The feast makers, p.29
The Feast Makers, page 29
I panted. I gnawed the lining of my cheeks. “Why aren’t they chasing us?”
“They can guess where we’ll be going,” Shi said. “They’ll see us soon enough.”
“She’s a witch,” I said.
Shiloh didn’t say anything. They skimmed their tongue over their Levi-shaped teeth.
“She killed my mom,” I said.
“God. I’m sorry.” They shook their head. “I hate my mom.”
“Ditto, solidarity.” I jerked my phone out of my pocket, tried to get my heart rate under control and failed. Screen crushed as it was, I couldn’t see who’d called me. I just called Yates. I squeezed my eyes shut, chanted, Pick up pick up pick up pick up, and heaven help me, she did. “Lila,” I breathed.
“Sideways thank goodness holy shit I—”
“Jing, how’s Jing.”
“Strung out but fine, we drove her to the Delacroix. She’s not fighting the spell anymore. It stopped. The mimic stopped. Madeline’s with us. She says that Shiloh went to the Chantry house to find you, Sideways, tell me that they didn’t—”
“They sure fucking did,” I said. “We’re on our way. Yates, I need you to tell everybody to get the fuck out of there. I—there are a thousand goddamned witchfinders congregating and they’re all planning on going to the Delacroix. They’re going to raze it. Salt and burn it.”
Silence, shuffling.
A different, lower voice. “Sideways?”
I shook my head. “Is this—is this Maurice?”
“I understand that there are witchfinders on the way to my house.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll let the relevant parties know.” He paused, murmured something to somebody who must’ve stood nearby. He sighed, then. Chuckled once. “I will not be evacuating, and I can tell you that a number of covens won’t, either. Witches hardly have homes, but this is one. We won’t be abandoning it. Will you be coming along?”
I nodded, and then found the breath to say, “Yessir.”
“I’ll see you soon, then.”
I hung up. I stared out the window. “Can I borrow your phone?”
“In my left pocket.”
I reached over, fished it from its ugly blazer confines.
“The password’s my birthday.”
“That’s secure.” A nervous cackle creaked out of me. My thumbs flew over the screen.
“What are you doing?”
“Can you turn on some music?”
They turned on some music. “That wasn’t an answer.”
I slipped their phone back in their pocket. “Texted Boris and Julian that I love them.”
“Mm.” They cocked their head to the side. “Did you include me in this?”
“Of course.”
“Good,” they said.
I turned the volume up.
Twenty-One
Loudest Brightest
Half as many cars in the Delacroix lot as there had been last weekend. Half was more than I was expecting. Half meant some of us got out no matter what and that was a relief. Half meant that we were about to be hilariously outnumbered.
All at once it was a gorgeous spring afternoon. The clouds in the sky hopped like rabbits.
Shiloh and I got out of the car. I held their hand, led them up the steps to the long walkway. Light gleamed orange and alive inside the Delacroix, and I set my teeth on edge, squeezed Shi’s hand so tight I couldn’t feel it.
They squeezed back harder.
The door opened for us. Inanna and another Dagger Heart whose name I didn’t know ushered us in, peered out at the blue sky behind us, closed the door once we’d stumbled inside. Shiloh put their hands on their face and rippled the them-ness back over them, albeit a them with longer, pinker eyelashes.
I eyed them, panting.
“I’d like to die cute.”
“You’re always cute.” I whipped my head around, drank in the crowd accumulated in the foyer. Maurice and Jupiter’s lot, all the Dagger Hearts, Dominick and people whose raw out-of-pocket intensity meant they were probably Sisters Corbie, Blair and some hardy-looking Anti-Edonists, Guadalupe, a Star Thief who hurt Daisy’s feelings. A man with long locs paced and prayed and tossed a little fire between his fingertips. Twin women with long red braids smoked together and peered into a looking glass that swirled with oil-slick colors. Lupe and Blair stared at each other from opposite sides of the room.
I took a few steps deeper in. I swiveled my head around, Shiloh close behind me.
I needed my girls.
Where the fuck were my girls?
