The Graces (15 page)

‘Hello?’ I called into the hallway.

The Grace house was quiet. It was almost a week after the party, but the last of the extended family had only gone the day before, leaving a cavernous silence in their wake. Gwydion had taken the opportunity to travel to the city with a cousin who lived there and wouldn’t be back for another couple of days. Esther was holding court at Nature’s Way and would be holed up in her workshop there until very late, Summer had assured me. I found it easier to be here when they weren’t. Easier to breathe.

I dropped my bag at the foot of the stairs and wandered into the kitchen. The fridge purred gently, underlining the quiet. Outside the sun sparkled over the patio stones, but in here it was calm and cool. A huge bowl of strawberries sat in the middle of the table, gleaming red. Fruit in this house always looked like it
would burst open on your tongue and fill your throat with clear, fresh juice.

‘Eve and the apple,’ said a voice behind me.

I flinched, turned. Fenrin was in the doorway, watching me. Sometimes it still hurt to look at him and have him look right back. I should have been used to it by now.

‘Huh?’ I said. Evocative. Eloquent. As always.

He pointed to the strawberries. ‘You looked like you were undergoing some kind of struggle with temptation. Forbidden fruit.’ He misinterpreted my expression as alarm at being caught and laughed. ‘Relax. You know you can eat them. You can have anything you like.’

Can I?

Was I making this conversation seem loaded, or was it him, talking temptation with that flirtatious slant to his mouth?

‘I haven’t seen you since my birthday,’ he said, coming in closer and picking up a strawberry from the bowl. ‘Did you have a good time?’

A good time? Yes, up until the moment it all started going wrong.

See, Fen
, I wanted to say,
the plan had been for us all to sneak out of there together, go upstairs and hole ourselves up with alcohol and music. The plan had been for me to watch you dance to ‘Footloose’ and cheer and clap and hug
you and feel your hand lightly skating my back in a way that didn’t say ‘friends’, and then later, when everyone had finally fallen asleep, the plan, Fenrin, had been to just lean forward and kiss you with no warning, and feel your hands around the back of my head, pushing your mouth into mine as if you couldn’t get enough of me and had been twisted up inside waiting for this for so long
.

The plan had not been for Fenrin to completely disappear for the rest of the evening without any kind of sorry or why. The plan had not been for me to spend my time getting Thalia upstairs to her room without any adult partygoers seeing us, and helping her into bed. She’d asked me not to tell anyone about Marcus’s visit, and I hadn’t, but I couldn’t keep it secret for long. How far would he go next time? Would it be my fault if something happened? I had to tell Summer, at least. The closer I got to her, the harder it got to lie to her. I liked the way she trusted me. I wanted to be the kind of friend who earned that trust. Now that she was no longer preoccupied with her visitors, I could get her on her own and we’d work out what to do.

‘Yeah, it was fun,’ I said. ‘Thank you for inviting me. Did you have a good time?’

‘I did, actually.’ There was a secretive kind of a smile in his voice. ‘Summer said something about swimming down at the cove today. You up for it?’

‘I have a towel with me and everything.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You are aware that you could just borrow one from us.’

‘I’m aware,’ I said, mock haughtily. ‘But my towel is better than yours.’

He smirked. I watched him take the strawberry into his mouth whole and bite down.

There was a short, sharp, loud shriek that echoed through the hallway.

Fenrin cocked his head. ‘What the hell?’

‘Was that … a cat, or something?’ I said.

‘We don’t have pets.’

‘Bird?’

‘Maybe. It came from outside.’

He disappeared out of the kitchen, and I followed him to the back door. He was standing, his back to me.

He was absolutely still.

I gave it a moment, but the moment stretched and grew strange.

‘Fe—’

I bit his name off as he moved fast, jerking into action, racing across the patio and down the stone path. Startled, I ran, too.

‘Fenrin, what—’

But he didn’t turn around and he didn’t talk. He reached Summer, who was standing in the middle of
the garden, holding a mound of mud in her hands. She was looking down at it.

