The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  I’m in Ginger’s car, the Malibu, except I’m driving.

  Evelina knotted a length of red string around Ruby’s left wrist.

  I’m young, maybe seventeen or eighteen? I can feel it. Plus there’s a Physics 2 textbook on the floor of the passenger seat with a badger sticker on the cover, and that’s the Saltville High mascot. So unless it’s seriously overdue, I’m still in high school.

  A length around her right wrist.

  It’s morning, and the sun is coming up through the windshield, but I know I’m not driving to school. I’m on a street I don’t recognize, and I’m drinking gross coffee out of a foam to-go cup from a diner I’ve never heard of, so I don’t think it’s in Saltville. There are empty ones just like it stuffed into every cup holder and side pocket, and crumpled up turnpike tickets, too. Like the kind we got that summer Mom took us to Pennsylvania on vacation, when it was my job to hold onto them for her between the tollbooths.

  Around each of her ankles, now. The string against her limbs felt . . . heavy. Like the ties were made of iron links instead of cotton fiber.

  This okay band, Creatures Such As We, comes on the radio, and I turn it up. Somebody’s waiting for me. I’m singing along to this song, even though it’s not my favorite, but I’m really excited to get where I’m going and see them.

  Then I don’t see anything else.

  Ruby opened her eyes as her mother slid Talia’s bracelet onto Ruby’s wrist, cold fingers brushing the flushed skin above her pulse. She shivered as Evelina touched her cheek and announced, “You’re ready, zerkal’tse.”

  The candles on the black cloth had burned low, but they flickered as her mother took up position on one side of the coffee table. Ruby risked a glance at Cece, pale and huddled on the couch, arms wrapped around her knees, her stained lips pressed painfully tight.

  It wasn’t long enough, but what could she do?

  Evelina poured a cup of tea from the pot into one of Polina’s cups, drank, handed it over. Ruby stared into the thin amber liquid before she sipped, gagging. It had gone cold while it sat, and worse, it tasted the way rotting things smelled—damp black earth and berries ground into mulch.

  Next, she passed Ruby a blini from a dull silver platter, also cold, spongelike, without any of the sweetness Ruby remembered from family parties.

  She opened her mouth, and Ruby knew what was coming.

  “Mom, wait.”

  There was so much she wanted to say. Her mother had left her, and had lied to her and convinced her to lie, to her sisters and her best friend and to herself . . . though it hadn’t taken much persuasion, if she were being honest now.

  If time is a prize you want to win, you must prepare to lose.

  She had told herself stories because she wanted to live, really live, and didn’t care to know the true price. And it had cost her, just as it had cost the women before her.

  None of this was easy, or simple. Part of her would always hate her mother, and would always love her, and would always wonder who they might have been.

  But even with all the time in the world, she couldn’t begin to say so. In the end, she settled on, “I’m sorry.”

  Evelina frowned. “For what?”

  Ruby touched the charms at her wrist, preparing to rip the bracelet free, whatever the consequences. “Just . . . that this is who Polina made you. And who you thought you had to become.”

  For a single moment, the firelit angles of her mother’s face softened. Not toward Ruby, she didn’t think, but toward some younger version of herself, far away and long ago. It blurred her wrinkles, and with the flames burnishing her hair gold, she looked like the Evelina Ruby remembered.

  Then her eyes darted past Ruby and crystalized, hard and cold once more. “This house isn’t yours,” she said, her voice a distant thunderclap, promising destruction.

  Ruby knew without turning to whom she spoke, but spun around anyway. There stood Mrs. Mahalel in the doorway of the great room: her great-aunt’s murderer, and her desperate hope. “It should’ve been. But why would I want it now?” She glanced around the room, taking in the gathered dust, the cobwebs in the high corners, the misplaced furniture casting bold shadows. “The place is rotting, and it’s starting to show.”

  “Then why are you here?” Evelina snarled, so unlike the quiet woman Ruby remembered that even after everything, it shocked her.

  “Didn’t you know? I was invited.”

  Both women turned as one to look at Ruby.

