Wayfarer

by Lili St. Crow

  “Sinder, a burning name. It matches her, yes it does. Auntie greets you, Sinder. Come inside.”

  A burning—oh, yeah. Not the first time someone’s said something like that. She examined the white and red wooden gate, and when she was satisfied there wasn’t any bad charm on it, she stepped through. It was so thickly painted it felt a little soft under her fingers, and as soon as she stepped onto the crushed-shell path the air felt warmer. Summer, instead of spring, and the shells made little crunching noises underfoot. The spiced-honey smell intensified, her stomach rumbled, and now she could see bees, zipping drunkenly from flower to waxen flower.

  The walk led up to the brownstone’s fudge-colored door, painted to match the stones. Between them, the masonry oozed creamy white, and the chimney was a darker stick, a thread of white smoke issuing from it. Why have a fire on such a nice day? Charmers didn’t usually work around open flame. Hopefully her workroom was insulated; Potential behaved oddly around live fire.

  The steps were weird quartzlike stone, almost translucent and freshly washed by the way they gleamed. The fudge door was open, and through it came the most heavenly smell.

  Brownies. Not just any tiny little chocolate bars of goodness, though. These had a slight bitter undertone and a dot of bright cinnamon, and the smell pulled Ellie irresistibly forward.

  Just like Mom’s, she thought, and followed Auntie into the house.

  • • •

  That first afternoon remained full of light for a long time, a bright island in a sea of ink.

  The foyer was floored in licorice black and whipped-cream linoleum squares, polished until they shone. Stairs went up along the right side, but a parlor opened off to the right as well, comfortable and overstuffed, all in shades of peppermint and cherry. The smoke from the chimney came from the kitchen toward the back, the dining room a tiny nook, with a round wicker table draped with a cinnamon cloth.

  It was what Laurissa would sniff at as “country chic, you know,” and for a moment the stuffed scarecrow in a blue velvet coat, propped against the dining room’s wall, seemed to twitch, its sad painted eyes eerily lifelike as it gazed over the table and the two noodle-colored wicker chairs with eggplant cushions.

  Braided strings of garlic and other less-identifiable things hung from racks, and the kitchen’s copper pots and cornhusk-green towels and touches were a little shocking by contrast. There was a wide brick hearth with an ember-glowing fire under a large iron cauldron, whose bubbling lid let loose bursts of colorless steam. It was the more prosaic stove and oven Auntie turned to, her housedress now appropriate amid all the other colors, an exotic bird in its soft delicious nest.

  The tea was heavy and rich, full of cream and spice. The sandwiches were watercress with thick pale cheese on snow-white bread, peppery and fresh; the cookies round sunwheels full of candied ginger. The brownies Ellie smelled were nowhere in sight, but that didn’t matter, because for the first time in a long while Ellie could eat without her stomach cramping.

  Auntie kept pouring the tea, and Ellie knew she was maybe shocking the old lady, but all of a sudden, there at the cinnamon table, she found herself pouring the entire story out. The old woman nodded, thoughtfully, asking a question every now and again. She wasn’t interested in Avery or Cami or Ruby—though Ruby’s name stirred a faint bit of brightness in her dark eyes—but she was very curious about the Strep.

  The funny thing was, Ell could never afterward remember much of what exactly Auntie had said. Just that the questions had been penetrating but soft, incisive but not impolite. That she had a way of drawing Ellie out, and that nobody had listened to her, really listened to Ell, in a long time. She was a stranger, not a charity case, so the old woman evinced no surprise or distaste.

  One thing she said Ellie remembered a long time after. “A daughter, yes. Old Auntie wants a daughter, but may have none. So she is Auntie.” The old woman gave her a considering look. “A wandering, wayfaring daughter, her family must be proud.”

  Proud? Of me? It was such a novel idea she shook her head immediately. “I guess Mom was . . . but she’s gone, and Dad . . .” Yet the soft, quiet idea that maybe they had been proud was a balm, and it turned the key in the lock. Her words spilled out, faster and faster.

