Alexei flopped on the couch, trading a beer for the remote and scanning as dully as Jeremy had. He had discarded his suit for sweats and a tank, and he looked more familiar that way—less like Alexei Kovrov and more like Jeremy’s big brother—but there was a harsh, distant edge to his face.
“What were you doing?” Jeremy asked.
“Don’t you worry about anything.”
Jeremy twisted his lips. The room smelled like blood. “That’s a little worrisome.”
Alexei stopped on a shot of an alligator roaring and cocked his head thoughtfully to the side. “I’m looking for something Corey Malcolm stole from me. I think he’s after it again.”
“Something about my curse?”
Alexei kept his eyes on the TV. “No. It has nothing to do with you. I know it’s hard, my prince, but there’s no shortcut. We would have found it years ago.” He put his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, rocking him lightly. “All you can do is follow your heart.”
Jeremy sighed. His heart was about as good a leader as Alexei’s was. He shut his eyes and, for as long as he could stand it, really imagined himself never breaking the curse. He imagined being sixty, Alexei seventy-seven, sitting together on this couch. They’d talk about arthritis or whatever. He’d go home to Vanya, who’d have kids of his own. Maybe Jeremy could help with them. Tears ached behind his eyes again, and he pushed the thoughts away. “From now on I’m going to kiss everybody, right when I meet them. Get it out of the way.”
“If that’s what you want,” Alexei said.
I want I want I want
“I’m going to go to Tulane,” Jeremy said. “It’s never cold in New Orleans.” And Luke told the coolest stories about visiting. Jeremy didn’t mention that part.
“Tulane’s a good school,” Alexei replied.
Jeremy huffed and scooted over, snuggling into Alexei’s arm. He hadn’t done that since he was a little boy, and it felt awkward now, but he hung on. “I’m trying to have a temper tantrum.”
“Okay.” Alexei patted the top of Jeremy’s head, and Jeremy rubbed it away. “You are ferocious.”
Alexei seemed ready to drink and channel-surf for gore all night, so Jeremy, warmly fuzzy at the end of his beer, took the opportunity to carry his improved mood home.
“Let me call Sergei,” Alexei said.
“I can take the subway.”
Alexei shook his head, so strained that Jeremy didn’t argue, and pulled Jeremy into a tight hug. “If I’d put in a custom order for a baby brother, I couldn’t have come up with one I liked better than you.”
“Aww,” Jeremy said meanly.
“I mean it.” Alexei’s hand closed around one of Jeremy’s shoulders, holding him so close Jeremy couldn’t see his face. “I’m glad you were born. I hope you are, too.”
Jeremy squeezed. “Don’t be weird.”
Because he knew it would make Alexei laugh, Jeremy pulled out his new sunglasses and shook them open with one wrist, looking dramatically to his left as he slid them on like James Bond. It did make Alexei laugh, but his mood didn’t stay up for long. He gave Jeremy another long, tight hug. “Be careful.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Call me. We should talk or not talk if you want. I’m sorry about my big mouth.
Going to get a bagel solved a chunk of Luke’s problems. It got him away from his family’s prying eyes and anywhere Short Wes might make fun of him again. And if the best bagels were in Brooklyn, if it only made sense for him to circle closer to Jeremy’s house so he could leap on that return text as soon as it came… Well, he had cover.
He got himself an everything lox, orange juice, and a small corner table, and sat down to glare at his phone. Jeremy would write back—he would. He had to. Anticipation closed Luke’s throat so it was hard to eat. Every time a blink of light moved over his phone, he jumped. But it stayed quiet, and tiny licks of fear and anger flickered in. Luke had called three times before he sent that text.
What if Jeremy didn’t want to talk to him again?
There was nothing about that conversation Luke wouldn’t take back. He’d been processing out loud and had meant little of what he’d said and none of what Jeremy had heard. But people did make mistakes. He had faltered once, for one second, asked for one tiny reassurance. He’d been doing too much magic and not enough resting, and he was running on empty. The more his problems multiplied, the fewer solutions he had.
