The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  “You have a pretty nose. Did you know that?” said Yates as she rubbed circles down my jawline. She turned up the corners of her mouth. “You have such a strong profile. You should model for me sometime; I’d love to draw you if you’d let me. Jing never lets me. It’s the only time I’ve seen her clam up.”

  I snickered. That was rich. I had a nose like the sharp side of a kitchen knife. It had a thick horizontal scar on the bridge from dumbassery at the age of seven, and a bump from breaking it in some tussle or the next.

  “I’m serious.” She tapped the rag between my eyes. “Let me draw you. I love portrait sketching. I’d die for a model who doesn’t fidget around when I’m trying to draw. You’re holding still. You’d totally be good at it. All you have to do is sit and be your pretty self.”

  “If you want someone pretty, make Daisy do it,” I said with a sneer, but Yates thwacked me across the cheek with the rag.

  “Don’t do that. Never do that. Don’t ever say you’re not beautiful, not ever, okay? Girls are just beautiful. That’s the way they are.”

  “Right,” I breathed, and yanking my hand through my hair. I felt all the blood in my body amass in my cheeks. What do you even say to that? I crossed and uncrossed my ankles. “I mean. I agree that girls are pretty great. I’m a fan.”

  Yates rolled her eyes.

  “I’m going back to sleep, Sideways.” Yates brushed her fingertips over my shoulder and moved to hang up the rag. The rag she’d been using was three shades darker than the rest of the towelettes on the rack, an odd pink where white should be.

  “Thanks. I’ll be down in a second. Don’t wait up. I’m gonna rinse the blood taste out of my mouth.”

  “Alright,” she said. “Watch your step on the way down.”

  The faucet, a faceless snake head to my 3:30 imagination, must siphon water directly from the Titanic’s belly. It was cold to the bone where it splashed my wrists, cold and sharp as needles. It would probably give me hypothermia. I stood blankly in the dark at the kitchen sink, pelvis shoved up against the countertop and shoulders hunched forward like a question mark, and filled a wineglass I’d managed to find with glacial water. The longer the faucet stream tumbled down, the less I remembered why I was there. The silvery churning at the bottom of the cup was mesmerizing. I watched the bubbles sparkle, split, burst into more bubbles. The froth looked like magic in old, scratchy cartoons. It belonged in an oozing beaker or a churning cauldron. Maybe it wasn’t water at all. Fingers of moonlight stretched in-between the blinds and stroked the surface of the water, which filled the glass to the brim and spilled over.

  “Fuck,” I spat aloud. I yanked the glass away. Winter water sloshed over onto my wrists and stung my skin where it touched. I put the glass down and twisted the knobs until the stream stopped. The silence sans faucet hissing triggered shivers between my shoulder blades. My wrist dripped. I rubbed it on the front of my shirt, which was Jing’s shirt. She’d let me borrow it to sleep in, and it smelled like her, like matches and metal and raspberry cream. I shivered, sucked in my cheeks.

  The shadows took on odd shapes in the kitchen, casting themselves from nothing. Stretches of black lined the floor, but they didn’t quite match the blinds, and I couldn’t think of anything rational to explain it away. I’m not the sort to be afraid of the dark. When I was little, I used to sit in my bathroom sink with the door shut and the light switched off, and I’d chant Bloody Mary until the thrill was gone and all that remained was how boring it was to sit in a sink. I genuinely like lurking around in the dark. It was just that the dark felt different here than it did at my usual haunts. It had eyes. It was prickly. Around the corner from Jing’s kitchen was her yacht-like living room, and the basement door was in sight. I’d drink the water up here then go back downstairs, sleep all this off.

  I made my way to the yacht-parlor and sat in one of the creamy leather armchairs, the one closest to the patio door. It felt very Gatsby and much less eerie than the kitchen. The view of the patio deck wasn’t exactly sexy, but it beat spooky shadows. I kicked my feet up on the coffee table and took a sip of my water like wine.

  Something shifted just outside. It barely registered, but there was something different just past the deck railing, something that darted in and out of sight.

  I stopped with the cup against my mouth.

  There it was again. Nothing, nothing, but it was real enough to make my heart wind a little tighter.

