The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  I pressed my chest, pushing my racing heart back into my rib cage. Wished I could push it through to the other side.

  “I thought it was Kay’s hook for a while. Making him act so odd. But if it was the hook it would’ve brought us to Kay, and he was keeping us both away. So I thought—the only way to interfere with a hook is another spell, right? So he must have other spells.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Markos said he’s been taking them for years.”

  Diana went silent. I tried to think.

  Hekamists’ spells are usually temporary so people keep coming back month after month. You pay a little bit of money to them regularly, a steady stream. Markos told me his mother had been paying for Cal’s spells for years—but a huge pile of money every month, not just a little.

  Nine years, Cal said. Nine years since he was last angry.

  I felt close to understanding something bigger than me. I pulled at my hair and squeezed my eyes shut.

  Nine years. So he would’ve been eleven when it started. Just a kid in junior high. I tried to remember what he was like then. When he was eleven, I was seven.

  So maybe he got in a couple fights in junior high. He might have gotten in trouble for pranks. Big deal. Nothing to warrant an anti-violence spell, nothing he would need to forget. It’s not like he killed anybody.

  My hand jerked to my face.

  The ground dropped open, but if I didn’t look down, I wouldn’t fall.

  No.

  “The key,” I heard myself say to Diana. “I have to get the key from . . .”

  I couldn’t say his name.

  One big barrel of scrap wood kept burning but the rest only smoked. I could leave this room and find him—find out if this terrible suspicion was true.

  I ran for the door. On the way I stumbled on nothing, all the way to my knees, crack, right on the floor.

  In class, before Rowena arrived, we used to make fun of the girls with bruised knees and shins and hips. Dancers weren’t supposed to walk into desks or trip up the stairs. Sometimes we got bruises from certain movements or being dropped in a pas de deux, but that wasn’t the same thing. Those were badges of honor. There was a difference between civilian bruises, which were stupid and avoidable, and battle scars.

  Since taking the memory spell I’d become a civilian, covered with bruises. I had thought the bruises were a mistake, and that if everything were right again, my skin would look as clean and smooth as the dancer I was inside my head.

  But no—these bruises were my battle scars now. I’d earned them. My outsides matched my insides, nothing clean and smooth about them.

  For a second before I got up again, I thought the best thing to do would be to stay exactly where I was and wait for Echo to find us—someone else could be the hero and save us all. Then tomorrow, if I was still alive, I could go to a hekamist with every last penny of my Sweet Shoppe savings and my parents’ life insurance money—all of our moving funds for New York—and have her pluck this memory from my mind. Cal Waters. The terrible thing he might have done. The secret his mother and Echo’s mom kept for years. Markos knocked out on the floor. Diana whispering his name over and over. The smell of fire and paint thinner and oil. I’d even rub out Kay for good measure.

  I didn’t want to know the truth.

  Only thing was, if I did erase it all, who knows who I would be then and what I might want.

  My damn spells. They scraped me away layer by layer. Cut out my parents’ death and fill the empty space with dancing. Cut out Win and the need for dance pours in again. What other deeply held but now forgotten desires were underneath those?

  Dig down farther and farther, discarding desires like old clothes. Eventually there had to be a point where I wanted nothing at all.

  But I hadn’t reached that point yet.

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  When I lay blacked out on the floor of the shop, I didn’t exactly dream. But it wasn’t pure blankness, either. I floated in and out of my body in waves. In—pain, panic. Out—numbness, nothing. In and out. For moments in between, breaths and heartbeats at a time, I knew where I was and what had happened.

  I knew the smell of the shop, wood and oil and charcoal, something crackling like spice.

  I knew I was in trouble. I knew we all were.

  I knew Ari was hurt and wasn’t moving, but I also knew that she would eventually get up and keep going, because she would never leave me and Diana trapped here to burn.

  I knew Ari was my friend.

  I knew what Cal had done.

  I knew the story. Ari’s dad brought her out of the burning house, then went back for her mom, who had passed out from the smoke. Then the house collapsed on them. The person who lit the fire wasn’t a drifter or robber, as we’d always imagined, not someone random and faceless. The person who did this was someone I’d known my entire life. One of my older brothers, who I idolized. One of the Waters brothers, which meant something.

  I also knew I wasn’t dead, because I didn’t see Win and my dad in some sort of mystical vision urging me to walk into the light.

  I had to get up.

  —Get up get up get up GET UP!

  —Can’t.

  —Don’t be such a baby. Who knows what your brother’s going to do next?

  —I don’t.

  —So what are you going to do to prepare?

  —Lie here. Wait.

  —Well that sounds like an A+ plan.

  —Not my choice.

  —What about Diana?

  —What about her?

  —You going to lie there when she needs you?

  —Diana.

  —Yes, Diana. You love her. Remember?

  —Right. Yes. I have to get up. Have to help her.

  —Well, you can’t.

  —Hey, fuck you. I have to.

  —Some things aren’t possible.

  —She needs me! I have to get up!

