The Devil Makes Three

by Tori Bovalino

  He blinked at her. Nobody but his mother’s coven and his father knew about his magic. His mother loved it because it was a part of her, too; Birch hated it because he’d never have it and never understand. He figured that would be how whoever else he told reacted.

  But Tess almost looked delighted by the fact. She came over, took in the setup, and ran her fingers across the newly fixed door. “Huh,” she breathed. “Think you could fix the front door, too?”

  Eliot fought to hide the surge of relief inside of him. “Of course I can.” He hovered behind her, watching her inspect his handiwork, and he felt an odd sense of belonging in this ramshackle dorm with Tess’s wet hair and the smell of magic in the air.

  “Have you … used magic on me before?” Tess asked. He worried at her tone. She sounded less thrilled. Or maybe afraid.

  “I have,” Eliot said carefully. “Not maliciously. When you were ill when we took the book back. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” He shrugged. “And my office is enchanted, for safety.”

  “Eliot—” she started. She turned, catching him off guard, stumbling into him, and he grabbed her arms to keep her from tripping. Her fingers locked around his upper arms, one thumb brushing the bottom edge of his tattoo.

  His breath caught.

  All at once, it was too thick and too much, the things he’d been thinking and pushing away, the things that had been flooding his deepest thoughts. Freckles dusted across her nose and over her cheeks, constellations he could spend ages exploring. He wanted to trace the tip of his finger over the curve of her lip, to consecrate his magic with the warmth of her breath.

  Moving carefully, like she was a fragile and beautiful thing he could destroy, he lifted a hand to her chin, tilting her face up towards his. Magic glimmered in his fingers like he’d called a spark to them.

  He grazed his thumb over her bottom lip, watching intently as her lips parted, as her eyes flicked down and then back to meet his gaze. Eliot leaned down, brushing his nose against hers, feeling their foreheads touch. A centimeter, and he’d be kissing her. A breath, and he’d finally know the shape of her lips, finally be able to escape them haunting his dreams. He shifted towards her and nearly—

  She closed her eyes. “I, um. I can’t get the smell of ink … of her … out of my head.” Tess turned, angling her head down, pressing her cheek against his palm. “I just. Yeah. Need to get out of here.”

  Tess’s hands fell away and she broke out of his grasp, sending him a rueful smile as she ducked into her room.

  forty four

  Eliot

  HE SMUGGLED A PIZZA OUT OF THE DINING HALL AND bought a two liter of soda from the corner shop. They laid on their bellies in Schenley Park, eating pizza until there was nothing left but grease spots, passing the soda back and forth between them. Tess had a little bit more color, but he couldn’t stop noticing the unhealthy look about her, now that he’d seen it. He wanted to put her to bed or feed her more or take care of her somehow.

  But he knew Tess was not the type of person who would tolerate being taken care of. Even now, that fierce look was coming back into her eyes, clear through her glasses. That light hadn’t been fully extinguished after all. It had only been burning low for a spell.

  “Why did you want to come to the park?” Eliot asked. He’d offered to drive her to his dorm, or they could’ve stayed at the dining hall, but Tess insisted on the park. It was nice to be in an open space, he thought—to not be so close to her wet hair and the honey scent of her skin; to put some distance between them and what didn’t happen at her dorm.

  “It feels safe,” she said.

  Darkness softened her edges just enough that she didn’t look so feral. He’d never thought of her like this, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, spread out on the grass, looking at stars. He’d never seen her wear her glasses before, either, and it made her look sleepy and secret.

  “There’s no …” she said. “I don’t know. I can’t feel the devil here.”

  The words sent a shiver down his spine. He swallowed thickly, wishing it wasn’t true. Because she was right. A small miracle existed in the park: he couldn’t feel the fear or the danger that had been a dull hum over the last few weeks, ever since they’d found the book.

  And another miracle: when he turned his head to look at her, he found her looking back.

  “What are we going to do?” Eliot asked.

