by Dahlia Adler
It takes all my willpower not to slap the smirk right off her face. What I want to do is wrap one hand around the crystal in my pocket and use the other to shove her to the wall. Squeeze that pale throat. But I have to wait, I have to wait—I can be as patient as the Shade.
“Did we get everything we need for tonight?” Cassie asks me instead.
“It’s all packed and ready.”
She’s already fiddling with the hidden zipper in her purse where she keeps her loose cigarettes. “Then I’ll see you assholes then.”
She stalks off, and I watch her face transform instantly into the sweet, appeasing good girl she likes to play, pretending she’s on the verge of tears as she begs the gym coach to let her step outside the field house. Julia taught her well. But Julia kept all her bile-etched turmoil and honesty and passion locked beneath a powerful shell. Cassie’s simply empty inside.
“It’s hard for Cassie, too,” Briony says softly to me. Always the peacemaker. “Just because she and Julia fought all the time—”
Her hand lands on my sleeve, and I yank away. Heart hammering against my ribs. My skin burns, corroded, under my coat where she touched it.
“I don’t give a shit what she feels.”
Briony sighs. “She cares about you.”
“No.” I laugh. “She only cares what I can do.”
* * *
Julia cuts through the indoor pool like a blade, long limbs honed from Pilates and tanned from her family’s holiday trip to Monaco and Cinque Terre. The underwater lights shift from purple all the way to red and back, and for a moment, they perfectly frame her billowing hair like it’s a golden crown. Then she surfaces in a rush and swims to the edge where I’m sitting. Her waterproof mascara hasn’t even budged.
“You haven’t said a thing about the other night. What the Shade asked us for.” Julia frowns up at me, a practiced jut of her lower lip that I can’t look away from. “I know you have an opinion.”
I shrug. There’s no use talking Julia out of something she wants, and it’s not like I don’t want her to take the Shade’s power. I just worry about how much of her will be left. But that’s nothing she wants to hear.
“Cassie wishes it was her,” Julia says, when I don’t answer.
“Cassie wishes she was you.”
Julia gives a horrible dry laugh. “That’s not true.”
But it always has been. In grade school, long before anyone in Julia’s orbit knew I existed, Julia and Briony were inseparable, dorky best friends like any other. Cassie came later when she and Briony grew close heading up the homecoming committee in junior high, and in retribution—I never believed it was anything but—Julia plucked me out of the background of the newspaper staff and made me into her newest project. Eun-Min was Cassie’s friend from a soccer team they’d both long since left behind, but she was always on the periphery.
Then there was Shemella and me. They were my accomplice in learning to draw from the Dark for years; we’d bonded over our shared fascination with it—them from scribbles and notes their mom had at the historical society, me from the dribbles of half-remembered dreams. We hadn’t gotten very far, though, and weren’t that keen on pushing for greater power—satisfied with small curses and tweaks—before Julia decided she wanted to command it, too, and I brought her into our fold.
But there’s only so much that one can dabble in the Dark before wanting to bargain for more. It wasn’t enough to give Eun-Min’s stepdad food poisoning or make Mrs. Gearig forget about a pop quiz. This town is built on secrets, lies, and shadow. If you want to break the first two, you’ll need more and more of the last.
Julia’s hunger has always been there. Cassie’s, too, though she’s always lacked the wits and the will. But Julia—her, I love in spite of her darkness. Maybe because of it—the way it stretched her, tested her, made her even better and worse.
I love the darkness in her, too—that’s what no one else can understand.
She grabs my wrist and tugs me downward, nearly yanking me into the pool. “Hey!” I yank my hand free then flick her with water. As if that’ll do anything.
“Come in with me.”
“I’ve got my feet in the water. That’s enough for me.”
She shakes her head. “All the way.”
I look at the void of churning water as the lights shift to nothingness before the cycle starts again. “No thanks.”
“Fine. A kiss, though.”
