Six

Sticks and Stones Might Break My Bones

Ducking behind Jing’s cherry-red convertible like a bunch of shitty cartoon spies, knees popping, inches from the oil-slicked asphalt, the five of us panted and tried and failed to think. We’d run like hell and scrambled out that window, my knee stung about it, I must’ve banged it on something. They didn’t pursue us the same way. Maybe it was a dignity thing. Like, technically this was still according to the plan, but when everything was mortally terrifying, actionable next steps felt so obscure. My head swam. My bottom lip felt swollen, raw where she’d bitten me, and I sucked on it and stared at my hands to keep myself from glancing over the hood at the house.

“Why haven’t they chased us out here?” Daisy snapped at Madeline.

Madeline just looked at her. After a moment she said, “Dominick’s a smoker. He doesn’t run.”

“You’re a smoker, but whatever. Let’s not wait for him to walk,” said Jing, whose expression was still blurry and ominously indistinct and made me feel like I’d broken something, though I wasn’t sure what the something could be. She flicked her eyes between us, then leaned close, whispered something in Yates’ ear that made Yates shudder and press her fingertips to the hollow of her neck. Jing looked at Madeline. “Do you have a place to go?”

Madeline pulled a face.

“I think we’re in the right.” Yates frowned.

“How sweet,” Daisy sneered, rubbing her eyes with both fists.

“No. I think we’re right.” Yates scrunched her brow. “I want to stay. I want to hold ground in this.”

“Can we talk in the car?” The asphalt between my palms looked blacker than it should, like it was made of water. I could smack through it if I wanted. “We need to move.”

“Agreed,” Madeline said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Daisy said.

“Agreed,” said Jing. She stood, unlocked her car with a starburst flash of headlights—how the little techno chirp chirp was so loud was beyond me, but it made my skull hurt and I flinched from it—and yanked open the door. “Everybody in.”

“No,” Yates said. She spoke with a firmness. “This is wrong, and we’re in the right, and I want to look everyone in the eye and tell them so. I’m staying. I’m going to convince them not to follow you.”

Madeline’s expression changed beside me, but I couldn’t bear to look.

Jing stared down at her from the driver’s seat. She looked stunned, her frozen weirdness smudged over with open shock, and then she shut her eyes and faced the steering wheel and leaned the back of her neck against the headrest. Every hair on her head looked crystalline against the leather. “I’m not leaving you alone. Are you serious about this?”

Madeline rounded the car, slid in shotgun, slammed the door behind her like a punctuation mark. She jolted her head up with a snap, fixed on something beyond the rearview mirror, then slammed one hand on the dashboard and said, “Now, for the love of god, we need to move now.”

Yates bounced once on the balls of her feet. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“Shit,” Jing said. She twisted the key in the ignition, revved the engine a few times, brows in a knot. She stared where Madeline stared. I saw her flick the tip of her tongue between her teeth. “Fine. Daisy, stay with her.” An order. “We will be back here ASAP, hear me?”

Over top of the car, I could see the steady amassing of witches on the porch, distant faces grim and pinched. They watched us. I felt their eyes on me like bugs. The crowd thickened. Peels of witches pulled away from the central cluster, started their procession down the walk. I swayed against the car and sucked in a hard, cold breath. “We’re really splitting up?”

“Yeah.” Daisy put an arm around Yates’ waist. It was a gesture that fell somewhere between bodyguard and boyfriend. “I can hold them off. You with us or them, Pike?”

I couldn’t think. I wanted Mr. Scratch. He would’ve picked for me if I panicked.

Why the fuck had I left him at home?

I rounded the car. The faces on the porch had definition now. I set my jaw, jerked open the passenger’s side door, and seized a fistful of Madeline’s shirt.

Madeline’s lip curled like, the fuck?

