Three

The Final House Party

I called Madeline four times in the car and got nothing. We pulled over for me to briefly panic in a cow field, cooled me down enough to get back on the road, and almost had a plan by the time we approached the Victorian mammoth. The extent of it was this: cool and normal. Case the house, get our hands on an operational itinerary, find Madeline, smuggle her out, and advocate for her after the fact. It would be so silly, trying to make like we hadn’t done it. If we were truly high-profile, we would be the obvious suspects. So! Discretion, not in the cards. Efficiency was the move. Speed and accuracy. What could go wrong?

Dead ahead the Delacroix House exploded upwards and outwards in intricate gingerbread frills. Old snow clung to it, and icicles long as my femurs. Colored lights bled through the windows. Irises clawed through gray slush on the lawn below. It was ostensibly closed for business today, but the look of it said otherwise—people teemed on the long porch in long fur coats and cowboy boots, smoking and bickering and embracing one another. It felt like a music festival or an artist’s funeral. Even from this distance I could hear acrid laughter, drunken singing, weeping, and blunt-edged threats. Jing pulled into the lot, cut the music, and eased into one of the last available spots in a sea of variously glossy dark or rust-fucked cars.

“Sideways,” Jing said. She leaned back, caught my eye. Her brows twitched inwards. “Did you know there were that many witches in the continental US?”

I had no head for guessing numbers. Surely, these people could’ve filled the Homo Erectus warehouse. Glimpses made my teeth hurt—hobble skirts and safety pins through nose bridges, garter belts and boiler suits, boas and bolo ties, a bathtub’s worth of pomade, heavy metal jewelry and animal bones on strings, a mirage of strangers that felt like people I’d already met. Intergenerational queer community I had, and beloved witches my age, but seeing scores of older witches plucked some chord in my gut. We grew up. Who’d have thunk it. “No,” I said. “Stick close.” Admittedly a moot point in this crowd—there were scores of showy femmes here, but they trended hard toward goth and milf. My coven brought the only pastels along with them. Avenging angel Bratz dolls in a sea of Elviras and Morticias would be easy to spot. Funny to think I might be the only one of us who blended in. I scraped my tongue with my teeth.

We got out of the car. Daisy pulled up her hood, took off without us, and Jing swore and locked up and stomped after her. Yates lingered. She smoothed her satin jacket. She said, “If we get separated, we’ll meet back at the car.”

“Sure.” I frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“It just feels heavy. Like we’re about to make adult choices. I don’t know if that makes sense.” She worried her thumb over her zipper. “Everything is so tense right now. The future feels close. Do you ever feel superstitious?”

I braced an elbow on Jing’s car, stepped between her and the witch crowd. There was something spooky about the suggestion. I’d been the witch of Sycamore Gorge for years. She and I shared that title and a book devil now. What’s more superstitious than that? “How do you mean?”

“Like you’ve got an itchy feeling. A bad hunch.” Yates looked through me, past me. I thought for a moment that she might cry. “I’ve asked Scratch about it. I know you know this, just—I need to talk this through. There’s cosmic energy, which flows everywhere, and everyone feels it. Concentrated violence and habit hardens it, makes and maintains the architecture of power, and those of us who chafe against that structure grow specters, and because we’ve grown specters, we can touch the still-fluid currents of cosmic energy and knead it according to our desires. There’s a current, is my point. Mr. Scratch says that some witches are more sensitive to it than others. Not like, stronger casters, I mean, some witches can feel magic’s current more. Like getting achy with the weather. You know how skittish I can be around some of this stuff. I think I feel it—more intensely than you three. I’m not a scaredy-cat. I am always on edge because I can feel it. I can feel when it’s thicker, I can feel when it’s faster. I was attracted to Levi at that Halloween party because he had it. It was stolen, so it was duller, but he had it. I was scared of you because you had more.”

