Echo leaned into the light. I hadn’t noticed until then that she wasn’t wearing her usual jacket, only a long-sleeved black T-shirt. She pulled up the sleeve, revealing a row of cuts from her wrist to her shoulder—some of them fresh and not scabbed over.
She picked up a jagged stone and selected a spot. I told myself to run over there and knock her hand away, but I couldn’t move. When she cut, she didn’t scream or wince. She didn’t close her eyes. She watched—and I watched—as blood from the cut dripped down onto the hockey puck. After a few moments of dripping, all the light in the room turned red. I thought I saw a face above the apple, blinking, malignant, and then Echo screamed and I screamed and shut my eyes and covered my head with my arms.
When I opened my eyes, there was silence in the room. Even Echo’s mom had stopped crying. She stood at the kitchen table with the apple in her hand, chewing. Echo slumped over, her head next to the puck-like device. Now that the room seemed less like it was going explode, I could walk over to Echo, checking to make sure she was breathing. She was.
Echo’s mother patted her daughter’s unmarked arm. “Thank you,” she said, then she lay on the couch. The crack of the apple’s flesh as her teeth ripped off another piece of fruit reverberated through the room. Echo’s arm continued to bleed, red puddling beneath her hair.
Echo was a hekamist.
She shouldn’t exist.
All the anger and recrimination that had sounded so good in my head on the way over seemed pointless. My secret was out. There was nothing Echo could do about it now.
I opened and closed a few cabinets until I found a huge pack of gauze and some antiseptic wipes. When I touched the wound with the wipe Echo started awake and blinked twice at me.
“You’ve got the money?” she said in low voice, glancing at her mother surreptitiously.
I let my jaw drop for a moment before answering. “Seriously? I came over here to give you shit—Markos knows, which means soon everyone will. I thought you got tired of waiting and told him.”
Her shoulders slumped and sank further into her seat. “Why would I tell Markos? Keeping the secret was my only leverage.”
“Well, someone told Markos.”
“Maybe he figured out you were lying.”
“I’ve barely hung out with him since Win’s funeral. He’s had no opportunity to test me on Win trivia.”
She sucked in a breath as if I’d pinched her, hard. “It’s not a joke, you know. Just because you don’t remember doesn’t mean a person didn’t die.”
I held my wrist where it hurt the most. “I know that.”
“You can’t know. That’s the point.”
She wiped blood away from the cut on her arm. It was a clean line, despite the rough edges of the stone, still clutched in her hand.
“I told Markos,” Echo’s mom said from the couch.
Echo and I turned to her. “Mom—why?”
“If you get money you’ll leave me,” Echo’s mom’s voice got soft; her eyes closed. The core of the apple rested on her chest. “Couldn’t let that happen. Too dangerous for my Echo to be out in the world . . . too many dangers . . .”
“Did you talk to my mom?” Echo asked me.
“Um,” I said. “Yes. But . . . you aren’t both blackmailing me? Together?”
Echo shook her head slowly. “She doesn’t want me to go. She worries about me. Shit.”
I tried to change the subject. “What kind—I mean—well—what’s wrong with her, exactly?”
Echo inclined her head at her mother, now seemingly asleep on the couch, as she started wrapping a bandage around her arm. “This is what happens when we lose our coven. First the mind becomes unbalanced, unreliable. Then there’s a period of pain, sudden and devastating. And eventually we stop being able to eat or speak, and . . .” She shrugs. “The more spells you’ve done, the faster it happens. That’s why I’m still okay and she’s in the pain part. I’ve been giving her some spells to take the edge off.”
“Why not take one spell and be cured?”
Echo shook her head. “One spell, for that amount of pain, would kill her. The best I can do is dull it temporarily. Buy myself some more time.”
“More time for what?”
“To get out of town and convince more hekamists to add us to their coven. To save her life.”
“You can’t just email them?”
“I’m illegal. Not supposed to exist. If I get caught, everyone in my coven goes to jail. I need to persuade them personally. Maybe even pay them off. What did you think I wanted your money for?”
“Oh.” I glanced over at Echo’s mom, asleep on the couch. “Oh. She doesn’t want to find another coven?”
“She’s afraid. That I’ll get caught, get taken away. Afraid I’ll leave her.”
“You are going to leave her, though.”