I hauled her up and thrust her over the gearshift. Her eyes popped wide and she kicked out but not before her shoulders struck the backseat, arms a mess on either side of her, heels up near the headrests. She clambered upright. I grimaced, sat down where she’d been, and pulled the door closed beside me. I scrubbed a hand over my head. The buzz felt like sable. “Let’s move.”

“Call me fucking immediately if you think you’re in imminent danger,” Jing hissed out the window. Low light fell through the windshield and made her hair catch like fire. She locked eyes with Yates. “We’ll be back soon. Keep a choke chain on Daze.”

“She’ll be good, she won’t need one.” Yates’ eyes sparkled. “Good luck!”

Daisy spat on the gravel beside her feet.

Jing gave her a curt nod. She pulled out fast then, whipped the car around with roller-coaster fuck-off carelessness, and zipped out of the lot with acceleration that she hadn’t practiced legally. I glanced at the speedometer and my stomach flipped. Dread kicked around my head, and shimmering, nauseous elation. I coughed and it twisted into something like cackling. I braced a hand against the glove box.

Jing’s lips moved. She muttered something to herself, something terse and needle-sharp, the same thing over and over again. Air warped around her head. Light refracted in ways it shouldn’t. She swayed forward, glitchy phantom halo sizzling, and pulled one hand off the steering wheel and pressed it to the back of her mouth. She put it back. She rounded a corner.

The lipstick stain she left glowed at the edges.

It was a sigil. Her kiss had made a sigil just below her knuckles.

I balked at her. I flattened against the car door and just looked at her, tried to fit all of her in my brain at once. She was too much to take in. I smiled wider. The air felt cold on my teeth. “Was that a spell? Did you just cast a fucking spell, Jing?”

“Keeping people off my back,” she snapped. Her eyes flashed up, matte black and livid, and she locked eyes with Madeline in the rearview for a split second before she looked back at the road. “Where am I going, Kline? Talk fast.”

“South. I’ve got people over state lines.” Madeline shifted on the seats behind me but I didn’t want to look at her. I was busy staring at the magic on Jing’s hand. Madeline spoke curtly and I knew, somehow, that she was lying. She wasn’t positive, anyway. I felt it in my gut. I blamed telepathy. “If you get me a few miles past Sycamore Gorge I’ll be fine. I can make my own way from there.”

Jing flared her nostrils a touch, rolled her neck, her shoulders. She sped a little faster. Trees melted, looked like feathers on folds of endless wings. The sun sank lower and made the pavement shiver. Felt like racing down an angel’s spine. The car might burst into literal flames. I wondered about the spell she’d cast, and about the incantation she’d whispered too low for me to parse. I had cotton mouth somehow. I gnawed on the meat of my tongue. I said, “What people, Madeline?”

The car made sounds underneath me, all around me. It turned my bones taffy sticky and made me want to die. No music, just the high whine of Jing speeding and asphalt tripping underneath us. My bottom lip had a salty taste. Wild that the swelling hadn’t gone down. Madeline didn’t say jack shit and Jing looked like she was ignoring us or trying. I peeled my eyes off the lipstick-stain sigil and glanced in the rearview. I opened my mouth to repeat myself.

Madeline made a face that shut me up for a second. She pulled one of her knees to her chest. She put a hand in her hair, sculpted the pompadour back, and every strand looked glassy against her long fingers. She looked at nothing, eyes unfocused, mouth in a tight line. “I’ve done this before. I know what I’m doing.”

“Not what I asked.”

“Sideways,” Jing said. A warning. Didn’t know for what.

“I’m not keen on the thought of you being homeless with Dominick on your heels,” I said. I mean, it was true, I wasn’t. The thought made me feel sick. I might be sick any second now. My blood ran sour. All cars go to hell. “This is fucked.”

Madeline looked grayscale. She kneaded her hands together.

“You know this crowd better than we do. Yates and Daisy are fine, right?” Jing glanced at the rearview again, and through some power more ancient than magic, pulled Madeline’s attention out of the twelfth dimension and dragged it back to earth. Jing’s expression was lethal. That look used to scare the shit out of me. Still did. “No harm will come to them while I haul your poisonous hide out of Sycamore Gorge, understand?”

