WARM, SOFT, TENTATIVE, AND HER EYES FELL SHUT without any prompting on her part. His tongue probed for entrance, and a flash of oh my God I don’t have enough practice to do this right went through her weary, aching skull, right before her hands crept up to cup his face and her own mouth opened. Stubble a slight roughness under her fingertips; he had certainly grown up, hadn’t he? He had to bend down, and she had wondered sometimes if your neck got tired when you snogged a boy.
It didn’t. And practice, she learned, was not incredibly necessary. All it took was attention, his hands carefully on her waist and she liked the feel of that. She liked the warmth of him, the way he blocked out the breeze and the night, the car solid behind her too. Caught between those two solidities was a space just her size.
He made a sound way back in his throat, and all of a sudden she wondered if Ruby was wild because she liked this feeling of safety. But that was ridiculous, right? Rube was super-safe. Her life was a picnic compared to Ellie’s. She was a de Varre, for God’s sake, what did she have to be afraid of?
The crazy idea returned, and she had to break away to breathe. Avery leaned into her, and she found out she liked the slight hint of cologne on him, too. Something woodsy, almost like pines, and a tang of silvery coldness. The space between his neck and shoulder was warm and oddly vulnerable, and just right for her to rest her face in, nestling up close. There wasn’t enough room to work a slipcharm between them, and she found out she liked it that way.
If only everything was this simple.
His arms were around her now, and he rubbed his jawline against her hair, a shudder going through him. His soft outward breath became a word. “Wow.”
Her smile caught her by surprise, and she was sort of glad her face was hidden. Everything inside her turned warm and soft for a moment, her bones full of heated honey. “Yeah.” Her breath made a warm spot against his collarbone, and he moved a little, restlessly.
He stilled. Deep breaths, and Ellie matched his. It was nice to breathe in unison, she decided. If she could just stay here for a little while longer, things might not be so bad.
“So tell me what I’ve got to do,” he finally said, into her hair. “Then I’ll drive you wherever you want. Okay?”
I really would just like to stay here. That wasn’t really an option, though. Neither was asking him . . . what could she ask him? Hi, take me home and protect me from my crazyass Strep-Monster? That would go over really well.
Who would believe her once Laurissa put on her charming face and reminded everyone she was Sigiled, an adult, a stepmother who’d kept Ellie after her dad derailed in the Waste?
When all was said and done, Ellie was just a kid. A stupid, worthless, brainless little bitch who ruined everything for everyone. Ruby and Cami believed her about the Strep, because they were her friends . . . but adults, even Mother Heloise, believed Laurissa couldn’t be that bad. There was nothing anyone could do. Until she was eighteen or apprenticed, she belonged to her legal guardian.
She was owned.
Besides, she’d heard about Province Homes and orphanages. They were pipelines leading straight to the kolkhoz, if you survived them.
No, she had to start planning and moving, and quick. The crazy idea returned for the third time, and the decision only took her a heartbeat.
What else did she have to lose?
“You can drive me to Juno.” Her throat was tight, but she managed to get the words out. “I have to go near there. And maybe soon you can teach me what they taught you at Academy. That’s what I want.”
“I can’t . . .” He sighed, his arms tightening. “Mithrus, you really know how to put the rack to a guy. Damn.”
“I’m sor—”
“Nah.” He actually kissed her hair, and the warm shivery feeling that went through her almost made her weary knees unlock. It was a good thing there was nowhere to fall; he had her against the car so hard she could barely breathe. It was only for a moment before he loosened up, stepping back and holding her at arm’s length as she blinked up at him. “You know, I had dreams about doing that.”
“About driving me around?” Her cheeks scorched, and she almost leaned forward. The little betraying tremble in his arms told her that he’d let her, and that he wouldn’t be averse to going back to that fascinating new thing called kissing.
“Sticking my tongue in your mouth.”
“You have no romance.”
“I have lots of romance. I’ll show you sometime.” Was that a grin on his face? She couldn’t tell, it was too dark now.
