No—the Kovrovs fell silent and turned as one.
Yuri held his ground but put his hands up. “Mr. Kovrov. Just here to talk.” He didn’t even look at Luke.
“What are you—”
“Mrs. Kovrov was kind enough to call me.”
Luke didn’t even know who that was until Sergei pushed out of the room, shouting, “Marta!”
Alexei went red—almost purple. Before he could speak, Yuri lifted his empty hands higher and said, “Obviously, Luke has made some poor decisions. I’m sure he has learned his lesson. I think we’d all appreciate the opportunity to walk away.”
“No,” Alexei said.
Sergei came back, body filling the doorway.
Luke felt like a cockroach—like the splat that’s left over after a cockroach. He’d been so careful with Jeremy, aware that he was bigger, and more experienced, that he had more power and the responsibility to be generous with it, but when it mattered, he had no power at all. His father was begging, and it was Luke’s fault.
“As encouragement,” Yuri said slowly, “consider that my daughter found some of Jeremy’s hair. She is expecting Luke and me home in no more than two hours.”
Luke tried harder to pass out, but he was whizzing into awareness. Every color—Jeremy’s red shirt, Yuri’s blue eyes—was oversaturated.
“Are you threatening us, Yuri Melnyk?” Alexei asked coolly.
“I don’t think so,” Yuri answered, just as calmly. “I think we all know you would win in a real fight. I also think we all know we don’t want a fight.”
Jeremy put his hands on his neck, pressing the ends of his hair down, and everyone in the room glanced over as he moved. His face went white as Alexei said, “Luke for the doll, and he never contacts Jeremy again.”
Luke’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t have words—only empty air. Jeremy looked at him once and then down to the floor, still as marble.
“Done,” Yuri said.
It took another round of negotiating to organize moving, but Luke ended up alone in that nondescript car with Sergei. He slumped, eyes closed against the light. He saw Jeremy behind his lids—of course he did—but it wasn’t any of the iterations of Jeremy’s anger he’d seen over the past few days. It was Jeremy in his lap, smiling a little as he tugged on Luke’s hand. Jeremy asking for one simple thing that Luke could have given him, instead of ruining everything with his damn fool mouth.
“I know I’m out,” Luke said, eyes closed and head vibrating against the window. “You won’t hear from me. But whatever loyalty you’ve got to Alexei, it isn’t worth keeping Jeremy trapped.”
Sergei was quiet for a long time, and Luke thought he was arranging an answer. But he just wasn’t talking, not even to tell Luke to shut up, and pulled up behind the Melnyks’ store without reply.
They met in the alley, trading Luke for a poppet in a wide no-man’s-land between clusters of their two families. The Kovrovs kept the money, the power, and Jeremy, but Luke got to go home. Luke paused in the middle, pressing Jeremy’s poppet into his hand. “Take it apart and burn the pieces.”
It would have been better if Luke did it himself, but they were past that. Jeremy looked great in red, his skin bright and his eyes rich, which was a messed-up thing to notice, but Luke noticed it anyway. His whole body ached, so the sore press in his throat wasn’t special. “If it has to end, might as well blow it up big.”
Jeremy took the doll and left without saying goodbye.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Jeremy listened on the steps as Alexei and Marta went to war. “Damn right I called a grown-up,” she was yelling. “You needed one!”
“You had no right—”
“This is my house. My children are in this house.”
Actually, currently, Marta’s children were with her parents. Sergei walked up to the landing with a bottle of beer at his lips and the neck of another in his hand. He lifted it in Jeremy’s direction, and Jeremy took the thought that he ought to say no, acknowledged it, and nodded as he accepted the beer.
“This might be the wrong call.” Sergei sat down a step above Jeremy, who wiggled aside for his long legs. “Might need vodka for this one.”
“We can get some later.”
“Absolutely not. Start with beer, end up hungover. The only thing that goes with vodka is more vodka.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t keep the fire in it. Sergei wasn’t who he wanted to scream at. How dare Luke, how could he talk to the Malcolms, lie to Jeremy’s face? “I respect you,” sure. Luke would believe anything anyone said about Jeremy’s curse or his family, unless it was Jeremy telling him how he felt.