“They’ll be fine,” Madeline said, convincing nobody. “I don’t think harm would come to them. Not real harm.”

Jing glanced at the road, then back at her. “If something happens to either of them, I’ll kill you. Know that.”

Madeline inclined her head. “The pretty one. What’s her name?”

We hit a bump and I fantasized wildly about it having been me.

“Yates,” I said. “You’re talking about Yates. Lila Yates.”

“Don’t talk about Yates,” Jing said. She clucked her tongue. “Sideways. Put on some music, would you?”

I felt around for the aux cord. The wire was clammy; its texture skeeved me out for some reason. I flipped my phone over in my palm, tried to conceive of music that’d make any of this tolerable as I punched in my password, and then my eyes fixed on the unread calls and bam! Endorphins screaming all at once.

Shiloh had called me five times and texted only once: i need to talk to u asap

“Fuck,” I said aloud.

“Is it—”

“It’s Shi,” I said. I shook myself, returned the call. My phone felt grimy on my cheek. Bile pinged at the back of my tongue, but nothing came of it. I squeezed my eyes shut. Something must be wrong with Jing’s suspension, it was making me feel worse than usual, and I was firm on blaming the object before I blamed myself. The phone rang and rang. Each tone flashed across the back of my eyelids with a little purple burst. I got their machine, which was without prerecorded message. Inbox full. I pulled my phone back to dial again but before my thumb hit the glass, they were calling me and I fumbled to receive it.

Against my temple and far away, Shiloh said: “Where are you? Are you still at the Delacroix?”

“What is it?” Jing inclined her head beside me, lipstick-­sigil hand tensing on the steering wheel, wisps of platinum swishing from behind her ear across her cheekbone.

I shook my head, shoved my temple against the rattling window beside me, which was a fucking mistake. My guts seized. The crooks of my fingers screamed, and I made myself ease up on my phone before I snapped it vertically like a graham cracker. “I’ll be back soon. Daze and Yates are there. Why, what’s up? Are you okay? Is Julian—”

“I saw Tatum Jenkins’ car on Elm Street.”

My head was a hornet’s nest. Just crawling buzzing awful. No complex cognition, no abstract thought, just noise noise noise. I gritted my teeth and said ungently, “I don’t know who the fuck that is, Shi.”

“Tatum Jenkins is a witchfinder,” they said. “An evil piece of work. You don’t get it, Sideways, my blood family, as far as Brethren went we were moderates, we believed in compromises, but the Jenkins family isn’t like that, they’re fucking unhinged and—”

“Slow down,” I said, “breathe. What? What exactly are you trying to tell me, here?”

“Tatum wouldn’t just hang around Sycamore Gorge for the hell of it, Sideways. He’s here for a reason, I’m sure of it. I’ve got a rancid feeling about this, and I’m worried about you four. The Jenkins family doesn’t believe in leaning on systems alone to eradicate witchcraft, they just hunt. They make trophy sport of it. I . . . one of the witches that I . . . I did with them. I’m not screwing around, I need you to be extremely careful, okay?” Their voice kept cracking. It was all breath and no music, just hushed, crackling consonants, and I got the sense that this had been full-on panic a few minutes prior. “I have a really bad theory and I need to know you are fine.”

“Theory,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else. I thought about Yates’ weird feeling from earlier and felt out of my mind. I crawled all over. “Tell me about your theory, Shiloh.”

“Who are you talking to?” Madeline said, a little loudly. She sounded suspicious. “Did I hear Brethren?”

“Shut up, Madeline,” I barked.

“Wait, is Addie in the car with you?” Shiloh’s voice cracked. “Is she—”

“Jesus fucking Christ. Yes, she’s here with me, we just busted her out of witch jail.” I pulled the phone away from my cheek and put it on speaker, then twisted around, jabbed a corner of it against Madeline’s shin.