I frowned. Unease kicked in me. I believed her, and following that logic, this many witches in one spot seemed like a headache waiting to happen. That didn’t seem quite it, though. I thought about Shiloh’s bad feeling. “Okay. What are you feeling now that’s got you worried?”

“I feel like we shouldn’t be here.” She zipped up her jacket to her chin, thrust her hands in her pockets, bounced once on her heels. “Not us like the Scapegracers. I mean like, all of us. I just feel so sick.”

“Like we shouldn’t be gathering for the specter stones?” I craned my neck, tried to meet her gaze. “Lila, hey. Are you okay?”

“I’m not so sure.” Her eyes were still fixed on something invisible to me, something just beyond my collarbone. “It’s good that we’re gathering. Assembly is great, I don’t want to cast doubt on it, even with the troublesome Madeline piece. I mean, here. At the Delacroix House. I don’t have anything concrete, and maybe this isn’t cosmic sensitivity, maybe this is just straight-up anxiety! I’m all wound up for normal reasons, too. I don’t know.”

“No, I trust your intuition. We’ll keep our eyes out. If something’s wrong, we tell each other immediately, and we figure out who here is trustworthy and we tell them, too. How’s that?” I bent my knees, put my face in front of hers.

She glanced up at me from under her lashes. She looked sharp.

“We should catch up with Jing and Daisy,” she said. She took my elbow in her hands. “Let’s go.”

I swallowed a lump and straightened my back, started toward the Delacroix. I tried to imagine magic eddying around its frosted spires, like the northern lights or oil floating on water. When Scratch lived inside me, I’d seen the rare glimpse of where he was from, what he’d originally been. It was hard to remember how beholding it felt. It was a slosh of light in my memory. Like a moving bruise.

I brought my focus down.

There was a crowd amassing on the lot before the long porch walk. There’d been people before, but they had a different vibe now. Bees swarming rather than simply chilling in the meadow flats. Shoulders came together, bundled leather and velvet and thick ancient wool, and I felt in my gut that somebody was about to get fucked up. I didn’t see Jing or Daze. I braced for the worst. I tilted my head back, tried to peer over some of the shorter people, but everybody was wearing platforms and all I saw were the backs of bowed heads. People circled. The witch ring was at least three bodies thick in every direction and completely blocked the stairs. I pushed through, tried to clear space for Yates and me, and managed to get us in view of the clearing.

Two dudes lurched in the circle’s center.

The beefier of the two, blue-haired and bearded, yanked his shirt up over his stomach. He dripped tattoos. The whole cosmos flexed down his belly. He curled his lip, reached two fingers under his binder, fished something out—a long rectangle, the length of his palm—and tripped his thumb over some subtle button. The blade flashed into midair. Its metal looked milk-colored. The tip danced in space.

Simultaneously, a weasel reared his longboard back. He was hatchet-faced, murderous—there was a cut under his left eye that muddied his lank yellow hair, smeared his already ruined eyeliner—and the way he looked at the bigger guy told me that he’d follow through. This was not a man who tapped out. Weasel would absolutely splash Blue Boy’s brains all over the steps, so help him god.

The onlooking witches seemed . . . amused? Intrigued? Annoyed? Exasperated? They smoked spliffs and cloves and did not move to intervene. A woman with fabulous enormous Dolly Parton hair was recording on her phone.

“Andy, honey.” A tall woman across from us folded her hands over her heart. She wore red leather gloves and a neat button-down, had her hair in lacquered jet-black finger waves. A tattoo across her cheek read HOLY SHE. God, be still my beating heart. She stared daggers into the back of the blue guy’s head. “Quit while you’re ahead.”

“I’ve got a Corbie to pluck,” Andy barked.