“Keep it under wraps, Fletcher. I’m a nice girl.” The wisecracking felt good. Like she had everything under control. If she could fool him, maybe she could make herself believe it.
“Yeah, you are. When you’re not hell on wheels. Get in the car, Sinder.”
So she did. He held the door for her, and closed it with finicky, careful softness. He even waited until she locked it before going around to the driver’s side, and she took a moment to shut her eyes in the dark, there inside the shelter of his car, and let herself pretend it was going to be all right.
• • •
“Here?” Puzzled, he peered up the street. Under the elms the darkness thickened, even the ancient wrought-iron streetlamps struggling to pierce through. “Who lives around here?”
“A friend.” Ellie reached for the door handle, hesitated. “Hey.”
“What kind of friend?”
A batty old lady. Who nobody, especially Laurissa, would ever connect me to. And it needs to stay that way. “Just a friend. Listen . . .” The words dried up. What did she even want to say?
The engine purred. His fingers didn’t restlessly tap the steering wheel. He stared at his knuckles like they were the most interesting thing in the world. In the soft glow from the instrument panel he looked older. Twenty, maybe, or even further along. It was a funny thing, to see what he’d look like in a few years. His cheekbone had a good arc to it, and the shadow along his jawline looked interesting enough to touch.
So she did.
Her hand hung in the air between them, and he was a statue. She traced the bottom of his cheek, marveling at the texture, so different from her own skin. A muscle flicked high up on his cheek, and his knuckles had gone white.
She snatched her fingers back. Don’t, Ellie. This could burn you.
This could burn you bad, and you don’t have a lot of wick left.
As casually as she could, she reached for the door. “Thank you.” Hoarsely, because her throat had gone dry. “I lost the number you gave me. Your parents still in the phone directory?”
“Yeah.” He still stared at his hands. Was he angry? Or maybe some other guy feeling, mysterious as the Seventh Layer of DeVarian’s Charms? “They’re bidding for Midsummer Ball, too, so the guest rooms are being redone. My dad had a couple extra phone lines put in.”
Bidding for Midsummer this early? Someone’s eager. Maybe it was Laurissa.
Ellie found, to her weary relief, that she didn’t actually care. “So if I call . . .”
He shook his head. “Someone will answer, they’ll get me. Just tell me where you want to meet me.”
“And you’ll show up?” Well, now I sound clingy. Clingy little Ellie.
“Yeah.” He didn’t even hesitate.
She had to ask. “Why?”
“You want me to say it again?”
“Maybe. No,” she interrupted when he opened his mouth. “Don’t say anything, okay? Let’s not ruin it. I’ll call.”
“Sure you will.” He said nothing else as she got out of the car. The engine idled, and he didn’t move.
She stepped onto the sidewalk. Up a block or two and to the right was where she thought Auntie’s house was. If it wasn’t, well, she was going to look really stupid wandering around here at night. Someone might even call the cops. There’s a prowler . . . it’s a girl . . . Then maybe she’d have to find a lie that wouldn’t tell them where she belonged, so they wouldn’t drag her
back to Laurissa.
She was so tired coming up with a lie that good just didn’t seem possible. Not to mention the fact that if they didn’t drag her back to Perrault Street, she might be taken to someplace like Jorinda Hall or Crantsplace Juvenile.
That was enough to make even Laurissa seem faintly welcoming. So Ellie put her chin up and her shoulders back, walking into the shadows under the elms. The sound of the primer-dipped Del Toro’s humming faded behind her, and when she crossed the street it cut off as if with a heavy knife.
She didn’t look back.
• • •
For a few moments she stood staring, in dull disbelief. At night Auntie’s house seemed even narrower, its slightly crooked chimney glowing at the top with a red smokelifter charm, its picket fence grasping fingers. The garden hummed to itself, and when Ellie stepped under the trellis arch she found the gate was open, held back by the twining vines of those queer frill-petaled roses.
