Alex tried to chuckle back, but the sound came out false. Jenny slid her a skeptical look. Alex tried to keep her face blank so that even Jenny, who knew her better than anyone, wouldn’t know that something was wrong.
Jenny stood. “Want some tea?”
“Sure.”
Jenny pulled their kettle out of the cabinet above the sink. The sound of water pouring into battered metal twinned the sound of rain on the shutters. It was the sound of something that had been high up falling to the ground. It was the sound of water breaking.
5
Jenny didn’t remember dying.
Alex had checked as thoroughly as she could without asking Jenny outright. Her sister was completely unaware anything had happened. She didn’t even remember not remembering something.
It was probably for the best. It meant Jenny didn’t ask questions Alex didn’t want to answer.
The day Jenny died had been rainy, too. To celebrate Alex’s high school graduation, the sisters had decided to bike out to the suburbs and visit the park where they’d played as kids, back before the car crash that killed their parents and left eighteen-year-old Jenny with custody of her ten-year-old sister.
Visiting the park was supposed to resolve things, to tie happy memories of the past to the success of the present, wrapping up Alex’s childhood like a bow. Instead, it just hammered home how much everything had changed in eight years, how the old streets looked weary, the houses dingy behind chipped paint, the lawns parched and brown.
They remembered the landmarks—the bright blue roof on the two-story between Ford and Applegate, the elementary school, the enormous oak that cast its shadow over three front lawns. Somehow, though, they couldn’t find the park itself; they rode back and forth, tried every turn they could think of, asked people passing by. The park was always really close now, just a block away, if you turn back, keep going, go left, head right.
Wet and tired, Jenny and Alex decided to bus back home, and set to walking their bikes to the nearest stop. There was one major street to cross in order to get there: a busy, forty-five mile-per-hour avenue that led to strip malls in either direction. They stopped at the corner, waited for the little blinking man, and started across the asphalt.
The crosswalk was empty until it wasn’t.
Some hard-core drunk, already blasted by three p.m., came speeding down at sixty-five. He tried to brake. His tires spun. Rubber shrieked; metal struck. Jenny shoved Alex to the ground.
Alex barely had the chance to look up before she saw her sister falling under a bright, metal wall. The driver was a dark silhouette behind the windshield, hands shaking on the wheel. Tires chewed the bike into scrap then bit into Jenny. A wet crunch. The smell of blood bloomed, mixing with the rain.
Taillights streaked past as the coward fled. Bruised and dizzy, Alex pulled herself toward her sister’s body.
Afterward, there had been an ambulance and a declaration of time of death and doctors who wanted to know how Alex was related to the victim. “She’s my sister,” Alex said. “She’s been taking care of me since I was ten.”
They asked more questions, but she didn’t answer. Jenny was dead and she was alone.
5
Jenny stood by the stove, watching the kettle heat. “Winter’s coming. We need better weather stripping.”
Rain tapped on the shutters. Cool wind blew through poorly insulated walls.
“Maybe I can find a coupon for it,” Jenny continued.
She smiled, inviting her sister to laugh. Alex couldn’t even manage her hollow chuckle.
“What’s wrong?” Jenny asked.
Alex couldn’t look her sister in the eye while she lied. She counted cracks in the linoleum. “The days are getting shorter. I miss summer, that’s all.”
“Stroke of luck. I’ve got twenty percent off on a full-spectrum lamp,” Jenny said. “No, seriously. I found it today.”
Alex still couldn’t laugh, but this time, the screaming kettle provided a distraction.
5
After Jenny’s death, Alex walked around in a daze. She had nothing to do, felt no connection with her former classmates. There was a little money left, enough to see her through six months or so. She could have gotten a job before then, but she couldn’t bear the idea of working minimum wage while she grieved, weeping silently at the cash register between customer orders.
She took long walks, rode her bicycle, read books, spent hours staring at nothing. She visited the library once a week to refresh her pile of mysteries. One Tuesday, somewhere between Grafton and Hillerman, she got lost in the stacks.
She’d been browsing a perfectly ordinary shelf, filled with rumpled paperbacks, but suddenly, everything was different. Tall, narrow mahogany bookcases formed an endless, twisting maze, their shelves populated by dust and spiders and books far too old to belong in a local library branch. She scanned for a way out, but saw nothing except corridors of books.
She jumped as a crooked man stepped around a corner. He was lean and dark like an evening shadow. He wore an old-fashioned suit with tails, elegantly cut but shabby. Tattered lapels sported desiccated flowers that had withered where they were pinned. Long, pointed fingers poked out of holes in his pockets.
“Wh—What do you want?” Alex stammered.
The man grinned jaggedly. “It’s good to see you.” Beckoning with a gnarled finger, he turned and darted through the stacks.
Alex hesitated before following, but then she realized—with Jenny gone, what did she care if he led her someplace dangerous?
She raced to keep up with his grasshopper-long legs. She whipped around corners only to see ragged coattails disappearing.
