by Dia Reeves
The Mayor dragged me forward to face them.
“I need you three to bear witness to what her actions have wrought. Now that the Key is once again in Runyon’s power, now that he has returned to his home where no one, not even I, has dominion over him, he has all the time in the world to devise ways of using the Key to bedevil us all, merely for spite.”
“It’s not spite,” I told her. “If you let him leave, he’ll go to Calloway and no one will ever have to see him again.”
“Runyon and your mother, gone away?” She shook me. “Shall I reward them for their disobedience?”
I tried to jerk away from her, but I couldn’t; her grip was too tight on my arm. “Runyon was right. Your grudge is more important than the lives of your people.”
The Mayor ignored me and addressed the three Porterenes. “Who would speak for her?”
Not one of them spoke. They looked so traumatized; they probably didn’t even remember why they were there.
In the rainy silence, a door formed out of nothing. Black with a silver doorknob and hinges. A suicide door, just as I’d thought.
“Understand that this punishment is reserved for the lowest among us,” said the Mayor. “There is none so low as a transient, except a coward, and you appear to be both. Suicide is, after all, the coward’s way out. Shall you finish what you started at home?”
She was trying to shame me, but I was beyond shame. What did I care what this town thought of me? Everything I had was gone. I wanted to be gone too.
I opened the heavy black door, saw the gray within, the emptiness. I stepped inside and filled it.
Chapter Thirty-three
It was gray and foggy within the door. Cold and wet. Numbness coursed through me as I waited for the end yet again.
I had barely enough space to slide to the floor and sit with my knees to my chest. It felt like a floor, but beyond the gray fog puffing around my hips, I saw nothing.
I waited for the end. I waited and waited.
How long did it take, for Christ’s sake?
The man in the suicide door I’d seen had had a rope, at least. I didn’t even have—
Something thumped against my head and dangled before my face.
A noose.
My eyes followed the swaying line of rope, but as with the floor, everything above my head was lost in fog. It was almost smoky, like a fire was—
Not that I wanted to burn to death!
I threw my hands overhead to protect myself from falling flames that never fell, thank God. I so did not want to burn to death. I wanted to die in a way that would make this gray space fill with blood, so much blood that when nosy Porterenes came to investigate, they would be drenched in a violent red flood.
Of course, such a stunt would only work once. It sucked that I would have to waste such an awesome effect on a lousy tweener-wiener. I wished I could be sure that Rosalee would be the first one to open the door.
I found myself wishing for her to fall down on my head like the rope had, but she didn’t. Hell, she was probably already on another planet by now, or wherever the hell Calloway was.
Except she couldn’t go to Calloway, could she? Not while the Mayor’s curse was still in effect. She couldn’t because Runyon couldn’t.
Not that I cared. She’d hit me, after all. My head and mouth still hurt from it.
But then I had hit her, too. …
It would be weird if she’d hit me for the same reason I’d hit her—fear. It had to be way easier for her to go with Runyon than to risk caring for someone like me. Love is a trap—that’s what she’d said. Maybe she was still trying not to get caught.
Well, to hell with that. I deserved better than that. We could work through fear. If she truly didn’t want me, I wanted to know for sure. How stupid would it be to die over a misunderstanding?
The heat of resolution warmed me, circulated the feeling back into me, along with an unpleasant pins-and-needles sensation, especially in my elbows.
My elbows.
They were tingling. Almost painfully. I stood, dodging the dangling rope, raising and lowering my elbows as though they were antennae and I was trying to find the best reception. I went down on my knees. That was the spot that made my elbows zing.
A hidden door. A real live hidden door. But how to use it? I couldn’t see it or even feel it except with my elbows.
Because I didn’t have Wyatt’s tattoo, that glyph the Mortmaine had inked into him: an eye within a door. If I could carve that glyph …
I spoke into the fog. “Spindle?”