  This wasn’t technically true. What Ruby had done was whisper instructions to Cece as she passed her cousin her phone. “Tell Dov he needs to tell his mom to come to Polina’s, now. Say Polina’s heir is back, and Talia’s in trouble.” She’d left it to Cece to decide how best to fit that into the few texts she could send while Ruby distracted Evelina, allowing herself to be prepared for the ritual. Then she’d prayed to nothing—or to the laws of nature she’d yet to break, or to the four unseen suns in a faraway sky—that Mrs. Mahalel, the only person who might be strong enough to stand up to her mother, would make it in time.

  Mila Mahalel eyed the tablecloth, eyes flickering across the spread with disgust. “You people will never stop trying to take what isn’t yours.”

  As Evelina rose and rounded the table to face her, Ruby snatched up the cloth bundle she’d left on the floor at her feet, forgotten for the moment. Holding it between pinched fingers, she grabbed Talia’s bracelet off the cloth as well, then scuttled backward toward Cece, away from the women.

  “It’s all ours,” her mother answered. “You people should’ve learned that by now. You shouldn’t have come back to Saltville.”

  From the pocket of crisp tan trousers, Mrs. Mahalel pulled a knife, its handle smooth and pale and knobbed at the end, spotted already with blood, like a bone filleted from a fresh kill. Its blade flashed in the fire’s glow. “We’ll be leaving soon,” she said calmly.

  Every muscle in Ruby seized, but instead of pointing the knife at her mother, Mrs. Mahalel dragged the blade’s edge across her own palm, unspooling a thin ribbon of blood. She murmured through barely parted lips, her words lost beneath a sound like radio static that stuffed up the air.

  No, that wasn’t it exactly—the static wasn’t around them, but in Ruby’s ears. In her head. And it was deeper, darker than white noise, the buzzing of flies, or a rattlesnake’s tail.

  Evelina wavered on her feet, a small red stream dripping from her freckled nose to spatter the floorboards. Between her mother and Mrs. Mahalel and Cece, Ruby imagined she could taste the blood in the room, the taint of iron, like water from a rusted spout. But there was no moisture in the air—impossibly, it grew hotter still.

  Her mother sagged against the fireplace, catching herself on the mantel.

  This was how the Volkov women broke what was whole.

  Ruby made herself crawl the rest of the way to the couch, where Cece sat transfixed. She reached for her cousin and grabbed her wrist—she wasn’t gentle—pulling until Cece tumbled to the floor. “We have to go,” she wheezed through a parched throat. She managed to get them both to their feet. They couldn’t stand fully—the air high up was too hot, as if the flames had leapt the fireplace, as if the braziers had toppled and caught the room on fire.

  Mrs. Mahalel closed her eyes and her smile stretched wide, the shadows of unseen things flitting from her lips.

  Between great gasps of scorched air, her mother was speaking now, too, words Ruby did and did not know. Russian chanting she’d heard outside of Dov’s bedroom, his hands on her and hers on him, their skin alight with the Spark. She recognized her mother’s voice, at once coarse and velvet, but Polina’s, too, and there was Galina’s voice, too, though she’d never heard it, and her great-grandmother, and whoever had come before her, though she’d never wondered much about Vladlena’s genesis; she was where all their stories began.

  “Prinyat’ vse,” the voices ungoverned by time called from her mother’s slim throat, and she straightened, snatchin
g up the fireplace poker from its stand.

  Mrs. Mahalel’s eyes snapped open.

  Ruby took Cece’s hand and ran.

  Out of the great room. Down the hall. To the front door, where she made them stop just long enough to scoop up their shoes and coats—whatever the outcome, Ruby wouldn’t leave anything behind for either woman to use. Cece flung open the door just as the wild buzzing in the room behind them became a roar.

  Nearly blind in the darkness, the moon and stars blotted out by trees once they reached the driveway, she and Cece skidded halfway down, ankle-deep mud sucking at their feet. Cece fell hard with a heavy grunt, and Ruby tugged her up, not letting go until they reached the bottom of the hill, her beautiful old Malibu gleaming under a streetlight. Soaked and shaking, they threw themselves into the car. As she started the engine and swerved them into the road, Ruby passed her cousin the little white bundle, which she’d been holding so carefully since she’d stolen it, as if cradling a cactus. She clawed the flowers and leaves from her hair, then tore at the clasp of Talia’s bracelet with her teeth. It broke away, and she handed that to Cece, too. The red string still around her wrists would have to wait; she couldn’t free herself while driving.

