The Graces (21 page)

Those fucking flowers.

They stank, maybe even more than when I’d first arrived. The smell filled up my lungs like soup. Made it hard to breathe. When you were concentrating on breathing, you couldn’t think too well.

There was always someone outside the door to the bedroom, and they kept it locked. I could hear them shuffling, whispering to one another like they were outside a sickroom and not a prison. I tried the window, but it had been sealed shut somehow.

I’d been here a few hours already, and it was nearly nightfall. I wondered if my mother would notice that I hadn’t come home. I doubted it. They had my phone – all they had to do was send her a reassuring message that looked like it was from me. I was out with friends. I’d be home late – maybe not even until tomorrow. Don’t worry. And she wouldn’t because she knew I
wasn’t with the Graces – the Graces were out of my life.

The buzzing silence crowded into my ears, and my mind ran a mile a minute but nowhere useful, just turning in circles and circles until I was dizzy. The white flowers were ghosts in the dusk light, and I imagined them crawling across the floor, up the bed, floating along my skin, laying themselves carefully on my mouth until I stopped breathing. The thick flesh petals rubbed up against one another, nestling against the floorboards as that smell rolled off them in waves.

I could hear them whispering outside the door again.

‘Hey,’ I called.

The whispering stopped.

‘Hey,’ I called again, desperate for them to acknowledge me. ‘I’m hungry. Hello?’

Silence.

A clicking as the door was unlocked and opened inward with a cautious slowness. I was sitting on the bed, my knees drawn up. I peered over their rounded tops and tried to look weak.

Fenrin came in, and his eyes found me, and my heart dropped.

We stared at each other for a moment too long. He shut the door behind him, and I heard a click as someone turned the key on the outside. I watched him look carefully around the room. Why? Checking for the booby
traps I’d made from all the useful materials in here?

‘We’ll get you something,’ he said, hovering by the door. ‘What do you want?’

I gave him my best stare of contempt. ‘If you’re really going to kill me tomorrow, why bother feeding me?’

He shrugged. ‘Summer insists.’

The sound of her name hurt.

‘Why aren’t you trying to escape?’ he asked me. ‘You could wait behind the door, try to get out when we open it. You might even make it.’

‘I don’t want to leave,’ I snapped. ‘God, this is crazy. If you’d just asked me, I would have said yes, you know. We could have talked it out. You could have said, “Hey, we’re thinking of trying to resurrect Wolf, want to come?” Not all this ridiculous cloak-and-dagger shit. What do you think I’m going to
do
to you?’

He didn’t answer, but neither did he come closer, as if whatever he thought I had was catching. What did they see when they looked at me now? I’d spent the last hour scanning every memory I had of us together. What had I done, what had I said, to lead them here?

The floating aftermath of the pills had worn off; I felt shaken, small, and angry scared. But there was no way I was going to let him know that. I could play games, too.

‘Fen,’ I said.

He was sharp all over, like just being in the same room as me stung his skin.

‘I don’t want to dance around any more, River.’ His voice was quiet. ‘It’s time for truth, now.’

Secrets and eggs.

‘Because you guys are so big with truths, right?’ I threw back at him.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘What?’

He shrugged. ‘What do you want to know? We’ll trade. One of my secrets for one of yours. And we get to pick each other’s secret.’

I was caught. This felt like a game that I didn’t yet know the rules to.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I have a question.’

He leaned against the wall nearest the door. He still wouldn’t come close to me. Was I so disgusting to him?

‘Wolf,’ I said, and I was rewarded with a tiny flinch across his eyes, the fleeting flash of a fish underwater, at the sound of that name in my mouth. ‘You were in love with him, weren’t you?’

He was silent.

I put my legs down and crossed them at the ankles, leaning back against the pillow propped behind me. ‘I thought this was truth time,’ I said.

I watched him steel himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, and his
voice was impressively matter-of-fact. ‘I was in love with him.’

The admission did something to me, a wave of embarrassment and shame all the way down to my toes. Wolf had loved him, too. He’d admitted as much to me in the garden, that he was in love with one of them. I’d just guessed the wrong one.

‘Marcus told me something once,’ I said. ‘That the Graces go in for arranged marriages.’