Madeline said, “Who the fuck are you talking to?”

I took the phone off speaker and pulled it back to my cheek. “Theory.”

Shiloh was quiet on the other end of the line.

“Shi.”

Nothing.

“Shi, talk to me. You’re freaking me out. Speak up.”

“Does she know about me?”

“Nope. Hasn’t come up. Ex-family ex-friend theory.”

They laughed. It came out staccato, brittle. “Remember how y’all killed my baby brother?”

My heart slammed against my teeth.

“I think that he might be here for a memorial.”

Molars against ventricles, again, again. My organs all yo-yo’d inside me.

“We’ll be safe at the Delacroix. There are lots of us there. Safety in numbers.” I silently thanked personified sky entropy that Yates and Daisy were still there. I shook my head, tried to steel myself. “I’ll keep myself sharp, okay? I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“Sideways,” Jing breathed.

“Don’t do spell work frivolously right now. Not without like, extensive protective warding or something. Nothing flashy, okay?” Shiloh sounded distant. I thought they might be pacing. “For the love of god, please be careful.”

“Beg fucking pardon?” Harsher than I’d intended. “Listen, you’ve got no position to lecture me about when I can and can’t use magic.”

“Tatum puts out jinxes,” they hissed. “Mimics galore and trip-wire jinxes, Sideways, please please please tell me you’ll be—”

Lavender fire burst out of the sigil on Jing’s hand and the world glitched in jaggedy vertical slices. The light was everywhere, it flooded the car and pressed on me with a warm, watery pressure. It felt like Jing. It smelled like her, salty sweet like her sweat through her perfume, and it was all over me, and for an infinite splintering millisecond I felt nothing but a shock of warmth. The shape of her kiss mark blazed between us. It seared my eyes like I’d looked dead-on at a naked lightbulb. Wherever I looked the kiss mark followed, arcane, lovely, violently girly and brimming, overflowing, with never-ending purple light.

The car pitched hard.

We spiraled left.

My head lit up in screaming bright orange. Vision flat and burning, lungs clapped against the folds of my belly so hard I thought they’d snap loose, hilarious, freefall pain coursed alive and electric in my face and neck and shoulders. I gasped. My tongue felt slippery. Was I choking? Air didn’t pull in through my teeth. I swam suspended in a thick, hot nothing, and I knew that I was dying, but then someone touched my back and I blinked and saw the livid green spiderweb that was Jing’s windshield. There was a line dividing it vertically. That was new. Did I have a piece of glass in my mouth? My eyes fixed, and the line took on three-dimensional form; it was symmetrical, pocked with staples, gravy-brown, deeply boring. We’d hit a telephone pole. I couldn’t breathe through my nose. In a giddy rush it occurred to me that in fact I did not have a chunk of windshield in my mouth, and that the hard, sharp-edged thing was a tooth. One of my front teeth balanced on my tongue like a party pill. It was not in its gum cubby. Fuck. Bummer. I opened my lips a crack and thick blood oozed, fuck it was everywhere, it was all over my face and my lap and the dashboard I’d slammed my face on, just everywhere. It clung thick to my eyelashes. Wasn’t sure how it’d gotten up there. If I rolled my eyes up, I could see the big sparkly strawberry gobs against the light. Nausea roiled once, hard. Did that mean I had a concussion? It’d better fucking not.

Beside me Jing Gao screamed bloody murder. Specifically, when I started listening she was going, SIDEWAYS SIDEWAYS OH MY GOD SIDEWAYS PLEASE FUCKING MOVE OH MY GOD SIDEWAYS SIDEWAYS SIDEWAYS BABY PLEASE.

The purple light was gone. It’s fun to observe shit like that. Magic, man.

I spat my tooth into my palm.