“They could have hurt Jeremy,” Alexei bellowed. “That is on you!”
“You started all this! ‘He’s going to get old, it’s going to get weird.’” Marta shouted back, lowering her voice when she mocked Alexei’s. “You didn’t think it through, and now you want to blame everybody else…”
Marta kept railing, and Sergei grinned with one corner of his mouth. When he caught Jeremy looking, he said, “That’s my girl.”
“Gross.” Jeremy wrinkled his nose and didn’t let his face show how his heart crashed. Oh, Luke. Jeremy had not stood up for him, either, and they—Jeremy thought, we—had hurt him so much. Luke was better off as far from Jeremy as he could get.
“Kid, you’ve got to get a haircut,” Sergei said. “Start wearing it shorter. You have to stop leaving your hair all over.”
He was probably right. “If I have my hair short, I look like a lizard.”
“Better’n looking like a chick.”
Jeremy glared. “One, that is offensive. Two, if you think I care what you think about my hair, I have serious problems today.”
Sergei shrugged and took a long drag off his beer.
“You think Luke’s onto something,” Jeremy said. “Don’t deny it, I saw you.”
Sergei squinted at his bottle. “I don’t know. I think there’s more to the story than Alexei wants to admit, but I don’t think your boyfriend filled in the gaps right.”
“Will you stop it? He’s obviously not my boyfriend.” It has to end. He wanted to keep snapping, but instead, sat up straighter and held his breath calm. “Why are you trying to pick a fight?”
Sergei glanced at him, and quickly away. He gestured to the racket downstairs. “Seems like the thing to do.”
Jeremy huffed. “Cut it out.”
Sergei nodded—ungraciously, but it was better than usual. “Katya lost her temper, too. Unprofessional. You mess somebody up like that, all it does is mess up the information.”
Jeremy fought hard to keep hold of that calm. This was not a teachable moment, and he didn’t feel like being taught. “I don’t see why you’re telling me that. I know.”
Sergei cut him a side-eye, long and quiet.
“So they’re both wrong?” Jeremy asked. “Luke and Alexei.”
“Definitely. Kid, I have no idea what happened or what’s going on, but I know for sure that both of them are wrong.”
Jeremy snorted.
“Say he’s right,” Sergei continued. “Something we did broke something on your contract and called up the curse. I know it wasn’t that Alexei hurt that girl in cold blood. Because if nothing else, plenty of Kovrovs killed plenty of people in cold blood in all those years before you were born.”
“Do you think we could find out?”
Sergei twisted his mouth. “If Alexei bound it, Alexei should be able to unbind it. He should be able to remember without having to unbind it, and that is the trouble.”
“I want to ask him. I want to try.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. If there’s a reason I’m here, maybe there’s another reason I can’t get free. Besides true love.”
Sergei took another drag off his beer. Jeremy drank, too, slower sips that smoothed his sharp edges.
“So you love him?” Sergei asked. “Or—loved him?”
Jeremy saw Luke e
very time he blinked: Luke, smiling in his bed; Luke, slumped in a steel chair. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what love is, and Marta and Alexei keep saying I’ll just know, so that’s a bad sign, but—” Jeremy swallowed, and mumbled out the rest. “That first one felt like magic. It should have been magic.”
Something glass shattered downstairs, and Alexei roared like an animal. Sergei ran his hand back and forth over his close-cropped scalp, lost in thought. Jeremy looked away, straining to hear the conversation below. He jumped when Sergei grabbed the side of his head and put a dry kiss on his temple. “I love you, little brother.”
Jeremy recoiled against the wall. “What are you doing?”
Sergei pointed with his beer. “I did that every day when you were little. I was so sure I’d break it. Kid, it might be unbreakable.”
“Oh my god.” Jeremy scrubbed his head. “Pull yourself together.”
Sergei nudged Jeremy’s arm with his bottle. “I’ll take Alexei if you take Marta.”