  Cece lifted the bundle in one filthy hand to inspect. “It’s got my hair around it,” she said, still panting.

  Ruby hoped it was exertion, rather than pain.

  She chanced a look, and her cousin was right. A strand of long, glistening blond hair was wrapped tightly around the yarn.

  Cece bared her teeth, still red-tinged, remembering, as Ruby was, the way Evelina had stroked her hair and cheek, as if because she’d missed her. As if she cared for her niece.

  Fumbling with the cloth and knotted yarn, she lay it open in her lap. Ruby kept her eyes mostly on the road, but caught snatches of its contents. Burned bits of some root, charred beyond naming, and dried leaves, and a heap of the tiniest bones, smaller than matchsticks. Before she could examine it all, Cece wound down her window, letting in the night and the fresh smell of pine. She held up the open cloth, and the cold April wind took it all, whipped away and lost along the road, never to be found. Finally, she let go of the white cloth, and it fluttered out the window like a freed dove.

  Talia’s bracelet, she clutched with muddy fingers to her chest. “What now?” she asked numbly.

  As with one million other questions, Ruby didn’t have the answer.

  • Thirty-Five •

  There was no way to know what had happened between Evelina and Mrs. Mahalel, but Ruby didn’t think her mother was dead. She didn’t feel that familiar, icicle cold. All she felt inside of her was . . . quiet. Like the ringing silence after a door slams shut on the outside world. Already, the words of her ancestors seemed to be fading from memory. Even her own mother’s voice was a slippery thing; had it been gruff, at the end, or sugar-sweet, or knife sharp? What was the last thing she’d said, not to her enemy, but to her daughter? Ruby couldn’t remember. It might mean that her mother was weakened. It might mean everything, or nothing.

  As for Dov’s mother, Ruby supposed she wanted her to be all right. Mrs. Mahalel had killed Polina, had probably meant to kill Ruby’s mother from the start. But Polina had killed, too. Murdered. Did that make Mrs. Mahalel right? Did it make her good?

  She didn’t know. Maybe there weren’t any villains or heroes in the world.

  Maybe there were just people.

  Exhausted but afraid to go home—if Evelina made it out and came after them, she might head straight for Stone Road—Ruby pulled into the parking lot of the first place that felt safe.

  The crowd at the Cone Zone had calmed some in the weeks since its opening. This week’s Danger Cone: Foie Gras.

  Cece was toying with Talia’s bracelet, running the little silver charms through her fingers one at a time, the way Ruby had seen religious people do with rosary beads in movies. Now she dropped the bracelet into her lap. “We need to tell Talia. And Dov. They should know about . . . about everything.”

  Ruby slumped back in the driver’s seat, watching a cluster of kids she recognized but couldn’t name spill out the brightly lit doors. “They’ll hate me.”

  Cece sighed through her nose, then coughed at the effort. “I don’t think they will,” she said once she’d recovered. “You lied to me, and you did a really shitty thing to Talia, even if she is a Volkov. But you’re not, like, evil. You were scared.”

  “My mom was scared, too,” Ruby pointed out.

  “That just proves you’re stronger than her, because you couldn’t go through with it. You couldn’t hurt someone to save yourself. You’re not like your mom.”

  Not yet, Ruby thought but didn’t say.

  Cece pulled the phone out of her boot where she’d tucked it. She set it in Ruby’s lap, and Ruby obeyed her wordless command, answering Dov’s increasingly frantic texts over the past few hours with instructions to meet at the Cone Zone.

  Before she could toss her phone aside, Dahlia’s name flashed on the screen. She didn’t want to talk to her sisters yet, but she didn’t want them calling around, either, comparing notes with Aunt Annie.

  “Hey, Dahlia,” she said in a breathless rush. “I’m sleeping over Cece’s tonight if that’s—”

  “What? Hold on . . .” Silence, then a muffled argument in the background before Dahlia returned. “Ginger wants to—”

  “You’ll be disappointed to know our trash can remains inanimate,” Ginger said dryly, having snatched Dahlia’s phone away from her.

  “Huh?”

  “You mean you weren’t expecting our trash can to gain sentience and walk itself out to the curb this morning?”

