Twenty-One

Loudest Brightest

Half as many cars in the Delacroix lot as there had been last weekend. Half was more than I was expecting. Half meant some of us got out no matter what and that was a relief. Half meant that we were about to be hilariously outnumbered.

All at once it was a gorgeous spring afternoon. The clouds in the sky hopped like rabbits.

Shiloh and I got out of the car. I held their hand, led them up the steps to the long walkway. Light gleamed orange and alive inside the Delacroix, and I set my teeth on edge, squeezed Shi’s hand so tight I couldn’t feel it.

They squeezed back harder.

The door opened for us. Inanna and another Dagger Heart whose name I didn’t know ushered us in, peered out at the blue sky behind us, closed the door once we’d stumbled inside. Shiloh put their hands on their face and rippled the them-ness back over them, albeit a them with longer, pinker eyelashes.

I eyed them, panting.

“I’d like to die cute.”

“You’re always cute.” I whipped my head around, drank in the crowd accumulated in the foyer. Maurice and Jupiter’s lot, all the Dagger Hearts, Dominick and people whose raw out-of-pocket intensity meant they were probably Sisters Corbie, Blair and some hardy-looking Anti-Edonists, Guadalupe, a Star Thief who hurt Daisy’s feelings. A man with long locs paced and prayed and tossed a little fire between his fingertips. Twin women with long red braids smoked together and peered into a looking glass that swirled with oil-slick colors. Lupe and Blair stared at each other from opposite sides of the room.

I took a few steps deeper in. I swiveled my head around, Shiloh close behind me.

I needed my girls.

Where the fuck were my girls?

Dominick had a hand on someone’s shoulder—Madeline, she wore a (my?) beanie and I hadn’t recognized her—and the two of them said little but kept their eyes locked and I made myself look away from them. I knew she wasn’t supposed to be here and that was theoretically my problem. Maurice was also in the room and didn’t seem upset and holy shit, I could die.

I could die.

Or actually—every other person could die. I’d be alive. I’d stay alive.

I needed Mr. Scratch.

I took a few steps deeper and then I couldn’t breathe. My lungs constricted, my vision twinged black. I huffed. I screwed my face up, baffled, adrenaline blazing the Fourth of July above the bridge of my nose. My eyes lined up the stimuli in front of me but I didn’t need it. I caught the edge of her perfume.

Jing.

I threw my arms around her and pulled her hard against me, pressed my face in her hair, and convulsed. She breathed, her ribs filled under my hands, and I focused on the texture of her turtleneck, the texture of her hair on my cheek. In her platforms we were the same height. I bowed my head, put my brow in the crook of her neck and gasped, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she said. “Holy shit, you went to the Chantry house? The godforsaken Chantry house? Why do you always go there? You have worms in your brain.”

I laughed and it hurt. I kissed her neck, her cheek. I put her face in my hands, the tip of my nose against hers. “You saved my life.”

She looked at me, black eyes expanding forever, back and back and back.

“Your spell. When you kissed me. You saved my life. I’m bulletproof, Jing.”

“I’m a very good witch,” she said with a little smile. “Figures.”

A sound came out of my throat and I kissed her.

Daisy bowled into us and almost knocked us flat.

I let go of Jing and kissed stupid Daisy on her stupid forehead, then whipped my head around, searched for Yates. She was nearby, whispering to Shiloh with the Scratch Book in her arms, cradled against her chest. She stroked its spine. She nodded at something they said, murmured something back with a gesture in Inanna’s direction.

“The Dagger Hearts are the only ones who’ve really done much battle magic.” Daisy sniffed. She wormed out of my hands, bounced on her toes. Her silky little dress felt egregiously impractical now. The scratches Jing had torn into her shoulders flashed hot pink. Angel amputation scars. Daisy bit a bit of skin beside her thumbnail. “Not on this scale, either. None of these covens have ever really shared spell notes so everybody’s freaking the fuck out to the point where they’ve circled around to chill. You know it took your asses like forty-five minutes to drive here? You should’ve seen us a half hour ago. Exciting stuff. We hid poor Molly in the basement. She’s chain-smoking and watching TV I think. She thinks this is hilarious. What a legend.”

