“Diana!” I called as soon as we stepped through the store’s door. The smell got stronger inside, and there was something in the air—something that got in your throat and made you cough like you’d inhaled fifty cigarettes. “Diana, you here?”
Ari stood close behind me. I knew she didn’t like the store, and for once I couldn’t blame her: it looked menacing in the dark of night, the uneven rows crowding in and strange shapes materializing out of the darkness, the smell of fumes in the air. We walked as quickly as we could up and down aisles, calling Diana’s name.
“So you can’t find Cal?” Ari asked.
“No. I don’t know what’s going on with him. I found out my mom pays an old hekamist every month to spell him—has been paying her six thousand dollars a month for years.”
“Six thousand dollars!” Ari’s eyes practically bugged out of her face. “That’s more than I’ve ever heard anyone pay for a permanent spell. And that’s every month? What for?”
I hadn’t realized it was so expensive. The only spell I’d ever bought was the one on Win’s last night. “He can’t hurt people. Couldn’t hit me. But maybe if it’s that much money, it’s for something else, too.”
“Huh. That’s so weird, because Kay’s spell—”
I winced. “Can we please not talk about Kay?”
She was silent a second, thinking, and we reached the end of another aisle before she spoke again. “Hey, can I ask you . . .” She breathed out through her nose, frustrated. I’ve never known her to ask permission to ask a question, so I braced myself for whatever it could be. “You really like Diana?”
I looked straight ahead. “I’m in love with her,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for another couple steps. Then she tripped over a stray gardening hose and hissed. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Some heavy, sad feeling in my chest broke loose and banged around my heart.
“I mean for everything. I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
She was not forgiven. Not yet. But I fell into step next to her easier now. If I closed a part of my mind, I could believe Ari and I were friends again, like before. If I didn’t look to the left, I could imagine Win next to us, silently a part of the group.
We saw a ring of light around the almost-hidden door to the woodshop. Ari saw it, too, and grabbed my arm.
“Diana?” I called. “You back here?”
I opened the door with my free hand—it stung my skin. The woodshop was so bright I had to blink a couple times to see. It wasn’t only the fluorescent lights; some of the scrap bins lining the walls were on fire.
“Shit—we have to get out of here,” I said, backing away from the door. It wouldn’t be long before the rest of the woodshop caught fire, and then the rest of the store—we’d be stuck here.
Behind me, Ari sucked in a breath and pushed past me, running straight into the burning woodshop. I started to call her an idiot then saw what she saw: Diana, behind the chain-link fence of the cage where we usually kept the welder.
My heart pounded against my ribs, no no no no no no no, and the shelves of wood and tools and fire closed in and towered above me.
When Diana saw us, she scrambled to her feet and started crying and talking at the same time. But I couldn’t hear anything she was saying over the rushing in my ears.
I ran across the shop, stumbling, and grabbed the chain link and shook it—actually kind of surprised when it didn’t crumble in my hands. The key the key the key the key—I knew where the key was, by the door, on a hook by the wood shop door, had to get the key to unlock the cage so Diana—
Diana was crying. Ari pressed her hand through the holes in the fence, reaching for her. “I was looking for you,” Diana said to me. “You weren’t under the tree. I went looking for you.”
I wrenched myself away and ran for the door, where I knew the key would be. The scrap bins burned and I could see where the end of a stack of two-by-fours had started to get black and smoky. I slipped on something on the floor—paint thinner? Alcohol? The floors all shined—someone had covered the place with it.
At the door I reached for the key on the hook even when I could see perfectly clearly that there was no key hanging there. Someone had taken it.
I kept saying “someone” in my mind but there was really only ever one person who could’ve done it, gotten in the hardware store after Dev checked it, known where the key was kept, locked her in and set the place on fire—even though I couldn’t imagine why and I didn’t want to believe.
Tools hung on a pegboard to my left. Fire licked at the bottom of it, but it wasn’t burning yet. (It would burn soon. The whole place would be ablaze. And Diana locked in the cage.) I took a deep breath, coughing on smoke, and grabbed a crowbar from its spot.
It was red hot; it burned my hand. I screamed and dropped it, then used my shirt wrapped around my left hand to carry it back to Diana.
She stood behind the fence watching me, tears streaking down her face.