He was so deep in his own mess that he didn’t recognize the body that dropped into the chair across from him until a second, startled look.
“You’re a hard man to get alone.” Natalya wore a black Coney Island hoodie a size too big for her, hood up over a bun. She had turned that glamour off or flipped it somehow, making herself more unassuming. A gray lump of stone hung from a chain around her neck, and though Luke couldn’t exactly feel a vibe from it, he could feel a hole it created, masking or tamping the energy around her.
She picked up his phone and put it in her pocket. Luke kept his gaze down, on the table, mapping the room out of the corner of his eye. He was close enough to run to Sergei’s house, and he could probably beat her in a fair race—but a brown teenager running from a white lady through Sergei’s neighborhood wasn’t a fair race.
“You don’t talk anymore?” Natalya asked. “That’s okay. Listen.”
She pushed back her hood and lowered her voice, drawing Luke closer to hear her. “Early this summer, I had a dream about a girl I used to be best friends with. When I woke up, I remembered her—which is when I realized I had forgotten her. Not, you know, grown apart, stopped thinking of her. It was like someone had gone into my mind and wiped her out.”
Luke shifted forward in his seat, his hand moving to the little key Jeremy had made him, hanging on the chain around his neck. This was it, Alexei’s secret—the key.
“Her name was Annabel Malcolm,” Natalya said. “She was Corey’s sister. I got a call from him the next day—the same thing had happened to him. And I told him, I don’t know what happened, but I know there’s only one person who can get in your head like that.”
“Alexei,” Luke said.
Natalya nodded.
Luke glared. He shouldn’t trust her. He couldn’t trust any of them. He wanted her story so badly he could taste it, bittersweet under his tongue. He wanted it badly enough to swallow lies or reveal secrets of his own if he let himself get caught up. “You gave Malcolm Jeremy’s hair. He could have been killed.”
Natalya’s face fell. “No. First, he told me he was just going to do a ritual. And, those bags, the seven of pentacles? A harvest? It was only meant to collect you two.”
“Collect us? The fu—?”
Natalya shook her head once, tightly. “I know. But the only thing that was new was Alexei trying to get you and J together. I don’t understand how it could have changed anything, but, Annabel disappeared at the end of one summer, and J was born the next spring—”
Luke gave himself away, gasping out loud.
Natalya’s eyebrows lifted. “Ah-ha. What?”
Luke checked his words before he spoke them to make sure he was only linking pieces together, not telling secrets she didn’t know. Natalya was the only person who might explain another side of the story. If she was wrong, he could take what he found out back to the Kovrovs, and if she wasn’t, she could tell him what to do next. “I think there’s a reason Jeremy was born when he was. It took a hundred years for this whole big family to have a boy? Nah. There’s nothing in the contract, but maybe his ancestor put some kind of tripwire on it. If Alexei did something to that girl… it might be the reason Jeremy was born when he was. And why the contract won’t break now.”
Luke’s orange juice went sour in his mouth. It was too bright in the deli, too loud. Too many people were getting their bagels like there was anything right in the world.
Natalya had disappeared inside herself, too—she yanked out her bun and pushed her hands back and forth across her scalp, tugging at big sections
of hair with her fists. She kept a blank, distant gaze on the table for a long time; when she finally looked up at Luke, it was with a twisted, hateful face, like he had made this mess. “Let’s go talk to Corey.”
Luke froze, measuring again the distance to the door out of his eye. They threw the word kill around a lot, but when the Malcolms and Kovrovs fought, people actually died. “So he can cut off my head and put it in Alexei’s bed?”
“No. You’re not nearly as valuable as a racehorse.” She paused, studying his face. “We’re looking for the same answers you are, and Alexei’s never going to tell you on his own. Either you think J’s worth the risk or you don’t.”
Luke’s breath left him and he dragged an inhale back hard. She was a master manipulator, vicious at it, even without her glamour, and Luke could see right through it. But he still followed her to her car.