I snorted. “Think we can reasonably Chett like two hundred people at once?”

“Maybe if Mattel decides to sponsor us.” She snickered.

Jing made a face. “The Anti-Edonists have experience holding off strikebreakers and cops, but they’ve got a whole thing about not being aggressive and it’s left some mighty big holes in their strategy. Plus, all of their spells—fucking all of them—straight-up bible quotes. The Anti-Edonist grimoire is literally a book of prayers. They wrote a gospel with an ink devil. Anyway, their shit is all predicated on belief, and I’m pretty goddamn sure they’re the only ones who are Jesus enough to be able to hold it.”

“Fuck that.” I shook my hands out. “Lila?”

She looked up, eyes glassy. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

I nodded, took a few strides toward her. “Can I see Scratch?”

“Of course,” she said. She handed him to me. “I accepted Yale, just so you know. It was like, ten minutes ago. Just in case.”

“I am so fucking proud of you,” I said as I opened the book wide. Yates stood beside me, and I felt Jing and Daisy circle around, Shiloh as well, knees against knees, our toe tips the prongs of a five-pointed star. “Scratch,” I said.

He slithered back and forth in big, erratic splotches.

“Scratch, what should we do?”

HONEYEATERS HONEYEATERS HONEYEATERS HONEYEATERS

THEY CAME AND KILLED MY HONEYEATERS

MY DAUGHERS ARE DEAD NOW

MY DAUGHTERS WILL DIE

“Scratch,” I breathed. I felt the first real vine of it unfurl in my gut, then—fear, real fear. I grinned like an idiot. I’d cried so hard that my sinuses felt like stones under my skin. “Scratch, you’ve got to help us out, here.”

I AM SO AFRAID OF FIRE

I AM SO AFRAID OF YOU DYING

I WANT TO EAT THEM I WANT TO EAT THEM ALIVE

I WANT TO PULL THEM APART AND CRUSH THEM INTO INK

“Please.” I tightened my grip on the cover. “We need weapons, we need a plan—”

“Holy fuck,” Andy said. “There they are. They’re pulling in.”

The stillness broke and everybody churned around us. Witches swarmed and rearranged themselves. Eyeliner ran, sequined shoulders squared. Dagger Hearts staged themselves around the room and chanted rhythmically, and whatever they casted raised the hair on the back of my neck. Blair strode across the room and caught Lupe’s shoulders, said with her voice high in her throat, “Goddamn it, Guadalupe. For ten years I’ve loved you, and I will until my last. I didn’t think you’d stay but you stayed. I’m so glad you stayed. I’m so proud to know you. It’ll be an honor to defend this place with you.”

“Blair,” she breathed. She curled her fingers around her lapel. “You idiot.”

Her face fell.

She swayed into her. Her hair spilled black and starlight down her back. She kissed Blair openmouthed, and she put a hand at the small of her back, kissed her deeper.

I could hear it outside. I could hear cars parking, could hear doors slamming.

Scratch fritzed. He repeated the same fistful of phrases over and over again, churned them and rearranged them. I flipped pages but our sigils were gone. Every page was his weeping. If I turned too fast he’d goo between slices of paper, ooze like strands of honey, stretch and break and fall into more gnarls of anguish.

“He wants to eat the ones who burned him,” Yates said. Her head snapped up.

Oh, shit. I looked up at her, and Jing at Daisy. Resonant and ringing, I felt the idea pop up to the surface. It was shared between the four of us. A pulse rang through me. Shiloh shifted like they could tell we’d struck something, but they were not a Scapegracer, and they looked between the four of us with their eyes rimmed red. They looked behind us, out a window. A vein flashed in their jaw.

