I pressed my chest, pushing my racing heart back into my rib cage. Wished I could push it through to the other side.
“I thought it was Kay’s hook for a while. Making him act so odd. But if it was the hook it would’ve brought us to Kay, and he was keeping us both away. So I thought—the only way to interfere with a hook is another spell, right? So he must have other spells.”
“Yes,” I said. “Markos said he’s been taking them for years.”
Diana went silent. I tried to think.
Hekamists’ spells are usually temporary so people keep coming back month after month. You pay a little bit of money to them regularly, a steady stream. Markos told me his mother had been paying for Cal’s spells for years—but a huge pile of money every month, not just a little.
Nine years, Cal said. Nine years since he was last angry.
I felt close to understanding something bigger than me. I pulled at my hair and squeezed my eyes shut.
Nine years. So he would’ve been eleven when it started. Just a kid in junior high. I tried to remember what he was like then. When he was eleven, I was seven.
So maybe he got in a couple fights in junior high. He might have gotten in trouble for pranks. Big deal. Nothing to warrant an anti-violence spell, nothing he would need to forget. It’s not like he killed anybody.
My hand jerked to my face.
The ground dropped open, but if I didn’t look down, I wouldn’t fall.
No.
“The key,” I heard myself say to Diana. “I have to get the key from . . .”
I couldn’t say his name.
One big barrel of scrap wood kept burning but the rest only smoked. I could leave this room and find him—find out if this terrible suspicion was true.
I ran for the door. On the way I stumbled on nothing, all the way to my knees, crack, right on the floor.
In class, before Rowena arrived, we used to make fun of the girls with bruised knees and shins and hips. Dancers weren’t supposed to walk into desks or trip up the stairs. Sometimes we got bruises from certain movements or being dropped in a pas de deux, but that wasn’t the same thing. Those were badges of honor. There was a difference between civilian bruises, which were stupid and avoidable, and battle scars.
Since taking the memory spell I’d become a civilian, covered with bruises. I had thought the bruises were a mistake, and that if everything were right again, my skin would look as clean and smooth as the dancer I was inside my head.
But no—these bruises were my battle scars now. I’d earned them. My outsides matched my insides, nothing clean and smooth about them.
For a second before I got up again, I thought the best thing to do would be to stay exactly where I was and wait for Echo to find us—someone else could be the hero and save us all. Then tomorrow, if I was still alive, I could go to a hekamist with every last penny of my Sweet Shoppe savings and my parents’ life insurance money—all of our moving funds for New York—and have her pluck this memory from my mind. Cal Waters. The terrible thing he might have done. The secret his mother and Echo’s mom kept for years. Markos knocked out on the floor. Diana whispering his name over and over. The smell of fire and paint thinner and oil. I’d even rub out Kay for good measure.
I didn’t want to know the truth.
Only thing was, if I did erase it all, who knows who I would be then and what I might want.
My damn spells. They scraped me away layer by layer. Cut out my parents’ death and fill the empty space with dancing. Cut out Win and the need for dance pours in again. What other deeply held but now forgotten desires were underneath those?
Dig down farther and farther, discarding desires like old clothes. Eventually there had to be a point where I wanted nothing at all.
But I hadn’t reached that point yet.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers ..................................................................
When I lay blacked out on the floor of the shop, I didn’t exactly dream. But it wasn’t pure blankness, either. I floated in and out of my body in waves. In—pain, panic. Out—numbness, nothing. In and out. For moments in between, breaths and heartbeats at a time, I knew where I was and what had happened.
I knew the smell of the shop, wood and oil and charcoal, something crackling like spice.
I knew I was in trouble. I knew we all were.
I knew Ari was hurt and wasn’t moving, but I also knew that she would eventually get up and keep going, because she would never leave me and Diana trapped here to burn.
I knew Ari was my friend.
I knew what Cal had done.