Dominick had a hand on someone’s shoulder—Madeline, she wore a (my?) beanie and I hadn’t recognized her—and the two of them said little but kept their eyes locked and I made myself look away from them. I knew she wasn’t supposed to be here and that was theoretically my problem. Maurice was also in the room and didn’t seem upset and holy shit, I could die.
I could die.
Or actually—every other person could die. I’d be alive. I’d stay alive.
I needed Mr. Scratch.
I took a few steps deeper and then I couldn’t breathe. My lungs constricted, my vision twinged black. I huffed. I screwed my face up, baffled, adrenaline blazing the Fourth of July above the bridge of my nose. My eyes lined up the stimuli in front of me but I didn’t need it. I caught the edge of her perfume.
Jing.
I threw my arms around her and pulled her hard against me, pressed my face in her hair, and convulsed. She breathed, her ribs filled under my hands, and I focused on the texture of her turtleneck, the texture of her hair on my cheek. In her platforms we were the same height. I bowed my head, put my brow in the crook of her neck and gasped, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she said. “Holy shit, you went to the Chantry house? The godforsaken Chantry house? Why do you always go there? You have worms in your brain.”
I laughed and it hurt. I kissed her neck, her cheek. I put her face in my hands, the tip of my nose against hers. “You saved my life.”
She looked at me, black eyes expanding forever, back and back and back.
“Your spell. When you kissed me. You saved my life. I’m bulletproof, Jing.”
“I’m a very good witch,” she said with a little smile. “Figures.”
A sound came out of my throat and I kissed her.
Daisy bowled into us and almost knocked us flat.
I let go of Jing and kissed stupid Daisy on her stupid forehead, then whipped my head around, searched for Yates. She was nearby, whispering to Shiloh with the Scratch Book in her arms, cradled against her chest. She stroked its spine. She nodded at something they said, murmured something back with a gesture in Inanna’s direction.
“The Dagger Hearts are the only ones who’ve really done much battle magic.” Daisy sniffed. She wormed out of my hands, bounced on her toes. Her silky little dress felt egregiously impractical now. The scratches Jing had torn into her shoulders flashed hot pink. Angel amputation scars. Daisy bit a bit of skin beside her thumbnail. “Not on this scale, either. None of these covens have ever really shared spell notes so everybody’s freaking the fuck out to the point where they’ve circled around to chill. You know it took your asses like forty-five minutes to drive here? You should’ve seen us a half hour ago. Exciting stuff. We hid poor Molly in the basement. She’s chain-smoking and watching TV I think. She thinks this is hilarious. What a legend.”
I snorted. “Think we can reasonably Chett like two hundred people at once?”
“Maybe if Mattel decides to sponsor us.” She snickered.
Jing made a face. “The Anti-Edonists have experience holding off strikebreakers and cops, but they’ve got a whole thing about not being aggressive and it’s left some mighty big holes in their strategy. Plus, all of their spells—fucking all of them—straight-up bible quotes. The Anti-Edonist grimoire is literally a book of prayers. They wrote a gospel with an ink devil. Anyway, their shit is all predicated on belief, and I’m pretty goddamn sure they’re the only ones who are Jesus enough to be able to hold it.”
“Fuck that.” I shook my hands out. “Lila?”
She looked up, eyes glassy. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
I nodded, took a few strides toward her. “Can I see Scratch?”
“Of course,” she said. She handed him to me. “I accepted Yale, just so you know. It was like, ten minutes ago. Just in case.”
“I am so fucking proud of you,” I said as I opened the book wide. Yates stood beside me, and I felt Jing and Daisy circle around, Shiloh as well, knees against knees, our toe tips the prongs of a five-pointed star. “Scratch,” I said.
He slithered back and forth in big, erratic splotches.
“Scratch, what should we do?”
HONEYEATERS HONEYEATERS HONEYEATERS HONEYEATERS
THEY CAME AND KILLED MY HONEYEATERS
MY DAUGHERS ARE DEAD NOW
MY DAUGHTERS WILL DIE
“Scratch,” I breathed. I felt the first real vine of it unfurl in my gut, then—fear, real fear. I grinned like an idiot. I’d cried so hard that my sinuses felt like stones under my skin. “Scratch, you’ve got to help us out, here.”
