I raise my eyes to meet hers. “I know what I’m doing.”
And Mads crosses her arms and says, “No one fucks with our coven.”
Jenny raises one boxing-gloved fist. “No one fucks with our coven.” Then she casts a sly little look my way and says, “But I’ve got you figured out.”
I wait.
“You don’t love him after all. You’re too us for love. You’re the most us of all of us.”
Summer shifts and bites her lip.
“You’re playing him worse than any of them. I mean, you’re destroying him, right? That’s the endgame. Soon they’ll all be dead and it will just be your golden boy all alone. Guilty and damned.”
“Not guilty,” I say, and it’s not even a lie. “Great.”
“All great men kill kings,” says Mads. Half soothsayer and half mockingbird.
Summer laughs a shivering-gold laugh. “You’d be sweeter to kill him. It’d be fair.”
I let my head fall back against the rope and stare up at the lush layered branches outside.
Jenny’s hand flashes out and a perfume vial lands in my lap. White powder gleams inside. “For when you’re done with him,” she says.
“You fucking didn’t,” says Mads, but she’s barely more than bored.
“Right. Summer did.”
Mads unfolds lithe and grabs the vial. “You made Summer break into the secret room again?”
“Not very secret,” Summer says, too pure. And it’s true: the secret room has been ours for as long as we’ve been us. The room off along a back hall, with bulletproof walls and bank-safe doors. With a portrait on the wall, Mads and her brothers, on hinges that swing back to a cabinet of pills and poison: better safe than helpless.
“Which one is it?”
Summer shrugs. “I don’t remember. The one with the prettiest name. Arsenic, or cyanide—” And her laugh sings out. “Something that works.”
“Let me see,” I say, and Mads tosses it back.
Jenny smirks across the ring. “Told you she’d want it.”
We stole the vial from the woman who smiled too much at Jenny’s father in the front-page photos four winters ago. We poured her perfume out. A defendant’s wife, the one who called Jenny a little creeping bastard brat. The one who spent nights when Jenny’s mother was away and left lipstick-stained coffee cups exactly where Jenny’s mother would find them, except we always found them first.
The one who called Jenny a little creeping bastard brat for the very last time the night I had Mads let us into the room with the bulletproof walls and the bottles full of poison. I measured out the one I wanted: not enough to kill, but almost.
When the ambulance left I stole back her last lipstick-stained coffee cup and breathed in the burnt-sweet smell of bitter almonds.
I send the vial spinning back to Jenny. “Not yet.”
“But soon,” she says. “For Mack.”
I glare.
“What did he do?” Jenny asks. No cherub-voice. All focus.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Bullshit. You chose him to take the fall. What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I say again. “That’s the point. He’s the noble one. The one they’d never suspect.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Jenny punches the sunbeam. “Can’t wait for the day you stop lying, by the way.”
“I’m not lying.”
“I’m just saying, we’re killing for you.”
“You know that’s what we do,” says Summer, slithering sweet. “You know what Jade’s done for you—”
“For me, or for her?” Jenny bites down on the smoke-still air.
“For us,” I say. My hand goes to the crucifix my coven left for me. I spin it between my fingers and my skin catches on a rough place. I scrape it with a nail and dull dark red flakes down onto my lap.
Mads sits up straighter. She’s taller than all of us. Anchored deeper and iron-steady, even when her temper fires bright. “Duncan is dead,” she says. “They blame Porter. What happens next?”
They all look to me. Loyal even when we have our clipping little spats.
“We use their fear,” I say. “Split each one of them off so there’s no one they can trust. So it’s every boy for himself.”
They nod.
“They’re ready to believe anything,” I say. “You saw Porter. He almost thought he’d really put that knife in Duncan’s heart. Now we make the rest of them think maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe—anything.”
They’re leaning closer. My whole heart swells for them. My beautiful coven. My flock, but instead of starlings they’re falcons with wings that turn the whole sky dark. Summer’s doubts and Jenny’s sass. Mads knowing all my lies.
“We need a phone no one can trace,” I say. “We’ll tell them things they’re afraid to tell themselves. We’ll turn them against each other.”
Outside, the sky goes even darker. Like the night is stronger than the day. Like the day is afraid to show its face even when it should.
I say, “We’ll be the witches they don’t believe in until it’s too late.”
Hunger
We eat dinner together for the first time in a month. My father and my mother and me, sitting far apart at the long wide table in the sunroom. It’s eight o’clock. They’ve seen the news. I haven’t, but the messages shooting from flock-girl to wolf leave a trail of sparks hot enough to start fires worth the clouds still fouling the sky.
Porter’s dead, said Lilia. To Mack and me, to Duffy and Piper, to Banks.
And Banks said, Had it coming.
The rumors pitch and heel: Malcolm’s gone, they say. He’s afraid he’s next. No one argues back that Porter’s dead. They know it wasn’t Porter who left the dead-eyed signs in the parking lot and turned us afraid of each other.
Porter held the knife, but fear drove it between Duncan’s ribs, the same way fear shoved Connor off the roof. And if stammering-scared Porter could kill the king—
well—
—who’s next?
So by dinnertime I know everything I need to know.
My father says, when our plates are empty and our forks and knives rest against the china, “The boy. The one who died last night. You knew him?”
I say, “Yes.”
He says, “What sort of boy was he?”
I say, “The sort of boy with daggers in his smile.”
They watch me. Both of them. Their faces give nothing away.
I say, “The sort of boy who needed a dagger in his ribs to match.”
My mother says, “And the boy who killed him?”
I say, “He knew too much.”
My father straightens the napkin tucked into his collar.
My mother says, “There was no mercy last night.”
I say, “There’s no mercy left.”
When night comes they sit together outside my door until my breath comes deep and even. After a long time, my mother murmurs, “Then it’s done?”
I know my father nods yes.
Their shadows move away together and the lights go out.