She almost wanted to stop and look at the charm used to train them, but her head throbbed at the thought. The crushed-shell walkway ground under her tired maryjanes, and there was an odd slipping sensation—as if the shells were melting, or as if she was being drawn forward without moving, the house looming larger and larger as the path became a river and Ellie a tiny boat rocking on a deep current. She hitched her schoolbag up on her shoulder, the knotted strap digging in, and had her foot on the first slick, quartzlike step when Auntie spoke.
“Come late to Auntie’s door, the wanderer has. They come back to Auntie late at night, always.”
Ellie whirled, almost losing her balance. There, in the middle of a stand of waist-high green fern set back behind tall blood-colored hollyhocks, black in the darkness, the old woman stood. Fireflies danced around her white head; she’d freed her thistledown hair, a thin but oddly vigorous river down her back. Her brown face was scored with deep lines, but just as night had made Avery look older, it made Auntie look younger.
“I . . .” Ellie floundered. “I’m sorry, Auntie. I have . . . I don’t have anywhere else to go, and—”
“Yes, yes, Auntie knows.” One plump hand waved, fireflies rising from the fern’s depths to follow the gesture. “Inside the lonely daughter goes, and the smallroom upstairs is hers. Tomorrow we begin.”
She was too tired to care how the woman knew, or to examine the tiny secret thrill that went through her at the word daughter. “Begin?”
“Bright light inside Auntie’s weary little dove. We train it, we shape it. We teach thee to charm, Columba. Yes, a singed little fiery dove. Go inside.”
It’s about time something went right for me. “I can’t pay—”
“Auntie doesn’t want money, little Columba. Go, and rest.”
Something in her lifted a weary protest, a murmur of danger. If Auntie had been a man . . . well, she never would have come here. She was smart enough for that. “Thank yo—”
A spark kindled in those dark eyes. “Do not, no thanking. Insult to Auntie it is. Inside, or we deny thee shelter.”
The implicit promise—that if she hurried, Auntie would at least let her stay the night—propelled her forward. Ellie forced herself up the steps. The fudge door opened, and strangely, once she stepped inside, she felt almost safe. It swung shut behind her with one high-pitched squeak, and she made it up the stairs and down a narrow, dusky hall. Four doors, three of them closed tight and secretive, but one left half open to show a soft gray bedroom with fans of white feathers over its empty fireplace and a small white-painted rocking chair by the tiny window. There was a bathroom the size of a closet, and a closet pretty much only big enough for a broom and two hangers, but it looked damn near like a palace.
The door even locked, but she didn’t find that out until later. Ellie dropped onto the deep gray velvet quilt on the narrow single bed, its iron scrollwork glinting in the bright moonlight—strange, that there was moonlight coming in through the window, because it was a cloudy night . . .
She fell asleep.
PART II
TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS PRETTY MUCH HEAVEN.
Each morning began with strengthening sunshine spilling through the glazed windowpanes. There was no tapping of lacquered talons on the door or lunging into terrified wakefulness thinking she would be late for school. The bathroom was small, but she didn’t have to worry about the door creaking open or a false-honey voice bouncing off the tiles right before the madness started.
Instead there was the clink of thick glass milk bottles on the front step—Auntie was old-school, and had morning groceries delivered at dawn. She could probably afford it—she could charm rings around just about any teacher Ellie had ever had. Still, she never left the house, so maybe she was retired? She must have saved and invested a pretty penny to be so reclusive, but it was rude to pry. As early as Ellie tried to get up, she never caught the milkman.
Auntie always made a big breakfast, floating around the kitchen with her thistledown hair braided into a coronet. The scarecrow rustled each time Ellie sat down at the table, but when she glanced at it, it stilled. Maybe it was an experiment, maybe it was just sensitized material reacting to the fact that there were two active charmers in Auntie’s house now.
Because the old woman didn’t want her to leave. Stay, and learn. Auntie offers sanctuary, she does.
After so much bad, Ellie was finally getting a little luck. It was, as far as she was concerned, about damn time. If only she could stay here until she was eighteen . . . but that was Too Far Ahead. Maybe all that planning really didn’t do anything, since every single one she’d had turned into a worthless jumble.