“Madeline,” I called.

She was at our side in an instant. “Please say you’ve got a fucking plan.”

“Storage,” Jing said.

“Upstairs,” Yates said.

“The room with all the random magic junk,” Daisy said.

“What?” Shiloh rubbed their hands together. “Whatever you’re talking about we need to do it now.”

Latticework rainbows weaved over the foyer, made a wall—a ward, an honest to god ward spell. Four Dagger Hearts locked elbows in front of the door. Their spell fell out of their mouths with a syncopated beat. I felt my heartbeat adjust to it.

The door pounded. It warped in its frame.

The Dagger Hearts chanted faster.

“Got it,” Madeline said. She peeled off toward the dining room and I careened after her, my Scapegracers and my sibling beside me. Yates pulled Scratch from my arms and shoved him in her backpack.

Bright bass clattering—the witchfinders rammed against the door.

We tore through the dining room. It was still impossible, still pressed past physics to accommodate spare seating. Without bodies it felt like a cave. The candles jutted up from their tables unburning like so many stalagmites. The stage was empty, the grand piano’s keys covered, strings exposed.

A scream tore out in the foyer behind us.

I heard the door burst open, heard boots pound inside.

We rounded a corner I’d forgotten about on the far side of the stage. It looked different than I’d remembered it, the brocade wallpaper was a different color and the pattern was larger, clawed around like the legs on harpy eagles. The hallway hadn’t been here last time. It’d been somewhere else. I shook that off.

There was a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and Madeline jerked it open. She held it, and Yates ran through first, then Jing, Daisy, Shiloh, me. Madeline dropped the door behind us.

Spindly terrible staircase. It looked like a Nephil’s spine. Twiggy, delicate rods of metal helixed up to drill through heaven, and I hated it as much as I had that first time. Yates was already halfway up. My girls bounded up, wound around and around. Winged seeds from sycamore trees falling in reverse. I put my hand on the rail and I ran. I climbed, I put my boots on each step and vaulted upwards. My stomach flipped. I glanced down, saw through the steps, saw the bones of the screw stairs and the floor far beneath me.

I saw Levi Chantry at the stair’s bottom.

He started climbing.

Shiloh put a hand on my back and I kept going. Dizziness rocked me. My core burned. I felt like I’d guzzled oil and my insides were slippery with it.

“Come on,” Yates called above me. She’d gotten the door open, she held it for the rest of us. Without looking up I felt somehow when Jing passed through, felt Daisy follow through in her wake. Another coil, Shiloh’s hand never leaving me, and finally the door was upon me and I spilled through it with sea legs, shins aching, lungs on fire.

Shiloh walked in backwards.

“It’s not too late, Addie. It’s not too late for you or”—deadname—“if you just come down with me. I can get you out of here, this doesn’t have to end like this, why won’t you hold still and listen to me you little—”

I could see Madeline round the stair’s top loop.

Levi crept behind her, blue eyes as big as tennis balls, veined like licorice, unblinking, near bursting. He had a gun slung over his blue cardigan. He looked at her beseechingly, looked in, beheld Shiloh. He panted like a dog. His shoulders rose and fell, made the gun sway.

Madeline whirled around to face him.

She slammed her sneaker against his sternum.

He windmilled his arms, mouth popped wide, brows up to his hairline. His tailbone smacked the railing. He pitched backwards, hips over ribs. I saw his ankles fly up, hit the place where his face had been a moment before.

His body slipped out of sight.

I heard the smack a moment later.

Madeline sprinted through the door and Yates shut it. They both flew away from it, backed up, stood behind Shi and me, stood with Jing and Daisy.

Shiloh walked toward the door. They pressed their palms against it.

“Shi,” I said.

“I’ll keep it closed.” They didn’t look up. “Do whatever you need to do. Be fast.”