At last, she turned to find him standing beside an iron gate that led into a section of the library that looked even older than the mahogany shelves. Light from mounted torches picked out patterns in the gate’s scrollwork. They read: DARK MAGIC.
The crooked man tapped the gate with his forefinger. It swung open.
“You can go in,” he said. “If you want.”
She started forward. He moved to block her path.
“Lots of people have the talent for dark magic,” he said. “Only a few reach the point where they truly don’t care whether they live or die. This is a place for the hopeless.”
“I want to go in,” Alex said.
With a cavernous grin, the crooked man stepped aside. When she looked over her shoulder, he’d disappeared.
Inside the mysterious archive, books populated the shelves sparsely, as if quarantined from each other. Dried blood streaked old vellum covers. Everything smelled of bones and mold.
All around, the shadows watched. Strange figures took shape in the corners, wagging their tongues and making obscene gestures, baring their genitals and grinning when Alex shied away.
Fingers pointed in a dozen, conflicting directions. Alex followed them at random. Despite dead ends and false starts, the shadows seemed to be herding her toward something.
She knew immediately when she saw it: a carrel upon which a single book lay open, a black silk ribbon marking the page to which it was turned.
The heading was written in old-fashioned, slanting script. It made her heart beat faster.
Resurrection.
Alex’s mouth dried. She ran her finger down the page, memorizing the directions for enchanting a dagger that would steal its victims’ souls. The magic spelled out an easy equation: twelve stolen lives for one resurrection.
She could bring Jenny back.
The shadows writhed and laughed.
5
Jenny brought their mugs of tea into the living room. She set Alex’s on the coffee table and pulled the chain that turned on the overhead lamp. Under the direct light, Jenny’s skin shimmered with the rainbow colors of the eleven souls Alex had collected to save her.
Ele
ven out of twelve.
The magic book had been clear on the number:
One for body
One for breath
Two for memory
Three to pay death
Four to mend the broken soul
And a last, like wax, to seal the whole.
Without the last soul, the spell would have nothing to hold it together. It would disintegrate into dust on the wind and Jenny would die again.
Jenny, unknowing, settled in their broken-down but still plush armchair, and sipped her tea. “This stuff may be more expensive, but it’s totally worth it.” She raised her cup. “Are you going to have some?”
Alex ached for her lost magic. She couldn’t help remembering the crosswalk: the screeching tires; the apple-red metal, washed clean by rain; the driver’s frightened eyes.
Alex stepped back. She couldn’t watch Jenny die again. She shouldn’t have come back to the house. She should have gone somewhere else. Back to the library to find the crooked man. To the train station to buy a ticket for someplace far away. Anywhere but here.
“I’ve got, um, some errands,” Alex said. “I need to get some stuff. You know, from the drug store.”
“Now?” Jenny asked.
“It’ll only take ten minutes.”
“It’s raining.”
“Ten minutes,” Alex repeated plaintively.
Jenny glanced down at Alex’s mug. “Drink your tea first?”
Steam rose from the mug into the cold air. It smelled like peppermint, humid and sweet.
Alex hesitated. The spell required that the twelfth soul be paid by nightfall. It wouldn’t fall apart until then.
There were still a few hours left. Alex could give Jenny some of that time and still be gone before her sister died.
She picked up her mug. It was warm in her hand. She blew and her breath rippled across the placid, dark surface.
5
After she found the book in the library, Alex set to work.
That night, when the fireflies emerged, she cast a seeking charm that caused a trail of them to glow red instead of gold. She followed the path of blood-colored lights to the door of the driver who’d killed her sister.
He was middle-aged, clothes well-chosen but rumpled, eyes red though it was only evening. He opened the door with a suave smile, expecting someone else. He frowned for a moment when he saw Alex, but recovered with slick charm. “Can I help you?”
When Alex stabbed the man in the throat, his eyes brightened with surprise. He seemed unable to imagine why anyone would have a reason to hate his smooth, handsome self.
Alex stumbled down his front step. She hadn’t brought anything to clean herself up with. She hadn’t even brought gloves to hide her fingerprints. Her hands were slick with his blood, matching the fireflies above her.
Alex had always been timid. She’d lost so much so young. She knew that life was full of precious, fragile things that you had to hold carefully because they could break at any moment.
Now there was nothing left to break.
The smell of the man’s blood was bright like a penny. It was the smell of vigor and freedom. It was the smell of possibility.
She followed the firefly-trail down dark, deserted streets. From time to time, headlights swung toward her, and she should have cowered, fearing discovery. Instead, she walked boldly on, and each time the cars pulled away, never coming too near.
Then, as Alex passed under a streetlamp spotlight, she heard someone gasp. “Goddess! Are you all right? Is that blood?”
A blonde woman stood on her apartment’s front step. She looked older than Alex, probably college-aged, but somehow she didn’t look like the type who’d gone to college. She wore a peasant-style blouse tucked into an ankle-length skirt. Wide, blue eyes stared with alarm.
Alex could have turned and ran, but she was someone new now. She was predator, not prey.
She held up her bloody hands. “It isn’t mine.”
