His brows knit together in confusion. “My doing?”
“Did you bury it?”
“I can’t tell if you’re pulling my leg or not.”
I’m frustrated; I know I must sound ridiculous. “The first night I was supposed to meet you, I came but we found only the spell book instead.”
Finn would have to be an incredible actor to fake the look of genuine bafflement on his face. “Aye, that is strange. But it wasn’t me. All the more reason for you to accept my help. A book that appears from nowhere is likely a book that is dangerous.”
Maxine’s voice cuts through the woods and the ringing in my ears. “Frances?” she calls. “Fraaances!”
I wish my head would stop spinning. I reach up and slap my face a little, hoping to regain feeling in my cheeks. Finn laughs, his face cast in moonlight and shadows.
“You all right there, love?”
“Don’t call me ‘love.’ ”
“Sure thing, love.” He has the nerve to wink.
William taught me how to throw a punch. I wonder how upset he’d be if I used his lessons on his friend.
“Frances?” Maxine calls again. She’s close and getting closer. A part of me is glad she’s come for me, another part wishes she’d go away so I could stay and listen to what it is Finn has to say.
“C’mere,” he says through gritted teeth.
I step forward, hesitantly. We’re close enough now that I can feel the heat of his breath.
“Frances, is that you?” Maxine calls. She’s just outside the copse of trees where we’re hidden. We’ll be discovered in seconds.
Finn grabs my hand, pulls me to him, wraps his arms around my waist, and draws me so close I can feel the heat of his breath and his heart thumping out a steady rhythm beneath his shirt. His lips hover above mine.
“There was another spell in the book,” I whisper.
“What kind of spell?” His breath is hot.
“A resurrection spell.”
“My, Frances, you are a dangerous girl.”
Maxine is coming; her footsteps are mere feet away.
But Finn is so close, I can see the flecks of green in his eyes, illuminated in lantern light. “Can you help me do it?”
“Yes,” he breathes.
“It has to be soon. The spell said ‘soon.’ ”
Maxine bursts through the trees. “Frances, there you are. We were worri—” She stops short at the sight of me in Finn’s arms. I gather my bearings enough to shove Finn away from me.
Her mouth forms a little O, her eyebrows raised.
“I didn’t realize,” she mutters. I’ve never seen Maxine at a loss for words.
“It’s not—” I begin to say, but she holds up a hand.
“Just hurry up please. It isn’t safe to be out here alone. I’ll wait for you, and we can walk back together.”
She’s angry with me, and I don’t blame her.
Finn and I are still standing too close. My shove didn’t make much of a difference. The warmth of his chest radiates through me.
“Meet me here three nights from now.”
It’s heavy, this moment, whatever it is.
“How?” It comes out as an exhale.
“You’re smart, Frances. I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” he replies with another maddening grin. “You’d best be going now. Your friend is waiting, and she’s none too pleased with you. I didn’t mean to create trouble.”
I glance through the trees to where Maxine is waiting for me, my stomach heavy with guilt and dread and communion wine.
I turn to Finn to respond, but he’s already walking back silently in the direction from which he came, whistling the same haunting tune.
“Come on, Frances!” Maxine shouts.
“Coming!” I push through the branches to meet her.
Her mouth is turned down in a frown, moonlight glowing silver on her skin.
“That was exceptionally stupid, even for you,” she says.
“It’s not like that.” As if I could possibly explain what it is like.
“Please, Frances, elaborate, because I am positively dying to know!” She throws her hands up in the air; wind-whipped tendrils of her hair dance around her face. “How did he even find you?”
She looks furious, the way I imagined Hera, Zeus’s perpetually betrayed wife to look in the stories William and I used to read when we were young.
“I had a brother once, Maxine. I’m just trying to figure out what happened to him.”
“By kissing boys?” she mocks.
“I told you: it wasn’t what it looked like.”
Leaves crunch beneath her boots, even her steps are angry. “I am begging you to enlighten me.”