It dropped onto my head, and I was almost set on fire after all. The spindle definitely singed my hair and burned my fingers. I dropped it, hissing, and it sank into the floor, vanishing into the fog.
I remembered then that Rosalee had worn gloves while handling the spindle she’d used on that boy’s forehead.
I removed my purple tights, moving awkwardly in the small space, and folded them into a bundle, which I held forth. “Spindle!”
The long red, needlelike thorn landed neatly on my tights.
I lifted my dress and pushed down my underpants to reveal the smooth, creamy brown, unmarked, gorgeous curve of my hip. My hand, protected by my thick tights, trembled as I brought the point of the spindle close to my skin. I took a deep breath, then another, and another, and then I realized I was never going to have enough breath for this horrid mutilation, so I just did it. Touched the tip of the spindle to my hip.
If I were the type to scream in pain, my throat would have been hoarse by the time I finished that carving. But I couldn’t afford to waste breath screaming. I could hardly breathe as it was—some leftover result of being kicked in the chest, no doubt.
I dropped the spindle and let it sink out of sight in the fog, and between one blink and the next, the hidden door appeared to me—a floating smile of darkness within the gray space, about the length of my forearm. I struggled and contorted and nearly dislocated my shoulders, but I finally managed to squeeze inside the hidden door.
It opened into a narrow, airless space even more dreary than the suicide door, a space without even fog to recommend it. I couldn’t see a thing, but there was only space enough to go one way—up.
I stood gingerly in the darkness and reached overhead. My fingers poked through a yielding slit, and a splat of icy rain wetted my fingertips. I pulled myself up, feet scrambling for purchase.
Cold wind and rain engulfed the whole of me as I pulled myself out of the slit, which hovered about a foot over a gravel path. I dropped free and lay on the path, letting the rain cleanse me, breathing huge drafts of fresh air. My tights were gone. One of my ankle boots was missing. I was freezing. But I was free.
I sat up and looked around. The path twined around a pair of utilitarian tombstones set close together. In the light of a lamppost shining several yards from me, I could just make out the inscriptions: Richard and Mary Price. My grandparents. I was in the family plot, assuming Rosalee would have buried me here with the rest of her family and not shipped me back to Aunt Ulla in a crate.
I got to my feet, kicked off my remaining bootie, and wound barefoot and bare-legged through the muddy pathways and gravestones until I reached the street. Lamartine. My street.
I went home on autopilot and then stood in the empty house, soaked through and shivering, but still alive. Still with a reason to live.
A thump from the downstairs bathroom nearly sent me out of my skin, but then I remembered Swan, how I’d locked her in. I raced to the door to let her out and was rewarded by a series of sharp, beaky jabs to my knees. “Ow!”
I couldn’t believe I’d expected to find her weak and bloodied and half-dead. Her wing was perfectly healed, and Swan was anything but weak. Her wings batting my head made me feel as though I were on the losing end of a vicious pillow fight.
“I’m sorry!” I yelled, hands up for protection. “I didn’t go through with it! Look.” I showed her my unmarked arms, the sight of which convinced Swan to s
top pummeling me.
She alighted on the bathroom floor, hurt feelings ruffling her feathers.
I dropped beside her, kneeling in a nearly dried stipple of blood, and cuddled her. She was soft and warm; she was always more fun to pet when she wasn’t wooden. “I don’t deserve you, I know it.” I checked the wing I’d slashed, making sure she was injury free, then bent my head to Swan’s so that we were nose to beak. “I know it sucks having to look after someone like me, but karma’s a bitch, Swanie. Now I get to see what it feels like to try to save someone from herself.”
Good luck with that.
“Poppa?” I looked around the wrecked bathroom and then down the hallway. “Where are you?”
In your room. There’s too much blood downstairs.
I picked up Swan, stroking her long neck, and as I went toward the stairs, I examined the walls. I decided that Poppa was too squeamish for his own good. The smears of blood were quite pretty, artistic rather than gory.
