Glass Heart

by Amy Garvey

  I freeze at the name Adam, even with Bay striding toward me, his face sculpted into a mask of fury. It all makes sense now—Fiona going to Saint Francis, the violence Gabriel sensed in Bay, Jude’s warning to be careful.

  For one horrible moment, I think I’m actually going to puke, right here in the middle of Memory Lanes.

  But Bay is still coming at me, and Leah is saying, “Where did he transfer to again? We never hear from him anymore,” and I need to be not here, right now.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I say to Bay, ignoring the others. I have one hand up, as if I’m going to hold him off with that. But he knows better and stops a good ten feet away.

  “Wren?” Leah says, but I don’t answer.

  And then I’m running, past Bay, past the desk, out the door, and away from all the brand-new mistakes I’ve made.

  Chapter Twenty

  I’M HALFWAY HOME WHEN I CAN’T TAKE IT anymore. Sometime during the afternoon it started to snow, and I’m not dressed for such a long walk. My scarf and boots are soaked, and the only gloves I have are my fingerless ones. I duck under the shelter of a gas station and get out my phone to call home for a ride.

  There’s a text from Darcia, short and sweet: TALKED 2 T. AGAIN!!! I’m so distracted it takes me a minute to realize she must mean Thierry. Which is cool, but something to deal with later.

  When I dial the house, no one answers. That’s strange, since it’s Sunday and I know Mom is home. I try her cell, and it goes to voice mail. Perfect.

  I’m shivering, lips and fingertips numb, even though the cold hasn’t iced over my fury at Bay. That’s still burning, a low, steady flame. I just wish it would actually keep me warm.

  It’s already getting dark, and in the soft fog of snow, it’s hard to see. I pull out my phone one last time and try Mari, who picks up on the first ring.

  “Wren?”

  “Hey.” I clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. “Could you possibly give me a ride?”

  “I was just on my way to your house, actually.” She sounds distracted. “Where are you?”

  I tell her, and when she pulls up ten minutes later I’m bouncing from foot to foot and rubbing my hands together. “Thank you so much,” I say as I climb into the car, holding my hands out to the heating vents once the door is closed. “I don’t know where Mom is, but I was all the way over at Memory Lanes.”

  Mari pulls back onto Mountain Avenue, the tires skidding in the first slushy coat of snow. “She’s home, with Robin. That’s why I was heading over there.”

  I’m not following, and I’m still too cold to concentrate. “What do you mean?”

  Mari frowns, and pushes the car into the next gear. All I can do is hold on.

  I can feel the magic as soon as Mari and I walk in. The air is trembling, echoes of power still shimmering and settling. It smells like ozone and burnt sugar, and there’s no question whatever happened is Not Good.

  “Rose?” Mari unwinds her scarf slowly, glancing into the kitchen and then up the stairs.

  I peel off all of my wet things and my boots, leaving them in a heap by the door. There’s movement upstairs, and I take the steps two at a time.

  Mom is just coming out of Robin’s room, and she looks like the victim of a battle. Her hair is coming out of its clip in a million crazy directions, there’s a smudge of soot on one cheek, and a book in her hands.

  One of my books. The one no one is supposed to know about.

  “Downstairs, now.” Her voice is a shredded husk, and I swallow hard.

  Mari is standing in the middle of the kitchen when I follow Mom into the room. Her mouth is hanging open, and mine follows. Smoke has left burnt trails on the wall, and the table is pushed up against the pantry door. One chair lies on its side, and the seat is splintered. Melted candle wax is stuck in hard, white clumps all over the table and the floor beside it, and the kitchen counter is a mess of herbs and spices and other things I can’t identify. Our biggest pot is still on the stove, a bubbled crust dripping over its lip.

  Holy crap.

  “What happened?” Mari asks before I can. She steps over a broken dish and a pile of feathers and rights the chair.

  “I left Robin here so I could go to the grocery store and run a few other quick errands, and I came home to this.” Mom sets the book down on one of the table’s few clear spots and leans against the counter. “And what I think was a ghost, as well as a hysterical twelve-year-old.”

