I knew the story. Ari’s dad brought her out of the burning house, then went back for her mom, who had passed out from the smoke. Then the house collapsed on them. The person who lit the fire wasn’t a drifter or robber, as we’d always imagined, not someone random and faceless. The person who did this was someone I’d known my entire life. One of my older brothers, who I idolized. One of the Waters brothers, which meant something.
I also knew I wasn’t dead, because I didn’t see Win and my dad in some sort of mystical vision urging me to walk into the light.
I had to get up.
—Get up get up get up GET UP!
—Can’t.
—Don’t be such a baby. Who knows what your brother’s going to do next?
—I don’t.
—So what are you going to do to prepare?
—Lie here. Wait.
—Well that sounds like an A+ plan.
—Not my choice.
—What about Diana?
—What about her?
—You going to lie there when she needs you?
—Diana.
—Yes, Diana. You love her. Remember?
—Right. Yes. I have to get up. Have to help her.
—Well, you can’t.
—Hey, fuck you. I have to.
—Some things aren’t possible.
—She needs me! I have to get up!
—I’m sorry, Markos.
In those fleeting moments, the part of me that wasn’t fighting against my lifeless body thought that this was it, the worst thing that was going to happen. Cal had knocked me out. Now someone would show up, take him away, and take care of us. I thought for sure that what he’d done in the past was the worst of it; that getting it all out in the open would be good in the end; that one day we’d all be able to get past this.
I was wrong.
Echo and I walked right in through the propped-open hardware store door. Mina waited out in the car; I had promised we would only be a minute.
I followed Echo through the dark aisles. She wouldn’t have been able to follow me. This is what “balance” meant, to a hekamist, and what Echo had told me would happen when Mina and I went to her house for the spell. She put a layer on top of my hook not to break it but to counter its effects. There was nothing left for the hook to hook into. If someone really loved me, if she was able to look carefully and recognize the real me, she could see me—I hadn’t actually disappeared—but for everyone else I’d become a part of the background. I was invisible, except not in a cool superhero way—more like an I’m-screaming-and-waving-and-nobody-notices-me nightmare.
Worse than that was the feeling. The side effects of this new spell. My hook had let me unhook my worries, and my conscience felt clear. Now . . . how to describe it? I was a vacuum, sucking up emotions. Every time one came anywhere near me, it sank its teeth into me—into my whole body. I felt everything.
I needed to see Diana, to make sure she was okay and that it had been worth it. Echo had insisted on coming along. And since I hadn’t actually paid Echo yet—I had only my parent’s eighty dollars of pizza money, which she’d taken as a deposit—I wasn’t in a position to argue with her. Once we’d seen Diana for ourselves and Echo had done whatever it was she came here to do, I could go home with Mina—Mina, who could still see me; Mina, who loved me—and cry forever.
In the store, we heard something scuffling and crashing around corners, and we smelled smoke and alcohol, but we didn’t see Ari or Diana anywhere. It got darker and darker—I held up my cell phone for light—until we reached an open door next to a rack of paint chips.
Inside the interior room, which was full of huge power tools and slabs of wood, smoke made us cough, and it took a second to see Markos collapsed on the floor, and Diana kneeling in a chain-link cage next to him. The walls and benches were half-burned, and flames still licked the lip of a metal barrel of scrap. Close to where we stood in the door, Ari had wrapped herself into a tiny ball on the floor and was crying.
“Oh my god,” I said.
Diana looked up—her eyes drifted away from me, no longer hooked—and she addressed Echo. “He’s hurt—Cal hit him—and he hasn’t woken up,” she said.
I ran over, slipping on the wet floor, and took Markos’s wrist. His pulse was shallow and uneven. If he’d opened his eyes they would be dilated and unfocused, I was sure of it. Concussion at the very least. His skull felt almost pulpy from where he’d been hit, but I hoped that was from the bruising. I didn’t know what to do if Cal had smashed his skull in; it probably meant Markos was dying slowly right in front of us.
I didn’t say any of that out loud. No one would’ve heard me if I had, anyway.
“Ari?” Echo asked. “Ari? Are you okay?”
Ari didn’t answer her, and Diana pressed her forehead into a gap in the chain link. Her breathing was shallow and her skin sweaty and flushed; it seemed like she might be hyperventilating and running a fever. “Are you the one who spelled Cal?” she asked Echo.
Echo stiffened and looked at Ari, alarmed. Ari didn’t move from her crouch.
Someone spelled Cal?