The screaming stopped. Hands on my shoulder now, feather light but with immeasurable intensity, giving me the gentlest of shakes. I grimaced. Grimacing stung, because my bottom lip was fucked. Split, I’d guess. Must’ve bitten it pretty hard before my tooth gave up on me. Blood fell clean out of my mouth, out of my nose, and onto my cupped hand. Thick worms of clotty blackish blood. That had not been on purpose. Blood was not really stoppable at this point. I might flood the car and drown Jing and Madeline.

Jing and Madeline.

Jing had been yelling.

I squeezed my eyes shut, kept them clenched for the length of an inhale, then opened them. I looked to my left. My neck was stiffer than necks usually were and this motion wasn’t well supported. I looked mostly with my eyes.

“Sideways,” Jing said. Her makeup made dark arcs around the curves of her cheeks. Had she been crying? I didn’t care for that at all. That felt wrong. She leaned forward, eyes flashing and dauntingly waterier than I’d ever seen them, and gasped, “Are you alright? Talk to me.”

I tried to smile. It hurt immediately and more blood fell out of my face and onto Jing’s sleeve, which made her wince, which made me wince in turn. I searched for language. Surely there was language inside of me, still. My linguistic capacity was not stored in my front teeth, cool as that’d be, and I needed to say something, say anything, because Jing had been crying and I realized that I might have looked fully dead there for a moment. She might’ve thought I had snapped my neck. It was a cold, clammy thought. My throat cloyed. Blood slicked down the back of it and made my insides fold. I searched her face for a moment, like speech might live there instead, and was comforted by the fact that her face didn’t look broken, or even super bruised. Sweat made her bangs stringy, pasted them against her brow. She flushed a deep red. That hooked something out of me. I leaned in, body screaming, and said thickly: “Did you call me baby?”

“I hate you,” she said. Her brows shot up. She shook her head, and a lopsided grin broke over her. Another inky tear fell. I watched it run down her jaw with mild horror. “You’re the fucking worst.”

“My tooth came out.” I sounded funny. “I sound funny.”

“You look funny.” Her brows twitched. More tears, they left cracks in her makeup, and I felt less shackled to earth after each. “You look like hell.”

“That tracks.” I leaned closer, said with all the firmness I could muster: “I’m alright, see? It’s alright. I’m okay.” I brought up my free hand, the one without a tooth in it, and circled my thumb over her left cheekbone. “No tears.”

She leaned her ear against my bloody, wet palm.

“We are so fucked.” That didn’t come out of Jing’s mouth. My sweet purgatory shattered. I managed to move my neck enough to peer down into the backseat, hand still on Jing’s cheek, and beheld a thoroughly un-pompadoured Madeline Kline.

Madeline looked like the soothsayer who told Julius Caesar to get fucked. Huge eyes, ashen, gaunt and ghastly, unsettlingly earnest. Her hair fell across her face. She stared at something indistinct, and then that something turned into me.

We held eye contact for a quick ugly forever.

She tore her gaze off me, kicked open the door, and slithered out of the car. I heard her soles thud against the pavement. She left the door ajar in her wake.

I turned my attention back on Jing and blinked, which freckled her with little ruby specks, and said: “We should follow her.”

Jing said, “I don’t know if you should get out of the car.”

“I’m okay,” I said. My voice was pitched oddly. Pinched sounding. I thought that potentially my nose was broken. My nose had been questionable before and a deviated septum wasn’t going to improve things. That’d suck later when I had time or capacity to really think. For now, my head was a slurry of television static and white-hot globs of ache. I didn’t know what to do with my tooth. For lack of better impulse, I put it in my pocket. I reached for the car door, gave it a limp, sorry tug. “I’ll be okay.”

Jing sucked in a hard breath. She looked at me a long moment and then she got out, passed around the front of the car. The broken windshield cracked her like a kaleidoscope. Jing looked nice all psychedelic. My neck felt sticky. I felt like I’d bitten the head off a honey bear and all the honey had sloshed down my front and it was the single most grimy feeling on earth. I felt disgusting. Jing made her way around the pole and appeared beside my window, and she opened the door for me, peered down at my face with open, brittle concern. She spoke crisply, without blinking. “Can I help you up?”