After breakfast, Ellie washed the painted dishes and Auntie dried, moving in companionable silence except for the old woman muttering the name of a charm symbol and Ellie lifting a soapy, drenched hand to sketch it in trembling air.
She hadn’t missed one yet.
Auntie didn’t charm in a workroom. Or rather, the whole house was her workroom, and the garden too. She didn’t seem too concerned about stray Potential breaking things or mutating. “Must flow, yes yes,” she would mutter. “Like water, or oil. See, little dove?”
The empty space still opened inside Ellie’s head whenever she charmed, but it didn’t matter. Auntie taught her how to set her feet in the ground before it flowered, toes sinking in like roots, and it was amazing how such a simple thing made the emptiness friendly instead of scary. There was a fuzzy sense of what was occurring when she did it, a sleepwalker’s sensibility of the earth moving around her.
“Watch the rose, Columba,” Auntie whispered, and Ellie would sink down in front of a single flower, barely breathing as she studied it, until the world became bright frilled petals and a saffron heart, a slim green stem and whirling universes inside the unfolding of a blot of crimson. The old woman’s touch on her shoulder would wake her from a burning reverie, and the roses would explode with vigor, charmlight under the surface of the garden’s blossoming all but blinding her.
The days were long seashore-curves of charming, with plenty of food to fuel the Potential. Round loaves of sweet or rye bread, spiced honey, apples, eggs always spun on the counter before being cracked into a bowl, wild rice, seeds and nuts, cheese tangy-yellow or mellow white. Auntie didn’t eat meat, and Ellie didn’t miss it. For once there was nobody watching every bite as if it cost cash, nobody bringing extra and pretending it wasn’t charity.
Auntie herself only ate bread and honey. There were weirder diets, and Ellie had seen Laurissa on a lot of them. Besides, Auntie was old, let her eat what she wanted.
After lunch there was cleaning the cottage while Auntie bustled through the garden, charming and weeding and snap-pruning. The bees followed the old woman, circling her white head while their hives near the back fence murmured a song Ellie didn’t dare get close enough to decipher. She’d never been stung, and Auntie said the little buzz-cousins wouldn’t, but why take a chance?
Auntie never gave a room the white-glove treatment once El
lie was done with it. She merely glanced about and nodded, mumbling in that odd way, as if singing along to music nobody else could hear. Once in a while she would smile, pleased, and that white V-shaped smile did something funny to Ellie. It made her shoulders clench but her chest loosen, and she found herself standing straighter every time it showed up.
The old woman never yelled or threw things or told Ellie she was worthless. Instead, she was downright pleased. Sometimes she even said the magic word, and Ellie’s heart would get two sizes larger and several ounces lighter all at once.
Apprentice. There wasn’t any paperwork to make it official, but that could come later. For right now, this was enough.
Juno was walking distance away, but why risk the Strep finding her there? Or risk the Sisters insisting she go “home”? Her schoolbag, broken and reknotted strap looped back on itself, hung in the closet. No homework, no Babchat. She rose when she felt like it and went to sleep when she was exhausted and charm-drained. It was a good feeling, to work hard and fall into the soft gray bed. No bruises, no scrapes, no flinching at every shadow or sudden movement. Auntie was halfway to apprenticing her already, and that would be enough to get Ell a license. More importantly, even half-batty as she was, the old lady could charm. Apprenticing with her would be worth something; Ellie learned more in a week here than she had in a year of Juno’s careful, mind-numbingly safe classes, where you always had to wait for the slowest damn idiot in the room to catch on.
The early evenings were the best, because as Auntie made dinner Ellie practiced charm-symbols, looking through her battered thick paperback copy of Sigmundson’s. The blue-jacketed scarecrow rustled, but she was used to it by now. The entire house was friendly and familiar, no sharp edges or cold stone. No screaming, no slaps, no steady drip of venom.
Sometimes she still heard Laurissa, though. Worthless, lazy, stupid, slut, bitch, HATE YOU.
Thinking about it made her hands shake a little, but she took a deep breath and the trembling retreated. It was getting easier. “Auntie?”