  I swung my feet off the coffee table and stood up, leaned closer to the glass.

  There was absolutely nothing outside. Which should have been obvious. I saw the balcony, planked railing washed blue by moonlight, the far edges of the fence and half-naked trees. From this angle, the swimming pool was out of sight, but so was everything else. If there really had been movement, it was probably a goddamned deer. Maybe it was a deer come to mourn her dead deer pals. Nothing for me to stress over.

  The pain struck down my spine.

  It was instant, electric. It surged down my sides and I pitched forward against the door, lungs constricting, heart carving itself up into bits. The cup flew out of my hands and smashed between my feet. I barely noticed. My vision twisted. I slammed my hand against the door to steady myself, but my knees buckled and my back gave way. Every nerve wire in my body twinged and cool sweat pricked the back of my neck. My body rocked with shivers, pounded like I’d been struck all over with hammers. My skin crawled—I imagined tangled centipedes squirming between my sinews, worming between my muscle ropes—and my stomach convulsed, flipped inside out. I toppled forward.

  My knees slammed the hardwood and pain scissored up my shins. A gasp knifed out of my throat, barely audible, and then my voice gave out. I hacked a cough and dry-retched, my shoulders heaving over and over until my ribs were sore. Everything was sticky. A pool of water trickled away from me in glass-studded tendrils. Something dark had tinted the water, flowing in gradients from black to rust. I must have landed in the glass. The pain from that hadn’t quite registered yet. I dragged myself to my feet and sucked in a ragged breath, because all at once that pain was registering. My shins screamed. Black slits scored my knees, and blood dripped like rain on a windshield.

  I knew what this felt like.

  This felt like magic rebound.

  But that wasn’t fucking possible. There was no magic to be broken.

  All the throbbing in my body dragged itself toward my chest and solidified into something the size of a fist, something dark and slick and magnetic. I felt its pull like a meat hook in my sternum. It ached like nothing else. It was carnal, visceral, unstoppable. It lugged me toward the French doors, threatened to bust me through the panes. I felt my fingers loop around the doorknob. My wrist twisted. The door clicked.

  Wind blasted inside and tore through me. I felt the chill marrow deep. My teeth chattered and I wound my arms around my stomach, but magic compelled my feet to move one after the other. I walked through the glass and water and onto the deck. I couldn’t bring myself to shut the door behind me.

  The deck was agony to walk on. The water on my soles threatened to frost. The weight in my stomach slammed; it said lower, go lower, and it took my nails in the railing and all my might not to pitch over the side. I forced myself down the stairs. Every step was progressively colder, bitterer. The tips of my toes numbed. Blood shook loose and made stains the size of pennies along the wooden planks. The blood was black as ink.

  I knew where I was headed, because I knew my goddamned luck.

  My body was being lured to the poolside.

  Proximity to whatever was drawing me here was skull-splittingly tense. The nearness made me nauseous. The wind whorled my hair across my face. I could barely see through the tangles, so I dragged it off my cheeks with both fists and slammed my palms against my temples. My toes hooked over the edge of the pool and I slammed myself to a halt just before I stepped into the deep end, resisted the urge to continue with every fiber of my being. My voice snagged in my throat.
/>   There were no longer three bodies in the swimming pool. There were seven.

  SIX

  HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS?

  There were four of them, and they lounged around in slacks and blazers, looking as shellacked and jolly as a Pencey Prep debate team. They snickered, whispered to each other, prodded the deer with the toes of their Vans. They looked like misprints of the same boy, with just the slightest alterations to distinguish them as separate entities—a mole here, a scar there, a smattering of extra freckles—but the same sugar-blond hair, strong jaw, skinny lips, and colorless complexion. Something about the way they leered at each other with button-blue eyes set me on edge. Every stitch of my body thrummed. I watched, openmouthed, palms twitching, chest ablaze.

