“RITA!” Ellie yelled.
Then things got very confused.
The girl didn’t stop. The garden was full of graying predawn light, as if someone had flipped a switch, and now Ellie could see the blood striping that goddamn peach sweater, the rags of her skirt—it looked like one of Ell’s school skirts, and for a moment weary anger filled her. Why couldn’t the bitch wear her own clothes?
But then, did Ellie have anything that could be called her own? Did either of them?
“Sweeeeeetheart,” a familiar, nasty voice crooned. “Sweeeetheart come back here!”
And there was Laurissa, shambling down the garden path. A bright gleam in one misshapen, trembling hand was sharp metal, and bile-fear crawled up in Ellie’s throat again.
At least the monster that had been Auntie had been somehow natural, even its shadow full of writhing legs obeying the invisible laws of how the world should look.
This . . . Laurissa had . . .
The Strep’s belly swelled, pendulous, but the rest of her was bony except for her shoulders, which had thickened as her head dropped forward. Her right foot dragged, the ankle corkscrewed and the instep clubbed, and her blonde mane had turned dark at the roots. Her forehead was thickening, heavy bone swelling under peeling skin.
A colorless smoke rose off her, blooming like ragged, silken petals, and Ellie could almost taste the rage and sick need. The Strep’s anger wasn’t burnt cedar now. Instead, it was rotten wood, not burning, just smoldering and sending up nasty toxic bitter smoke.
Soon the horns would grow and her shoulders would hulk, and she would rage until she was spent. There wasn’t any of the perfect, lacquered shell she’d fooled the outside world with anymore.
What had turned her into this? Did it matter?
Ellie had reached the garden path. The Strep crooned something else, seeing her, but Ellie bolted in Rita’s wake. “Stop!” she yelled, her throat full of sludge-terror. “Don’t go down there!”
Rita’s sobs were harsh and clear between her hitching screams. She was getting tired. How long had she been evading Laurissa? That sharp metallic gleam in the Strep’s hand, that was troubling, because—
The other girl skidded to a stop, pinwheeling her arms. She’d reached the slick concrete edge of the pool, grown over with moss—no more blue sky-reflecting eye and scrubbed-clean pavement. The garden was heavy with storm-rain, still dripping and fresh but with that rotten green undertone, a nasty smell lurking under the goodness of grass and trees. The reek reached down into Ellie’s empty stomach, and bile whipped the back of her throat.
I am never going to eat again.
Ellie dug in her heels. The borrowed slippers squeaked through moss and dug against concrete, and she grabbed Rita’s arm. Threw herself backward and they both fell, Rita’s elbow whopping Ellie a good one between the eyes. A starburst of pain, but at least they fell on a soft squidgy carpet of moss.
Crashing in the bushes. Had the Strep blundered off the path? Where was Avery? If he got in her way . . .
If he’s part fey, will he Twist? Oh, God, don’t let anything happen to him—
Rita swore at her, and Ellie swore back, both using filthy anatomically impossible terms that would have been hilarious if it had been Ruby or Cami.
I never told them I was sorry. The thought was gone in a flash. “Get up,” she panted. “We can run. Come on.”
“She’s . . .” Rita gulped, lunging to hands and knees like a primary-school kid playing horse. Her hair fell in her face, and it wasn’t as thin and fine as it used to be. It was plastered down with the damp, and the mineral copper tang of blood filled Ellie’s nose. Wet slickness coated Rita’s upper lip. “She’ll kill me. Kill us both.” Hopeless, as if it was a done deal. “She’s always . . . she wants to, she always wanted to. Always.”
Don’t I know it. Ellie thrashed, trying to rise. Every inch of her was worn through, rubbed bare. Avery’s sweatshirt was covered in moss and guck, and a brief flare of regret went through her, as well as a burst of bright red relief.
They’d made it in time, right? Rita was still alive.
Amazingly, Rita hauled herself up and glanced at the path. “God,” she muttered. “God.” She leaned down, offering Ellie her hand. It was a quick, instinctive gesture, and Ellie grabbed before Rita could change her mind. “You’ve got to get out of here. If she—”
“I’m not leaving you,” Ellie informed her. “You’re a bitch, but I’m not leaving you.”