Fenrin took hold of her arm.

‘Summer, what’s wrong?
Summer
.’

I reached them, trying not to pant.

‘Can you see it?’ Summer said to him. Her voice was normal. Very, very normal and extremely calm.

‘See what?’

‘Look at it.’

She was staring down at the mud ball in her hands.

Fenrin looked at it. ‘It’s just mud. What is it, like a chunk of stone?’

‘It was just lying there,’ Summer went on. ‘There’s that clear patch of soil right at the back, near the oak tree. We don’t plant around that tree, you know? We don’t plant anywhere near it. But the soil was all scattered, and this was lying there next to the hole, as if it had just been dug up.’

‘
What’s
been dug up?’ said Fenrin, growing impatient.

I stared at the mud ball.

It was kind of elongated, like a mini rugby ball. A dirty red-brown.

‘You don’t see it?’ said Summer, her voice whispery, paper thin.

‘There’s a tube coming out of it,’ I said, getting curious.

‘It’s a heart.’

Fenrin went still.

I looked at it. The more I looked, the more I could see it.

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ said Summer.

‘It’s too small,’ I said cautiously, my body humming with anxious dread.

Fenrin extended a finger, thought better of it. ‘Animal.’

‘Fox,’ said Summer.

‘How the hell would you know that?’ Fenrin shot back.

‘There was a bit of fur. It was orange and white.’

‘Could be cat.’

‘It’s fox.’

‘How do you know for sure?’ I said.

Summer pursed her lips. ‘Because I know what you need a fox heart for.’

We watched each other.

‘Well, for Christ’s sake, stop touching it,’ Fenrin said suddenly, and Summer dropped it to the ground like it scorched her. ‘And you should wash your hands because god knows.’

I stared at the dirty heart on the ground. ‘What do you need a fox heart for?’

‘It’s bad,’ said Summer. ‘Old magic. We don’t do that sort of thing. This is really bad.’ Her eyes widened with a new urgency. ‘If there was old magic working against us …’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That night in the woods. We tried to get Marcus to go away, right?’ She turned to me. ‘Well, what if someone had already tried? But they used old magic to do it. And then we did ours on top. That could really mess things up, two spells working against each other—’

Fenrin scoffed. ‘I’ve never even heard of that. How do you know what would happen?’

‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘What does a fox heart do?’

‘It’s about cunning and manipulation. The trickster. You see?’ Summer looked down at her dirt-streaked hands. Dirt plus something else? My insides gave a gentle roll. ‘Thalia cast a spell on Marcus to manipulate him.’

‘You make me sound like a calculating bitch.’

Summer full-body flinched.

Thalia was standing, framed by the house, as we stared back at her. She looked calm, but it was a lie, and if I could see it, then everyone could. Her mouth was drawn and her eyes were too wide.

‘Thalia,’ said Summer. ‘What did you do?’

‘What did
you
do?’ she snapped. ‘You did a spell in the woods? Without me?
On
me? How could you?’

‘Thalia,’ Fenrin joined in, gently. ‘Come on. What the hell is this?’ He pointed to the heart on the ground.

Maybe it was the sight of her twin, the sceptic, the hater of magic, asking her. But she broke.

‘I just wanted to not end up like all the rest,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like our aunts and cousins. Like our grandparents, and like Esther.’

‘You tried to break the curse,’ Summer breathed.

Thalia wrapped her arms around herself. ‘No, no. No one can break the curse. I just wanted to make it so he didn’t like me any more.’

There in the sunshine, it sounded so thin and unreal.

‘When?’ said Fenrin. ‘When did you cast it?’ His face was cold. I knew what he was thinking.
You kept this from me
.

‘A while ago. After the thing at Christmas.’ She swallowed. ‘I didn’t want him to end up like all the rest of them from our amazing family history. Dead or mad. It’s him or me, isn’t it? That’s how the curse works. I liked him too much, okay? He didn’t deserve that. I
wanted to save him. But it didn’t work.’ Her voice had a quiet wail to it. ‘He’s gone crazy anyway, hasn’t he? So I’m screwed. It’ll play out like it always does.’