  “Levi, you showy son of a bitch. Who were you measuring your cock against, huh? Who were you trying to best? This is so sloppy—even I know that. We’re supposed to use stupid little rats or birds or something. Why in Christ’s name would it even occur to you to use goddamn deer? I don’t care if it worked, there’s no flipping way someone from that party didn’t see it all. And what about the girl you used to activate it? Don’t you think she’s gonna snitch about it? Dad’s gonna gut you. He’s gonna gut you like a mackerel. He’s gonna gut you, and I’m gonna watch. Think about how many witnesses there could’ve been! Think about how much you could have fucked everything up. It was a damn bad move, Levi. We’re gonna fry you for supper.” It was the shortest boy who spoke, a boy whose ears peeked out from under his hair like freshly sliced strawberries. His voice cracked every other syllable. There were at least two octaves in his monologue, and with every spike in pitch, his strawberry ears grew increasingly pink.

  “Language,” scolded the boy to his right. He was tall, but that had more to do with how broadly he held his shoulders and how high his chin raised toward the sky than his actual height. He wore his hair slicked back, and there was something like a laugh in his voice. “We don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, David. We don’t snitch, neither. Levi was right to come to me. He knew he had done wrong by us, and he knew he needed help. There’s no need to involve Dad. We can handle this smoothly. It’ll be over and done with.”

  “Sounds like your girlfriend,” added the third boy, kneeling on the ground beneath the others so I could not see his face. He spoke flatly. Devoid of inflection.

  “Sure.” The tall one sighed, gingerly crossed his arms over his chest. “Or it would, assuming David here had a girlfriend, which he does not. Now. Levi. How are our results coming?”

  That third speaker, the one I could only half see, shifted, and his hair blinded me for a second—he was searingly blond, far blonder than the rest of them. He knelt with the fawn’s head propped in his lap. His fingers fished between its jaws. “Hush,” he said. “I’m close.”

  My stomach soured.

  A smile cracked over the kneeling boy’s—Levi’s—mouth. He jerked his wrist, breathed something that sounded like pillow talk under his breath, and withdrew what he’d been looking for like a magician producing a dove from his sleeve. The object glittered in his grip. It was spherical, glistening red—red like a slap to the face, crushed cherries, rubies on snow—and it sparkled in the darkness like a chunk of fallen star. His smile flickered, then abruptly dropped.

  “It should be violet,” he said. The smug, vulpine sharpness slid off his face and left him looking wounded. He shoved the fawn’s head off his lap in disgust. Its skull made a dull thud as it dropped against the concrete. If he noticed, he didn’t care. He stood up, paced the length of the pool, and returned to deliver a solid kick to the base of the fawn’s neck. Something inside it snapped. The snap echoed in my skull. The marble radiated red between his knuckles. “It wasn’t her. She was violet. I’d been so damn sure. Fuck it all.”

  “It couldn’t have been her. Levi, listen to me. We knew she wasn’t the caster when we came here. You thoroughly eradicated any possibility of that, remember? It doesn’t mean she wasn’t involved. They congregate. They travel in packs. She might have found herself a new circle. Most respectable flocks wouldn’t admit someone like her, I’d wager, so she must have found some loser stragglers willing to accept the handicap of keeping her around. She’s deadweight. Deadweight is easy to spot. We’ll find her. Don’t lose faith.” The oldest boy adjusted his cufflinks, and Levi responded with a scoff. David looked thrilled just to be there.

  “I frankly don’t give a fuck.” It was the last boy, the one who’d been silent the entire time. Whatever genetic anomalies had distinguished the rest of them, this boy seemed to lack. If anything, he looked so like Levi that it would’ve been hard to distinguish them, were it not for the long, blunt scar on the bridge of his nose. He rolled his shoulders and slipped his thumbs through his belt loops. “I don’t care about her, or how you’re stuck on her, or your everlasting angst parade. The mimic is glowing and that’s what matters. Eyes on the prize.” He traced his teeth with his tongue, swiveled on his heel, and looked at me head-on. He gave me the smallest of nods. “Good evening, ma’am.”

  The other three boys turned in tandem.

  “God, that was quick! Is she the witch?” asked David.

  “Don’t be rude,” said the tallest. He clapped his hands together, raised his brows, and beamed at me. Dimples bloomed in his cheeks. It was the sort of look that I imagine would murder a straight girl. It made my skin feel grimy. “Hello there! My name is Abel, and these are my brothers. Terribly sorry if we startled you, miss. Wasn’t our intention. You were at that party last night, weren’t you?”