Fenrin cocked his head.

‘Promised,’ he replied. ‘That’s the word. It’s not a marriage. It’s not legally binding.’

‘That’s …’ I searched for a suitable word. ‘Really fucking weird, Fen.’

He was silent.

I stared at him, the angles of his face. That snarled expression it had worn when I saw him underneath Wolf in the sand. Like nothing else on earth existed for him right then except the body he touched and the soul it belonged to.

‘So let me make a guess,’ I said. Something I’d worked out long ago, but I wanted to see it hit home. ‘Wolf was promised to Thalia.’

‘How clever you are.’

‘Fen – that’s crazy. So … what? One day someone says, “Right, now you guys are together”? No choices?’

‘I’m not discussing this with you.’

I felt a surge of irritation. Apparently, I was now only worthy enough for a certain amount of truth in one go. ‘Fine. I mean, I’ve never seen two people less interested in each other. They acted more like cousins than
promised
, but … whatever. Everyone knew you and Wolf were in love, but that’s cool, for the sake of
tradition
, we’ll just all ignore it? So when Thalia and Wolf got together, that would be it for you two, would it? No more little trips to the beach? No frolicking in the sand?’

Fenrin’s face turned hard, statue-like.

‘Frolicking in the sand,’ he repeated, but there was no question in his voice.

I waited, puzzled.

He laughed to himself. It was not a sound of amusement. ‘There was actually only one time we frolicked in the sand, as you put it. Just that one time.’

I knew which time he meant.

He tilted his head up, as if he wanted to contemplate the ceiling for a while. ‘Do you know what
I
remember from that day?’

‘You said you didn’t remember anything. Another lie?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve never lied to you.’

I opened my mouth in outrage, ready to give him times and dates. But nothing came.

‘Everything I had to go through,’ he said, his body closed and tight. ‘The police questions, the suspicion. My own doubt. What happened, why couldn’t I remember. It was torture. If I knew, then I could have moved on. I could have somehow, eventually, been okay with Wolf gone. But I didn’t know. We tried everything, every charm, every spell and trick, to get my memory back. Nothing did it. But not long after your confession, I woke up from a dream. The dream was of the day he died. And suddenly, I remembered everything.’

Now, finally, he looked full at me.

‘It was like something had been stopping me from remembering until then. I knew exactly what had happened. Because I saw you there in the cove.
I saw what you did
.’

Hiding was a type of behaviour the Graces were all particularly good at. He’d been hiding earlier, but he wasn’t now. The expression on his face I was never going to forget – like he wanted to stab me and feel my flesh give under the weight of his arm.

‘I guess part of it was my fault,’ he said. ‘I handled it badly that day in the grove. I should have told you I didn’t like you that way, but you just completely took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought about you like that, you know?’

He paused.

‘I don’t think I believe that you can really bring Wolf back,’ he said, finally. ‘Even if you had the power to kill him. But it doesn’t matter. In fact, I think what I want is for you to fail. Because then you die instead, and we get him back anyway.’

My insides shrivelled in fright.

‘Fenrin, listen to me,’ I said, fighting panic. ‘Whatever it is you think you saw … Wolf’s death was an
accident
. You of all people can’t possibly believe that I can bring someone back from the dead!’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. But if it doesn’t work, if it really doesn’t bring him back … well.’ His eyes were far away. ‘Your life for his. It’s the right way of things. The old way of things.’ His gaze fell on me. ‘Vengeance,’ he finished. ‘An eye for an eye.’

I was silent with sick horror.

How dare he turn that back on me.

How
dare
he.

Fenrin went back to the door, taking a key out from his pocket. He opened it and I watched him go, my muscles twitching just once, as if I could leap across the room and fly out of here. But I couldn’t. The door was pulled shut. I heard the clicking of the lock.

I was suddenly furious, rage like petrol fuelling me. I leapt off the bed and grabbed a handful of devil stones from the bowl on the bedside table, those
useless powerless stones, throwing them at the door. The noise as they bounced and scattered violently was awful, punching my ears in, but at the same time it gave me a satisfied feeling in my belly.

‘Where’s my
food
?’ I screamed over the grinding sound of the stones rolling across the floor. ‘I’m hungry! You can’t starve me!’