“Why?” Rita cast another quick glance at the path. “Look, just get out of here.”
Ellie clamped her fingers down, and the other girl flinched.
That’s why. It passed through her in a scalding flood, every single reason.
Because the other girl knew. She knew what it was like to live with Laurissa, and she had it even worse than Ellie had. Because Ellie had Cami and Ruby, and even Avery, even though she hadn’t known it. They were willing to come into a dangerous place for her, and even Rube hadn’t said a single angry word. They just treated it like it was no big deal.
Like she was worth it.
Who did Rita have?
Nobody except Ellie. Laurissa had made damn sure of that. Where had Rita been stashed in New Avalon? Imagine just being left somewhere like a broken toy, by your own mother, the same mother who had stolen your Potential, scraped out the very core of what made you a charmer. The Strep had sent for her, probably when Dad died . . . why? What had she been planning?
Who cares? She tightened her fingers again, her entire arm cramping. “We will. The pool—”
“There you are.” Heavy and misshapen, the words slurred, and Laurissa blundered through a screen of overgrown azaleas. The metal in her fist was a butcher knife, one of Antonia’s beautifully sharpened pieces of steel. “Naughty girls. Little sluts.” Her eyes had become bulbous smears, and shimmering ribbons of thick reddish ectoplasm were beginning to rise on a corkscrew-draft of Potential. The throbbing dual swelling on her forehead had sprouted into tiny cancer-black spikes, and they twitched, thickening with scary speed.
Rita’s mouth was loose and wet with terror. She yanked back, and her fingers slipped through Ellie’s.
No—
Ellie faced Laurissa squarely. “Back off!” she yelled. Where’s Avery, Mithrus Christ, did she get him, what am I DOING?
There was nowhere to go but into the swimming pool. Ellie’s fingers flicked and relaxed, and Potential flashed. Her head ached, and she doubted her ability to even throw a popcharm.
She wet her lips, or tried to. Her tongue was still dry, and her stomach was ragingly empty. “You wanted to steal my Potential too, didn’t you.” Her own voice surprised her, and the tone—soft but clear, almost adult—stopped the Strep in her tracks. “You couldn’t figure out a way. Did you ever have any charm of your own? You must have, because you Sigiled. But then you thought of an easier way. You’re a black charmer, and now everyone knows.”
Rita sucked in a deep hopeless breath, panting. To hear someone else tell a secret you’d been holding like a spike in your chest, was it a relief for her too? Did it lift the awful burden to know someone else knew?
Laurissa lifted the knife. “Little rich girl.” Her shoulders pulsed, swollen, and clear fluid dripped upward from her skin, riding the updraft of a minotaur’s rage. “What do you know? Rich girl with her rich daddy.”
You leave my dad out of this. “You’re Twisted.” The words stung her mouth. “You always were, but now everyone can see it.” Another deep breath, and a massive wrecked scream filled her throat. “You’re ugly!”
The Strep actually rocked back, on both her good foot and her clubbed one, and her mouth fell open, a grotesque caricature of surprise. Rita actually laughed, a high, shocked sound.
Gray dawn light strengthened. There was a plink, plink of water droplets falling, and later, Ellie could have sworn she heard a bird sing somewhere on Perrault Street.
The dark is broken, she thought, right before
Laurissa, her distorted face suffusing with an angry brick-red, horns widening from her dropping, bone-thickening head, spat a curse that arrowed for them both.
THIRTY-FIVE
IT WAS A STREAK OF BLACKNESS, BOILING WITH RED AT the edges. This wasn’t just a nastiness to bring some bad luck or a prank-curse to sting your target. No, this was pure black charming, meant to do more than hurt.
Meant to kill. It corkscrew-hissed through the wet air. Rita let out a little cry and stumbled back. Ellie stepped forward, directly into its path, and she lifted her hands.
This is going to hurt. She didn’t care. Her head was full of sunlight and the buzzing of bees, and she heard Auntie’s voice. Not the hungry howling of the thing on the stairs, but the patient teacher.
A mirror does not Twist. Impossible.