Instead of screaming, the woman approached. “I can smell the magic in the air.” She glanced up at the blinking red trail of lights. “The magic came to me when I was about your age.”
Startled, Alex staggered back. The woman continued undaunted.
“I remember what it was like, starting out. No one to guide you…no idea what’s happening…I’d fight some demon in the dreamlands and stumble back, all covered in its ichor, and wish I wasn’t on my own.” She gestured Alex toward the door. “My name is Lyric. Come inside. You need to clean yourself up.”
Alex wasn’t sure at first why she followed Lyric. She only knew that once the offer was made she was desperately curious to find out how Lyric lived.
Her apartment was cheerfully cluttered with sheet music and various instruments. Enchanted items gleamed here and there: crystal globes and charmed angels’ feathers and vials of golden powder. They were artifacts of a magic that looked nothing like what Alex had encountered in the library, a different kind of magic altogether.
Slowly, as Alex washed her hands and listened to Lyric burble, she realized what it all meant. If there was a dark magic then there must be a light magic, too.
A magic for people with hope.
5
What do you do on your last day with your sister? Sky-dive? Ride in a hot air balloon? Drink and dance? Weep and gnash?
What do you do on your last day with your sister when she doesn’t know she’s already dead?
Alex stood in the kitchen and watched Jenny mix spices and roll out dough. She listened to her plan for winter. She watched the shadows that the rain made on the shutters and wondered what would happen when the sky stopped falling.
5
Lyric was an Iowa-transplant. She’d left home at eighteen, moved to the city, and taken a new name. She was a singer-songwriter who earned extra income playing in a piano bar. Hence: Lyric.
She knew all about magic. Her kind of magic, at least.
“There’s a secret world overlain on this one,” she said. “It’s like we’re on one side of the mirror. The other side is right in front of you. You just have to press your nose against the glass and look.”
Lyric introduced Alex to her community of magical friends. There was Sabella, a strange woman who always wore a plain, black mask that lacked eyeholes. She could use anything to scry the future, even piles of trash. Alex’s favorite was Dirk, a four-foot-tall man who wore a long trench coat to conceal the dusting of golden fur that revealed his cat-magic heritage. Fingerless gloves left his claws sharp and bare.
Alex knew it was stupid to spend her time with a community of good witches. She kept her secrets to herself, but she was still risking discovery.
When she met them, Alex hadn’t had anyone else in her life. Her house echoed with the lack of her sister. Even once the accumulated souls restored Jenny’s body, at first she was only a shell, void of personality and volition.
It was good to have sun-dappled afternoons in Lyric’s apartment, listening to Sabella’s grim forecasts and Dirk’s exaggerated exploits.
“There will always be a place for you here,” Lyric told her more than once. “A place to rest when the world and magic and everything are too much.”
Alex knew that snub-nosed, open-hearted Lyric was making promises she couldn’t keep. Despite everything, it was comforting to hear.
5
“I’ve been thinking,” Jenny said as they sat down to dinner.
The scent of rosemary rose from roast chicken, mingling with the aromas of cinnamon-baked apples and diced red potatoes.
“I’m not sure it’s good for us to stay here, in this house,” Jenny said. “It made sense when you were younger, but now that you’re out of school, we’re going to have two incomes. We can move somewhere that isn’t full of old memories about Mom and Dad. Somewhere that doesn’t make us sad. This p
lace won’t get much on the market, but it’d be enough to get us a new start somewhere else. I could get a better job. You could take night classes.”
Alex looked down at her plate. “I couldn’t get into college.”
“Junior college. You can get your AA then transfer.”
“I don’t really want to go back to school,” Alex said. “That’s more your thing.”
Alex felt old guilt stir in her stomach. Jenny had been about to leave for college when their parents died and she’d had to drop out to take care of her sister. Alex knew it wasn’t her fault, but from time to time, guilt whispered in her ear that, in a way, it was.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said.
Jenny knew what she meant. She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” She reached across the table to take Alex’s hand. “I wouldn’t trade my years with you. You know that, right? The me who left home, who went off to college, I’m not that person anymore. I like who I am.”
“You could go back to school,” Alex said. “I’ll work to pay for your classes. You can be her again. The you that you were supposed to be.”
Alex knew it was stupid to say. Jenny was going to die. She was already dead. But Alex felt better for the fraction of a moment when she could believe it was true.
Jenny chuckled softly. “I’m too old to go back to school.”
“Of course you’re not!”
“Oh, God. Writing papers. Raising my hand. I don’t think I could survive.”
Jenny was trying to laugh it off, but Alex could hear the desire in her voice. “You’d be great!” Alex said.
Jenny pulled her hand away from Alex’s. She stood to clear the table. “We’ll talk about it.” She paused thoughtfully as she piled dishes by the sink. “Yeah. I think it’ll be good for us to move away from here.”
The sink bubbled with dish soap as Jenny plunged her hands into the water. Dishes clanked. Dinner smells faded as leftovers cooled, waiting to be cling-wrapped and tucked into the fridge.
When the Villian Comes Home Page 27