  Words tangled themselves in my throat. Intricate, vinegar-soaked paragraphs detailing every sort of fuck you imaginable bubbled up my esophagus, but I couldn’t make myself open my jaws, much less spit insults. There was something skin-crawlingly wrong about that. Whatever was happening to me felt like magic. Magic forces the words out of you. It drags up poetry with every exhalation. It takes a jackhammer to any floodgates blocking thought. Trying to bite back an incantation is a solid way to knock a few teeth out, and I wasn’t even sure if I could slide my tongue across my hard palate. It was bizarrely numb, and lay in my mouth like a dead thing. It should be impossible not to scream at them. What the fuck was happening to me?

  The fourth boy, the one who’d first noticed me, strolled to Levi’s side. He unfolded Levi’s arms, yanked his wrist away from his chest with one hand, and worked at prying the marble from Levi’s fist with the other. His face remained a dead neutral—hollow eyes, flat mouth, the unnerving stillness of dissatisfaction—and he was seemingly deaf to the little hisses and winces Levi made when he squeezed too hard. He pulled Levi’s fingers farther back than he needed to, past the threshold of release and into potential dislocation territory. He finally plucked the glowing marble from Levi, but took his time letting go. Levi, whey-faced, yanked his battered hand to his chest. The other boy rolled his gaze over to me.

  Three long strides and he was below me.

  My instinct was to kick his teeth in, but I couldn’t make my leg obey. The closer I was to the marble, the harder it was to breathe.

  He extended his hand, translucent marble tucked between his fore and middle fingers, and held it to my ankle.

  It swirled opaque as a maraschino cherry.

  He gave a barely perceivable nod. “Found our witch-girl.”

  “Caleb.” Abel spoke slowly, gently, as if he was addressing a half-tame pit bull instead of his brother. “Put the mimic away. We have what we need.”

  Caleb’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he pocketed the marble—the mimic—with a sigh of resignation.

  Abel rubbed his hands together and cleared his throat like he was about to drop a sermon. I decided right then that I hated him, and that I’d hate him even if he wasn’t being a freaky lurker. When people preach at me, they tend to get hit. He deserved a fucking hit. He flashed me a smile. “This all must be terribly confusing for you, miss. I’m sorry about that. Fortunately, it’s our custom to explain th
ese things to you to minimize whatever discomfort you might be feeling. We—the four of us—are the brothers Chantry. Our family and those who follow us are devoted to purifying the world of anathemas and witchcraft. We want to help you. That little stone Caleb was holding? It’s called a mimic. Handy little things, mimics. They copy the magic signature of the nearest active caster, and then they play that signature back at a frequency that compels its caster to approach it. My little brother Levi was attempting to find a wayward friend of his, a girl who’s lost her way. She goes by the name of Addie. The poor thing is a danger to herself and everyone around her, and it’s very important for us to locate her before someone is seriously injured. Rumors circulated that a magical reckoning was to transpire at this residence yesterday evening. Levi believed that Addie might wish to attend such a gathering, so he went as well, and planted a mimic in hopes that it might draw her back to this spot for retrieval, in the event that she had acquired the means to cast on her own. Now, I admit that he might have gone about that in a tactless way—we would never aim to make such a scene on a stranger’s property—but trust that his intentions were just.

  “It did not reveal her. Instead, it brought you to us. That’s really excellent, miss.

  “We know that you likely did not intend to be malevolent. You weren’t trying to hurt anyone, and we’d never accuse you of anything of the sort. You were just trying to have a little fun. We understand. There is no safe or harmless casting. There is always a victim in one form or another. Magics erode the natural order of things and endanger everyone involved. It’s an addiction. It really is. Was it exhilarating, casting that spell? Did it make your heart hammer faster than anything you’ve ever experienced? Did you feel powerful? Important? Like everything you wanted was yours, like there wasn’t a stitch of the universe that wouldn’t bend to your every whim? Invincibility is a tricky thing. Power like that isn’t good for you, miss. It’s not a thing we humans are designed to endure. It makes monsters out of good girls. Only God should have the power of God.