The Cost of All Things (27 page)

I took the bag from Echo’s outstretched hand.

It wasn’t a spell to forget, like I had hoped for, and it wouldn’t fix anything Cal had done, but it was something. It would get me out of town.

“If this works,” I said to Echo, pressing the plastic together between my fingers, “you can come with me to New York, stay on the couch in our shitty apartment. There’s got to be a ton of hekamists in New York, right?”

Echo touched her face where I had hit her. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Because . . . otherwise me taking this spell is charity. And I don’t need your pity.”

That wasn’t the only reason, of course—there was the fact that she’d probably die if I didn’t help her, and the fact that I owed her doubly for this because I’d stolen Win’s money, and the fact that I liked her, despite myself. She’d kept Cal’s secret, she’d tried to blackmail me, but she’d also tried to help, even though
she had no reason to. Plus she cared about Win and I used to care about Win, so she must have good taste.

She looked at me for a long moment. For a second we didn’t worry about Cal out in the store or Diana in the cage or Markos still knocked out on the floor. She smiled tentatively, as if I might change my mind. “It’ll work. You’ll be beautiful.”

I pulled open the seal on the plastic bag and several things happened at once.

Kay pushed Echo into a stack of buckets and tackled me to the ground, grabbing the bag from my hand.

Just as the shelf behind me—right where I had been standing—creaked and toppled over, sending a pile of PVC pipes clattering to the floor.

When the pipes stopped rolling, I pushed Kay off me. Echo groaned and sat up. “What the hell?”

Kay spoke frantically, words tumbling over one another. Though she wasn’t whispering I had to lean in close and concentrate extra hard in order to make out the words. “I figured it out. There’s got to be a spell. Echo’s spell. I mean the spell
affecting
Echo. A hook!” Kay flapped her arms in frustration. “Remember when you and Diana tried to leave me at the bonfire, and Diana busted her face?”

“Your hook’s balanced out now,” Echo said.

“And thanks so much for that,” Kay said, bitterness souring the words. “But I’m not talking about me. I think there’s a spell affecting Echo. A hook. One that her mom gave her, probably years and years ago. Think about it—that’s why Echo can’t seem
to get anyone to pay her for their spells, why she doesn’t just leave. It’s exactly like my spell—it keeps her close to her mom.”

Echo frowned. “My mom wouldn’t do that.”

“But Echo—all your bad luck,” I said. “What if it’s not luck?”

Echo kicked a piece of pipe and it rolled away. “She wouldn’t. Hekamists don’t spell other hekamists.”

“You give your mom spells for her pain,” I said.

“That’s different. That’s for her own good.” Echo’s eyes widened when she heard her words out loud.

“She would’ve thought she was protecting you,” Kay said.

“Keeping you from being discovered and going to jail,” I added.

“Watching over you. Because she cares about you.” Kay sounded defensive.

“Wait—hold on,” I said. “All I did was offer you our couch in New York if the spell works, and the shelf fell down on us. So if someone tries to help you, or gives you a way out . . .” I stopped, looking at the plastic bag in Kay’s hand.

A little thing—the thing that would let me dance again and go to New York as planned. I wasn’t attached to Kay’s hook anymore, so that wouldn’t keep me in Cape Cod.

And if I left, Echo could leave, too.

She’d been close to leaving once before. She’d told me she was waiting for Win to pay her the night that he died.

I leaned across the fallen pipes and grabbed Echo’s arm. “Echo—Win owed you money, right?”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh.” Her chin shook, which
made her look ten years younger. “Win was on his way to bring me the money when he crashed.”

“If you had his money, you could go,” Kay said.

“So if there was a hook on me . . . Win . . .” She hugged her arms close to her chest, as if to keep her heart inside her body.

“It could be a coincidence,” I pointed out.

“That’s how hooks
work
,” Kay said. “With coincidences and luck and chance. Your mom told me that when I got mine.”