  —I’m sorry, Markos.

  In those fleeting moments, the part of me that wasn’t fighting against my lifeless body thought that this was it, the worst thing that was going to happen. Cal had knocked me out. Now someone would show up, take him away, and take care of us. I thought for sure that what he’d done in the past was the worst of it; that getting it all out in the open would be good in the end; that one day we’d all be able to get past this.

  I was wrong.

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  Echo and I walked right in through the propped-open hardware store door. Mina waited out in the car; I had promised we would only be a minute.

  I followed Echo through the dark aisles. She wouldn’t have been able to follow me. This is what “balance” meant, to a hekamist, and what Echo had told me would happen when Mina and I went to her house for the spell. She put a layer on top of my hook not to break it but to counter its effects. There was nothing left for the hook to hook into. If someone really loved me, if she was able to look carefully and recognize the real me, she could see me—I hadn’t actually disappeared—but for everyone else I’d become a part of the background. I was invisible, except not in a cool superhero way—more like an I’m-screaming-and-waving-and-nobody-notices-me nightmare.

  Worse than that was the feeling. The side effects of this new spell. My hook had let me unhook my worries, and my conscience felt clear. Now . . . how to describe it? I was a vacuum, sucking up emotions. Every time one came anywhere near me, it sank its teeth into me—into my whole body. I felt everything.

  I needed to see Diana, to make sure she was okay and that it had been worth it. Echo had insisted on coming along. And since I hadn’t actually paid Echo yet—I had only my parent’s eighty dollars of pizza money, which she’d taken as a deposit—I wasn’t in a position to argue
with her. Once we’d seen Diana for ourselves and Echo had done whatever it was she came here to do, I could go home with Mina—Mina, who could still see me; Mina, who loved me—and cry forever.

  In the store, we heard something scuffling and crashing around corners, and we smelled smoke and alcohol, but we didn’t see Ari or Diana anywhere. It got darker and darker—I held up my cell phone for light—until we reached an open door next to a rack of paint chips.

  Inside the interior room, which was full of huge power tools and slabs of wood, smoke made us cough, and it took a second to see Markos collapsed on the floor, and Diana kneeling in a chain-link cage next to him. The walls and benches were half-burned, and flames still licked the lip of a metal barrel of scrap. Close to where we stood in the door, Ari had wrapped herself into a tiny ball on the floor and was crying.

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  Diana looked up—her eyes drifted away from me, no longer hooked—and she addressed Echo. “He’s hurt—Cal hit him—and he hasn’t woken up,” she said.

  I ran over, slipping on the wet floor, and took Markos’s wrist. His pulse was shallow and uneven. If he’d opened his eyes they would be dilated and unfocused, I was sure of it. Concussion at the very least. His skull felt almost pulpy from where he’d been hit, but I hoped that was from the bruising. I didn’t know what to do if Cal had smashed his skull in; it probably meant Markos was dying slowly right in front of us.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud. No one would’ve heard me if I had, anyway.

  “Ari?” Echo asked. “Ari? Are you okay?”

  Ari didn’t answer her, and Diana pressed her forehead into a gap in the chain link. Her breathing was shallow and her skin sweaty and flushed; it seemed like she might be hyperventilating and running a fever. “Are you the one who spelled Cal?” she asked Echo.

  Echo stiffened and looked at Ari, alarmed. Ari didn’t move from her crouch.

  Someone spelled Cal?

  “My mother made Cal’s spells,” Echo said softly. “Cal’s mom came to us when I was eleven, not yet a hekamist. She was terrified. I’d never seen an adult so scared in my life. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it was good that we were helping that poor woman.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, but no one answered. I thought about trying to carry Markos out to Mina in the car, but he was too heavy, and if his injury was bad it could be terrible to move him. It might loosen something that needed to stay in place.

  Plus Diana would still be stuck there. I looked around for something that I could use to pick the lock, or cut the chain link. Not that I had any idea how to do either of those things.

  “I didn’t find out what we were really doing until a couple years later, after I’d joined the coven,” Echo said. I wished she’d stop talking and do something. She was a hekamist; she should have a lockbreaker spell or some other brilliant idea on hand. A fire extinguisher, maybe—I looked around the woodshop but didn’t see one, so I got up and started pushing aside tools to see if one was hiding in a corner. “I thought it was awful, but necessary. Mom believed Cal’s spells were our protection, in case people found out about me. Money to live on—not that she let us spend much of it—and a family in the community that needed us. I think that she’s regretted making me a hekamist since the day we did it. She wishes she was strong enough to die and save me.” Echo’s smile seemed forced and bloodless. “We have different ideas about that.”

  As she talked I gave up my search and circled back around to Diana. I thought about running out into the rest of the store and trying to find a fire extinguisher or a wire cutter—but I wouldn’t know where to look or if I’d ever be able to find anything, and I knew I’d get lost and might not be able to find my way back. Instead I got out my phone and called for an ambulance as calmly and firmly as I could. I hoped the spell wouldn’t work through phones, or 911 would forget about me as soon as I got off the line.

