When she's ready to tell me, she will.
I pick up the book from where it's fallen on the shelf—spine down, pages fanned—and set it right.
"I can feel everything you're not saying," I say, "and it's killing me."
She opens her mouth.
I leave before she answers.
I'm at the end of the range and turning the corner into the stacks before she's had the chance, not because I don't want tohear it but because hearing it will mean talking, and if we talk she'll see that I'm still shaking, and I have no intention of giving her that until I've had time to rebuild the thing I just broke in the dark behind the last shelf.
I keep walking. Through the range and past the locked cabinet and down the stairs and out into the air, where the campus hums its ordinary hum and the mark on my hand does its second heartbeat and Everly is warm and a little opened at my back.
She lets me go.
I knew she would. She always understands, before I say it, what I need. That's either the bond or her, and I have long since stopped trying to sort out which parts of her I'm feeling through the magic and which parts are just her.
Doesn't matter. She's both, always both, braided together so tight I'd have to tear something to pull them apart. I'm not going to.
I walk back across the quad with the taste of that building still on my tongue, cold and patient and old as the foundation stone, and I hold what I know and I say nothing, and I wait for her to be ready.
I'm good at waiting. I've had nine years of practice.
6
EVERLY
There's a cat in this house, and the cat is how I know when to move.
Fat gray thing, torn ear, belongs to nobody, answers to nobody, feeds everything it sees straight back to Wheeler, same as the raven on the landing, same as the fox that owns the parlor. The animals are how he watches me. I have no mark on the back of my hand; he can't tether a girl who won't hold still, so instead he keeps eyes in the wallpaper. Fine. Eyes have schedules.
The cat works the ground-floor corridor in the mornings, sunning itself by the radiator like it's getting paid, and for one hour—nine to ten, when Wheeler takes the upper-year grad students down to the parlor and the whole third floor goes quiet as a held breath—it isn't watching the back stair.
So I take the back stair.
"Morning," I tell the raven on my way past the landing. It rotates one glass eye to find me and says nothing, which is more honest than most of the people in this house. "Don't wait up."
I live here now. Weeks of it: the term settling in around me, September gone, October coming down cold on the quadand the last leaves letting go outside the landing window. Long enough that the house's schedule is mine now too, learned the way you learn a bus route. That's the part that still puts a cold little hook under my ribs every time I climb these stairs—this beautiful, watchful, wrong Victorian pile ishomenow, by Catalina's decree, and the third floor of my own home is the one place in it I'm not allowed to go. Which, if you've met me, is the surest way to make me go there.
The third-floor hall smells like cold stone and old varnish. My flats make no sound. I keep a count running in my head—how long the cat's been off the stair, how long that leaves me—the way I used to count the gaps between Atlas's lightning and the thunder in a Missouri motel. At the right door I put two fingers flat against the wood until my pulse stops slamming, and then I let myself in.
Wheeler's study is a sales pitch with shelves, the kind of room built to make a girl want this whole world before anybody mentions the price. God help me, for about four seconds it works on me too.
Dark shelves floor to ceiling, half the books clasped shut with iron—old hasps gone the color of dried blood, the kind of lock you only put on a book that's worried about who'll open it. A row of amber jars at eye level with small curled shapes suspended in them. I decide they're pickled ginger. They are not pickled ginger.
A chair by the window worth more than my Honda, a globe, a brass instrument I have no name for, and under all of it, faint at the back of my throat, the flat penny taste I've learned to dread. Metal on my tongue. Blood magic, recent, done in this room and not cleaned up, because why would you clean up a smell only one unmarked girl in the whole school can taste?
Lucky me.
Dust on everything. Gray and even—across the desk, the shelf-lips, the arm of that gorgeous chair. Everywhere except the door handle, which is bright brass worn shiny by a hand that closes on it daily. So is the lip of the desk drawer. So is one clean oval on the desktop, notebook-sized.
One room in this hush of a house gets opened, and opened a lot, and the man who opens it wipes nothing else because the dust is the costume.Nobody comes up here,says the dust.Nothing happens here.Subtle, Wheeler.
I clock the time. Nine-oh-six. The session runs the hour. I give myself forty minutes, not a second more, and I start where the dust isn't.
The notebook's on the desk. Battered leather, fat with use, the strap gone slack. I don't read it first. I get my phone out, brace my elbows on the desk edge to stop my hands shaking, and I photograph it shut, then open it and shoot it page by page, corner to corner, the way Felix taught me on the road without ever once admitting he was teaching me anything.Take the picture before you read it,he said, somewhere around Tulsa, shuffling.You always read it wrong the first time. The picture doesn't.
He was right. Of course he was. I read it wrong the first time.