Corey Malcolm was three inches shorter than Luke, but he was built like a machine and didn’t try to hide the gun in his back pocket. He met them on the porch of a house built like an actual castle—it had round towers—somewhere in the twisting suburbs of New Jersey. They sat in white wrought-iron chairs around a matching table, delicate as a doily. Malcolm’s shadow, the taller, younger man, stood a few feet away, keeping watch down the rolling lawn. At the corner of the property, a rough-hewn gray boulder punctuated the tidy border. The same emptiness Luke felt around Natalya dulled his senses here.
Luke didn’t know where he was, didn’t have a weapon or a car or his phone. He had nothing going but a smart mouth and the absolute conviction that he was the only person in this game who had his head in the right place.
Malcolm dropped a thick book on the table between them with a puff of dust. Luke thought it would be a spell book or some arcane text, but it was only a photo album, embossed with ivory flowers. “What have you heard about my sister?” Malcolm asked.
What Luke had heard was that Corey Malcolm had killed her, sacrificed her for power. His first thought was that it would be pretty reckless to say that to Malcolm’s face; his second, that it was absurd. What kind of rumor was that? Where had it even come from? “Nothing I believe, sir.”
Malcolm grunted, flipped the book over, and opened it from the back. A girl smiled up—it was a stiff, awkward portrait in front of a mottled gray background, but she was still beautiful, with round features like a doll and bright red-gold hair. Freckles spread over her nose and chest. Natalya made a pained noise.
“That’s Annabel,” Malcolm said.
They waited, like Luke ought to speak. “She’s very pretty, sir.”
“Look again.”
Luke looked down and the photo was gone. He blinked—no, it was empty. He shook his head—there was some other girl there. “Jesus, what is that?”
“That’s in my head.” Malcolm turned pages. What should have been a boring family album was the nastiest mojo Luke had ever seen. Pictures slithered and flickered. The girl was there, she was gone, she was in one photo and fading from another. It hurt Luke to look at, and he couldn’t resist the urge to pin her down like a butterfly, finding the photos where she was whole and focusing there. It was like any uncrossing: he focused on the images he saw, and imagined the images he wanted to see, shuffling back and forth between them until they were the same.
He didn’t make the pictures stop slithering, but they slowed as he watched them, starting to feel more right.
“Shit.” Malcolm stopped turning pages and looked up. “Is that you?”
Natalya knocked Luke’s arm. “I told you, this one’s doing something.”
“This is in your head,” Luke said. “You mean your memories?”
Malcolm nodded. “It’s not that she just went missing, or might have died—it’s that he took her out of the past, too. Out of reality.”
“A family feud thing?” Luke asked.
Malcolm and Natalya looked at each other like they were trying to decide who ought to take a live ball.
Luke guessed again: “They loved each other?” That was a daunting thought, the true love of Alexei Kovrov. She must have been a whirlwind of a girl.
Malcolm stood. “I have something else to show you.”
Luke followed him inside, through a sprawl of rooms set up like galleries—big, landscapey art, clusters of chairs no one had ever sat in, sculptures of pineapples and fishermen’s knots. There was so much space, so much useless stuff, and the air conditioning was uncomfortably cold. It was luxurious in a way that even Sergei and Marta’s house wasn’t, more museum than home.
Malcolm led them up a huge staircase and down another hall, into a pale blue room with round walls and a canopied princess bed. It was the first place in the house that felt lived-in.
“This was my sister’s room,” Malcolm said. “It hasn’t been here for years.”
Luke snapped his head around to read Malcolm’s drawn face. “Say that again?”
“The room. Either it hasn’t been here or I haven’t looked at it or—it’s not clear now. It was hiding. My father says one night he came up to go to bed and it was here, like she’d never left.”
Luke’s stomach dropped like it had when he’d watched the cards disappear from Alexei’s palm. “When?”
“The end of June, a Wednesday,” Malcolm said. “Why?”
“Just wondering.” Luke’s voice was breathless with the lie. The last Wednesday in June, he’d been working in Sergei’s basement and asked Jeremy, “How are you related to the Kovrovs, anyway?” The strange, shifting feeling of the ground rotting underneath him. He’d split a binding and cracked open the world, and it was about Jeremy, whatever had happened to this girl. He flexed his fingers, itching for a spell to throttle.