  Tess’s eyes slid shut. “Let’s not talk about it. Not now. I can’t stomach it.”

  Eliot wasn’t going to argue with her about that. He couldn’t really stomach the discussion now, either, but they had to have it eventually. “Okay.”

  “You said you were at your father’s house. How was it?”

  Eliot thought about lying. Saying it was tolerable, or even smiling and remarking that it was good, or saying something pleasant about the food. “It was …” He faltered. After all of this, he couldn’t find it in himself to lie about this. Not to Tess. “God, it was terrible.”

  For a moment, the only sounds were from the park, and the Oakland nighttime: cars accelerating, crickets, a train going through Panther Hollow. And then, Tess said, “Did he hit you?”

  Eliot was about to ask how she knew, but Tess had a peculiar way of reading him. She rolled enough so she could reach him and gently traced the outline that his father’s signet ring had cut into Eliot’s cheek. It stung when she touched the raw area, but not as much as it sparked when her skin met his.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” All of a sudden, it was hard to swallow.

  “It matters to me,” Tess said quietly. She moved her hand down, away from his cheek, and Eliot immediately missed the feel of it until she moved it to his arm and started tracing figure eights on his bicep, under the curl of his tattoo. “That day in the stacks, when we were looking for your books. You said Falk was only bearable. Did you mean only the school specifically, or being in America, or did you mean something else?”

  Eliot sighed. The worst part was he could see himself telling her the truth, clear as he could see the stars above them. “I guess you could say all of the above.”

  She didn’t stop the figure eight patterns, sending shocks into his skin with every turn of her finger. “Why?”

  He bit his lip. There were a thousand answers, but only one truth. “My mother might die before the end of summer.”

  Her hand stopped. “Eliot. I’m so sorry.”

  He hated condolences, so he brushed it off like errant blades of grass, shedding the sadness her pity aroused in him. “No, it’s fine. Everything is okay.” But it wasn’t. He knew that this summer would be the last summer, the end of it all. The end of his childhood, the end of her magic, the end of his mother. There were stories he could bear. And there were stories he couldn’t, but he’d have to.

  Tess flipped over onto her side to face him, and he could feel her eyes boring into his face. He couldn’t look at her. To look would be to cry, to weaken, to break. In the grass, her hand found his. Like in the tunnel, she took his hand and entwined her fingers through his.

  “You don’t have to be fine,” she said.

  He turned his head. Her glasses were knocked off her nose since she was lying on her side, giving her a strange, endearing, extra eye effect. And the ferocity was gone. She was not a blade or an edge. She was a girl, looking at him like he was a boy, looking at him like he mattered.

  So he told her everything.

  He told her about his mother, and how thin she’d gotten, how he could encircle her wrist with his thumb and pointer finger. And about her voice, like a bubbling creek or a flute, and how she’d used to tell him fairytales when he was little as they walked through the woods that surrounded the country house. He told her about his magic, how sometimes it felt as tight and vibrant as a bowstring and sometimes it was loose and hard to shape. About how he felt alive when he used it.

  He even found himself telling her about what really happened with his father when things went wrong.

/>   It had been a Thursday. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, after everything else had faded behind a veil of memory, but he knew it had been a Thursday. His hair was wet, because he’d had swim lessons at school that day, and he was eleven. He’d asked his mother very nicely if he could go by himself from their London flat to his father’s university, taking the train, not talking to strangers. Back then, he admired his father nearly as much as he admired his mother. She’d tucked a phone into his hand and told him he could, only if he didn’t bother his father at his work, only if he called her when he got there.

  Things had been … strange at home lately. His mother’s friends had started helping her with Eliot’s lessons; lessons that left him feeling tired and charged in a way he never had before. Lessons on magic and runes and blood. Lessons his mother told him not to tell his father about, no matter how excited he was, no matter how much he loved him.