And that I can never deny her. I lean forward, let her damp, water-slick lips press to mine, and I savor the taste of chlorine like every taste of her.
It’s almost enough to tempt me to fall in beside her and sink. Almost enough to drown myself in the darkness, too.
* * *
The six of us who remain are crammed into Briony’s SUV. And I should’ve realized we’d have to take this same road to the old cemetery—of course we’d have to wind around Piney Hill and the salt marsh and the barn where Shemella and I used to first draw on the Dark together, before I stabbed myself on a bent nail and had to get a tetanus booster. But more importantly, it’s the road from the Piney Hill Estates to just about everywhere else worth going in Westbrook—the storybook main street and old mill and school and the soggy, vinyl-siding shacks where people like me live.
It’s the road Julia took from the party. The mangled-up bit of useless steel railing and old oak that took her life.
Cassie and Briony are arguing about music in the front seat—Briony wants something to cover up the silence of us in our grim task; Cassie says she needs the silence to prepare herself for the ceremony. Then Shemella’s screaming at the two to focus on the road, and Eun-Min’s begging for everyone to get along, and I hate them all, I wish the whole car would catch fire right now, burn while Julia laughs, winning as she always does—
“Pull the fuck over,” I shout.
And Briony, at least, is scared enough of me not to argue. As soon as she’s stopped, I throw open the door and practically fall out onto the highway. My head is pounding, spinning. My conversation with Julia is a dark, taunting drumbeat in my veins, and everyone else’s frenzy smells like the stink of someone else’s weed.
But I was right—I could find this spot in my sleep. Not that I need to. There’s a bright-white painted cross and the heap of flowers and long-dead candles and stuffed bears, as if Julia gave a fuck about stuffed bears. It’s all piled high like its own kind of offering to the Shade.
It’s exactly what I need.
“Anamaria?” Briony says. I jump—I hadn’t realized she’d followed me. Her hand lands on my shoulder. “Hey. Sorry.” Softer: “I know you miss her.”
This is not a conversation I’m willing to have. With Briony, most of all.
I crouch down. Select a sad little snow globe someone left—the Westbrook Old Mill, signature autumn leaves swirling around instead of glitter and white flakes. It’s perfect for what I need.
I slip it into my pocket, right alongside the dead crystal I stole from Briony’s backpack during the memorial assembly.
“Okay.” I stand. “Let’s get this over with.”
* * *
The truth of the Westbrook Shade is this: she was just a woman, and sometimes even that can be too much.
The Westbrook settlers knew there was something living beneath the town; they felt it humming in their fields with an untapped energy and plucking the harp strings of their dreams with promising chords. The Dream, some called it. The Dark, others muttered. It was always just around the next corner, shimmering around the next tree, and trying to grasp it only made its absence more acute.
But Philippa offered herself up. It spoke to her differently, or so she swore. She didn’t want any great power, she claimed, because what was power to a single woman back then? All she wanted, she said, was to help however she could. Channel the Dream for the town, in whatever way served it best—to drag the isolated village from destitution into opulence.
What they offered her instead was too mu
ch power. More power than she could resist. They wanted her to become the Dream, the thing that could cure all their ills.
Three times, she said no.
A fourth was more than anyone could bear.
No one knew quite how to invite the Dream to them, though the town’s leaders seemed confident. Philippa, though, she went below the funeral altar, to the chamber where the whispers echoed most. Where the air turned gossamer and hungry. Where she heard the Dream scream her name.
She would do everything it asked.
She would give everything of herself.
And when her bargain with the Dream was finished, the person who emerged was Philippa—but not.
It was the townsfolk who claimed to see the difference. Her stares that lasted a little too long, words a little too clipped, fingers sharp and stretching. The whispers followed her same as the dreams once had—of stolen husbands and sacrificed cows and girls led into sinful ways.