In my room I set Swan on the top shelf, curtsied to her, and turned to find Poppa lounging on my bed on his left side, his head on my pillow. Lying like that, no one could tell his face was all torn up.
“My life is in ruins and you’re lazing in bed. Unbelievable.”
I stripped out of my wet clothes in the bathroom and donned a purple terry-cloth robe.
“I like to let the words soak into me,” said Poppa when I left the bathroom. “Even though she didn’t stitch it for me.”
I scraped my wet hair back into a bun. “What are you talking about?”
He sat up and folded back the pillowcase, showing me what Rosalee had stitched into the pillow: “I Love You Too.”
I took the pillow and held it to my face, examining the tiny purple stitches. Purple. I remembered the word burned into that heart at Fountain Square. Had she burned the word into all those hearts? Had she made it impossible for the stick figures to hurt me?
I squeezed the pillow to my own heart. Poppa was right; the words seemed to soak into me, the knowledge that she loved me after all and that the time we’d spent together hadn’t been a lie.
“Is she still here in Portero?”
“Yes. At Runyon’s house. On Nightshade.”
I brushed my cheek across the stitches. “What’s Nightshade?”
“It’s a street downsquare—darkside—where all the Mortmaine live.”
Where the Mortmaine lived and the weird shit happened. Great. But somehow, I didn’t feel worried. I squeezed the pillow. “Do you know the house number?”
“No, but it’s easy to spot,” Poppa said, as though he’d lived in Portero all his life. “It’s the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It’s white and has pyracantha growing all over it. Plus, it has all the wards. There’s no way you can miss it.”
Now I was worried.
“The wards!” I groaned, and collapsed next to Poppa on the bed. “You mean the wards no one can get past?”
“Wyatt could.”
I laughed, but it came out wrong, crippled and ugly. “Wyatt would sooner see me in hell after what I did to him.”
My stomach growled. Crazy how your body insisted on making demands even when everything was circling the drain. I shot to my feet. “I’m going downstairs.”
“I’m not. But …”
I looked at him, saw him eyeing the pillow still in my hands. I ran my fingers along the words once more, and then I gave it to him and went down to the dark, bloody kitchen.
I know Wyatt’s angry with you. Poppa said, continuing our conversation from the relative comfort inside my head, but it’s his job to be objective. That’s why he was able to kill his own friend, because it was his job.
“Would he consider it part of his job to help me?” I said, grabbing a handful of granola bars from the cupboard.
For the Key? What do you think?
“Maybe.” But how could I get to him without alerting his folks? Especially his mom. I was not in the mood for another ass kicking.
I opened the fridge to snag a bottle of milk and saw the cherries. Dark red. Deliciously ripe.
Cherries.
Why didn’t you think of me? said Poppa, distracting me.
“What?”
When you cut your wrists. When you lay there thinking of Rosalee and no one else.
I sighed and set the cherries opposite the blood smears on the counter. “Poppa, don’t guilt-trip me. We know how we feel about each other. But Rosalee … ?”
It’s okay. His words soughed desolately inside my skull. My last thought was of her too. I didn’t mean to pass it on to you, this obsession.
“It’s not an obsession; it’s fascination.”
The Price fascination. he said, as if he knew it well. So powerful not even the devil infesting her will give her up.
“He might,” I said, fingering the container of cherries as a plan began to take shape. “For the right price.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Carmona Boulevard was wrecked, the lights broken out, the traffic signs snapped in half. A crater-size hole dented the street; I knew because I’d driven Rosalee’s red Prius into it and had to walk the last few yards to Wyatt’s house. Just as well—the Ortigas might know Rosalee’s car by sight.
Thin rain gleamed in the flowerless vines hugging the wrought-iron fence circling Wyatt’s house. I slipped through the gate and crept to his backyard. Through the living-room window of his tall, skinny house, I saw Sera ranting from the couch as Wyatt and Asher sat nearby, listening. Asher nodded sympathetically after every word that left Sera’s mouth, but Wyatt only looked empty, staring blankly at the floor.