“Don’t do any stupid shit, I swear to god.”

“I won’t,” they breathed. “Fucking move.”

We moved.

The storeroom had shifted slightly from the last time I’d been inside it. The rows were skinnier, there were more of them. Portraits that’d been downstairs at some point lay in stacks, wrapped in brown paper. Astrolabes slumped against busts. Books hummed. Jewelry stands, boxes upon boxes upon boxes, shipping crates that looked like something that might’ve fallen out of a Victorian freighter, filing cabinets, lavish displays of cutlery. I picked an aisle and peeled down it, scanned like mad. I knew I’d found Scratch by the grimoires, but where were the fucking grimoires?

I sprinted. No vases on either side of me, just wet samples of pickled baby mammals, hand mirrors, a bunch of porcelain dolls that I hated very fucking much. My head rushed. All this arcane shit and none of it useful to me. I tore a white sheet off a rocking horse. I kept running.

I hit the end of the aisle and ran into Jing. She took my hands, pulled me down the row and then up along to another. We caught sight of Madeline, who’d partnered up with Daisy.

“Have you—”

“No, not yet.”

“Guys!”

Yates’ voice sounded from a few aisles down.

We split, ran in that direction.

She stood with her back to a perilously tall bookshelf. Her yellow romper shone like a beacon, we flew to it, to her. She had her hands looped around the straps of her backpack, the place where Mr. Scratch lay. She looked at an industrial-looking metal set of shelves.

The shelves held urns and tall-necked amphorae, flower vases, covered jars.

I seized a porcelain one with blue winding flowers.

I lifted it above my head and hurled it to the floor.

It shattered into a billion pieces with a spectacular hyperpop clatter sound. Porcelain splinters flew in every direction, splashed my work pants. Amid the wreckage, bubbling and churning, was a glob of angry ink.

I slapped my hands on my thighs. “Come on, little fucker. Hitch a ride on me, I’ve got a job for you.”

The ink devil rolled in on itself. It looked like a nosebleed clot. Its movements were weak, and if it spoke, I couldn’t hear it. Still, it squelched over to me, gushed over my boot and climbed, crept up my pant leg. It slithered through the fibers, coursed over my kneecaps, the lines of my femurs, my belly, my chest. Faintly, its voice from nowhere and everywhere at once: Good morning little sorcerer I am alive I squirm I brim with hate.

Fuck, I love book devils.

Jing seized another urn and everything devolved. Madeline stomped a jar under her heel, Yates cracked a flower vase by knocking it against the blunt edge of a shelf. Daisy whammed them on the floor two at a time. The ink smell slit through the dust and the amber. It cloyed, electric and alive. Three book devils coiled around my body, clung to me, tendrils of their living murk swishing wild around my upper arms. I couldn’t see it on Jing, couldn’t see it on Madeline—their clothing was dark enough to obscure their seething disembodied fugitives. Yates and Daisy looked like they’d rolled in paint. Yates seemed vaguely discomforted but nevertheless determined. Daisy was a kid with a fistful of tickets at the county fair.

“Ladies,” Shiloh shouted. I could hear them, could feel them grit their teeth. “With speed, if you please.”

Jing ran. She and Madeline shot forward, Daisy and Yates close at their heels. I came up behind. The ink devils writhed against me, spiraled around me, circled my limbs and my neck. The wet snail feeling rocked a sick nostalgia through me. They felt like Mr. Scratch.

I could see Shiloh, now. They’d braced the door with a grandfather clock and an upturned table, slammed their shoulder into it to boot. They looked up, glanced between us, searching, desperate. They saw the splotches on Yates and Daze. They moved their mouth. I wondered if they were casting.

“How many witchfinders are out there?” Jing jerked her chin out.

“More than one,” Shi hissed.

I passed a suit of armor and something shiny caught my eye. Book devils against me made me bold, the ink spell made me feel salty and brutal and sparkling with life. My gums thrummed. The suit of armor had a magnificent peacock-plumed helmet, a face like a beak. There was a poleaxe in its hollow grip.