‘But … it’s better,’ said Summer cautiously. ‘I thought he was better. It’s working. Isn’t it?’

Thalia’s eyes met mine.

Tell them
.

She sighed. ‘No, it’s not. He was here at the party. He was … he was not okay.’

Fenrin threw up his arms to the sky, turning his back on her. He rubbed his hands over his face, there in the bright sunshine, and it looked odd because we’d all been brought up to believe that sunshine and darkness couldn’t exist in the same place, but they did, they did.

‘That crazy – What did he do?’

The athame, gripped in his hand.

A blood pact
.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Thalia. ‘All that matters is that the curse exists, Fen, you have to see it does, because nothing we do works. It’s stronger than all of us.’

‘Come on. That’s twice he’s tried to attack you,’ I said. Her heavy, tragic fatalism was starting to grate on me. ‘Are we just going to sit back and see if third time’s the charm?’

‘Twice?’ Fenrin echoed, baffled. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Well, the first time was in Thalia’s bedroom.’ Fenrin was blank. Thalia’s eyes were on the ground. ‘The thing that started all this? Your parents throwing him out?’

‘They threw him out because Esther walked in on them having sex,’ Fenrin said coldly. ‘They actually threw him bodily out of the house and told him he was never allowed to even speak to Thalia again. And she went along with it – she’s utterly ignored him ever since. Our crazy ex-best friend. Why, I hear you ask? Oh, because she was risking the curse by being with a non-witch, wasn’t she, the good old non-existent curse, and let’s not forget that Marcus isn’t the one they’ve chosen for her. Is he?’

They were staring at one another. I felt the undercurrent of something unsaid all around us, pulling and tugging, but I didn’t know what waters we swam in now.

‘So,’ I said, in my most reasonable voice. ‘You, what. Told everyone at school that he attacked you? Why? To save face?’

‘I never said that,’ Thalia tried to snap, but her voice wavered with unshed tears.

‘But you didn’t deny it, either, did you, when the rumours started?’

She looked away, her mouth trembling.

‘What rumours?’ Fenrin demanded.

I rounded on him. ‘How the hell can you not know? It’s all anyone at school ever talks about when he walks into a room. They’ve made up all these lies about him because none of you ever told them what really happened. He’s practically a rapist in their eyes. That’s really unfair. At the least, he’s some kind of creepy stalker—’

‘Well, that part’s true,’ Summer said, and then she held her hands up when my eyes landed on her. ‘Look, he is. You can’t deny how he’s been recently. And I didn’t know about the rumours, not really. I mean …’ She paused, uncomfortable. ‘Maybe I overheard something one time. But no one talks about anything to do with us around us, River. They all get this look on their faces, like we’d take their heads off if they so much as breathed a word of it.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ I said.

‘No one’s.’ She shook her head. ‘We didn’t ask them to be like that. It’s just the way it is.’

No. You never ask, do you? People just part for you, and bend around you, and flock to you, and it’s not like you encourage it. It just is
.

But you don’t discourage it, either
.

Why would they, though? Who would discourage power? It was all anybody ever wanted. Power got you through the day when everything seemed grey and bleak. I knew this.

My anger drained away, leaving me tired.

Summer was staring at her hands. ‘What are we going to do about this?’ she said.

I nodded at the brown, withered heart on the ground. ‘We’re going to take off this fox spell. Have you even thought about the fact that Marcus’s recent behaviour is because of it?’

‘It was supposed to do the opposite,’ Thalia said, her voice wispy and small.

‘River’s right.’ Summer glared around. ‘I’m going to wash this horrible shit off my hands. And then we’re going to fix it.’

When the day stretched into early evening, we gathered in the garden.