I backed away from the window and searched until I found a jasmine-covered trellis; I climbed it, my French heels forcing me to be careful.
In the lit second-story window to my right was Wyatt’s room. The body parts he’d stuck to his walls, the plaster legs and hands, now littered the floor, curled and shrunken like dead bugs, as if my theft of the Key had sickened the house. Or killed it.
But I couldn’t fix that now. First things first.
On the left side of the trellis was Paulie’s room. The blue glow of his night-light washed over him as he lay sleeping beneath his Superman bedspread, oblivious of the turmoil downstairs. Ragsie lay in his arms, wild orange hair spilling over the pillow.
I tapped at the window, and though I tapped gently, Ragsie immediately lifted his head. Carefully, trying not to pitch over backward off the trellis, I removed the plastic bag of cherries from my coat pocket and shook it in front of the window.
Ragsie scrambled out of Paulie’s arms and hurried to the window, making quick work of the lock with his floppy arms. He threw open the glass and made a grab for the cherries, but I held them out of reach.
“Not yet,” I whispered. “First I need you to get Wyatt for me. Can you?”
He nodded.
“Good boy.” I held out the bag and let him take a cherry.
Ragsie opened his slit of a mouth and popped the cherry in whole, stem and all. When he reached for another, I again held the bag out of reach. Ragsie’s shoe-button eyes regarded me reproachfully.
I leaned closer to the doll, close enough to see the creases in the woven cotton that he was made of. “Bring Wyatt out to the backyard, and make sure he’s alone. If you do that for me, I’ll let you have all the cherries. Okay?”
Almost before I’d finished speaking, Ragsie scurried off the windowsill and out of the room. I followed suit, scurrying down the trellis, hoping he hadn’t run off to sound the alarm.
I kept watch in the shadow of an oak tree, water dripping off the scant red leaves and down the collar of my coat. I’d traded the hooded indigo for the fitted fuchsia coat I now wore, which, though hoodless and less warm, was much cuter and matched my shoes. Looking stylish always put a girl at an advantage, especially when she was in the wrong.
After some time, Wyatt came out to the backyard, Ragsie leading the way.
Good ole Ragsie.
; “What is it, Rags?” Wyatt asked, his arms crossed over his T-shirt against the cold.
Ragsie scanned the yard, and when he spotted me under the oak, he ran to me.
“Good boy,” I said. and patted his wild hair … and then cringed, taking my hand back. Ragsie’s hair felt … human.
When Ragsie held out his arms, I gave him the cherries. He almost buckled under the weight of the bag, but managed to carry it back into the house on his strong cloth legs.
Wyatt, meantime, looked dazed as he came toward me, sleepwalker-slow. “Who’s there?”
“Me.”
My voice briefly stopped him in his tracks … then he marched under the tree and grabbed my chin, turning me so that the light from his bedroom window touched me. With his back to the light, I couldn’t read his face, but I could read his touch, the ceaseless drift of his hands over my face.
“The Mayor opened a suicide door,” he whispered. “Ma said it was for you, because of what you did.” His warm fingertips pressed the pulse beating beneath my jaw. “Are you a ghost?”
I kissed him, and even though it hurt my mouth, I didn’t mind; Wyatt’s kisses were worth suffering over. I’d been prepared to never be this close to him again, and now I was breathing in his sighs. I wanted to inhale all of him, but he pushed me away, panting.
“Don’t kiss me like that,” he hissed. “Like you care when I know you don’t.”
He’d pushed me away, but he was still holding my arms, so I pulled him back into them. I could tell him I cared, but couldn’t he feel it? He must have, because he stopped resisting me and let me kiss him the way I wanted to.
“How are you not dead?” he asked, when I let him breathe.
“It doesn’t matter right now,” I said, kissing his ears. The rain hung from his earlobes like delicate jewelry. “I’ll tell you later. Right now, we have to save Rosalee.”