But no one came back to see me all evening, no matter how much noise I made.

I woke up from a nightmare.

It was mostly a series of impressions. The pearly grey of dawn. Panting. Fenrin’s feet, digging into the sand. The sound of the sea claiming a life in the only violent way it knew how. Violent and beautiful. It was still so beautiful even when I saw it now, and that thought filled me with shame that I found beauty in death.

There were snapshots of memories in the nightmare, things we had done together in the past. They shifted and shuffled, and they were all tainted. That first day in the copse at school, Summer was controlling and manipulative, and we were all her baby acolytes, hanging on her every word like weak rabbits. Fenrin didn’t seem happy any more. He was cruel, tossing hearts aside like sweet wrappers, ignoring the girl he was screwing the previous week in favour of the girl he was screwing now, and her eyes, pinched with
misery, watched them all the way down the corridor. At our film night they closed in on me like a pack, mocking everything I said and laughing uproariously. They poisoned my wine glass, and I threw up in front of them all, shaking and ashamed.

I crawled out of bed, covered in a light sheen of sweat, and sat on the floor under the window, the duvet wrapped around me. It was the soft pit of the night, somewhere in between two and three a.m., the time I felt most like anything could happen. The sky was clear, and the moon shone in, stirring something weird and wild in me. It was on nights like this that I used to stare out and wonder if I could just fly away, skipping across the ground like a hare, fleet and silent. Live in the woods, knowing my way perfectly, fitting into the landscape like it was made for me and me for it.

I hated myself for these thoughts because they were the thoughts of a child. But I never stopped thinking them. They weren’t comforting – they made me edgy, erratic.

Earlier I’d cleared the room of flowers. I got methodical, taking each individual flower stem and shredding the petals off. Ripping them up carefully, their soft furriness squelching under my fingertips, making me squirm. I fed them through the gap under the door, taking the empty stems and poking savagely
at the heap through the gap until the petal shreds scattered across the hallway.

Thalia was shouting at me to stop from outside the room. Stupid earth witch. She pretended like it hurt her when her precious plants suffered. I told her to stop play-acting. She wasn’t three any more, and she needed to face reality.

She didn’t believe I wanted to bring Wolf back. I could see it in her scurrying little glances, full of nervous hate. She thought she was strong, but her strength came from fear. Fear of her parents, and of her future, which just seemed to get narrower and narrower, a tunnel that shrank until she couldn’t move forward any more; stuck in a dark, suffocating place for the rest of her life.

I used to feel sorry for her, but once it turned out that she wanted to kill me, sorry was an emotion I could no longer afford.

I shifted, rearranging my knees so they didn’t ache in my cross-legged position. I fancied I could feel the moonlight on my shoulders, a cold, gentle kind of touch. I knew it wasn’t real, but it helped my mind to reach down and inhabit that space of make-believe that seemed to go hand in hand with magic. Believe it and it would become true.

Will. You had to will it to be so. That was what
Summer used to say when we did our spellcasting. If I was a real witch, I could make the Graces set me free or believe anything about me that I wanted. But they didn’t. They believed the worst of me.

It was a stupid, pointless thing, anyway, to try and make people love you. Everyone was alone. We were born alone and we died alone. Whatever we did in between was nothing but a series of attempts to stave off the darkness we knew was always waiting for us. That was weak. We should welcome the darkness in. If you knew a thing, it couldn’t scare you as much. It couldn’t hurt you. I knew darkness. I knew alone.

So I sat there and I willed, willed with my atoms and my molecules. But I didn’t really know what I was willing. It kept changing on me. Faces slipped into each other, and the words became meaningless.

I wanted so many things, I didn’t know which direction to go in.

Then the bedroom door clicked and a sliver of black opened up wide, rushing towards me. For a second, I didn’t get it – had the darkness come for me somehow? But the hinges creaked and I realised the door was opening, and there was no light from the corridor beyond spilling through. It was black and still.

Before I could even think of getting up off the floor (
and doing what?
said the voice inside me scornfully),
something slipped in. The door clicked shut behind it. The key turned in the lock.

‘Oh god,’ said a normal voice, breaking the spell.

‘I’m right here.’