Wolf had turned up late in the afternoon, back from a day trip he’d taken into the city with his father. He was enigmatic at the best of times, but tonight it felt like he was trying to disappear into himself, barely raising his voice over a grunt. Someone had evidently filled him in on the day’s events, and he didn’t seem happy about it – it looked like he and Fenrin had fallen out. They kept circling each other like angry cats and now sat on opposite sides of our ragged, five-pointed circle.

I’d spent the afternoon at the cove with Summer, but no one else had wanted to come, and it hadn’t been carefree and fun the way I’d imagined it. She’d scrubbed them clean, but every time I looked at her, I flashed back to her dirt-streaked hands and the heart they had held.

We gathered, and at first no one talked. Thalia was draped in a wicker chair next to Summer, silent. Summer was staring off into the distance, her fingers tapping out a rhythm on the grass only she could hear. Wolf was fiddling with the cork in a bottle of wine. Fenrin seemed lost in thought.

I had a role to fulfil. I was the disruptor. The outsider. The one forcing them out of the comfortable rut of secrets and silence they were accustomed to, and into action.

Be brave
.

‘So what magic needs a fox heart?’ I said. ‘I mean, what does it do, exactly?’

‘It’s an old way of doing things,’ Wolf said, unexpectedly. ‘You offer an exchange, a sacrifice, instead of using your will. You offer up something else instead of using yourself.’

‘Bad magic,’ Summer said, gloomily.

Thalia was very still and small.

Bad magic?

I didn’t think magic could be bad. It depended on the person doing it, not the thing itself. It was like a knife. Inert until someone forced their will on it, driving it into action. It could be used to cut someone free or kill them. It was all things, and no things, given purpose by an outside force.

Magic was only bad if you were, too.

‘Well, come on,’ said Fenrin to me. ‘The spell in the woods was your idea. What do you think we should do to fix it?’

Wolf raised his head to look at me. And then they all did.

I felt myself start to melt under their collective staring. I searched, stumbling around half-formed thoughts. ‘What do you want me to say?’

Fenrin folded his arms. ‘You must have a plan of action. You said we had to take off the spell on Marcus, so let’s hear it.’

‘I don’t have a plan,’ I said, uncomfortable. ‘I’m not an expert on magic. I was just …’ I faltered.

But his stare was hard. He was challenging me.

Be the disruptor. Be brave
.

So I said, ‘I was just thinking about bad magic. I don’t think that’s the problem here. I think it’s to do with intention.’

Summer was frowning.

‘I think when we did the spell in the woods, our intentions weren’t pure,’ I carried on. I wouldn’t look at Fenrin for his reaction, not until I’d finished.

Maybe he didn’t even remember what he’d said to me, anyway.

‘We all wanted to break the curse,’ Summer said.
‘That was the intention. Why would anyone want something different?’

‘Maybe someone wanted to punish her.’

‘Who? Thalia?’ Summer was mystified. ‘Why?’

I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say it.

It didn’t matter, though, because Fenrin said it for me. ‘Maybe I thought she deserved it for being a coward.’

There was a shocked silence.

His eyes fell on mine.

‘Thank you,’ he said, clearly. ‘Very sweet of you to let everyone know.’

He stood up and walked off down the path towards the grove.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wolf twitch as if to go after him, but then he stayed still.

‘What is he talking about?’ Summer said.

I didn’t dare look at Thalia.

‘River, just tell us.’ Summer’s voice was urgent. ‘We can’t do a spell without knowing everything. We could screw it up again.’

It felt like a betrayal. He’d confessed it to me – you didn’t tell other people’s confessions. But god, there were all these knotted, tangled secrets, strangling us. We were choking to death. I wanted to save us.

‘He told me something,’ I said. ‘That night in the
woods. He said he wanted to punish Thalia, not help her.’

Thalia laughed, only it sounded more like a gasp.

‘Look, I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry,’ she echoed, her voice flat, and laughed again.

‘So you’re saying it’s Fenrin’s fault.’ It was Wolf.

I eyed him. ‘I’m not saying anything like that. People can’t help what they really feel inside.’