I weigh my options. Perhaps telling Maxine about Finn is shortsighted. There’s still a chance she’d try to stop me from meeting him again. I don’t think she’d rat me out to Mrs. Vykotsky, but if she truly believed I was in danger, I don’t doubt she’d lock me in my room, or barricade the doors. Plus, there’s a tiny part of me that wants to keep Finn a secret. Someone just for me.
Maxine’s brows are furrowed, her sharp face both enraged and concerned. It’s her concern that makes me relent. That, and I’ve missed having someone to share my secrets with. I sigh. “I’ll tell you everything, but not here.” There’s something about this park that makes me feel itchy all over.
“Come along, Frances,” she says, tugging me forward through the inky night back to Haxahaven.
Maria has left the front gate unlocked for us. The massive double doors creak as we open them, but the foyer is mercifully dark and still as we step inside. We’re the only ones foolish enough to still be awake after curfew.
We creep through the front hall, careful to quiet our footfalls. Maxine gestures with one hand in a follow me motion.
Clouds must have overtaken the dim light of the moon, because it’s as dark as sin in Maxine’s bedroom.
I reach my hand out through the impenetrable darkness only to bump Maxine.
“Watch it,” she hisses at me.
“Shhh,” I whisper back.
“We need to find a candle.”
“And aren’t you supposed to be a Finder?”
She reaches through the darkness and raps me on the head.
“Go to hell,” she snaps.
The sudden sound of a match striking makes us both go still.
We snap our heads around to see a shadowy figure sitting at Maxine’s vanity, their feet propped up as casual as you please.
After an agonizing second, the figure lifts the match to a candle; it catches light and illuminates her face.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Well aren’t you two just waking snakes,” Lena says.
I sigh in relief.
“Jesus Christ!” Maxine exclaims. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“You didn’t think I was going to let you leave me out, did you?” she replies, face awash in candlelight, still leaning back in Maxine’s vanity chair like the queen of the castle. Her mouth is curved in a half smile, eyes glowing with the glee of seeing Maxine jump out of her skin. I would be hunched over laughing if I weren’t clutching my own chest in surprise.
The vanity where Lena sits is covered haphazardly in jewels as sharp as Maxine’s eyes.
“Leave you out of what, exactly?” Maxine asks while pulling pins out of her hair. She throws one at Lena, who dodges it with a laugh. Maxine then reaches down to the hem of the man’s shirt she’s wearing and tugs it over her head. She isn’t wearing a corset underneath.
It’s with confidence that I will never possess that she strides over to her wardrobe and throws on a silk dressing gown, while Lena and I stare at her in identical stunned silence.
“Oh of all the things we’ve done tonight, this is what scandalizes you the most? Grow up,” she snipes. “Now, Frances, please tell us what it is you were doing with that boy in the park.” Lena snaps to look at me. “Well, well, well, Frances.” She sounds
impressed, maybe. Or she’s mocking me too.
I sigh and sink down onto Maxine’s feather bed. Maxine sprawls out beside me. Lena rises from the vanity and joins us.
“His name is Finn. He was a friend of my brother’s.”
Maxine jabs me in the ribs with an elbow. “Don’t think I don’t notice you didn’t answer my question.”
Lena closes her eyes and massages the space between them. “I think he’s going to teach us.”
I turn to her. “How did you know that?”
Lena’s eyes blink open. “The same way I knew you’d be here.” She taps the side of her temple with her pointer finger. “Clairvoyant, remember?”
Maxine settles her head into the crook of Lena’s neck. “So this mysterious woodland boy is going to teach us what exactly?”
Lena thinks for a moment. I’d give anything for a peek inside her brain. “I see the three of us with him in the woods. We have the spell book. It’s nighttime. We’re…” She shakes her head, baffled or bemused by whatever she’s seeing. “We’re smiling. We look happy.”
If what Lena is seeing is true, then the resurrection spell might be legitimate. I could speak to my brother once more. I’d do things much worse than sneak off to meet a boy for that.