“Oh god.” Echo took a deep, shuddering breath. “I killed him.”

We’d never know. Not for sure. No one was there with him in the truck; no hekamist could do a forensic analysis and tell us the truth. But it felt true, like how Cal setting the fire at my house felt true, like how Kay’s hook explained so much about my friendship with her.

“Everything I’ve done has backfired,” Echo said. She stared at her hands and spoke in a monotone. “Every spell I’ve ever done has made things worse.”

I knew that feeling. I was about to tell her it wasn’t her fault, and that I had made plenty of the terrible decisions that brought us here, too, but we heard sirens in the distance, and Kay grabbed our arms.

“They’re not going to be able to find us back here,” Kay said.

She started for the woodshop’s door, my spell still clutched in her hand. I was still trying to decide if I should follow her or stay with Diana and Markos when she stopped suddenly and backed up, stumbling over fallen PVC pipes.

Cal walked in after her.

That blank look on his face. He’d forgotten so much—to have it all come crashing back at once, every terrible feeling and thought, must’ve made him lose it.

Or maybe he was always a little bit off, and this was his real personality finally clawing its way to the surface, freed from the cage of spells he’d been given.

He held out an arm, his silver lighter in his fist. With a metal snap, he lit the flame.

I stepped right up to Cal and took the lighter from him.

It wasn’t particularly brave. In the hour since I’d balanced out my hook, I’d almost gotten used to being mostly invisible, and I figured he wouldn’t notice me. Sure enough, he had to blink a couple of times before his eyes—his strange, wild eyes—focused on my face.

“You don’t need that, Cal.”

He frowned, those terrible eyes darting all over the room, a bird crashing against windows looking for the sky. “You shouldn’t have spelled me,” he said distantly, as if recalling a dream.

“I’m sorry. I screwed up. I thought being alone was the worst thing that could happen to me, but it wasn’t.”

It didn’t matter that I meant that sincerely, and for Diana and Ari, too, because he didn’t have to listen and neither did they. He shoved me by the shoulders—hard—and ran from one end of the woodshop to the other, jumping nimbly over benches and around hulking pieces of machinery, digging through smoldering piles of
scrap and tossing PVC pipe right and left. He was looking for something. Another lighter? I clenched his in my fist along with Ari’s spell in its plastic bag. Maybe my anti-hook spell wouldn’t let him see that I had it.

It wouldn’t be long before he found something that would work just as well, though. I thought about running, but I couldn’t leave them all. I thought about trying to get him to give Echo some money, so we could trigger her mom’s hook and rain hellfire on him like the hook had done to Win, but there was no time. Plus, spells were unpredictable. I remembered hanging out in the ER expecting my hook to kick in and send one of my friends through the doors. They never showed. No one could know how far we had to push before the spell fought back.

Ari shrank against the wall away from Cal as he tore through the room, and Echo stood in front of her protectively. I glanced at the security monitor and saw cops shining flashlights through the closed front door. Cal must’ve doubled around behind me and Echo and locked the door after we came in.

That chilled me more than the darkness in his eyes or the lighter fluid. It said to me that he wasn’t simply unhinged, but that he knew what he was doing, and he didn’t want us to leave or be rescued. He wanted us to burn with him.

As he ran by Markos’s motionless body he knocked over a tin of lighter fluid. It spread quickly, seeping underneath where Markos lay and under the edge of Diana’s cage. She let it soak the knees of her jeans.

He made a noise—a cry of some kind, almost a howl—and
flicked the switch on a knee-high box with a rubber pipe running out of it, sitting just outside the cage where Diana was trapped. The pipe ended in a handheld trigger and a thin neck like the stem of a flower, and he clicked it once—twice—before the flower blazed to life. Blue and yellow. Too bright to look at.