  Eliot loved to visit his office. It made what his father do feel magical, almost like his mother’s workshop. Dr. Birch was a professor at one of the universities, esteemed for his writings on astrophysics, which Eliot thought was a sort of magic in itself. He had a dedicated group of mentees. Eliot had even met some of them, but none stood out so much as a PhD candidate called Shel. He was never sure if Shel stood for Shelly or Shelia or Shelissa or if she was simply Shel, with her brown curly hair and her nice blue eyes. She called Eliot “Eli,” like his mother did always and his father did sometimes.

  He’d been to his father’s office before, thousands of times. He had a particular way he walked down the hallway, even though he was now eleven and far too old for such things: skipping the white tiles, walking in only the black, edging around the mathematics hall until he reached his father’s door.

  It was his office hours, which usually meant his father was behind his desk with the door open. But not today. The door was closed, and there were voices coming from inside. Soft, whispery voices, and quiet laughs, like pleasant secrets were being told.

  Eliot knocked softly. Nobody answered, but that had never stopped him before.

  Except this time, when he opened the door, it was his father and Shel. His father with Shel.

  Eliot froze for a moment, only a moment, long enough for Shel to look up, see him and scream, try to cover herself.

  And Eliot ran. He ran until he was well and truly lost and the phone in his pocket kept ringing and ringing and it was his mother, he knew it was his mother, but he couldn’t talk to her. Eliot was old enough to know what was going on. Old enough to know that it would hurt her.

  He went to Hertfordshire, to the country house, where he felt safe. Eliot used the key under the ceramic frog to get in and ran to the place where he and his mother practiced. He pulled down one of her books, the ones she told him never to touch without her, and he opened to the glossary and found a section on infatuation spells.

  His mother’s jars of herbs were carefully labeled, and Eliot pulled down all the herbs mentioned in the grouping of spells. Long words and short, familiar and unfamiliar.

  He made a pile of them. Basil and blue vervain and five finger grass and coltsfoot, dill and hibiscus and jasmine and lavender and mandrake, mistletoe and orris root and peppermint and raspberry and willow bark.

  Eliot drew every symbol, cut his thumbs until the blood flowed, and when that didn’t work, he cut lines on his arm. He cried, muddling the words of the spells. He did not feel the rush of his own magic; he knew it was not working.

  And then, after his parents had spent hours looking for him, headlights cut through the haze. His mother ran around the house, calling his name, and Eliot couldn’t stop crying long enough to answer.

  His father heard him and froze in the doorway, eyes glazed over with fury. His mother came in after, one hand pressed to her mouth while she took in the ruin of the scene and put the pieces together. Eliot sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by smoking herbs and scorch marks, arms bloody up to his elbows.

  “Caroline,” his father said very, very quietly. “What have you done?”

  That was the first time Eliot saw hatred in his father’s eyes. None of his spells worked. When he most needed it, his magic failed him.

  He remembered something now, relaying the story to Tess. Eliot closed his eyes, tried to push the memory away, but it was useless.

  “You promised me,” his father had seethed, “that he would know nothing of this.”

  Eliot felt nauseous. Tess didn’t let go of his hand. She examined his face as if she could peel the years away, strip him down to that eleven-year-old boy he once was, reaching for magic that would never work.

  “Did you tell your mom what happened?” Tess asked. She hadn’t spoken at all, as he relayed it.

  Eliot rolled onto his side, still holding her hand. His arm was starting to cramp but he wouldn’t let go, not for the whole world.

  “Of course I did,” Eliot said. “She wrapped my arms, and when my dad went away to be furious somewhere else, she healed me with magic. And I told her. She yelled at me, which was something she never did, but she was terrified when I was lost. And she sent me to bed after forcing me to eat this god-awful soup.

  “My dad came in after my mother went to bed. He smelled like alcohol and firewood. He sat down on my bed and said, ‘Eliot. What you saw today must remain our secret. But more importantly, you must swear to me, promise me, that you’ll never do that sorcery again. You never should have learned of it. It will ruin you.’ And I laid there, hearing the hatred in his voice, knowing it was directed at me. And I couldn’t help but think, how can he love me if he hates what I am?”