The space inside her head opened, only now it wasn’t empty. Instead, it was brimful of liquid light, a humming, and her hands were loose and open. She caught the channeled Potential, her fingers tingle-stinging with pins and needles. It fought, heavy and slippery like an armored eel, and there was a horrific thick splash behind her.
Rita!
She couldn’t look back.
The moment stretched, impossibly long. Two thoughts, lengthening like taffy between a candy-charmer’s slipgreased hands, filling her, pulling her in opposite directions.
First: I could throw this back at her. I could loop it there, just a touch here, and it would kill her. She wouldn’t hurt me ever again.
Second: There’s no time.
If she spent even the scant moments to throw the charm back at Laurissa, striking in anger, Rita would hit the bottom of the pool. The other girl’s lungs would fill, the thing that used to be Laurissa would howl and stumble back, bleeding just like she’d made them bleed, and when the Strep died Rita would too.
The choice trembled inside her. Hot rage and cold knowledge, exact opposites, and Ellie was the rope between them. A thin, fraying, tired rope who had already been drained past her capacity to stretch.
If I throw this back at her, I’ll be just like her.
The curse spun, driving down into the ground before her, throwing up chunks of blackening moss and chipped paving stones, shrieking in rage as it burrowed.
Ellie, her arms opening wide, fell backward, borrowed slippers sliding again, for a long endless moment.
• • •
Smashing through the water, arrowing down, clothes full of viscous green. Tired, so tired, lungs burning, hand groping through the blackness. Eyes squeezed shut and fingers turned to claws, combing the jelly that passed for water here below the surface.
She sank forever, and finally, the thought came swimming up to meet her, a realization like dawn breaking.
I don’t want to die.
Her questing hand touched something. Living warmth, her grasp curling in sodden floating hair, and she hauled up. Dead weight, tired muscles straining, and suddenly she was full of a terrible lightness. It was the last scrap of oxygen being forced into her bloodstream, her aching arms giving up, the smothering black around them bearing down on two guttering sparks.
When a candle is snuffed, does it feel relieved at the end of burning?
No. A familiar voice, familiar warmth, and a cascade of blue sparks, crackling against inimical algae-laden water. My brave, strong girl. No.
But the ring was gone, wasn’t it?
It was never the ring, my darling. Her mother’s touch, light and warm and soft.
One of her hands was tangled in the other girl’s hair, the other reached up blindly, hopelessly searching for the surface. For light, for hope, for everything she found out she would miss if the dark succeeded in smashing them both.
It was never the ring, her mother repeated, and warm fingers—too impossibly big, as if her hand was a child’s and her mother’s so much larger, tapering fingers capable of soothing any ill, righting any wrong—threaded through hers. It was always you. My brave, bright girl.
Pulling, then. Lifted, her arms stretched and a jolt of pain cracking in her back, and they rose on an escalator of bubbles. The blue glow became a brilliant point of white, and her mouth opened, an explosion of silver bubbles, and she—
• • •
—broke the green mirror’s surface in a thrashing geyser, tasting mud and slime and rot, dragging at the hair in her fingers. Rita came up too, shooting out of the water like a dolphin, coughing and choking. They both struck out blindly, and there were hands and voices, lights and harsh sounds, and the choking screams as a Twisted creature rampaged away through blackening, curling azaleas, its body striped with slashes from dying roses.
THIRTY-SIX
LATER SHE FOUND OUT THAT AVERY HAD CLEARED THE side of the house in time to see the Strep, her shoulders thickening and her belly swelling obscenely as she dragged one clubbed foot behind her, scuttling off the kitchen step. He’d immediately recognized what was happening, decided that a minotaur was too much for three teenagers to handle, and darted in the kitchen to find the phone. Which was thankfully still active.
He’d punched 733 into the phone, and by the time the Strep had found them near the swimming pool the night was alive with sirens. At least Perrault Street was high enough on the list of priorities that when someone called, there was an answer.
Then he had called his parents. It was the adult thing to do, and she supposed she could be grateful. Especially once Mrs. Fletcher—Livvie—found Ellie huddled, wet and covered with green gunk, in the back of a high-crowned white ambulance and swept her up in a hug, after scolding Avery and kissing his cheeks and shaking him. Don’t you ever again, she had said, over and over again. What were you thinking? Don’t ever, ever, ever again . . .