Maxine kicks my foot. “I didn’t get the impression we were invited too. Seemed like a Frances-only affair. Who are we to get in the way of romance.”
I kick her back. “Don’t be cruel. That wasn’t what it was like at all. I only met him once before tonight, a long time ago.” I don’t tell her about the way his hazel eyes and the set of his jaw sent a thrill through me. It’s stupid to think of a boy that way at all when we have bigger issues at hand. “If you want to come, I’m inviting you.” I also don’t tell them they’re so much more important to me than any boy. That is what I really wanted, a warm bed filled with friends, with three identical hearts on fire, burning for something more than what we’ve been given.
Lena gives a decisive nod. “I’m coming.”
Maxine sighs and rolls over, nestling her head against my chest and laying her legs across Lena’s. The three of us are tangled like a pretzel, like a single unit of being. “You’re both rather stupid—you know that, right?”
Lena scowls down at Maxine. “You’re telling me you don’t think we have a right to learn more about our power? We’ve snuck out twice now—how difficult could it be to do it again? Helen’s clearly a terrible patrolman.”
“Lena makes an excellent point,” I agree.
Maxine purses her lips and lifts herself up—sitting straight and sure. “If you tell anyone what I’m about to tell you, I’ll skin you both alive, understood?”
Lena and I nod solemnly.
“Vykotsky thinks a little rebellion is good for a girl, so I have special permission to sneak out a few times a year. Tonight was a school-sanctioned outing.”
I feel more betrayed than I should by Maxine’s admission. I thought tonight was a gesture of friendship, and to find out it was little more than a field trip stings. But still, I know she burns for more too.
“What about the night we found the spell book?” I prod.
“That was a risk. I knew the faculty had a meeting that night, and were likely tipsy on brandy. It was luck more than anything. Getting out won’t be so easy next time.”
Lena seems less surprised. “But you have a key to the gate in the wall. There has to be a way out?” she prods.
“It’s getting out of the walls of this mansion that’s the problem, not the wall surrounding it,” Maxine snaps, but there is a flicker in her eyes. Faint, but I can see it.
“There is a way, though.” I press her. “Isn’t there? Lena sees us training with him. So there is a way. Not easy isn’t the same thing as impossible.”
I’m learning that Maxine keeps her face in a carefully constructed mask of cool amusement, but it cracks when she’s thinking hard about something. You can see it in the way her eyes scrunch up in the corners. She’s making that face now. “We could try, if it’s worth it.”
To learn magic that does more than mend a dress, I’d face more fearsome creatures than Helen and Mrs. Vykotsky.
Lena and I respond simultaneously. “It’s worth it.”
* * *
I’m back in Mr. Hues’s shop, cranking the wheel of my sewing machine, fabric passing softly through my hands.
I know it’s a dream because the shop is empty. No Mrs. Carrey or Jess or Violet. No chatter drifting down from the apartment upstairs. I’m completely alone. The edges ripple, the light bends all wrong here.
The chime of the doorbell startles me. I should be less surprised to see Finn standing in the doorway, his curls haloed in soft morning light.
“Hiya, Frances,” he greets me.
“Are you real?” I stop the turning of my right hand, and the ticking of my sewing machine quiets.
“As real as anything ever is.” His hair has turned golden in the dream light. He looks like an apparition, a son of Zeus.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Having touched you makes this easier, us talkin’.”
I fall back on old habits, directing my attention to the garment I’m working on rather than meeting his gaze. It almost makes me want to laugh, the idea of pouring work into this dream dress, until the garment comes into focus. It’s a coat made of dark blue velvet. The laugh dies in my throat.
“So. Three days from now. You coming to meet me?” He raises his brows seductively like he’s asking to call on me.
I’m reminded of the errand boys, the sons, and husbands of clients who would come into the shop to fetch orders and the way they would leer at me. Once a boy whistled at me as I handed him the dress I’d worked all week on wrapped in tissue paper.