Wolf shifted, folded his arms. ‘No, but it
is
his fault, then – whether he wants it to be or not.’

Fenrin felt guilty. He remembered what he’d told me and thought the same as I did – that this was all going wrong because of him.

‘I’ll go and talk to him.’ Summer shifted.

‘No, I’ll go.’ I got up and walked down the stone path to the grove. I could see him in the half-dusk, just beyond the apple tree. As I contemplated his outline, alone and stark against the tree trunks, I made a decision. In the spirit of the evening, I would finally tell him the truth about the way I felt.

He was leaning back with his arms folded, facing away. He heard me approach and sighed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I offered.

He said nothing. I waited a moment, but a nervous energy was sparking in me, and I walked round to stand right in front of him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated.

He looked at me. ‘Are you the type to bring out people’s secrets when it suits you, like a good card hand?’

‘What? No. I didn’t tell them to hurt you. I just … we shouldn’t let everyone think it’s all going wrong because of bad magic, when it might not be. We should all know everything between us. Shouldn’t we?’ I hated how my voice sounded, like I was pleading with him. Pleading didn’t sound like I was right. I tried to change my face, my stance.

‘Was it really up to you to tell them?’

‘Well, were
you
going to tell them?’

He was silent.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘Why not?’ he exploded. ‘It’s bullshit. We didn’t do anything that night in the woods. Nothing.’

‘Will you just stop lying to yourself? You believe, Fen. Why else would you be acting so weird about this?’

He laughed, raising his hands helplessly. ‘Jesus, another zealot. You’re really starting to fit in well, aren’t you?’

I wanted to hit him.

‘Why do you use that as a put-down with me, as if it’s just so pathetic to like you?’ I stopped. ‘All of you,’
I amended. I bit the inside of my cheek hard, to replace the emotion with pain. To regain my control.

He was turning away from me.
Don’t turn away from me
.

‘It’s not because I met you guys and then suddenly decided magic was real, okay? I’ve always believed, before you came along. Maybe not in magic, but in something.’

Fenrin stopped. ‘What do you mean?’

I’d gone too far without even realising. ‘Nothing.’

‘No,’ he said, renewed. ‘You’re so damn mysterious. You never talk about yourself, you just let us go on and on about our own unimportant crap. You sit there like a mirror, and all you do is magnify all of us. You have to tell us your secrets too, River.’

‘There’s nothing to tell!’

‘Come on. There’s always something.’

‘No! I’m the most boring person in the world! Okay? Is that what you want to hear? That I hang around with you because I want to be interesting, to be
loved
.’ I spat the word out. ‘Loved and adored, like you are. That’s what I want. You happy now? I’m just as pathetic as you think I am.’

I stopped, shocked at myself. How had this happened? How had I let so much out when I’d worked so hard to keep it all in?

‘You’re not,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve never thought that, River. Not once.’

My heart moved, stirred. It was the confirmation I’d been looking for from him all this time. I felt tears trying to leak out of me, and I just panicked. I did it badly as well, kind of gulping in a breath like I was about to take a dive, and moving up to him, trying to concentrate on his mouth.

I leaned in. This was it. The moment I had been thinking about for months.

But I didn’t even get close enough to touch. His hands were on my shoulders, stopping me.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. He sounded alarmed.

I could see a sickly realisation creeping across his face. He wasn’t happy.

He wasn’t happy at all.

‘River, I—’

I tried to laugh. Bad, bad mistake. It came out stuttering. ‘It was just a joke. You should see your face.’

He dragged in a deep breath, fighting for words. ‘This is … I didn’t even realise.’

It was a compliment, of sorts. A testament to how good I was at hiding my true self.

I was looking at the trunk past his face, tracing the bark cracks with my eyes. ‘We should get back, okay?’

He said nothing. So I walked away.

As I walked I heard rustling, and he came up beside me. ‘Don’t just walk off,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’ I replied, offhand.

He breathed a short, sharp sigh. ‘I like you, I do. But—’

But. There was a but.