  Ellie babbled on, weariness falling away as secrets dropped onto the tabletop beside the bone-china teapot and the delicate cups, the ravaged plate of dainty sandwiches and the piles of cookie crumbs on platters delicately painted with ripe fruit.

  Through it all, Auntie listened and nodded, and patted Ellie’s hand with her own soft plump paw.

  Long afterward, Ellie would realize that the old woman ate nothing at all.

  NINETEEN

  FINDING A BUS TO PERRAULT WASN’T EASY, AND IT WAS twilight by the time Ellie made it . . . home. Suppose you had to call it that, or something. Wasn’t home where they had to take you in when you showed up? But they didn’t have to. Surely Laurissa would be a lot happier if Ellie just . . . vanished.

  Not just the Strep, either. Ruby and Cami could probably do without her bitchiness, and definitely Avery Fletcher could do without her doing whatever it was that kept making him show up like a puppy just begging to be kicked.

  The front door was unlocked even at this hour—well, if it hadn’t been, she would have gone around and through the kitchen. The servants—the few of them left, that is—were long gone for the day, and there was no way she could paper this over with an excuse.

  She’s going to be furious. Ellie sighed, dread a lead ball in her stomach, and pressed the thumb-handle down. The door creaked open slowly, announcing her presence with a screech that shouldn’t have been there, because the hinges were always kept well-oiled.

  The foyer was dark. An unfamiliar feeling began in the center of her bones. She froze as the doors swung closed behind her, latching with a tense click, and tried to figure out what the buzzing almost-burning inside her was.

  Something’s going to happen. But that’s not it. She closed her eyes, searching inward.

  The answer came just as there was a harsh sobbing noise, and a fluttering.

  Ellie didn’t move. I feel . . . strong. As if pouring everything out to Auntie had done something, changed her. It was really amazing, what just having someone listen could do.

  She opened her eyes.

  Rita was there, crouched at the bottom of the steps. Her pallid little face was open and avid, and there was a strange click-tap-drag from upstairs, unfamiliar footsteps.

  “Rita.” Her throat was dry. “Hi. You—”

  “She found your money,” the other girl whispered, scurrying aside. “All of it. Upstairs in the little hole. Your rat hole.”

  For a second the words made no sense, an exotic gobbledygook. The click-dragging footsteps upstairs drew nearer, and the smell of burning cedar anger rolled down the risers, a colorless fume twining around the balustrade.

  The Strep was coming for the stairs, and she was pissed.

  There were dark jagged shapes on the floor, and Ell was momentarily confused before realization exploded inside her. They were records. If you dropped them from high enough, they would break. Especially the old, brittle charm-wax ones. The fluttering bits were the album sleeves, shredded and crisped, a charmer’s rage smoking up from them.

  “You told her.” Ellie was suddenly certain. “You followed me.”

  Rita’s pallor flushed, and for a moment she was almost pretty. The beauty submerged under a swift grimace, lips skinned back and eyes rolling. “Charmer girl. No more blue bedroom for you.” She nipped through the silent swinging door into the servants’ back hall just as Laurissa came into sight at the head of the stairs, the chandelier overhead tinkling as Potential drifted and eddied, foxfire specks and sparkles showing the grime and dust on crystal beads and dead lightbulbs.

  She hates all sorts of light, doesn’t she. Maybe it burns her. Ellie stared.

  The click was from Laurissa’s red Githrian pumps, but the drag was because somethin
g was wrong with her left foot. She hauled it along, scraping the side of the pump along the floor, and her frosted-blonde mane stood straight out, aggressively lacquered. Her belly had swelled—surely it hadn’t been that big before? Now it jutted in front of her, and her free hand raked its long nails lightly over the bulge, scraping against the soft fabric of her crimson Lethbridge jacket. Her skirt was slightly askew, a sliver of creamy lace from her slip showing underneath, and her jacket was buttoned awry.

  Ellie’s jaw was loose. She shut her mouth with a snap, and her hands curled into bloodless fists. Her stepmother’s face was shadowed except for the burning coals of her eyes, glimmering under a shelf of winter-blonde fringe.

  Mithrus, she looks terrible.