“It still smells like her perfume,” Natalya said. “Eighteen years, and it still smells like her.”
She made Luke notice the scent, a fresh, blue-toned sweetness. It reminded him of something Camille used, of bumping into her in the hall in the mornings, rock-paper-scissors for who got the shower first. It was a horror to imagine losing his sister in any way, but to lose her like this—having her sucked right out of reality, forgetting her… he wouldn’t be able to bear it.
There was nothing he wouldn’t do to fix it.
No, that wasn’t true. There were boundaries.
“This isn’t Jeremy’s fault.” Luke looked Corey Malcolm right in the eye. “You shouldn’t have tried to hurt him.”
“That’s her life he’s walking around in,” Malcolm said.
“Wait, what?” Luke threw open his arms, and Malcolm twitched at once toward his gun. Luke pulled his hands back to his sides and spoke calmly. “That’s a big leap. It’s got to be more complicated than that.”
“More complicated than what? Alexei killed her, and now you’re telling me that made some weird Kovrov shit create a kid.”
“Right, something happened,” Luke said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re talking about an even trade, her life for his. I don’t think anybody was doing magic intentional enough to pull off something like that.”
Malcolm shook his head. “That’s just splitting hairs.”
“If we’re going to undo it, we have to know exactly what happened.” Whatever Jeremy’s ancestor had done to the contract was too old to find, much less fix, and Jeremy’s out, true love’s first kiss, didn’t work. But Alexei was right in the middle, still squatting over his web of bindings like a fat spider, and those bindings were breakable. That was the hinge—break whatever Alexei had made.
Malcolm gaped like a fish. “Undo it? Could you—I mean, she’s been dead for decades…”
“Has she?” Luke squinted around the room. It had been gone, but it had come back. Like the cards. “We’re not sure he did kill her.”
Malcolm’s face slammed shut. “Splitting hairs. Dead, never existed—what’s the difference?”
He turned away, pacing to the hall, and there was a meaty thud of fist on plaster. He was clearly too angry to be smart, but Luke filed the question away to
work on later—there was a whole lot of difference.
Natalya changed the subject. “We went to high school together. A girls’ school, not far from here. It’s possible I introduced her to Alexei. My dad worked for his father. I don’t remember that part.” She trailed her hand over Annabel’s desk, an artful clutter of stacked notebooks, pens, and piles of the stuff that Luke had on his phone—CDs, magazines, printed photos, three different calculators.
Natalya pulled a notebook forward. The cover was berry red, with Pre-Calc in bubble letters and Annabel C. Malcolm in a loopy cursive. She started flipping pages—the math notes were dwarfed by doodles and scribbles—until she came to a page that alternated text in black ink and sparkly teal. “This is me.” Natalya pointed to the black. “And this is Annie.” She touched the teal.
Teal: Corey found out about A He told Dad
Black: !!!!!!
Teal: Ya C called me a whore then Dad did, so fun
Black: :( What are you going to do?
Teal: It’s not worth a fight—told A it’s over but he’s being all clingy
“They were together. But—Corey, earmuffs.” Natalya waved at Malcolm, hovering in the doorway. “They were both with a lot of people. As far as we can tell, Annabel didn’t think it was worth keeping up after their families found out.”
“Two houses both alike in actually, I’m not that into you,” Luke said.
“What?” Malcolm turned back to the conversation.
“It’s something J said.” Natalya’s eyes lost focus as she replayed the memory. “And it made Sergei so mad. Do you remember?”
“I guess,” Luke said. “I thought it was because Jeremy wasn’t supposed to date a Damiani.”
“But we all knew Jeremy didn’t like him. There was nothing to be mad about.” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “Oh my god. She dumped him, and Alexei…did whatever this is, and Sergei knows and—” she stopped and swallowed hard.
“And Jeremy is stuck with them,” Luke finished.
The Uncrossing Page 21