Easy to ignore, at first. What with all the good she brought as well—crops flowering into the dead of winter and fat livestock and babies who never once cried. The Westbrook healing springs and the piney hills drew money from all around as tourists came to pay tithe. No one warned them of the Dream, and most of them never acknowledged the way it murmured to them during their stay—because who would want to break the spell of money and prosperity and survival that bargaining with the Dream had brought?
But—and no one is sure just what the tipping point was in the end—the scales slid.
This monster they had made, this creature knotted up in the Dream, or more accurately, the Dark—she had to be unmade, too.
They tried to snare her. Break her spirit. Run her out of town, though they didn’t know what it might cost. What would become of Westbrook if the power underneath it collapsed? In the end, it came to fire. Nothing so deliberate as burning at the stake. Just a fire set by wronged villagers (so they claimed), all-consuming, the orange flames turning green and black as they licked at her Dark-touched bones.
All they did was strip away the husk that the Dark had donned. What was left behind was a new master of that power, an eternal one in search of new forms: the Westbrook Shade.
Power only lasts for those who don’t seek it. And it lasts longer than any of us can stand.
* * *
Cassie leads us through the old cemetery, past the overwrought mausoleums of all the men who tried to burn the Shade, her cell phone’s flashlight sweeping crudely over battered headstones of everyone who wanted her dead. We are as loud tonight as we were quiet under Julia’s guidance. I can barely hear the leaves crunch under Briony’s constant nervous chatter to my left.
“Do you think Julia would understand?” she asks me. “I mean—it isn’t like she’s the only person who’s been able to bargain with the Dark. We’ve all pulled on it before. She’d want us to use it for good.”
“The fuck are you asking me for?” I mutter.
Briony’s stare crawls over my skin. “She trusted you more than anyone. In the end.”
I resist the urge to make a fist. “But you’re her oldest friend,” I say. “You tell me.”
“Yeah, but.” Briony’s voice drops. “She liked you more.”
And we are not having this conversation, this is not what I’m here to discuss. Briony doesn’t get to know me. She doesn’t get to know what Julia meant to me. All I want is for Briony to feel it, the weight of all they’ve done.
What I want to do is reach over, grab her neck, and squeeze.
Rip that crystal off the cord around her throat.
But I already know what I need to know, and I have what I need from it. It is, after all, a twin to the dead one in my bag.
“Okay.” Cassie draws us up when we reach the altar stone and throws down the two shovels she’s been carrying. “Time to dig.”
I volunteer, and Briony gets voluntold, and we dig through dense layers of moldering leaves until the top of an archway begins to emerge from underneath the stone. It feels like it takes forever to clear away, but it must only be an hour; by the end, my hands are blistering and bleeding, and Briony can’t stop whining about the same. But all we need is enough for the six of us to squeeze down into the ritual chamber under the slab. Which we do, and only Eun-Min’s fishnet hose are a casualty of the jagged doorframe.
“One last time,” Cassie says, as she busies herself with lighting the candles. “You all will let me bargain with the Shade?”
Shemella nods. Briony says yes, just a little too loud. Eun-Min hesitates but agrees. It all comes down to me.
I close my hand on the velvet bag dangling from my side and don my sickly-sweetest tone.
“It’s what Julia would have wanted,” I say.
* * *
It’s the middle of March, and we’re christening the start of spring break at the Ogden barn. It’s about the last thing I want to be doing, but Julia insisted, and she always gets her way. She’s offered to DD—a shock that I’m still wary to trust—but rather than cling to my side, which I was absurd for hoping she might, she’s been snarking at anyone unwise enough to cross her sober path.
“God. Get her drunk already or something.” Briony slumps next to me against one of the hulking hay bales, the golden bonfire light painting strange shadows across its form.
“Nothing for her tonight.” I shake my head. “And you say that like I can tell her what to do.”
“More than the rest of us, anyway.” Briony watches me over the lip of her red plastic cup. “You’re sure there’s no way to talk her out of this ‘binding with the Shade’ thing?”
I frown. Something in her overly familiar tone is putting me on the defensive. As if this is something we’ve talked about before. Like I’m automatically going to take her side that this is a bad idea.