I didn’t think. I ran straight at Cal, hugging him around the stomach and trying to tackle him. But he was taller than me, and stronger, and I didn’t want to hurt him—I just wanted to stop him. I managed to push him against the wall. He dropped the welder and it went out before it could touch any of the lighter fluid, but he grabbed a two-by-four leaning there, and as I scratched and kicked and flailed, the two-by-four swung and hit me in the side. I dropped to my knees. Then it caught me right in the chest with a crack.

Couldn’t breathe.

Fell to the ground and gasped for air.

I expected another hit from the two-by-four and welcomed it because I knew it would knock me out, and I wouldn’t have to feel my broken ribs and aching side, and I wouldn’t have to see Cal burn down the store and us in it.

Instead, lighter fluid seeped all around me. Up my nose. Stinging my eyes.

Ari yelled at Cal—yelled for the EMTs, somewhere out in the store—begged him not to do it—told him we would forget, that we would all take a spell with him, go back to the way things were, if that was what he wanted.

He didn’t respond. Nothing in him could hear her.

Breathing in fumes, lightheaded. The room shimmered.

Turned my head, and Cal picked up the Zippo from where I’d dropped it. Visible again.

Dizzy. Lighter fluid on my clothes, in my hair. Couldn’t get up.

I couldn’t see Ari or Echo. Markos lying next to me, not moving. Diana on the other side of him screaming.

I rested my head in a puddle. Took a breath and my chest crackled. Ribs broken. No air.

I felt empty, floaty, like there was nothing left of me but a paper shell. Wouldn’t hurt to burn to death. A
whoosh
and then nothing, like a scrap of newsprint.

So much for making things right and reversing the hook. So much for spells.

They couldn’t be counted on when it mattered. Spells would always find a way to trick you, to use your weaknesses against you, to come up with the ugliest possible solution to your problem. They were blunt instruments—but then again so were planks and flames. Fists and hammers. So were words and kisses.

Cal held the yellow flame of the Zippo far from his body. It came closer, a tiny sun, and I had to close my eyes.

“What’s in the bag?” Cal asked.

He held the Zippo a foot from Kay’s head, which was soaked in lighter fluid. I smelled barbecues and bonfires. Burned flesh.

If I ran I knew I’d trip and fall and get lost in the store before finding the door to the outside. I knew the place would burn down with me and Diana and everyone else in it.

Cal looked at my dancing spell, lying on the floor where Kay must’ve dropped it.

“It’s—it’s a spell,” I said.

Kay raised an arm and pushed the bag toward him.

“What does it do?” Cal asked.

“It’ll make you forget,” I said more steadily. “Like I forgot Win.”

He picked up the bag. Something flashed from the depths of his dead, blank eyes. Something alive—something that hurt—a flash of the person Cal had been, trying to claw its way out.

He blinked at the spell. The bright hot room lit up his face
and the hope and desire and anger and fear in it.

Get ready.

I looked for Echo, and she was kneeling over something in the corner, muttering to herself.

Diana’s mouth moved, and she shook the chain link.

Kay turned her head and managed to half roll over to watch.

Tears streamed down Cal’s face, no longer a terrifying blank, but broken, in agony and relief. He opened the bag and emptied most of the contents into his mouth. Chewed and swallowed.

A beat of silence, the Zippo still lit in one hand.

He made a strangled noise and his expression twisted. “What the hell . . .” He turned and crashed into a machine. “What did you—this isn’t—”

I ran to him, slipping on the lighter fluid. I landed hard on my knee and it twisted beneath me. Something snapped. Pain shot up my thigh to my back, but I dragged myself up and threw my entire body at Cal, knocking him down. I dug my knees, even the one that felt loose and shaking with pain, into his back.

There was a
whoosh
, and fire burst from the spot where he’d been standing. He had been holding the lighter—it was a live flame. Markos was still unconscious. Kay could barely turn over. Diana was locked in the cage. We would burn up quickly from the fluid in our clothes and hair and mouths.

An easy way for Echo’s mom’s hook to eliminate the threat of Echo leaving would be for it to kill us all.

Echo—where was Echo?