“When we’re both still alive in six months, she’ll be in better shape to understand why I had to go.” She gestured at the small room filled with cheap furniture. “People pay a lot for what we do, but she’s always hidden the money, says she doesn’t want to call attention to ourselves by spending it, and I’ve never been able to find it. I’m not sure she knows where it is anymore, now that her mind’s going. So I have to earn money myself.”
We sat in silence for another few moments. It struck me that Echo had been here the whole time I’d been going to school, living her life in a tiny house, invisible to the rest of us—except when we needed her or her mother.
“So you’re a hekamist,” I said.
Echo nodded.
“And it’s always like that? Spells, I mean?”
“More or less. Food, blood, will.” She recited the words like a mantra, then bit off a piece of medical tape with her teeth and attached it to the gauze.
“And it . . . hurts?” I asked.
“Like hell.”
“So why do you do it?”
She peered up at me through dark hair matted with blood. “It’s not just pain. It’s also joy—the power of it. I’m a part of something bigger than me. Something beautiful. I set things right, keep the balance. That always feels good.” She sat up, pulling down the sleeve of her shirt over the fresh bandage. “Plus it’s my choice. I get to choose to help my mom stop suffering.”
“You never regret it?”
She looked for a second like she might snap at me, but seemed to reconsider. “There are moments. When it would be easier . . . not to be a hekamist.”
I’d heard hekamists on TV protesting the laws against joining covens, but they never talked about this. They talked about history and natural balance and the free market, and the grand peaceful history of hekame. No “food, blood, will.” No pain.
Echo leaned back in her chair. Her hair dripped red onto her cheek, so I handed her some extra gauze and she wrung out handfuls.
“Well, now that the secret’s out, I guess we’re done, then,” she said.
“Yeah. Good luck.” I started to creep toward the door, stepping carefully around the awkwardly placed couch and the passed-out older hekamist sleeping on it.
“Hey,” Echo said. She chewed on her bottom lip, hesitating. “The night Win died—the night he was going to pay me. Do you really not remember it at all?”
I stared at her, examining every twisted piece of hair and cinched buckle on her boots. Her eyes were light brown, softer than the sharp angles of the rest of her face. I had that not-quite-a-memory feeling again—of buoyancy. Light and air.
“You do seem a little familiar. I don’t know what this means, but I have a vague memory of—lightness.”
She smiled big then, so big it seemed to crack her face in two and she started crying.
I could’ve left then, turned around and walked out the door. But there was nothing out there for me except videos of past performances and friends who didn’t trust me. Strangely, Echo reminded me of Diana, or at least the old Diana, who needed me to be the strong one, the leader. Even though she was a hekamist. Even though I was the one who knew a secret about her, now. The secret made her real.
I went back to the kitchen and sat down across from her. Echo kept crying, tears gathering at the end of her nose, mixing with blood, and dripping onto her black-sleeved arms, which she’d crossed on the table. I wondered if that was what I would’ve looked like if I hadn’t taken the spell, and was in real mourning.
“I wasn’t in love with him or anything,” she said after a while.
“Oh. That’s okay.”
“But he listened, he trusted me. I’ve been on my own, basically, for a long time. I . . . miss him.” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
“What was he like?”
She looked down at her sleeve and the fingernails clutching the hem. “He played baseball. He was always kind to his sister.”
“I’ve met her,” I said. I remembered a small, pale girl who hugged me fiercely at the funeral. Where was she now? Would Old Ari have sought her out, spent more time with her? Did she miss me?
Echo stood up so abruptly I thought she might pass out. But though she swayed, she stayed upright, grabbing plates and throwing them into the sink. She stowed the puck in a cabinet next to a stack of dented baking sheets. The dirty gauze pads went into the garbage and the clean ones back where they came from. She moved too fast to follow in such a tiny kitchen.
“Win was a good brother,” she said. “Not that I have anything to compare him to. I’m an only child, obviously—and I’m not sure how my mom managed to have me, because it’s tough for hekamists to have kids. Something about the shared life of a coven isn’t conducive to the selfishness of a baby. That’s why—it’s why most hekamists used to join covens when they were older, back when it was legal to join. They’d wait until they’d already had their kids.” She stopped moving in the middle of the kitchen, as if shocked by her own words.
I was shocked, too. No babies. Not ever. I didn’t want one then and I doubt she did, either, but it was a tough life sentence to bear.