I slid it from its hands.

The poleaxe was heavy, handled like a Louisiana slugger. Black handle, then the head: gibbous moon blade on one side, a hammer on the other, a prickly spike peaking up top. It was heavy, grounding. I spun the handle in my hands, looked up at Shiloh.

“I’ll go out first,” I said.

They looked between me and my stupid decision. They shook their head, exasperated. They nodded and Daisy and Madeline pulled the table aside, lugged the grandfather clock out of the way.

Shiloh let go, leaped aside.

The door flung open and three identical witchfinder boys loomed on the other side, one grinning, two grim-faced. Grim boys in jerseys, grinning one with his shirt unbuttoned, a gleaming crucifix pearly at his throat.

My life was a Hammer horror flick.

I opened my jaws and yelled. The scream tapered into a laugh, my lungs seizing, my diaphragm throwing a rave. I lunged; I reared the poleaxe back. I flew through the doorway. I did not blink. My heart swelled ripe with love. I slammed into the smiley boy with my full weight behind the metal edge and something broke on him. I knocked him back into his boys. His chest opened—shallow, but fuck did blood fall fast. He blinked, bewildered, down at his chest. It looked like he was wearing a pageant sash. It smelled like sucking a fistful of coins. Like Tang and ink.

A devil burst forth from the folds of my clothes.

They were drawn to the blood. They needed little encouragement. They squelched from one boy to the next and it was like acid had fallen from the sky. The devil whirred around them, dissolved them. I thought about the formaldehyde sheep’s eye on my tongue, about how it’d felt when Scratch had devoured it.

The tops of their heads were gone.

Jaws slack, bodies still upright through some force unknown to me. Shock, maybe. They did not move but I did not know if these men knew that they had died. The devil ate fast. It unknit them bloodlessly, their upper limits dissolving, gushing black and happy. They were neck, shoulders. Hilariously, with a sound that would give me nightmares for the rest of my life, the devil noshed past their arm sockets, and their arms thunked on the floor.

“Fuck,” I said. “Oh fuck, holy shit.”

Screaming from the dining room.

I flew down the stairs three at a time. There were two devils on me, I trusted them to keep me upright, I was humming past the point of comprehending fear again. I felt like I’d eaten the sun. There was a nuclear reactor behind my face. I kneecapped a witchfinder girl as I passed her, and the devil above us oozed through the floor grate, done with those three boys, to drizzle over her shoulders and melt the dome of her head.

My heart in my stomach went bambambam!

I reached the floor. I stepped over Levi Chantry, yanked the door open.

There was violence in the dining room. Pearl and Jacques crouched behind the grand piano, clutching each other’s shoulders. They levitated chairs. The chairs soared through the air, crashed into fifteen—fucking fifteen—guys. It was like a fucking pledge night invasion. They were armed, there were splintering holes in the lip of the stage, but I figured it was hard to take aim when one was pelted endlessly with heavy wingback armchairs. One dude was flat-out horizontal, howling beneath one that’d landed on his leg. Knee at a funny angle. Knees shouldn’t bend that way.

I pointed the point of my poleaxe at the crowd.

A book devil leaped from the back of my knee, flowed around my hips, over my shoulder, down the inside of my arm and then out. It glided off the poleaxe’s handle. It sprang from the spike, torqued, unfurled in midair like an octopus. Its appendages laced together. It fell like a net over their shoulders.

Madeline went for the stage. She jumped up, threw her arms around Jacques and Pearl. She held them a moment, then the three of them rose.

The rest of us kept running.

Daisy Brink dove through the double doors into the bloodshed like it was a mosh pit. It looked like a mosh pit—magic swept in aurora LED bursts, fists flew, bodies slammed bodies and elbows clattered into ribs, knives made arcs through the air like slung jewelry. I wondered about the lack of bullets and decided to stop wondering. Blair and the Anti-Edonists held off cops, yeah? These were cops and mayors and dentists and whatever. Same skill set.