  “Little Ellen.” The Strep grabbed at the balustrade, peering down at her. Every word was smooth honey; her tone had lost none of its terrible false sweetness. “You’ll have to come up, darling.” Her knuckles stood out, her hands bonier than ever and horridly graceful.

  The foyer trembled around Ellie, miserably trapped like a fly in amber, staring up at the Strep. If she went up the stairs and did what Laurissa said, maybe she wouldn’t be hurt too badly?

  Yeah, sure. The shredded album covers rustled, rustled. The broken discs twitched, little sliding sounds. The Hellward ones had probably been first off the ledge.

  She destroyed everything.

  The tip of the Strep’s nose was a pale dot. The chandelier tinkled, sweet ominous music, and Ellie realized dreamily she was directly underneath it.

  “Ellen.” A thin crust of false solicitude over a deep screaming well of rage. “Don’t make me come down there.”

  When did I ever make you do anything? That was something Ruby might say. Channeling Rube at a time like this would probably be hilarious, but not really guaranteed to calm anything down—

  An ominous creak overhead. The chandelier jingled, jangled. Like thin icy bracelets on a skeletal wrist.

  Laurissa took another step, dragging her foot. The charms on her shoes hissed angrily, raindrops hitting a hot griddle. Her face was still a shadowed hole, and Ellie was dozily glad of that.

  “Ungrateful girl.” The Strep reached the first stair, twitching her good foot forward and landing heavily, wobbling. “With your nose in the air like you’re so special, at your little school with your little friends. I teach you everything, and this—this—is how you repay me? By stealing?” Her free hand flicked forward, and the smoking wad in it was paper credits, fluttering like trapped birds.

  The silver scrollwork box hit the foyer floor and crumpled into a ball, shrieking.

  Ellie made a shapeless sound. Her escape money, four hundred twelve credits, unleashed itself from Laurissa’s bony fist, shredding and sparking into flame. Smoke curled, a tang of heavy charmed credit-paper sharp and nasty under the burnt cedar of the Strep’s rage. There was another nose-stinging reek too, one she couldn’t quite place. Whatever it was, it made her vision blur, and a hot trickle of water slid down Ellie’s cheek.

  “I worked for that!” Her sudden shout smashed the whispering tinkling of the chandelier. Another sharp groan from overhead, this one full of creaking and popping. “I earned those credits, you leech!”

  A sneer twisted Laurissa’s face, rising from the shadow of her hair like a cottage-cheese moon. “Who would pay you?” She hobbled down one more step, and another. “Little slut, who would pay you?”

  I’m not a slut! I go to chapel! The injustice of it closed Ellie’s throat, and the mounting buzzing vibration in the middle of her bones demanded words to let it free. “You’re a whore! That’s not my father’s baby! You got it off one of your boyfriends, and I hope it rots in you!”

  The curse flew free, stinging-black and sharp-feathered. It shaped itself from trembling Potential and flashed through space before Ellie could pull it back. Ever afterward, she would sometimes wonder if maybe she would have been able to pull it back . . .

  . . . but just didn’t want to. Which made what happened afterward her own damn fault.

  Just like everything else.

  Laurissa screamed, the familiar, piercing, Potential-laced noise; she was so used to disorienting and overpowering her prey. Ellie’s own cry was higher pitched, a terrified animal struggling in a snare, and the curse hit her stepmother’s face with a bonebreaking crunch.

  Ellie backpedaled, not realizing she was still screaming until her shoulders hit the front door and she had to stop to whoop in a long, endless breath full of choking smoke.

  The Strep tottered, her dead foot pulling itself up in a terrible corkscrew, blood spattering in a bright hideous rain as the curse clawed and shrieked in its own train-whistle voice, not heard with the ears but felt like a drill through the front of the skull. Ellie scrabbled for the door latch, her battered maryjanes striking deep black marks on the marble, the mended buckle—when had that happened, maybe Auntie had done it—chiming as luckcharms sparkled and spat. She was too slow, caught in hardened syrup again, nightmare-time making her fingers clumsy and scraping as Laurissa fetched up against the bottom of the stairs, legs indecently splayed, her body twitching nauseatingly.