  “Oh my God.” The words are barely audible around the hand Mari’s holding to her mouth, but the tone is pretty clear.

  Meanwhile, I’m still stuck on ghost. “What was she trying to do?”

  “Summon your father, apparently,” Mom says, turning hard brown eyes on me. She points at the table. “With a spell she had no idea how to use, not that it was the right one anyway. What I want to know is what the hell you were doing with a book like that? Robin told me she found it in your room.”

  I can’t lie my way out of this one. I mean, I could, but I can’t. Not anymore.

  Even if I don’t plan to admit exactly why I needed those books.

  “I was, um, curious.” The laser glare of Mom’s gaze pulls my spine straighter. “I just wanted to see what magic was all about, you know? All kinds of magic.”

  “Sam?” Mari is saying, shaking her head. She’s still stunned, all of the color drained from her face. “Sam is . . . not dead. You can’t summon a living person! I mean . . . can you?”

  “If you can, that’s a kind of magic I want absolutely nothing to do with.” Mom scrubs a hand over her face, and her exhaustion is right there in the way her hand shakes, the faint shuddering breath she draws.

  Summon your father. I still can’t believe it. I want to strangle Robin and hug her and scream at her all at the same time.

  “There was a . . . ghost?” I manage to ask, trying to picture it. “Whose ghost?”

  “I have no idea,” Mom says, and she actually laughs a little. “I’m not even sure where I sent it. I haven’t done magic like that off the top of my head in a long time. Maybe never.”

  Mari stands up and pushes the table aside to get into the pantry for the broom. “And Robin?”

  “Is asleep.” Mom sighs and pushes off the counter to help. “She’s grounded into her next three lives, but she’s okay. She didn’t hurt herself anyway, and she didn’t burn the house down.”

  “Well, that’s good.” I shake off the fog of shock and get the pot from the stove, intending to take it to the sink to soak it. I’m holding it, and the nasty stench coming from it, away from my body when Mom says, “Wren? There’s something you should know.”

  I can’t think of what else there could be on top of what I learned about Bay and Adam, and the fact that my baby sister apparently lost her mind this afternoon. I set the pot in the sink and turn around. “Yeah?”

  “I called your dad. He’s coming to see you both.”

  Gabriel is heading toward me when I round the corner twenty minutes later, and I don’t even pretend to have pride. I run straight into his arms. I have no idea how he happened to be right there, but I don’t care. Maybe he could sense the ginormous freak-out brewing in my head.

  “Hey, whoa, what happened?” he says after a minute, pulling back to look me in the eye. “You didn’t answer your phone, and I was coming to talk to you.”

  My only answer is a muffled sob, and he holds me tighter. “Just tell me . . . are you okay?”

  I finally step back, wiping the hot tears off my cheek with the back of one hand. “I don’t know. Can we go somewhere?”

  He smiles and smoothes my hair out of my eyes. “Always.”

  “Better?”

  I’m wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa, with a pair of Gabriel’s thick socks on my feet and a hot mug of tea. I nod, trying not to sniffle. “A little.”

  “Okay, so.” He sits down and puts his arm around the giant lump of me inside the blanket. “What happened?”

  I take
a deep breath and set the tea down on the coffee table. “Robin tried to . . . summon our dad. Which, you know, would be like teleportation if it even worked, and that’s just insane, so what she got was a hot mess all over the kitchen and apparently a ghost, which my mom had to . . . I don’t know, banish or something, she’s not even sure, but after that, I guess because Robin is having some kind of dramatic preteen meltdown about it, she called him, our dad, and he’s coming. Here. To see us.”

  Gabriel blinks and opens his mouth. He shuts it again, and then looks up at me. “Um. Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  It’s too much, all at once. Everything I believed about Bay, and even Fiona, was just an illusion, some pink, pretty lie I told myself to get away with using magic when and where I wanted to. And I can’t help wondering if my memories of my dad are nothing more than that—an illusion, a half-remembered fairy tale I embellished with a strong, handsome father and a happy little girl.

  If one more thing shatters, it’s going to be my heart.