‘I get it, okay?’ I interrupted. ‘Just fucking drop it.’ I turned my face from him as if I didn’t care at all.

‘Fine,’ he said sharply, and walked on ahead.

I stopped. I had to. My chest was shrinking, pushing inward and squeezing all my air out. I leaned against the nearest tree and took in a deep breath, counting to ten. Let it go, counting to ten.

I would not cry here.

I would go back to them, and I would be perfectly easy. I would be the River they knew. I would be their equal. The only way to be what you wanted to be was to pretend that you already were. One day you would stop feeling like you were acting. One day there would be no need, and finally, oh finally, you would be able to relax.

What if Fenrin tells them?

I ignored the voice.

He will
.

He wouldn’t.

I reached the garden. Fenrin was laughing, and for an awful screeching moment, I thought it was
at me, but it was at something Summer had said. She lashed out, kicking his ankle, and he staggered dramatically.

I walked up, and nothing more was said about spells and magic at all that night. But it hung over us, stretching and straining our time together.

He hadn’t told them. But what about tomorrow? Summer would be so disappointed in me. I was half convinced the reason she had liked me in the first place was because I had seemed so uninterested in her brother. Because it meant I wasn’t going to try and use her to get to him.

I hadn’t. I hadn’t done that. But it would look like I had.

Thalia was silent in her chair, sunken into the bright, brittle chatter around her. I felt Wolf’s eyes on me more than once, but I acted as if I didn’t. Fenrin laughed like his usual self. Summer suggested music, and a stereo was dragged out on the end of an extension cord. Twilight rose all around us, and we switched the garden lights on – fairy twinkles strung through the trees, solar lamps round the edges of the lawn, fat candles lining the patio stones. I watched the light fall across their faces, as it must have fallen across mine. Did that make us seem the same, somehow?

Fenrin was right, about everything. I did act like
a mirror. I told him there was nothing to see inside me that was worth seeing. Sometimes I thought that was true. Sometimes I thought it was better if all I did was reflect.

After the fourth bottle of wine, they started playing games – hopscotch, dares. The promise of more magic lay forgotten between us as the moon came out. I stayed where I was, chasing that nothingness I had felt during the spell in the woods. Chasing the life of a star.

At some point, I was passed a different bottle, something homemade. It tasted like spiced honey. Summer pulled me to my feet with a wild grin. The others were chanting nursery rhymes, over and over. It should have felt stupid, but it didn’t.

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s
.

Summer was spinning me. We weaved and swayed. I fell over twice. It was loud. The garden was black outside our circle of light. The endless night stretched all around us, so we told each other that we had to be close together, together in the dark.

I remember only images, snapshots burned into me, bleeding into each other until I no longer knew the order in which they had happened. The flash of my bare arms as I stripped off my sweater. Thalia standing up and shrugging off her long skirt, peeling it down until it pooled at her feet. Cool grass tickling my back
when I lay down and looked at the stars, Summer’s hand in mine. Thalia’s long hair wrapped round my fist as I played with the strands. Thalia’s or Summer’s, all the same colour in the dark.

That night I think we were trying to fight against death, against boredom and banality, against everything that made us cry and stare at our futures full in the face with dread. We drank and played games to be in the now, to be in each moment as hard as we could, because the moment was all that mattered, at the end of it all. I remember I felt intoxicated on life and darkness. I felt powerful. It was the most natural thing in the world. This was why we were alive – to be powerful and free.

It was only in mornings that spells were broken. In mornings, reality always came back in a sick, rolling wave, and the glittering black night before had become something grey and wrong in the daylight.

The next thing I remembered was a sound like a rusting jackhammer. Then another overlapping it. And another. Magpies calling to each other in the dawn light.

I opened my eyes and was immediately sliced with pain.

Greyish light. My skin was cold.

I managed to roll over. My head was surging.

The fruit trees whirled and rustled, whispering. I knew what they were saying.

We saw what happened
.

I was in the grove, and I was alone.