  Oh God I’ve killed her oh my God I killed her with a curse Mithrus Christ forgive me—

  She barely had time to finish breathing in to scream again before the Strep sat up, the curse falling away and shattering into shards of smoking obsidian, and her mad gaze focused on Ellie through strings of frosted, writhing hair.

  “You little bitch!” she yelled. “Look what you’ve done!”

  Yep, that one was me, Ellie thought, dark hilarity bubbling under the panicked beating of her heart. This one was all me. You should see what I did to an ink bottle last week. Or was it last month? How long ago was that?

  The thing about time was that it slipped through your fingers. Like Potential, and charm, and one day you woke up in your own house with your parents dead and a madwoman lurching up from the marble floor, her once-immaculate hair daggers of dyed string and her nasty bruise-making talons twisted into claws. The red suit was more than askew now, and Laurissa’s flesh underneath its gaping was dead white.

  Fishbelly white and somehow, in some way, wrong. Something twitched under the gravid lump of the Strep’s middle, reaching out. Bile slapped the back of Ellie’s throat. She fumbled for the door afresh, its handle slipping greasily against sweating skin. None of this was very important. There was no use in fighting. The Strep was going to cross the white and black floor, and then everything she’d done up until now would look like picnics and chapel compared to what she was about to do.

  A crunching squeeze on her right hand, the star sapphire shrieking as it flashed. A splintering, creaking moan, iron staples popping free of roof beams, and the entire pile of Perrault Street stone shuddered on its foundations. The chain holding the chandelier made a horrifying sound as it slithered through rusted hoops, and the entire tinkling, chiming thing descended with ponderous grace, a slight arc bowing it toward Ellie before the ring spoke again, a Tesla’s Folly flash of blue lightning, and she found her hand had flung itself up as if it could stop the Strep from lurching into the path of the chandelier.

  The funny thing was, it maybe did, because the chandelier was jerked off its course. By a single degree, maybe; Ellie didn’t have time to calculate.

  But that single degree was enough.

  It hit the marble floor to one side, fetching up against the rise of the staircase instead of its foot, and shattering bits pierced the air in all directions. Laurissa screamed again, a cheated howl, and the door finally flung itself open, spilling Ellie backward onto the front steps.

  She tumbled down, bruising her shoulder, her head hit the pavers with stunning force; for half a second everything grayed out. That brief starry interval was all the rest she was granted; the ring gave its tongueless shriek again, and she remembered the only time she ever saw her mother truly angry. There had been a car, and a screeching of tires, and Mom hunched protectively over a much younger
Ellie, her hand flung out and the sapphire ring sparking just as it did now as metal shredded and her mother’s face for a moment turned dark as a storm cloud. The shadow on her mother’s face, that was why Avery looked familiar, because sometimes his cheekbones looked—

  The sky was purple now, and the wind was chill and damp.

  Ellie scrambled to her feet, every muscle rusty-screaming like the chandelier’s chain, and backed up, her head tossing nervously as a horse’s. The open door spilled a crazycrack flutter of blue-white light, Potential fluorescing as Laurissa snapped a firecharm and eldritch flames splashed against the steps, smoking.

  She means business, Ellie thought, and skipped back a few more steps. She’ll roast me alive.

  Only if she catches you, a quiet, determined voice inside her head that sounded like Cami’s answered, and under that depthless twilit sky, Ellie ran.

  TWENTY

  SOUTHKING STREET WAS A DIFFERENT BEAST AT NIGHT. Still crowded, but the regular shops were locked and barred, the daytime tents and stalls darkened. Caged foxfire charmlights hung in the traditional slotted-tin lanterns, showing where the nighttime trades were conducted.

  Poisonseller, blackblade knifemartin instead of a dealer in clean honest steel, fortune-makers and charmthieves, the entire street a chamber in the beating heart of New Haven’s shadow economy. The Families, like Cami’s, took a cut from each transaction after dark too; the raw materials for some of the blackest work had to be imported and thus toll was paid to the de Varres as well—Ruby’s Gran, kind as she was to her granddaughter’s friends, did not keep her stranglehold on the import and export business with cupcakes and charity.