“What? No way.”
“I can’t talk to her. She’s going to stay mad for at least twelve hours.” Sergei rose and walked down the stairs.
Jeremy trailed after him. “I didn’t marry her.”
“Exactly.”
Jeremy huffed and pushed past him. “Alexei! Alexei, I need to talk to you.”
Chapter Forty
Luke stirred to a soft tap on his door, a sound so unlike anything his family would make that the senseless animal in his chest asked, Jeremy?
It was Camille, peeking in like he might be building a bomb in there. “Hey. You awake?”
Luke nodded, sitting up in bed. He had been floating half-in and half-out of sleep for…what day was it? Since his father had brought him home. Long enough that his head had stopped hurting, though his lower back ached and the cut on his bicep burned.
Camille wiggled in next to him, back on his pillows, and dropped a cornhusk poppet in his lap. It looked normal but felt awful—damp, heavy, and putrid with menace. When he picked it up, a beat tapped his hand that could almost be his own pulse, if it wasn’t pounding so much faster than his own sluggish heart. “What is that?”
“I made a backup, obviously.”
Luke dropped it, raw in shock. “That’s Jeremy?”
“Don’t be like that. They had you; I took him.”
Luke’s first wild impulse was to pick the doll up and put it to his lips. His second—hotter, lower—was to twist one of its little limbs. He plucked it off his lap and set it on hers. “No, I know. I get it.”
She turned her head slowly. “You do?”
“Sure.” Luke’s jaw ached as he clenched it. “Alexei made Dad beg and still wouldn’t give me up. I couldn’t take it.”
“That wasn’t real. Dad had a backup plan.”
Luke only shrugged again. Luke hadn’t known, and he couldn’t get past it, the crawling shame of it a sludge inside him that covered everything else.
A chill ran down Luke’s neck, and he finally asked the questions that had been nagging him. “Did I mess everything up? Are we going broke?”
Camille studied him before answering. “It’ll be all right. Dad said he’ll figure out how to keep the apartment.”
The cold feeling sank deeper, settling in like a conqueror.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s them. The Kovrovs.”
Luke pressed his shaky hands under his legs. Sure, it was all the Kovrovs’ fault. But they weren’t the ones who would suffer.
“What happened?” she asked. “Not the bad part. But before they got you? He said you found a secret.”
It had felt so clear when Luke was talking to Natalya about it, but now, under the haze of pain and failure, he wasn’t so sure. There was his theory about Maeve’s tripwire on the contract, and then a big hole. A story about Annabel that he couldn’t corroborate, and then a big hole. And then somehow Jeremy, disappearing right out of Luke’s hands on a sunny sidewalk. That story was not worth what it had cost, and the impulse to keep trying to add it up wasn’t as strong as his exhaustion. “I found—I don’t know what I found. Something about why Jeremy is stuck. But how much am I supposed to care about helping him if he doesn’t even want out?”
Camille tilted the poppet on her flat palm toward Luke. “Right. I get it. I thought you’d want to destroy this, is all.”
“Maybe you should keep it. Alexei took some of my blood.”
“But we’re better than them, right?” Camille made the poppet dance. “Where’s my lecture? I need all that, Camille you can’t be a bad witch, Camille we’re above that.”
“I guess we’re not.”
Camille searched his eyes. “You’re tired.”
Luke nodded because it was easiest.
“Do you need anything? I can bring you some water.”
“No.” Luke tried to do something encouraging with his face. “I think I’ll sleep it off.”
Time slipped away. Luke thought he was only moping for a few days—I’ll get back to work tomorrow, he kept thinking—but he found the moon a sliver in the sky one evening, and did the math. It must have been a couple weeks.
Luke had never lost time like that. It made him think of Jeremy’s grayness, how outraged he’d been that his brothers didn’t treat it like an emergency. Living it was more complicated than he’d expected.
He had lost his phone and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it—didn’t want to think about the cost. So he couldn’t get a message from the Wesleys, just the Wesleys themselves.
He smelled them before they made it into his room. “Pew! What is that?”