The figure adjusted. ‘River? What the hell are you doing on the floor? I saw the bed empty and thought you were gone somehow.’

I stared up at Summer from my seat under the window. ‘How would I manage that?’ I said. ‘You’ve sealed the window and locked the door.’

She didn’t reply. I watched the figure cross towards me and bend near the bed. Warm, dim gold light flooded the room as she switched on the bedside lamp. I squinted until my eyes adjusted. She was wearing black cotton pajama bottoms and one of her many band T-shirts. Her hair was mussed, but she gave her head a tiny shake and her hair dropped into place around the curve of her cheekbone.

‘Isn’t it, like, three in the morning?’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

She ignored this and sat at the bottom of the bed, curling her feet under her. She had chipped black nail polish on her toes. She had the money for the expensive stuff, of course, but for some reason she always bought the cheap ones that lasted about a day. I wondered why. I’d never questioned it before. I would wonder about
all her motives now, forever. That was one of a long list of fallouts from what she’d done.

‘I take it you didn’t like the flowers,’ she said.

‘Was I supposed to? They stank.’

Summer looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Your reaction to them was a bit over the top, though.’

‘You filled the whole room with them. I couldn’t even open the window. It was kind of difficult to breathe.’

‘Do you know why they were there?’

I settled back with a sigh, as if resigned to the interruption. ‘Enlighten me.’

‘They’re a binding flower.’

‘Oh, not this again. What are you going to do, wrap ribbons around me while I’m asleep? Hang another little figure up in a noose?’

‘More than that,’ she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘They’re from our own garden, and Esther’s been growing the bush for years, so they’re pretty strong. Fen has bowls of the petals in his room. He likes the smell.’ Her eyes slid onto my face. ‘Esther makes this perfume mist with them. It’s one of her bestsellers. Like a heavy vanilla, but kind of a wilder smell than vanilla. Fen wears it. Pretty much every day. In fact, that’s his smell. That and sea salt.’

It
was
his smell. It was a mean trick. I swallowed the sudden burst of fury I could feel blooming in my chest.

She shook her head, this funny twist of a smile on her face. ‘You know, until recently I was still on the fence about this whole thing. I just thought – it’s not possible. It’s crazy.’

‘And now?’ I said casually, like I didn’t care at all, at the same time as my heart tried its hardest to climb out of my throat. ‘Have you lost your mind along with the twins of evil?’

‘I guess I’m waiting for you to tell me what really happened.’

‘So you can gaze into my eyes and see the truth?’

She shrugged. The shrug meant ‘sort of’.

I threw up my hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to say. You … you
drugged
me, Summer. What the hell is wrong with you? Why didn’t you just, oh I don’t know,
ask
me?’

‘Ask?’ she said. ‘Oh, sure. “Hey, hey, Rivs. I’m back in your life again for a teeny little favour. I know this is ludicrous because, well, if resurrection spells actually worked we’d have a serious population problem by now, but I wondered if you fancied trying to bring Wolf back from the dead, for old times’ sake, you know, could be fun?”’

‘Well—’

‘Also,’ she carried on over me, ‘let’s look at this hypothetically. Would you ask someone’s murderer to
try and resurrect the person they killed?’

A hysterical laugh bubbled up out of my mouth. ‘I can’t believe we’re really having this conversation. No, hypothetically, I guess not.’

‘They’re afraid of you,’ she said quietly. She wasn’t laughing. ‘They figured you’d never do it. They thought kidnapping you was the only way.’

But why did you go along with it? Why are you doing this?

Summer, please, please don’t be afraid of me too. I don’t think I can take it
.

‘And what do you think?’ I said out loud.

She ran her hands through her short hair in a tight, frustrated gesture. ‘I don’t know, River. I thought I knew you. That’s the thing that’s really screwing me up about this.’

‘You did. You
do
.’

‘Do I? But you kept lying to me, so how the hell could I? No, actually, you don’t lie so much as just leave really, really important things out. You never bothered to tell me, for example, that you were totally, loopy in love with Fenrin.’

‘… What?’

I started to panic. Of course he’d told them. I’d thought he would, hadn’t I? I’d always known he’d humiliate me like that.