Daisy raked her nails up her satiny sides and tossed her head back, basked. Ink tendrils shot from her, shimmered through the air, glommed onto bodies in motion. It looked like she was a mushroom bloom. Daisy had broken so many urns—there had been so many urns, there were so many burned books that had been stored upstairs, there were so many dead witches, these books had lost so many witches—and I kept waiting for her to stop sprinkling devil juice, but she didn’t. Yates and Jing, hand in hand, darted beside her, pushed out into the foyer. Shiloh snaked out with them but peeled off from us, knelt where Andy lay on the floor, spitting blood. Jing looked back at me.

I rolled the handle over the back of my hand and caught it, then set it down. I followed after her empty-handed. I knew that they were all I’d need.

The Scapegracers marched through the foyer and out the front doors. We walked in lockstep, bubbling with broken, livid things. Jing took my hand and when I felt her brush by me, I took Daisy’s. Jing murmured something. It was what she’d murmured against my hairline this morning, and I heard it clearly now—nobody touches the ones I love, nothing can hurt my beloveds. She whispered it again, again. My forehead tingled, and the feeling washed through me, made a circuit through my body and bled out through my hands. The spell extended, cloaked us, illuminated us with a veil of lavender light.

There were a hundred-some witchfinders waiting outside. They stood politely, hands clasped, murmuring among themselves, pretending to laugh at small talk. Red-beaked canisters of gasoline waited between their ankles. Someone checked their watch. Someone answered a business call. Elias Chantry had a hand over his heart like he was at his brat’s recital.

Grace stood atop a Range Rover.

She looked down at us. She snapped one hand.

Muzzles raised.

“Us Scapegracers forever,” Daisy said.

It sounded like a thunderstorm and all I saw was light. Ink lifted from our shoulders, surged from us, I felt it rush around me. The light filled my nose and mouth, it tasted sweet and clean. I tipped my head back. I felt like I stood in a river, fully submerged, water above my head. It swept around me, churned circuits, stole the sound out of my head. My clothes billowed around me. I could feel my girls, I could feel their hands and the heartbeat we shared, but I couldn’t feel the porch under my feet. The light vibrated. It scintillated; I saw infinite color fractals unfurl in space. I was plunged into opalescent milk. I had red gills. I did not drown. My ankles hung limp, I was suspended in light, the boards of the porch were far below me, the porch did not exist. More ink fell from us, through us, from behind us. I heard a voice like Mr. Scratch’s, but it was not Mr. Scratch’s. It was not a voice at all. It said,

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I couldn’t speak, the light was in my mouth, but I felt: I want safety for these witches. I want my friends and me to live. I want to grow up. I am so in love.

THERE IS NOT ENOUGH CONSOLIDATION OF THE POTENTIAL THAT COULD BE US TO CONSUME ALL THAT MIGHT HARM YOU HERE. THERE ARE DEVILS WHO HAVE BEEN KNEADED INTO BEING THAT FEAST BUT THEY ARE NOT ENOUGH. THEY WILL NOT BE ENOUGH.

In my stomach, in my spleen: If they are not enough, can we make more?

WITCHES CAN ALWAYS MAKE MORE. MAKE US BE, AND WE WILL BE. WE WILL BECOME BEINGS. WE WILL BE THE SUBSTANCE FROM WHICH BOOKS MIGHT BE BOUND. WE WILL EAT FOR YOU WHEN WE ARE. THROUGH THE CIRCUIT OF YOUR BODIES AND INTO EARTHLY AIR: DO YOU SCULPT THIS INTO US?

All of us, from the seams of our folded hands: We do.

The void slithered in through our ears and climbed out of our mouths.

My boots landed softly on the porch.