  I’m shocked to see that, now that the surprise has sunk in, Gabriel looks relieved.

  “Um, I’m having, like, major trauma here,” I say, curling deeper into the blanket.

  “I know, I’m sorry.” He hugs me tighter, kisses the top of my head. “But maybe it won’t be so bad. I mean, you were going to face this eventually, right? So now you’ll, you know, get it over with.” His gaze is far away, and he still looks strangely pleased. Like this is the answer to all of my problems or something, which I really doubt.

  “I’m just not ready for this. Not with . . .” Now I’m the one who’s not telling all, and at this rate we could probably talk around each other all night.

  “With what?”

  I smile weakly. “Just . . . everything. It’s been a weird couple of weeks, you know?”

  He bites his bottom lip, gray eyes searching my face. “Trust me, this will be good. I mean, it’ll help. It’ll . . . really. Believe me.”

  Suspicion curls like smoke in my stomach. “How can you possibly know that? How can you—” And then it hits me. I’m so stupid, so very, very stupid. “You do know. You know something about this, about my dad. Don’t you?” When he looks away, I fight my way out of the quilt and grab his arm. “Don’t you?”

  He starts to shake his head, and I glare at him. “Don’t even lie. Not now. Just tell me.”

  He lays his head on the back of the sofa to stare at the ceiling. “I didn’t mean to. I swear, Wren, I didn’t mean to. But at Christmas, when your mom started talking about my dad, I was . . . I was just so pissed off, and I wasn’t trying hard enough to control it, and I . . .” He takes a shaky breath, and I dig my fingers into his arm.

  “Gabriel, come on. What is it?”

  “I just had this flash from her, and it was all this stuff about your dad.” He picks his head up and looks at me, and I shiver. The relief is gone.

  “What about him?”

  “It’s more impressions and feelings, remember, but . . .” He takes a deep breath this time, but he doesn’t look away. He doesn’t chicken out. “He has powers, too, Wren. And he can’t use them anymore. He . . . it’s like he poisoned himself with them or something.”

  Even when Ryan called to tell me Danny had died, I didn’t feel this dizzy. I’m sitting, but the room seems to spin away from me anyway, and I squeeze my eyes shut.

  It makes all the sense in the world. It’s why I’m more powerful than Mom and Aunt Mari, and why Robin is, too. I can’t believe I never even considered it.

  Now I understand why Gabriel has been so worried about me doing magic, and I think of all the things I’ve been doing with Bay, the things Robin did today. I can hear Gabriel’s voice in my head: Poisoned himself . . .

  “Oh God.” I push away the blanket, kicking my feet free, and Gabriel grabs my arm.

  “Wait, Wren, just think about it for a minute. I don’t know everything, I only get impressions unless I’m trying, you know that.”

  I wrench my arm free and stumble to my feet, fighting to see the room in focus. It swims in shifting shadows instead, and I lurch away from the couch. All these years, and Mom never said anything. Never even hinted. If anything is a betrayal, that’s the worst.

  “Wren, let’s talk, okay? I mean, maybe it’s not that bad, but at least you’ll know. Wren?”

  I can hear him following me, but I can’t answer. I’m crying too hard.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “ARE YOU SURE THAT’S ENOUGH FOR LUNCH, sweetie?” Mrs. Lattimer says the next morning. She’s hovering, mostly dressed for work minus her shoes and lipstick, and her briefcase and keys and coffee are piled on one end of the counter. “I can give you some money if you want to get a sandwich, too. You girls eat like birds. I don’t even know how you get through the day.”

  “This is fine, thanks.” I smile at her, or try to, and shake my paper bag of yogurt, fruit, and peanut butter crackers. It’s what I take all the time, and the thought of food still doesn’t sit well anyway.

  Gabriel was the one to go to my house and pack a bag for me after I called my mom and told her there was no way I was coming home. She didn’t argue, and I was so wiped out, I couldn’t process how surprising that was, even though I told her I was angriest at her for keeping the truth about my father’s magic from me.