“Fuck you,” the scrawny one spat back. The veins in his eyes looked like bunches of licorice. His eyes looked like water balloons or flash grenades. They were too big for his long skinny knife face. He white-knuckled his longboard, which was, on second glance, painted with a broomstick along its wheelbase, which felt so stupid and extremely cool to me, and jerked his head back, leered up at Andy with an expression I’d never seen in real life. Anime deathmatch face. It made the air vibrate. “Fuck you, you insipid, presumptuous little fascist fucker.”

“You’re calling me a fascist? Me? Pull your head out of your ass, Dominick.” Andy spun the knife’s handle around one finger and caught it in one fluid motion, then traced it in the air, connected invisible dots between Dominick’s pierced brow down to the line of his long, pinched mouth. “I will shred you. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Boys!”

Both of them snapped their heads up.

A worn and weary somebody shouldered through the far side of the ring. Salt-and-pepper crew cut, white shirt and workpants, steel-toed boots, slim earrings. Short and proud and fat. Maybe mid-fifties? Early sixties? I was terrible at adult ages. Crusty old dyke, by any rate. Hypnotically androgynous. The witch looked between the two of them, then at Dominick with sudden diamond-splitting intensity, took a few strides to the left and said, “When I passed by you, and saw you polluted in your own blood, I said unto you when you were in your blood, live.”

The cut on Dominick’s cheek zipped itself up neatly. He looked stricken. He blinked like he was smothering tears. He glanced at the caster, murmured something too low for me to hear.

The caster dismissed him with a huff. “We’ll have enough to fight about later. Stop tussling. Dominick, and . . .” Eyes flicked up, fixed on—me? I swam with gooseflesh. “You. Baby butch. Come help me set up.”

I stood very still, slack-jawed.

Yates whispered into my neck, “Case the house! That’s part of the plan.”

Through my teeth: “What about you?”

“I’ll find Jing and Daisy!”

“I’m not leaving you alone—”

She pushed me into the clearing where the fight had broken out, and when I whipped my head around, Lila Yates was gone. Fresh nerves and my hangover sloshed together. I looked back, and the old butch was waiting. The blue-haired man, Andy, was gone with HOLY SHE. The weasel, apparently Dominick, remained.

Dominick pulled a face. I couldn’t tell if he was a rough nineteen-year-old or a baby-faced thirtysomething. As I made my way toward the butch, he tucked his longboard under one arm, a horrible frown on his horrible mouth.

We followed the butch together in silence for a moment. The quiet itched.

God, cool and normal was a terrible plan! I sucked so fucking hard at both of those things! I needed intel, ASAP. I cleared my throat and tried: “Who’s . . .”

“Blair. She’s in the Anti-Edonist Union. They’re based in a holler south of here.” Dominick spoke with a reedy, nasal drawl, barely loud enough for me to hear. He didn’t look at me when he spoke. He looked grayish. I picked up my pace a touch, strode onward at Blair’s heels. On the porch, women with broad sun hats and dark sunglasses floated a foot above their wicker armchairs. They drank Bloody Marys and openly gossiped about everyone who walked by. Their heads turned as we passed. Blair’s shoulders tensed. Dominick looked contemptuously at his shoes. I thought I heard one of the floating women say: “There goes the firing squad.”

I missed Mr. Scratch. I wanted to know if he could articulate the rancor going on. Did the Honeyeaters flock when a safe house called? Did they get along swimmingly with their peers, feel something like, I don’t know, solidarity with their fellow witches? Women supporting women? No?

Inside the Delacroix was calamity. Workers in white tie ferried objects back and forth, some of which (folding chairs, folding tables, tablecloths, stacks of plates, cutlery) made sense, others (a ball python, a bouquet of swords, milk crates stuffed with books, fireworks, a disco ball) less so. I thought I saw Maurice Delacroix himself conducting traffic, his back to the neon display lights over the lush, rich wallpaper, but he was gone in a blink. Jacques and Pearl, a musician and a server respectively, both sat on a low staircase in matching velvet suits and morosely passed each other a handle of Fireball, which they drank straight.

Jacques made eye contact with me.