  “But …” She only said that, that one word, and he warmed to her immediately. She didn’t have to say anything else. Tess understood what his father didn’t.

  “I told my mother,” Eliot said to the grass. “I told her what he said, and she didn’t seem surprised, which was the worst part. She just … fell a little bit. Curled into herself.”

  His father had never called him Eli again. Not after that. After Eliot betrayed him. Eliot couldn’t help seeing how they were all tied up: his father’s betrayal, his mother’s magic, his own. How they were the same thing, in the end.

  “Did your mother leave him?”

  Eliot sighed. “She would’ve, if she didn’t get sick. And they were separated, when Dad first came here. But no. Regular treatment and magic weren’t working for her illness, so they are trying something experimental, and she can’t pay for it without my father’s money. And it just … looks better if he stays married to her. So they separated but didn’t divorce.” He didn’t know what else his father had to gain from staying with her. Maybe he did it just to control Eliot. If he took Eliot away from his mother, maybe he could strip away his magic.

  “But how did your father come here?” Tess asked. “Why would he leave, if he had a good job?”

  Eliot sighed, running a hand through his hair. “That’s kind of my fault too. When I told my mom, it got back to Shel. She got scared and reported the affair to the university. My father was let go. I can’t say he was blacklisted, entirely, but he was never able to get back in with a uni. So when he was offered a job at Falk, the choice was clear. And he left and took me with him.”

  “As punishment?”

  Eliot’s mouth tasted sour. “Maybe,” he said, but he wasn’t sure who Tess was thinking was getting punished: him or his mother. It didn’t matter. They both were, in the end. “And here we are.”

  After a pause, when all that was left was the sound of crickets filtering back into his ears and the laughter of students somewhere on Pitt’s campus, Tess said, “I wish there was something I could say that would matter.”

  It was a strange thing to say, Eliot thought, but it wasn’t necessarily untrue. Usually, when he mentioned any part of this story, or anyone knew it, there were I’m-sorrys and condolences and it’s-not-your-faults all around, until the sympathy was so thick around Eliot that he was suffocating.

  But here,
now, he could breathe.

  He wanted to kiss her.

  He was not going to.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  Tess sighed, and her hand felt uncertain in his now that it wasn’t there simply to offer comfort. He squeezed hers a little, trying to reassure, and held his breath until he felt a faint squeeze back.

  “It’s boring,” Tess said.

  “I doubt that.” Nothing she said could bore him.

  “My parents will lose the house if my mom doesn’t find a job, and my dad threw all of our money at his failing business,” Tess said all in a rush, like a confession.

  “Is this a sudden change in status?” Eliot asked. “The no-job thing, I mean.”

  Tess sighed. “She was a teacher, but public schools are getting funding cut and— It’s boring, honestly. It’s just, teachers are getting laid off, and she happened to be one of them. And my dad runs a pen company, but all the money from that was paying for his stationery store. So.”

  “Ah,” Eliot said.

  “They’re good parents,” Tess continued, pulling more grass. “But they’re … naïve. They don’t see the consequences of things. They forget a lot. They don’t see how hard it is for … I don’t know. To get into college and pay for it. They don’t really get what it’s going to take for Nat and me to be stable adults, and so I took matters into my own hands. I couldn’t play the parent at home anymore. So I talked to Mathilde, and now we’re here.”

  “And do you like it here?” Eliot asked, though he suspected he knew the answer.

  Tess’s lips twitched upwards. “I’ll be honest. I’d like it better if your father wasn’t here.”

  Well, he couldn’t argue with that.

  Her hand in his was distracting, and he couldn’t stop looking at her lips, tracing the shape of them with his gaze. He wondered what it would be like to not feel this much, to not cling to every word she said.