Short Wes spread his arms. “Oud Gold! It makes me irresistible. What’s yours, man?”
He nudged Straight Wesley, who made a much smaller version of the same motion. “Incense Silver.”
Luke shook his head. No incense had sacrificed itself for the gasoliney fumes coming off either of them.
“Cool,” Short Wes said, “I’m definitely taking grooming advice from somebody who smells like unshowered ass and misery.”
“I showered.” Luke sniffed under his arm. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the pair of them, choking up his room.
“That’s pathetic.” Short Wes nudged Straight Wesley again.
“It’s not great,” Straight Wesley agreed.
“Also, you missed about nine horchata runs, so you owe us three rounds at least.”
“That does not make sense,” Luke said.
“What about horchata doesn’t make sense?” Short Wes crossed his arms. “Come on. Put on a clean shirt and let’s go.”
They watched him. Straight Wesley stayed impassive—he was so good at that, it made him a little bad at anything else—but Short Wes started to heat around the eyes. It was obvious that they’d all been talking about him, that this was a ploy, and likely that if Luke couldn’t get himself together for one horchata with his friends, the next ploy was going to be more serious.
He did not want to go out. He wanted to eat in bed, hogging the family laptop to monitor Jeremy’s quiet Instagram and Max’s buzzier one, and feel sorry for himself. But he could recognize both that he was being sick and self-indulgent and also that if he went now, he could buy himself a few more days of isolation in peace, so he got up and went to his dresser. “You going to watch?”
They cleared out while he changed and led him outside in a cloud of chatter and body spray that kept his family at bay. Short Wes kept detailed, dynamic horchata rankings, but he turned toward the place on Luke’s block, another over-careful concession to Luke. “When last we met our hero,” Short Wes said as soon as his feet hit the sidewalk, “he’d been ditched like an old sock in the middle of his game.”
He looked expectant, like it was Luke’s turn to talk. Luke was good at talking, usually. When he wasn’t so tired. “That feels like it was months ago.”
The Wesleys made similar vague noises, so in sync they practically harmonized, and left the quiet for Luke to fill.
> “Camille didn’t tell you?” he asked.
Short Wes shot him a glance. “It’s all right. You don’t have to talk about it.” He jittered one hand across the air in front of him. “Ask the big guy about basketball.”
“Shit.” Luke had totally forgotten about Straight Wesley’s summer grassroots tournament, the years of college hopes he’d poured into it. “I’m sorry, man—how’d it go?”
Straight Wesley nodded. “All right.”
Short Wes made a long psssssh noise as he opened the door of the restaurant. “Don’t listen to him. Talked to all kinds of important people! He’s going to be famous.”
Luke got a round of horchatas as the Wesleys grabbed a table. Straight Wesley took two chairs, draping himself across both and making them look comically small. “I might not be tall enough.”
“Stop.” Short Wes blew the end of his straw wrapper at him.
“Big in high school isn’t that big in college. When I play against guys who are all this tall…” He trailed off.
“You’re used to it being easy,” Short Wes said. “Just because you had to work a little harder doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough.”
Straight Wesley shrugged. “We’ll see.”
Luke ducked his face over his horchata and took a long sip. It was heavy on his tongue—he’d been eating sweet, easy food for too many days in a row.
They were quiet, waiting for him. “That’s what it was like,” he said. “Playing my usual game on a whole different court. I lost before I knew it was over. I was connecting the dots, I was so sure I had it all figured out, and now…” He glanced between them. “Did Camille explain it?”
“She said a lot of words,” Short Wes said. “I didn’t feel like they added up to an explanation.”
“That’s real.” Luke’s evidence had stopped fitting together. And even if it had, he didn’t know how he’d go about uncrossing such a tangled old web. And even if he did, Jeremy had made his choice and it wasn’t Luke. The only thing Luke was sure about was that somewhere, Corey Malcolm still believed the story they’d created, affirming his decision to target Jeremy. Luke had made nothing but mistakes. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. He’s not talking to me.”
The Uncrossing Page 23