Was I the girl in the bottom of the pool, now? The dead little baby deer dyke?

My pride disagreed, but it was overpowered by some gut wisdom that moved my mouth for me. “Yeah,” I said. I poked my tongue up into the fabulous screaming hole where my front tooth should be. “Thanks, yeah.”

She leaned over me. Her blond hair fell along the line of her cheek and brushed my chest, sopped up some of the red there. It clung like paint. My stomach went sour. She reached down, movements careful and rabbity, and unbuckled me, manually guided the straps so that they did not touch my body as they receded back into their above-hanging plastic slit. She took a step back. “One foot out, come on.”

One foot out. That worked! Foot on pavement.

Jing nodded and touched my arm.

I twisted. My vision also twisted with a moment’s delay, which was exciting. I glanced at her—she spun, still warbled and aglow with hallucinogenic angel squiggles, which I knew she did not have intellectually but emotionally couldn’t process as abnormal—and pulled my weight up, balanced my pelvis over femurs over bottle caps over whatever was inside of calves. The sunset screamed at me. Heaven was excruciatingly pink, a snarling, hungry, evil pink, and it pressed down on my shoulders and pulled more blood out of my face. I didn’t move but did a pirouette. I slammed a hand on the car. Jing put a hand on the middle of my back, said my name a few times like it was some minor incantation. I inclined my head and opened my mouth. It was like upending a pudding cup. Dark red splattered between my boots in a single, viscous mass. I hoped I hadn’t coughed up my soul. That would suck a lot. Jing didn’t jump back, which I guess I had anticipated somehow. She leaned in, pulled me closer, just enough to hold some of my weight. I worried about crushing her. I worried about her body getting mashed under the horror show that was me.

“Steady,” she breathed.

“Mm-hmm.” I grimaced, took a step or two forward. That worked, feet worked, body suspended and attached to feet seemed to be doing as they ought. Progress. I reached out one arm and hovered it in midair above her shoulders, worried for a moment about touching her, about staining her clothing.

She lifted on tiptoe and shrugged me on like a jacket. “After Madeline, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

She steered me toward Madeline.

Madeline was only a few yards away from us. She stood at the edge of the road beside a ditch about as deep as a bathtub, and I felt a smidgeon grateful that Jing’s car had decided to eat shit on the pole instead. Crows jumped around to my left, beaks scissoring at the downed wires on either side of Jing’s crunched-up hood, and they cawed, they just kept cawing their incessant Caw caw caw I’m a bird what’s up bullshit antics, and it was so loud that I thought I might shatter. I swayed against Jing. She bore my weight more than I thought she could. Later I’d apologize, or maybe just thank her.

We came nearer to Madeline, shadowed against the violent pink sky and the chalky blue-black road. She peered down, face pale, lips pulled tight over her teeth. The ditch was hemmed with tawny dead grass, looked like cheap plastic hide on a hideous pair of boots, and it was not immediately apparent to me why the sight made Madeline look so wan.

We pulled ourselves beside her, peered down with her, beheld what she beheld.

Six raccoons at the bottom of the ditch. They looked like planks in a stretch of railroad. All belly up, with their feet stretched above their heads and toward the tips of their stripy lemur tails, stomachs as long as possible. Mouths like stingrays. Fur parted and rippling subtly in the breeze. They lay on top of the blackish gunky snow and something soft. Evenly spaced. The soft thing they rested on, I thought it was a coat initially, but three blinks later and I saw the hooves and fluffy knub of tail. Horizontally stretched beneath them was a deer skin, head retained, peppered with bead-sized flies. Marker stains peeked from under the raccoons. Sigil work, I thought. Unthoughtful, lazy sigil work.

“Tatum Jenkins’ car,” I mumbled.

Jing looked at me.

Madeline, fixed to the spot, did not.

“To think I could’ve died because of some guy with a name like Tatum.”