  “I—”

  “Because once you recovered so miraculously from your terrible illness, you’d think you would’ve been able to complete one of your two weekly chores.”

  “Ginger . . .” Her voice cracked down the middle, and she had to stop to clear her throat. “Hey, I have to go now. I’m with Cece. But . . . I’m sorry, okay? I . . . I’ll remember next time,” she finished, because she couldn’t say ‘I love you’ without casting suspicion on the whole conversation.

  It was almost six years to the day since her sisters had brought her here for their speech. At the memory, Ruby felt such a wave of love for them, it was almost like drowning, and she undid her seat belt to fill her lungs with all the fresh air she could. Her mother didn’t think very much of them. Not Ginger, with her piles of Russian classics topped by Anna Kar-e-nin-a, and her unfathomable blind spot for flannel-wearing mailmen, and all of the nights she’d spent with Ruby at the dinner table, going over history essays and creative writing assignments she’d never got the point of. Or Dahlia, with her piles of costume jewelry, and the patient way she’d taught Ruby to shave her legs, to make mac and cheese, to ignore whatever insults kids tossed her way because none of it mattered; she knew who she truly was, a Chernyavsky, and it was somebody to be proud of.

  Evelina had called them flighty and stubborn, and Ruby had listened, so desperate to be special. But Evelina didn’t know the sisters who’d raised her, not anymore. If she did, she’d know they weren’t expendable, weren’t just leaves shivering on a branch.

  “We have to tell them, too,” Cece said, though it wasn’t necessary.

  “I know.” Ruby owed them the whole truth, and she would give it to them. “But I don’t think they can protect us,” she admitted, to her cousin and to herself. Evelina had been right about one thing: Her sisters weren’t hungry the way their mother was. They were better women by far, and for this reason rather than in spite of it, they didn’t have anything approaching her power. “If Mom wants me for her heir, if that’s the only way she thinks she can win, she won’t stop. And they can’t stop her. I don’t think anyone in the family can.”

  “Maybe Vera can help?”

  Ruby considered this. Galina had wanted to go to Vera. She’d believed that her little sister would help her, and they could stand against Polina together. Maybe t
hey could have. But that was over forty years ago, and Vera was an eighty-five-year-old woman without Polina’s secrets to aid them. Slowly, Ruby shook her head.

  She was only telling Cece what her cousin already knew; Ruby saw it in her decisive nod, and heard her steadiness when she said, “So we’ll leave Saltville. We can go tonight.”

  “Go where?”

  “I don’t know, but there has to be another way to save you. Polina was a bad guy, sure, but she proved that we can change our Time. There has to be someone who can help us. Someone . . . not evil. We’ll find the kind of people your mom talked about, people like us and the Volkovs. We can do it, Bebe, I know we can!” Her cousin looked awful, blond hair mud-clumped and wild, round chin still smeared red, and the white of one eye dark with burst blood vessels from coughing so violently.

  Still, she burned so brightly, ablaze with hope, that Ruby badly wanted to believe her.

  “Cece . . .”

  Her answer withered on her lips as the sharp rap of knuckles on glass startled them both. Talia was stooped over, staring in through Cece’s window. Behind her stood Dov, and their dark eyes were as round as moons in the black-and-neon night.

  The Mahalels sat in the back of the Malibu while Ruby and Cece, twisted in their seats, told them everything in turns.

  It wasn’t as hard for them to accept as Ruby would have guessed. But then, they already knew the part that had happened before they were born, the birth of the feud between their ancestors and the woman in the woods. Ruby wasn’t even sure the Volkov version of events was the skewed one, anymore.

  They’d also gleaned some of the truth from Cece’s desperate texts to Dov, and from Mrs. Mahalel before she left for Polina’s. But of course, they hadn’t put all of the pieces together.

  By the time Ruby and Cece finished the story, the Mahalels sat in stunned silence. Talia had her hands braced against the back of Cece’s seat, as if to ward off attack, while Dov was folded in on himself. Arms wrapped around his body, elbows in a bear grip, he kept his gaze determinedly on the car ceiling. When he finally spoke, his voice rattled brokenly. “I told you everything. Like . . . every single secret I have. And you didn’t say a word.”