  Mom wouldn’t let me stay at Gabriel’s, which I mostly expected, but Jess’s parents were glad to have me for a few days. I have no idea what my mother said to Mrs. Lattimer on the phone, but they’ve been treating me the way I guess most people would treat an unidentified explosive.

  I don’t mind, really. I don’t feel like talking, to anyone. Even Jess didn’t try, although she curled up behind me in her big bed last night and stroked my hair until I finally went to sleep.

  Mrs. Lattimer drives us to school, which is a bonus since it snowed hard enough to leave a few inches, and the day is crystal cold, brittle with ice. Gabriel’s waiting at my locker, and I don’t even care who’s watching—I kiss him hard, pretending just for a minute that I can swallow some of his calm steadiness.

  Once I’d cried myself out, I told him about Adam. I wanted everything spread out in one place so I could try to make them neat and orderly facts instead of a throbbing panicked pulse in my head, and that meant telling him what I’d learned about Bay, and what I’d been doing.

  Part of me was cringing, waiting for him to say it was too messed up, too much, but he didn’t. I’ll always be grateful for that. Not to mention the chance to do something about a missing kid and take my mind off how furious I am at my mother.

  Gabriel and I walk to homeroom together. Dar passes us in the hallway, holding Thierry’s hand, her cheeks pink as an Easter egg, and I give her a subtle thumbs-up. Then I give Gabriel a kiss on the cheek, just because.

  Once Gabriel and I are at our desks, I lean over. “Any ideas?”

  “About . . . you know?” He shakes his head. Without confronting Bay, which doesn’t seem really likely to end happily, we’ve been trying to figure out some way to learn more about him. I can just picture interrogating Audrey, and drowning in a flood of tears and outrage. Without her, though, I’m stuck.

  Unless . . .

  “Hey, is Olivia working today?”

  He shakes his head again, frowning. “She usually has Monday off. Why?”

  I grin at him, possibilities racing through my head. “How do you think she would feel about taking you on a prospective student tour of Saint Francis?”

  “There’s no way they’re going to believe I could afford this school,” Olivia says as we chug across town in the VW. “Especially not if they see us drive up in this thing.”

  Gabriel laughs. “I doubt they’re going to be watching out the window.”

  “Shut up, you,” Olivia grumbles, fingering the stiff, white collar of her shirt. “I’m not an actress, you know. What if they ask questions? What if they want to talk about the application process first? What if—”

  “D
ude,” Gabriel says, glancing at her from the passenger seat. “Relax. We can always just walk out.”

  “Dude?” Olivia says, but she’s trying not to smile. I snicker in the backseat.

  My smile fades a minute later when my phone buzzes again. It’s the fifth text in an hour, and I know exactly who it is without even looking. My stomach turns as I reach into my pocket to look anyway.

  U CANT KEEP THIS UP 4EVR. U KNOW HOW MUCH FUN WE HAD.

  Bay. I delete it and tuck my phone away, nauseated. How he can believe I’m going to forgive him after yesterday is beyond me, but Gabriel thinks he’s worried because he knows I heard Adam’s name.

  “That’s probably true,” I said when he proposed his theory, and he shrugged. I haven’t told him how often Bay has texted since the first two, though, because Gabriel may be understanding, but he’s not a saint.

  And he’s convinced that something awful happened to Adam at Bay’s hands. “I felt blood, Wren,” he explained, “and no one has seen Adam in weeks. Put it together.”

  I don’t want to, really. I can’t imagine a kid my age murdered, especially not by other kids. It’s too huge to consider, wrong on levels that I can’t even comprehend.

  But going to Saint Francis is one possible way to figure out something helpful. As we pull into the parking lot, I cross my fingers.

  A woman is waiting for us in the office. I’m not sure if I was expecting a nun, but this chick looks like any other corporate worker bee in her navy suit and red scarf. She eyes me with curiosity, and I try to make myself as small and unobtrusive as possible. Gabriel holds my hand anyway.

  “I have some information to gather for you,” she says after shaking hands with Olivia and introducing herself as Valerie Flynn. “Why don’t you take a look around while I do, get a sense of the school?”