  While I was calling, Ari unfolded from her crouch, swaying on her feet. I couldn’t see her face; she was looking at Echo so her back was to me. Echo’s eyes followed Ari’s every jerky movement. When Ari slapped her, the crack of it made us all—except Markos—jump. Echo held her cheek but didn’t fight back.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Diana, hoping and praying that just this one question could be heard and answered.

  “Among other things?” She tried to breathe deeply. “Nine years ago, Cal burned down Ari’s house.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  The sadness and sympathy were too strong, like all my emotions now. I could feel tears filling my eyes, not just for Ari and her parents but for Echo and her mom, for Markos lying busted on the floor, for Diana trapped, and for all of us broken by spells.

  I reached out and took Diana’s hand through the cage. She held Markos’s with her other one.

  She didn’t look at me. Probably forgot I was there. That hurt, too, very badly, but I would get through it, I would wait with her until I was sure she was going to be okay.

  I’d made myself powerless, invisible, inconsequential, in order to save Diana from my spell, but it turned out I wasn’t the dangerous one after all. Now all I could do was keep my eye on her until help came.

  I hoped it was worth it.

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  Echo’s skin, always pale, seemed clear and fragile as glass in the shop’s harsh bare-bulb light. When I slapped her and the bright red hand mark appeared, it only made the whiteness seem brighter. She swallowed and did not break eye contact.

  “You knew this about my parents and you still blackmailed me.”

  “I . . . You don’t understand. I’d been alone for nearly twenty years. Win was important to me. I was . . . upset . . . about what you did to him.”

  “Why do people say I did it to Win?” I asked. “I did it to myself. No one can do anything to Win anymore.”

  “That’s not how it feels.”

  “Things you do to yourself do have an effect on other people,” Kay said from where she was kneeling with Markos and Diana. I hadn’t noticed she was there, and it was hard to focus on her. Even her voice sounded muffled.

  Echo wrapped her black-clad arms around her stomach. “I have done some bad things, and I’ve done some good. But the world isn’t fair.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  Echo exhaled and spoke gently. “There’s nothing I can say to make it not true.” She reached into one of the many pockets of her jacket and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag. It was filled with crackers and cheese; she held it out to me warily, as if I might swat it out of her hand. “I made you your spell.”

  “Is that supposed to be an apology? Here’s your dancing spell, everything’s better now?”

  “Everything’s not better. Win’s still dead. Your parents are dead. My mom will be dead in a few weeks, since I don’t have the money to leave her and get a new coven.” She shook the bag; the cheese smeared the plastic. “But you can dance again, if you want. I promise.”

  I took a step closer to where she stood near the door to the woodshop. She did not flinch away, just left the plastic bag hanging in the air between us.

  I turned from her and stared out the woodshop’s door into the mess of a store as if trying to clear it all away with my mind. Wanting to erase what was right in front of me. Wishing to deny the truth.

  Cal was out there.

  The person who killed my parents.

  There it was: the thing I’d been trying to avoid thinking about. The thing I wished more than anything not to be true, but that Echo had confirmed wholly and completely.

  I lost my parents.

  It was a long time ago. It was today. It was all the time. I couldn’t escape it. I couldn’t contain it. They’d been taken from me, and I missed them, and the hole in my heart was a fatal wound.

  I shuddered an
d saw that I was holding my sore wrist. For once, I didn’t feel the usual isolated ache. Instead the pain covered all my skin, paper-thin, and sank into muscle and bone and blood.

  It didn’t make it any better that the memory of the day they’d died had been removed. In fact, it was worse. Instead of knowing exactly what terrible thing had happened, I imagined a thousand different ways of it happening, each worse than the last. I saw them die over and over, their faces surprised or angry or sad. I wore my headphones or I didn’t. I slowed them down or I didn’t. I cried or I didn’t. In each one, Cal ran from the house and hid. He’d been hiding ever since. Until now.

  Now I knew what had really happened.

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  My last night on earth, a Saturday, began like many others. I picked up Ari and Markos and we went to the beach in my truck. It was raining and tourist season wouldn’t start for another couple of weeks, so we had the place to ourselves.

  It had been a bad day. I hadn’t left my room, not even to eat, and so my tongue felt fat and heavy in my mouth, my stomach pinched with hunger, and my mind felt like sludge. Like the wet sand that worked its way between our toes as we picked our way down the shore.

  “Remind me why we aren’t at the diner or someone’s clean, dry basement?” Ari asked. Her shirt was wet and sticking to her body in a way I know I should’ve found attractive—Markos took a couple of long looks—but it seemed clinical, like a diagram of a female body in health class.

  “I’ve arranged a special treat,” Markos said. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”

  Ari sighed and swung my arm over her shoulder. Knowing Markos, his surprise could’ve been legitimately great—a BBQ dinner, or a nighttime whale-watching cruise—or it could have been nothing at all, and he wanted to own us for the evening.