She held up a hand. ‘Well done, by the way. I had no idea. I thought you liked me for me, not because I was a way to get close to him. I mean, it’s not like it’s so unusual, most of the girlfriends I’ve ever had were the same. I’d just thought you were different, that’s all. Shows how stupid I am, doesn’t it?’

‘Summer, please, that’s not true. You don’t understand.’

‘The second thing you left out,’ she continued, ignoring me, ‘is what you said to Wolf just before the wave took him.’

I was mute now. Mute was my last remaining defence.

‘Maybe you don’t remember,’ she said. ‘But Fenrin does, now. You said to Wolf, “If I wished you gone, and the sea just came and took you away right now, what would happen? Would he want me instead of you?”’

She was paraphrasing.

But okay.

‘And the third thing you left out,’ said Summer, with a faint and strange smile, ‘is what you did to Niral.’

‘What?’ I was mystified. ‘I didn’t do anything to her! She bullied
me
!’

Summer hugged herself, wrapping her hands around the tops of her arms.

‘It wasn’t until her that I really got it,’ she said.
‘Thalia believed Fen right away. She was the one who got people to do that stupid binding crap to you in school. I tried to get them to stop. It was all so petty.’

She paused, and I felt an expectant dread like falling gently push me back.

‘But then there was that spell you did on Niral that day,’ she said. ‘You wanted her to stop talking shit about you, didn’t you? I guess there’s no time limit on these things because nothing happened at first. But she was ill, on and off, do you remember that? And then, after Wolf died, she was out of school a lot. Lou told me on the phone that she’s still missing whole weeks all the time, even now. She might have to drop out.’

My breath was coming up short. I didn’t want to hear it.

‘She keeps losing her voice,’ I heard Summer say.

‘So?’ I managed.

I could feel her eyes on me, assessing every little movement I made. ‘Chronic laryngitis, apparently. They have no idea what’s causing it.’

‘She could have throat cancer or something.’

‘They tested for all that. I told you, they don’t know what the problem is. But then, they wouldn’t. They don’t have hospital tests for binding spells.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, urgently. ‘You’re seeing things that aren’t there. It’s coincidence, that’s all.’

She sounded amused. ‘Yeah, you said that yesterday. You know, I remember telling you a long time ago that real magic wouldn’t need chants, or the right clothes, or any of that pointless stuff. Real magic would be about will alone. You must have been laughing at me. You must have just sat there and thought what a colossal idiot I was. River, I wanted real magic so much to be true, sometimes I hoped so hard for it I felt like my guts were coming up. I
wanted
to believe, but I never have, not truly. Not until you.’

Her pale cheeks were patched red, like she’d been slapped.

I was trying to keep my voice steady. ‘Are you telling me you’re a fake?’

She was evasive. ‘I’m telling you that nothing is as black and white as that, okay? Nothing is as easy as that.’

‘No shit, Summer. No
shit
. Think for a second. If I truly had real magic, don’t you think I could have made myself a better life than the one I have?’ My voice was rising but I didn’t care. Let her see my pain, for once. Let her be convinced. ‘I could have just magicked myself pots of money, and fixed everything wrong in my life.’
I could have brought my father back
. ‘I could have made Fenrin love me. The love spell in the copse – it was for him. You were right. I did like him, okay? But it didn’t work, did it?’

‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘It worked. He was so into you back then. He thought you were great.’

‘Just shut up!’ I shouted at her. ‘No, he didn’t. He loved Wolf!’

‘He saw you as a baby sister, River. He told me.’

‘Well, that’s great. That’s just what I wanted when I did that spell.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ said Summer, incredulous. ‘He saw you as a
sister
. Not someone to
wear
for a few weeks. Don’t you get how much more that means?’

She hunched, her lips thinning.

‘And you betrayed him,’ she went on. ‘
Don’t you get how much more that means?
’

I had nothing for that.

‘I think you can undo what you did to Wolf. You can bring him back.’

I felt like cradling my head in my hands. ‘Summer, I
can’t
.’

Summer’s face dropped like I’d never disappointed her so much before. ‘Look, I’m sorry we did it this way,’ she said, and she sounded like she genuinely meant it. ‘I wanted you to
want
to help us. Just … River, please. We were best friends.’