She wrapped a hand around the opposite elbow and bit her lip. “Win owes someone five thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, and I gave him five thousand dollars. So that’s done.”
“She didn’t get that.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . I spent it.”
I exhaled all the air in my chest.
“I didn’t know it was his,” Ari said. “I mean, yours. I found it in my closet. He must’ve hidden it there.”
“So return whatever you bought and give this person the money.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t going to say what she spent it on; I could see that. I think she thought I would be grateful that she told me anything at all.
“Fine, then,” I said. “Win’s debts died with him. Tell this person you went on a shopping spree and they can fuck off.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
I brushed scrap metal off the table and took a step closer to her. “I should give you five thousand dollars—why? You basically already stole five thousand from me. You won’t tell me what you spent it on. You won’t talk to me at all. Where have you been all summer?”
She frowned, a mulish expression on her small face. “If Win asked, you would lend him the money right away. You did lend it to him. Bet you didn’t give him the third degree, either.”
“You think we’re friends like me and Win were friends?”
Her stubborn expression didn’t budge. “I have your back. You should have mine.”
“Win was my best friend. There’s no one else I would treat the same, and no one else I ever will. Ever. You and I haven’t even hung out in weeks. You think I owe you what I owed Win? Because he loved you? No. In fact, as of right now, we’re not friends. You understand?”
“Come on, Markos—”
“No. I’m serious. Why keep pretending? We don’t have anything in common anymore. I’m not sure we ever did.” That wasn’t what I wanted to say, and probably wasn’t even true, but I couldn’t stop. “I don’t like you. I don’t like your jokes. I don’t feel sorry for you because you have such a tragic past. There’s nothing about you that’s in any way interesting to me.”
She seemed defeated, but not as completely as I’d hoped. I had hoped for a massive meltdown. I wanted her to feel on the outside as shitty as I felt inside.
“You could have just said no,” she said.
“And you can show yourself out,” I said, and turned my back on her. “Good luck finding the door.”
Win, I’d steal for. Win, I’d die for. Ari was not Win.
She left, stumbling a little through the woodshop door. On the flat screen, I watched her turn and double back through the store, always choosing the wrong way. Lost.
And I did not help her.
Echo had agreed to help me, but practicing the spell took time—hers and mine. She’d tell me when to come over and I’d sit on her couch and she’d ask me more questions about how I felt and how I wanted to feel, or she’d tell me what she’d read in one of her mother’s books about mental spells and what I might expect as far as side effects.
She also told me about her mother, who wasn’t well. “She’s forgetting things. Losing pieces of herself,” Echo said. I thought she meant dementia, but it was more than that: this was what happened when hekamists outlived their covens. Echo was the only one her mother had left. A coven had to have at least three—and ideally more than seven—in order to be stable. “When she dies, I’ll go totally nuts,” Echo said matter-of-factly.
“Are you mad at her for making you join?”
“She didn’t make me do anything. I joined when the second-to-last member of her coven got cancer. I wanted to. I couldn’t let my mother fall apart.” She grinned a red-lipsticked grin. “Besides, being a hekamist has plenty of perks. If I hadn’t joined, I couldn’t help you.”
On one of these visits, while she frowned into pots and pans and made me taste tiny crumbs of cheddar and Parmesan and Camembert and Boursin, Echo told me how she’d gotten kicked out of college and fired from her waitressing job and how apartments had filled with rats and suspicious supers had torn up leases and forced her home again.
“It’s almost like my mom’s given me a hook,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“What’s a hook?”
“Type of spell to keep me close to her. It would make sense—she’s worried about me because I’m illegal. She’s afraid I’ll get caught and go to jail forever.”
“Would you?”
“Well. Yes.” She waved away the threat. “I’d go to jail, she’d go to jail. Anyone in a coven who makes a new hekamist goes to prison for life. Which is why I need to get out there and find another coven—convince them to take us on. They’ll need some persuading, maybe even some cash, because it’s such a risk to take on someone underage. But I have to do something to save my mother. Save me.”
I leaned forward across the kitchen table, surprised to find myself interested—not a word I’d use to describe myself often those days.