I tried for a smile and wasn’t sure if it landed.

Blair led Dominick and me through a set of doors I hadn’t been through before, and the world on the other side was bottle-green and damasked with tall ceilings and sea- glass chandeliers. There were framed mirrors and raised hanging surfaces that’d been shrouded with white sheets. I wondered what was under them. I decided quickly that it was none of my business. At the room’s head, maybe twelve paces ahead of me, a fireplace yawned. It looked like a lion’s mouth, carved teeth and eyes and mane that spiraled outward into the deep green wallpaper. Two iron loops twisted through either side of the hearth’s upper lip like angel bites. A poker rested in those loops. A low fire twitched below.

The floor was clear aside from a mass of folding chairs that quickly piled against a side wall. Blair crossed the floor with an easy stride. Real butch swagger, a showy confidence tempered in hurt and harshness. I wondered if I’d ever walk like that. She picked up a stack of four-ish chairs and glanced over her shoulder at us, or at Dominick, rather. “Here?”

He winced. “Good a place as any.”

I said, “Sorry, what?”

Blair looked at me, then. “D’you know why you’re here?”

“To help set up,” I said, feeling ridiculous.

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Which coven are you with, sugar?”

Dominick, suddenly interested in the fact that I was alive, turned to look at me. He searched me. There was a seriousness in his evaluation that I didn’t strictly appreciate. I wondered abstractly if Andy would’ve bodied him if the fight had gone uninterrupted.

“I’m—”

“Eloise!”

My government name clapped me up the backside of my head. I spun around, mouth open.

A woman leaned against the doorframe. She looked maybe Julian’s age, had a silver streak in the dark waves above her brow. She wore a slim knee-length dress and thin gold chains. She was, inexplicably, familiar to me. She smiled at me with jarring, disarming warmth. Without looking at her, I felt Blair’s body language shift behind me. I wasn’t sure if she was breathing.

The woman crossed the room. Her heels clacked and echoed in the back of my skull. The closer she came, the thinner the world stretched around her. The room accordioned, and it felt like with every stride, she stayed in place, and the room rolled underneath her until she suddenly stood close to me. Very close to me, closer than I’d stand next to anybody who wasn’t a Scapegracer or maybe Shiloh, and despite being shorter than me, she filled my vision to my periphery. She smiled wider; it made her eyes crinkle. She took me by the shoulders and appraised me, looked me up and down, then pulled me into a quick, tight hug.

My brain made a sound like a teakettle.

The woman leaned back. She said, “You’re so tall.”

“Yes,” I said, stunned.

She laughed. “In my head, you’re still little. I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl. Kindergarten, I think. Look at you now! You look so like Lenora, but—but you’ve docked your fluffy ears and tail.” She reached toward my buzz cut but stopped just short of touching me. “Have you been getting into fights?”

There was a car crash in my head. My pulse rammed in my hard palate. “What?” I shook my head, pulled a face, braced myself for the sharp, reactionary anger that usually took me whenever anybody reminded me that I’d been a little kid at all. The anger didn’t come. Something softer and worse did instead. I bit my tongue. I looked down at the chains on her neck, little herringbone snakes, and my gut kicked and I wanted to cry, which made me want to pry the chairs from Blair’s hands and hurl them against the hanging mirrors, or maybe crawl into that fireplace and bury my body in the coals.

“You called me Auntie Lupe then. Don’t you remember?” Her smile faltered for a millisecond, but only just. She shook her head. “It was a long time ago. You can get to know me now, as a woman. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

I wasn’t sure if there was anything I’d like to discuss with her. I wasn’t sure if I was a woman. Lesbian and Scapegracer were my principal identifiers and that second one was being called into question. My stomach hurt. Bad thoughts swirled. If you knew me when I was little, if you knew my mother, where the fuck were you when I was in foster care? I am alive because you sent a spell book, but couldn’t you have sent a little lunch money, too?

