Every night—every night—he dreamt of her, and even though he had her face memorized, in his dreams she was always burning. Never dead, but always burning.
More than once, he found himself seated on the edge of his bed, her phone number glowing on his laptop screen. One morning after he woke up with his burns on fire and his sheets twisted around him, he actually called it.
It wasn’t like he expected anyone to pick up, but then someone did.
“Hello?”
Hi would have worked, but Kane hadn’t expected anyone to answer the phone in a house he thought was empty. It wasn’t Maxine’s voice, but it was somehow familiar. Small, questioning.
“Hello? It’s very early to be calling. Hello?”
There was a long silence in which the static between the two phones whirred, and then the voice asked, “Maxine? Is that you?”
Something clicked. Through his shock, Kane recognized the voice: Maxine’s friend. The one who talked about the eggs.
The one who didn’t know Maxine was dead.
“Please,” she said, and behind her voice rose a strange din, a whispering that swallowed her just before the line went dead. Through it, Kane could hear her pleading:
“Please, Maxine, just come home.”
• Fifteen •
SUSURRATIONS
Kane was still thinking about the call days later. The hope in that voice was unforgettable, but so was the sorrow. And he had no idea what to make of that strange whispering.
The woman’s name was Helena Quigley. She used to run a small shop downtown, and before that she was a biology teacher at the high school. Aside from appearing to be close friends, Kane had no idea why she had answered Maxine’s phone so early in the morning, and he couldn’t bring himself to call back.
But he was curious, and Kane usually lost all battles with his curiosity.
He kept himself busy in Roost, the bookstore downtown that had become his haven from school and his house. He’d been hiding there for the past week, burning through the mountains of homework he needed to make up. Hiding wasn’t the right word, though. Sophia and his parents knew exactly where he was when he wasn’t at the house or his support group. They dropped him off at Roost after school and picked him up at closing, like a day care.
Kane even went there on Saturdays, like today. Anything to escape the eerie music of Sophia practicing viola and his parents bickering in the backyard about where to put this new plant or that red mulch. The hypernormal soundtrack of a suburban hellscape, which made it impossible to imagine a drag queen sorceress watching over East Amity, and even harder to imagine just a garden-variety, standard-issue drag queen in East Amity to begin with. But here in Roost, among books about curses and adventures and cities that clung to the outermost rim of space, it was all a bit more real. A bit more reachable. Kane didn’t feel so lost.
And he liked the staff. They knew all about him but never asked about any of the town-wide drama that his name represented. They saved him a seat near the outlets and brought him leftover corn muffins from the café, and they even let Kane bring in his blue Slurpees from the 7-Eleven across the street so long as he put them on a saucer, as not to mess up the wooden tables. In short, they gave him plenty of space.
Sometimes, though, Kane wished they would ask how he was doing. Or what was going on in his head. But they didn’t, and so Kane poured his thoughts into the journal instead, until his hand was as tight and cramped as his heart.
“So you’re a writer now?”
Kane closed the red journal quickly, unaware anyone had even sat down next to him. When he looked up, he was staring through a sweep of dirty-blond hair, into laughing, hazel eyes.
Elliot.
“Wait!” He put his hands up, trying to keep Kane from running. “I just want to talk, okay?”
Kane pushed the journal under some books. How long had Elliot been sitting there, invisible? Had he seen what Kane was writing? It was a list of places the loom might be.
“What do you want, Elliot?”
Elliot glanced around. “Can we maybe find somewhere else? I’ve got my car out front.”
“No. We stay here. And don’t use your powers again. That’s not fair.”
“All right. But you, too, okay?”
“I don’t even know how to use my powers.”
This was a lie. He had been practicing summoning the ethereal fire, then dousing it when the objects in his room began to float.
“Adeline said you did well in the Cooper reverie. Like a natural.”
“Well, don’t worry. I won’t be doing any snapping or clapping anytime soon.”
Elliot did a good job pretending this reassured him, but overall the boy still looked a bit surprised to find them actually talking. He fidgeted until Kane repeated his question.
“What do you want?”
“I guess I wanted to apologize. We were always planning on bringing you back into the Others, but not like that. Nothing went according to my plan, and it’s my fault.”
“You like plans a lot, don’t you?” Kane bit the straw of his drink. “Plans and facts.”
“I’m that obvious?”
“Yeah. I’ve witnessed like three conversations with you, and in every one you can’t stop correcting people. I don’t know how Adeline and Ursula deal with it. You’re extremely patronizing.”
A blush climbed up Elliot’s neck. He looked like he was going to defend himself, but then he looked at his hands.
“I deserve that,” he muttered.
The old words stirred in Kane, all the acid he’d saved up for Elliot and the Others, but those emotions were flat now, like old soda. He didn’t know what to say to move the conversation past it, though. Thankfully, Elliot offered a path forward.
“You and I were working on this theory together, before, you know,” he said. “About how our powers come from our pain or from parts of ourselves we hate. For instance, I really like facts and planning, but all I can do is create illusions. Lies and manipulation. And Ursula, right? She’s like, the least confrontational person I know. She hates violence, but her power gives her that brutal strength. Seems kinda strange, right?”
“What about me? And Adeline?”
“You can ask Adeline that. And we never figured yours out.” Elliot’s face was still red, his shoulders tense like he was waiting to be eviscerated again, but Kane wasn’t buying the hurt act.
“It’s kind of weird that you hate manipulating people with illusions. You seem very good at it.”