I AM SO AFRAID OF FIRE
I AM SO AFRAID OF YOU DYING
I WANT TO EAT THEM I WANT TO EAT THEM ALIVE
I WANT TO PULL THEM APART AND CRUSH THEM INTO INK
“Please.” I tightened my grip on the cover. “We need weapons, we need a plan—”
“Holy fuck,” Andy said. “There they are. They’re pulling in.”
The stillness broke and everybody churned around us. Witches swarmed and rearranged themselves. Eyeliner ran, sequined shoulders squared. Dagger Hearts staged themselves around the room and chanted rhythmically, and whatever they casted raised the hair on the back of my neck. Blair strode across the room and caught Lupe’s shoulders, said with her voice high in her throat, “Goddamn it, Guadalupe. For ten years I’ve loved you, and I will until my last. I didn’t think you’d stay but you stayed. I’m so glad you stayed. I’m so proud to know you. It’ll be an honor to defend this place with you.”
“Blair,” she breathed. She curled her fingers around her lapel. “You idiot.”
Her face fell.
She swayed into her. Her hair spilled black and starlight down her back. She kissed Blair openmouthed, and she put a hand at the small of her back, kissed her deeper.
I could hear it outside. I could hear cars parking, could hear doors slamming.
Scratch fritzed. He repeated the same fistful of phrases over and over again, churned them and rearranged them. I flipped pages but our sigils were gone. Every page was his weeping. If I turned too fast he’d goo between slices of paper, ooze like strands of honey, stretch and break and fall into more gnarls of anguish.
“He wants to eat the ones who burned him,” Yates said. Her head snapped up.
Oh, shit. I looked up at her, and Jing at Daisy. Resonant and ringing, I felt the idea pop up to the surface. It was shared between the four of us. A pulse rang through me. Shiloh shifted like they could tell we’d struck something, but they were not a Scapegracer, and they looked between the four of us with their eyes rimmed red. They looked behind us, out a window. A vein flashed in their jaw.
“Madeline,” I called.
She was at our side in an instant. “Please say you’ve got a fucking plan.”
“Storage,” Jing said.
“Upstairs,” Yates said.
“The room with all the random magic junk,” Daisy said.
“What?” Shiloh rubbed their hands together. “Whatever you’re talking about we need to do it now.”
Latticework rainbows weaved over the foyer, made a wall—a ward, an honest to god ward spell. Four Dagger Hearts locked elbows in front of the door. Their spell fell out of their mouths with a syncopated beat. I felt my heartbeat adjust to it.
The door pounded. It warped in its frame.
The Dagger Hearts chanted faster.
“Got it,” Madeline said. She peeled off toward the dining room and I careened after her, my Scapegracers and my sibling beside me. Yates pulled Scratch from my arms and shoved him in her backpack.
Bright bass clattering—the witchfinders rammed against the door.
We tore through the dining room. It was still impossible, still pressed past physics to accommodate spare seating. Without bodies it felt like a cave. The candles jutted up from their tables unburning like so many stalagmites. The stage was empty, the grand piano’s keys covered, strings exposed.
A scream tore out in the foyer behind us.
I heard the door burst open, heard boots pound inside.
We rounded a corner I’d forgotten about on the far side of the stage. It looked different than I’d remembered it, the brocade wallpaper was a different color and the pattern was larger, clawed around like the legs on harpy eagles. The hallway hadn’t been here last time. It’d been somewhere else. I shook that off.
There was a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and Madeline jerked it open. She held it, and Yates ran through first, then Jing, Daisy, Shiloh, me. Madeline dropped the door behind us.
Spindly terrible staircase. It looked like a Nephil’s spine. Twiggy, delicate rods of metal helixed up to drill through heaven, and I hated it as much as I had that first time. Yates was already halfway up. My girls bounded up, wound around and around. Winged seeds from sycamore trees falling in reverse. I put my hand on the rail and I ran. I climbed, I put my boots on each step and vaulted upwards. My stomach flipped. I glanced down, saw through the steps, saw the bones of the screw stairs and the floor far beneath me.
