the muddy trek across the lawn. He didn’t seem bothered; in fact, he seemed in a trance as he padded by her and down the hall, pausing in the archway of the great room to take it in.

  Would he recognize it? she wondered. Sense that this house had belonged to a relative, like a monarch butterfly that knows its home without ever having been there? She was curious, but felt detached, a scientist studying her subject from afar.

  “This was your grandma’s?” he asked, unsteady-sounding.

  “Just my great-aunt’s. Want the tour?” Without waiting for him to answer—or to blink—she folded their hands together. His was warm, and when he finally looked at her, brown eyes focusing, her whole body warmed, too.

  She tugged Dov down the hallway and up the stairs, not bothering with any of the rooms they passed until they reached the foot of the staircase spiraling into the tower. He followed her up and through the door, unlocked since her and Cece’s last visit. When her fingers found the familiar pull cord, they both winced in the sudden light.

  This was what she’d wanted to show him, why she’d asked him to come in the first place, she now realized. She wanted him to stand among the Chernyavsky secrets, see Ruby, truly know her at last. “What do you think?” she prompted.

  Dov turned a slow half circle, taking it in. “I think . . . it’s cool?” He seemed to guess at the answer she wanted, then chuckled. “Kind of Goth.”

  He’d guessed wrong.

  She dropped his hand, drifting toward the rough worktable and the little object that glinted on top. It was the clock Cece had knocked over. She picked it up, held it to her nose, and she could see how fragile it was—the delicate gold scrollwork around the face, the slim wooden finials like flattened clovers, its black metal hands as thin and sharp as toothpicks beneath the finely cracked glass—yet still it ticked away, even after the fall. As if nothing could stop it.

  Ruby pressed her thumb into the glass and watched it splinter. Harder, until it caved, until glass shards tinkled around her feet. Her finger seared with a small, sharp fire.

  “Stop, stop!” Dov took the clock and dropped it carelessly back on the tabletop. He took her hand in both of his, holding it up to examine. “What the hell, Ruby?”

  An ugly slice ran down her thumb, oozing blood that looked black in the attic light. She peered at it with mild interest. “Can you fix it?” she whispered hoarsely.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you do, right? You fix broken things.”

  Dov froze in place, his face stricken. “I don’t.”

  “But you did.” There was a horrible desperate whine in her voice. “You fixed me. You could do it again if you tried.”

  His mouth set in a grim line, eyes huge and damp, before he reached back for the broken clock. His fingers drifted toward the sharp glass.

  “Wait, stop!” She grabbed his wrist at the last moment, pulling him back. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

  Dov looked at her uncertainly, so she plastered on a calm smile to show the danger had passed.

  “Let’s go down,” she said. “There’re Band-Aids in the bathroom.”

  But after they’d descended the tower staircase, she didn’t stop to grab the first aid kit in the bathroom cabinet. She continued on, to her mother’s old bedroom instead, towing Dov behind her.

  It didn’t happen the way she’d pictured her first time, not exactly. For one, it wasn’t a solemn, dramatic affair. When Dov’s watch clasp got tangled in her hair by the root, he worked it carefully free as they grinned into each other’s faces. He was nervous, she could tell, though it wasn’t his first time. But he was also patient, and sweet, and talked her through everything, stopping often to ask questions. He told her where he wanted to be touched and how, and Ruby did the same (everywhere, and every way, just to be sure). Afterward, he hopped out of bed in his binder and boxers to fish her clothes off the floor so she wouldn’t be cold. Back under the covers, they coiled against each other until Dov dozed off, and then Ruby twisted carefully around to look at him.

  He lay on his belly, lean muscles loose. One arm was outstretched, fingers curled against the blankets where she’d lain a moment before. Dark hair flopped over the angled plane of his cheek, and little puffs of breath from between his parted lips warmed her face.

  She rolled away from him.

  Regret sat jagged inside of her. Not for the sex; she didn’t regret that. She’d liked it, and part of her wanted to kiss him awake and begin all over again. She was glad they’d done it.

  And yet, she did not feel fixed.

  That had been a stupid thought, of course. Dov couldn’t fix what was really broken in Ruby, even if he’d been a true Volkov heir. That was just the little-kid story she’d started to tell herself at bedtime to stave off the fear that came i
n the dark: that she was nothing, and would never have the chance to be anything more, whether she deserved it or not, despite her mother’s promises. It had gotten so the only way to fall asleep was to let herself believe that love might save her.

  But it was time to grow up.

  • Thirty-Two •

  Though she set her phone alarm when she got home so that she’d get up in time to get up for school the next day, when it went off on Wednesday morning, Ruby didn’t get out of bed.

  “I’m sick,” she croaked at Ginger, who lay a skeptical hand across her forehead, examined her red cheeks and eyes bloodshot from rubbing, with bags beneath she didn’t have to fake, as she hadn’t slept at all. Dahlia dutifully stuck the thermometer beneath Ruby’s tongue, but as she rushed off to get ready for work, Ruby held it briefly against her bare light bulb until the temperature was just high enough that her sisters wouldn’t bother to argue.

  She’d be in trouble when they came home from work to find her gone, with some unsatisfying excuse on a Post-it stuck to the fridge. Grounded from electronics, maybe, until Dahlia forgot that she was being punished and invited her to watch a Bachelorette marathon. It didn’t matter, and would pass quickly.

  None of this was strictly necessary. Skipping school wasn’t part of the plan. She could’ve gone to class as if everything were normal. Her mother probably would’ve preferred it, though it’s not like she’d ever shown much interest in her education. But Ruby couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing Talia in the halls, of holding still while Dov pressed a quick kiss into her cheek by her locker, of looking Cece in the eye at lunch as she forced down rubbery chicken nuggets and sweating french fries. She couldn’t imagine making it to seventh period, collecting her books at the end of the day, and waiting patiently in the parking lot line while student’s cars squeezed out onto the main road one by one.

  Instead, she texted Cece a few face-with-thermometer emojis to explain her absence and her silence, waited until seventh period would’ve started, then dressed in jeans and Ginger’s old cheeseburger baseball tee, grabbed her backpack, and got in her car.