It was a mother’s song, and Ellie recognized it. Every string in her tired body relaxed, and she had finally, finally burst into relieved tears. The sobs shook her, but she didn’t have to do anything about it. Someone else finally had the reins, was finally worrying about how to get things done, and the weight of responsibility had slipped from Ellie’s aching, too-thin shoulders.
There were bright lights and a long juddering ride in the screeching ambulance, Mrs. Fletcher crammed in the back with a sobbing Ellie and a dry-eyed, green-streaked, catatonic Rita, who was whisked away as soon as the bright glare of Trueheart Memorial Hospital swallowed them both.
The weeping wouldn’t stop, even while she was poked and prodded and had to answer all sorts of questions until Livvie Fletcher took over, her eyes gleaming under the fluorescents, and told them to leave the girl alone, yes, she’s part of my charm-clan, call Giles Holyrood—he’s a charmstitcher with the clan—and let’s not have any more nonsense.
Avery was there too, in a chair with his elbows resting on his knees, just watching. She tried to gulp back the sobs whenever she glanced at him, since he was ashen and his cheek had a smear of green algae, flaking and cracking as it dried.
The charmstitcher, a tall stoop-shouldered man with dark circles under his eyes and an amazing beak of a nose, eyed Ellie for a long time, standing next to the hospital bed. She felt his scrutiny and flinched under it, tiny diamond feet running over her skin.
An arachna, Livvie Fletcher murmured, her hands clasped like a little girl’s. And Laurissa Choquefort was forcing her to charm above her capacity.
I doubt she knew this girl’s true capacity, he’d replied solemnly, in a surprisingly reedy voice. She’ll Sigil, if she hasn’t already. Now, Ellen—it’s Ellen, right? Her own nod, the tears trickling down her chapped cheeks. Would she ever stop crying? Rita had been taken away in a wheelchair, her large dark eyes fearful and helpless, still silent—
Ellen, I’m going to charmstitch you, and you’ll sleep until you’re healed . . .
She had fallen into darkness, relieved that she didn’t have to run or fight or stay so constantly, painfully alert anymore. As far as she was concerned, she could sleep forever, though she knew she wouldn’t.
Yet in the dark, she heard two things. A
distant seashell murmur—my brave girl, my brave darling, sleep until it’s time to wake up.
The other was a young man’s voice, low and hoarse. “Just be okay, Ell. Please, just be okay.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I AM NOT QUITE SURE I UNDERSTAND.” MOTHER HELOISE’S broad pale face looked, as usual, slightly damp. Her habit was just as starched-penguin as ever, her small avid eyes just as bright. The charmlight around her, if Ellen concentrated hard enough to glimpse it, was eye-wateringly bright.
No wonder Mother Hel hadn’t been afraid of the Strep.
“The clan will pay for her schooling,” Livvie Fletcher repeated, quietly. “She’s missed a great deal, but is willing to attend make-up classes.”
Ellie sank down further in the chair, her hands laced over her midriff. It felt weird to be sitting in here without a Juno blazer on, but the leather seat was reassuringly sticky against the backs of her knees. At least she had a skirt, Livvie had seen to that. Wearing a pair of jeans to St. Juno’s was just not done.
“Her stepmother . . .” Mother Heloise’s gaze bored into Ellie’s.
“Is responsible for that absence. She was forcing Ellen to charm and selling the resulting—”
“Yes, yes. Hm. Well. This is a very irregular situation.” Mother Heloise folded her hands under where her breasts should be, and the light overhead in its cage of suppressive charms ticked slightly as its heat expanded.
Idly, Ellie wondered if she should shatter the light bulb. It wouldn’t be any great trick. It might even add something to the festivities. Just a little pressure here, a little pressure there, slipping through the suppressors, and pow. Big fun.
Livvie continued, doggedly. “We’re willing to—”
“Little Ellen.” Mother Heloise still stared at her, as if she could see Mithrus Himself printed on Ellie’s face.
Maybe she could just see guilt. Plenty of that to rumble around inside Ellie Sinder, that was for sure.