I saw Levi Chantry at the stair’s bottom.
He started climbing.
Shiloh put a hand on my back and I kept going. Dizziness rocked me. My core burned. I felt like I’d guzzled oil and my insides were slippery with it.
“Come on,” Yates called above me. She’d gotten the door open, she held it for the rest of us. Without looking up I felt somehow when Jing passed through, felt Daisy follow through in her wake. Another coil, Shiloh’s hand never leaving me, and finally the door was upon me and I spilled through it with sea legs, shins aching, lungs on fire.
Shiloh walked in backwards.
“It’s not too late, Addie. It’s not too late for you or”—deadname—“if you just come down with me. I can get you out of here, this doesn’t have to end like this, why won’t you hold still and listen to me you little—”
I could see Madeline round the stair’s top loop.
Levi crept behind her, blue eyes as big as tennis balls, veined like licorice, unblinking, near bursting. He had a gun slung over his blue cardigan. He looked at her beseechingly, looked in, beheld Shiloh. He panted like a dog. His shoulders rose and fell, made the gun sway.
Madeline whirled around to face him.
She slammed her sneaker against his sternum.
He windmilled his arms, mouth popped wide, brows up to his hairline. His tailbone smacked the railing. He pitched backwards, hips over ribs. I saw his ankles fly up, hit the place where his face had been a moment before.
His body slipped out of sight.
I heard the smack a moment later.
Madeline sprinted through the door and Yates shut it. They both flew away from it, backed up, stood behind Shi and me, stood with Jing and Daisy.
Shiloh walked toward the door. They pressed their palms against it.
“Shi,” I said.
“I’ll keep it closed.” They didn’t look up. “Do whatever you need to do. Be fast.”
“Don’t do any stupid shit, I swear to god.”
“I won’t,” they breathed. “Fucking move.”
We moved.
The storeroom had shifted slightly from the last time I’d been inside it. The rows were skinnier, there were more of them. Portraits that’d been downstairs at some point lay in stacks, wrapped in brown paper. Astrolabes slumped against busts. Books hummed. Jewelry stands, boxes upon boxes upon boxes, shipping crates that looked like something that might’ve fallen out of a Victorian freighter, filing cabinets, lavish displays of cutlery. I picked an aisle and peeled down it, scanned like mad. I knew I’d found Scratch by the grimoires, but where were the fucking grimoires?
I sprinted. No vases on either side of me, just wet samples of pickled baby mammals, hand mirrors, a bunch of porcelain dolls that I hated very fucking much. My head rushed. All this arcane shit and none of it useful to me. I tore a white sheet off a rocking horse. I kept running.
I hit the end of the aisle and ran into Jing. She took my hands, pulled me down the row and then up along to another. We caught sight of Madeline, who’d partnered up with Daisy.
“Have you—”
“No, not yet.”
“Guys!”
Yates’ voice sounded from a few aisles down.
We split, ran in that direction.
She stood with her back to a perilously tall bookshelf. Her yellow romper shone like a beacon, we flew to it, to her. She had her hands looped around the straps of her backpack, the place where Mr. Scratch lay. She looked at an industrial-looking metal set of shelves.
The shelves held urns and tall-necked amphorae, flower vases, covered jars.
I seized a porcelain one with blue winding flowers.
I lifted it above my head and hurled it to the floor.
It shattered into a billion pieces with a spectacular hyperpop clatter sound. Porcelain splinters flew in every direction, splashed my work pants. Amid the wreckage, bubbling and churning, was a glob of angry ink.
I slapped my hands on my thighs. “Come on, little fucker. Hitch a ride on me, I’ve got a job for you.”
The ink devil rolled in on itself. It looked like a nosebleed clot. Its movements were weak, and if it spoke, I couldn’t hear it. Still, it squelched over to me, gushed over my boot and climbed, crept up my pant leg. It slithered through the fibers, coursed over my kneecaps, the lines of my femurs, my belly, my chest. Faintly, its voice from nowhere and everywhere at once: Good morning little sorcerer I am alive I squirm I brim with hate.