“It’s time someone harnessed the Dark for good. Especially for all we need to do.”
“Yeah, but.” Briony huffs. “Don’t you think she wants it too much? The power, I mean. Doesn’t it scare you, what she might do?”
Everything about her scares me, I think, but that’s not for Briony to hear. “The same any of us would do with it. We take care of our own.” And because I’m drinking gin and extra bitter, I add, “She’s going to clean up your mess for you, isn’t she?”
“Hmph. Maybe.” Briony shoves off the hay. “But she seems to think she stands alone.”
An hour later, she and Cassie and Julia will pile into Julia’s car, Julia driving them back toward Piney Hill. I will be left behind. And in that car, something will break: darkness bubbling up like an oil well. Julia’s car will lurch, jumping across the median, and slam into the guardrail and cliff along the inside of the road. The driver’s side—crushed. Ravaged. Shredded. The driver along with it.
The passengers—both seated on the right side—make it out with nothing but bruised ribs and one broken nose.
A tragic accident, everyone says, especially when the autopsy shows no alcohol in Julia’s blood. But there are darker things that can lurk in people’s veins. Especially in Westbrook.
* * *
“Westbrook Shade.” Cassie speaks loudly, crisply—she’s been waiting for this for a long time. “We are ready to fulfill the bargain you offered us to tap into the Dark in full.”
The candles dance on a phantom breeze in the musty chamber. Someone—Briony?—whimpers, but Cassie stands firm, squeezing my right hand.
“You made an offering to one of our own. Julia. She is no longer with us, but perhaps, in death, she has made herself a worthy sacrifice for your needs.”
There is a strange tingling sensation all over my body; like the dizziness after giving blood. Like I’m not even here, just watching this from afar—but also like I’m rooted, surrounded by the flood.
“… Westbrook Shade?” Cassie asks. “We’ve brought you an offering for your request. Are you with us now?”
And then the tingling shifts. The shifting weight of someone stepping into my skin.
; The snow globe, the crystal, the binding spell I cast—exactly like Julia begged me to, just days before she died.
“The Shade has accepted your sacrifice,” I say, my voice thick as clotting blood.
Shemella’s head whips up first, their brows furrowed—recognition or concern. They know the Dark better than most. Then Eun-Min glances to me with the flame dancing in her eyes. Briony’s expression is the one I seek, though. She delivers, that wide-eyed terror turning her inside out, and it’s the most delicious sight.
I turn toward Cassie, still gripping her hand. “Two girls who thought they were worthier than Julia. That’s what she wants you to pay.”
“What the fuck,” Cassie shrieks, trying to wrench away from me. But the shadows are like claws growing from my fingertips, wrapping up her forearm, pinning her. The Dark is like thorny vines reaching out for Briony.
“How did Cassie convince you to do it?” I ask Briony. “Did you really think Julia would be drunk with power?”
The Shade is speaking with me—but she is not me. She is in my blood, like spiced wine, but I am my own. I can see the Dark that lives underneath Westbrook. And I can see the darkness others can do to possess it—a darkness all their own.
“She was going to abuse it,” Briony cries. “She wanted it too badly!”
I crook my fingers, and both Cassie and Briony wrench toward me, screaming, strangling on the oily black that surrounds them. “So do you.”
Cassie’s eyes fill with blood, the blood she spilled when she wrenched on Julia’s steering wheel to smash them into the tree. The blood she’d shed if she’d taken control of the Shade instead. It pours down her face as she chokes and coughs, as her lips go blue and her face turns gray.
And Briony—she didn’t want to take Julia’s place. That much, I understand. She thought by stopping Julia, she was stopping something worse.
I’ll be the something worse, since Julia can’t.
“You shouldn’t have listened to Cassie.” I stand over Briony as she shudders and shakes, wheezing as her lungs refuse to fill. “She only ever wanted to be like Julia, but she was so much crueler. So now you’re all stuck with me.”