“I’d bet you look fetching out of the wool dress,” he said, and my face went so red, the other girls in the shop teased me about it for weeks. I went home and took a bath so long, my fingers pruned as I scrubbed myself raw, like I could wash his gaze off my skin and down the drain. I couldn’t. I still felt it crawling all over me as I slept.
It doesn’t feel like that with Finn. Sure, I’d like to sock him, but he smiles at me like I’m in on the joke.
“If you can talk to me in my dreams, why can’t we practice magic here?” I ask.
“Magic on the astral plane is different. The only limit of what is possible is what you can think to create. Real magic doesn’t work like that. Go ahead. Picture a flower blooming in your hand.”
I unfurl my palm, and in it sits a tulip, white in the middle and blood red at the edges of its fraying petals.
“See?” Finn smiles.
I’ve taken enough of Mrs. Roberts’s needle-levitation lessons to know magic doesn’t feel like this when I’m awake.
“So you’ll do it? You’ll come train with me?” he asks.
The dream space is closing in on me; the voices of my roommates waking up filter in through the edges. I’ll be awake soon.
“I’ll try.”
The shop blurs in and out of focus. Before he can reply, Finn is gone, and instead I find Aurelia standing over me, shaking my shoulders gently. I blink my eyes open.
“It’s time for breakfast, Frances,” she whispers softly. In the corner, Ruby rolls her eyes.
“Hallowell can’t handle her liquor,” she says with a laugh. “Get the hell out of bed and nurse your headache without complaint like the rest of us.”
My stomach rolls, and my head pounds fiercely.
“Leave me be,” I mumble into my pillow.
Aurelia prods me. “Frances, we have to get dressed and head down to breakfast.”
Ruby buttons her cape around her delicate shoulders while Lena plaits her hair in front of the mirror.
Ruby is likely right and I simply can’t handle my liquor, but the idea of standing up makes me want to vomit, and surely that’s a legitimate reason to miss breakfast.
“Frances, come on,” Lena shouts. She, too, looks a l
ittle green but is putting on a brave face.
“I can’t. Tell them I’m sick.” It itches where each sweaty tendril of hair is plastered to my forehead.
“You heard her,” Ruby says. “She said to leave her. We have to make it to breakfast before those god-awful Underwood sisters eat all the sticky buns.”
The three of them walk through the door. Lena pauses for a moment and turns to me.
“Do you want me to stay with you?” she offers.
By her tone, I can tell there is nothing Lena would dislike more than playing nurse to me all day, but that only makes her offer kinder.
“No, thank you. Please go.”
She shrugs a little, then replies, “Drink some water,” before running out the door to catch up with the others.
I’m too jittery to fall back to sleep, so I stare at the ceiling and think of my brother. When we were very young, before my mother was too crushed by the weight of living to care for us, we’d sometimes go to the beach. William and I would sit, our chubby little legs sprawled out in front of us, and we’d dig holes in the sand right at the edge of the water. It was a futile task. The sand would collapse in on itself, and William and I would laugh and laugh as the holes filled with seawater.
There’s a sinking pit in my chest now that feels like the holes at the beach my brother and I used to dig. Every time I think I’ve worked through some of the pain, new pain arrives. There’s no bottom, just endless salt water and a hurt that doesn’t end. Since his death, I’ve thought maybe if I found his killer, the pit in my chest would stop collapsing in on itself. Finn’s arrival feels like my first real chance.
I miss breakfast but make it to Mrs. Roberts’s class on time. She hands me a small scrub brush at the door. It’s magical dishwashing day.
In between sudsing a plate and rinsing it, Lena passes me her textbook with a deliberate jerk of her chin.
I flip the book open to find a folded square of parchment inside. I slip it into the pocket of my pinafore. It stays there, heavy, all through the rest of lunch, class, and dinner. There is no place at Haxahaven where someone isn’t watching you. Finally, after dinner, alone in our bedroom, I unfold it. Maxine’s handwriting is sharp and small. Thursday night at 10 p.m. Meet in my room. —MCD
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