“I’m helping Blair set up,” I said stiffly.

“Oh,” Lupe said. She blinked, then craned her neck, peered over my shoulder. “Hello, Blair.”

Blair said, “Hello, Guadalupe.”

“It’s been a while. You haven’t been to any parties in ages.” Lupe’s eyes sparkled with something. Maybe loathing? Something stickier than loathing. It made my skin prickle. “I hadn’t expected you to come. You look well.”

“The Anti-Edonists always heed the call toward flocking.” Blair sounded raw, exhausted. There was a pang in her voice, the weight of some shared history, but I couldn’t parse it, I wanted my bones to flatten and to slip through the floorboards and dissolve into the ground water. A Pythoness approached me and mentioned my mother to me and had the audacity to carry on small talk over my shoulder? Or was this not small talk. Man, I was supposed to be saving Madeline! Blair said, softer this time: “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s nearly time.” Dominick’s voice scissored through the tense adult lesbian staring, and I jerked my attention back on him. He looked grave. When he spoke, he barely moved his lips at all. It didn’t even look like he was breathing. “Finish up without me. I’m going to go get her.”

Her.

My mouth opened and I said: “Madeline?”

His snapped his eyes at me. The red veins sparkled. His expression shifted in some indiscernible way. He took a few steps nearer to me. His hair, long as his collarbones, swished forward and hid the edges of his face. “Are you Sideways Pike?”

I jerked my chin down and didn’t blink.

He stood toe to toe with me all of a sudden. It made Lupe back up a little, and I slapped down any embers of feeling I might’ve had about that one way or the other. I leveled with Dominick. My pulse hammered.

Dominick inclined his head and said to me: “Thank you, and I’m sorry. You’ll have your justice soon.”

I opened my mouth to retort, I’ve got my justice, I think. Nothing came out.

In a whirl Delacroix staff pushed through us and de­scended on the chair stack. Lots of elegant lines and stiff, pomade-­burnished hair. I blinked and Dominick was gone, vanished into the fray, and Blair had peeled off with the stream to help. Chairs formed half rings around the fireplace, recalled makeshift church pews. They looked like ribs. There was an aisle down the middle, and people moved with eerie synchronicity up and down it as they slammed down chairs beside chairs. I turned to Lupe, but she was halfway across the room, talking to Maurice Delacroix, who looked worn to the bone. His cheekbones broke the light.

He nodded at me, waved two fingers, checked a pocket watch.

I blinked again and the room filled with witches. They smelled like perfume and tobacco and leather and poppers. They streamed around me, took places among the newly assembled rows, spoke animatedly about heaven knows what. Someone must have put on a record—there was a thin crackle then a whirl of rough, honey-thick blues. Someone with a sense of humor, or evil, unforgivable irony. This was Madeline’s song.

Hands on my back. Hands above my left elbow, a forehead against my right sleeve.

“There you are! Ohmygod, learn to answer your phone.”

“Where are we supposed to sit? These chairs look so bad. My thighs hate vinyl.”

“Are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”

I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could, and the reunited Scapegracers pushed me down the aisle. We kept going and going. I thought for a second that they’d march us directly into the hearth. When I opened my eyes we’d somehow managed not to stomp into the fire, and we lingered before the front row, which was as vacant as the head of a classroom on the first day of term. Jing and Daisy and Yates arranged me in a chair, or maybe I sat on my own, and the three of them arranged themselves beside me. My head swam. Daisy, still dead eyed, was somehow half on top of me. Her nose pressed my neck.

“We can’t find her,” Daisy hissed. “There are literally no exits that aren’t crammed with people. Not to be the fire-safety freak, but if Madeline pulls a Christmas, that’d suck so much.”

“What is up with the setup?” Jing put an arm around my shoulders, craned her neck to scan the crowd. “I feel like we’re about to watch community theater.”

“I think it’s starting,” Yates said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s starting.”