Fiendish Read online

  There was a towel hanging on the edge of the tub and I dried off, trying not to think too much about how I was a completely different person from the one I’d been. Every time I caught a glimpse of my body, it was like looking at a stranger.

  I changed into the green dress, which buttoned down the front and had a bow at the neck like a sailor’s. The top was tight, with barely room to move, and I knew that I was going to need what my mother had always referred to as support garments, if she had to refer to them at all.

  When I left the bathroom, Shiny was waiting for me. She led me back to the kitchen, through the crooked door where I’d first seen her, and into a cramped, narrow room. It wasn’t much more than a closet, with a rickety little bed pushed into one corner, and the rest of the place taken up by a giant water-stained dresser.

  The walls were plank instead of plaster, and hung all over with wind chimes. They were nailed straight to the bare boards and tacked haphazardly to the ceiling. Among them, Shiny seemed like the only useful thing, and everything else was completely silly.

  It was strange and dizzying to stand and look at her, when the last time we’d been face to face, she’d still had messy pigtails and a missing tooth. The way she looked at me, I knew she was feeling the same, like I was something that had been stored away, and now that I was unpacked and out in front of her, she could only stand back and count all the ways that I had changed.

  “How is it you remember me, but Myloria can’t?” I said.

  Shiny leaned against the dresser, chewing on her thumbnail and scowling. “If I could tell you that, I’d feel a lot better, if you want to know the truth. She’s right about it being craft, for sure. And there are tricks for keeping secrets or messing with someone’s memory, but I’ve never known one strong enough to just paper over a whole person. That’s something more serious than I know about.”

  “Then how can you be certain it’s really me at all?” I said, wondering how to ever trust a world where my own aunt could forget me. “I mean, what makes you so sure?”

  Shiny laughed, tossing her hair over her shoulders. “Sure that you’re my cousin? I’d have to be crazy to forget. I missed you every day,” she said. “I used to just sit out back in the tire swing and think of your face, like if I forgot a single thing, even an eyelash or a freckle, something bad would happen. I feel like I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.”

  The way she said it was so raw and fierce it showed in her face, and I felt a rush of gratitude to know that someone had been waiting for me after all.

  She leaned closer. “You still look right, you know. Or at least, how I’d have thought you’d look. Except your hair—now that is really something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned me by the shoulders, steering me in front of a heavy mirror propped on top of the dresser. For the first time in forever, I looked at myself.

  A part inside me wanted to cry or scream, or just do something to show how awful it was to be lost for so long and then come back looking nothing like myself.

  At first, I couldn’t do anything but stare—at my hands on the top of the dresser and the wide, unfamiliar shape of my mouth and my cheeks, and my eyes, the way they gazed back at me, full of hurt.

  After a minute, though, I began to pick out things I could almost recognize.

  I looked less like myself and more like my mother, with her high, smooth forehead and her chin. My nose had grown from a button into the long, straight one common to the Blackwoods, but my mouth was big and soft like a stranger’s, like it belonged to someone else, and no matter how far I tried to open my eyes, they stayed heavy-lidded. Half-closed. The skin around them was dotted with little scars.

  What Shiny had spoken was the absolute truth. I looked right, more or less, for someone belonging to the Blackwood family. And also, the strangest thing about me was my hair.

  When I was little, it had been a plain dog-brown that promised to darken to mahogany, the same color that Shiny’s was now. Instead, it had gone red. Not an unfortunate carroty red like the O’Radley girls had, or even beauty-parlor red. My hair was the deep, bloody red of cherries, black at the roots and getting brighter as it went, nearly glowing by the time it got to the ends.

  “What happened to it?” I said, holding my hands away from myself, like I was marked with something dirty.

  Shiny came and put an arm around me. “Hey, hey, don’t act like that. It’s not so bad. It just needs to be brushed out.”

  I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t the color or the tangles making me seem wrong. It was my broken voice and my scarred eyes and my strange new body. And my cheeks and my chin and my grown-up nose. I stared at my reflection, trying to get friendly with the fact that I wasn’t myself anymore.

  “Okay,” I said finally, after I’d looked and looked and it had changed nothing. “Okay, you can help me fix my hair.”

  Shiny got out a comb and had me sit on the edge of the bed. She settled down next to me, holding a matted handful straight out from my head and clucking to herself. Her nails were painted a deep, sticky purple.

  “Well, this is a devilish state of affairs,” she said as she went to work on the tangles. The comb bit at my scalp, yanking my head back, and at first I thought she was talking about my hair.

  Then she leaned around me, peering into my face. “You want to tell me where you’ve been this whole time?”

  “In my house,” I said. “Buried in the cellar.”

  She stopped combing. “All this time? Since you were seven?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” she said after a second. “You’re definitely not seven anymore.”

  “No,” I said, looking down at the front of the dress. “Definitely not.”

  She laughed a breathless little laugh. “I mean, not in your head, either. You’re like a real person.”

  It was true. I could feel the difference between now and then, a plant that had outgrown its pot, and now the roots were forcing their way between the cracks.

  “I knew things,” I said, trying to put a name to the dreams that weren’t dreams but more of a cross between visions and memories. “Sometimes I lived on old pictures, like looking through a photo album, and sometimes, it was more like I flew out into the real world and floated there. I saw things. I was part of the world, but not in it, if that makes sense.”

  Shiny’s face made it plain that it didn’t, but she nodded anyway, frowning to herself. Then she went back to work on my hair.

  I held as still as I could and looked around me. The bedroom was impossibly small and like a carpenter’s mistake, growing straight off the side of the main house.

  I winced, grabbing at the back of my neck to keep her from combing me bald. “I don’t remember this place.”

  Shiny shook her head. “She had it built a few years ago. When I finally just about lost my mind and told her that maybe wandering around at all hours was good enough for her, but I needed a bedroom. So, she went out and paid a bunch of the O’Radleys’ cousins two hundred and forty dollars to build me this.”

  The room was decorated with a little rug and had a window at the back, but I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t a lot bigger than the closet I’d been buried in.

  “It doesn’t seem like much,” I said.

  Shiny let her hair fall over her face and looked away. “‘Not Much’ is kind of the name of every damn day around here. Things are—well, they’re not how you remember.”

  But in truth, it seemed that what I mostly remembered were only the recollections of a little girl, overjoyed by dragonflies and Fourth of July sparklers. Every other fact and feature was missing, covered up neatly by that clean white sheet.

  “Where does Myloria sleep?” I said finally, because it seemed better to say anything than to let Shiny keep sitting there with her hair in her eyes and her shoulders slumped. Bett
er than to keep dwelling on all the things I’d lost and could not get back.

  “Are you kidding?” She started picking at my tangles again. “Myloria doesn’t sleep. All she does is wander around like a crazy person, vague as hell and scared of everything.”

  I considered the Myloria I’d known when I was little, tall and proud, full of flash. “She didn’t used to be.”

  Shiny shrugged and looked away. “And the dinosaurs didn’t used to be dead. Do you know that your hair is like trying to put a comb through wire? It’s breaking off the teeth.”

  She set the comb down, and then there was a strange tickling feeling at the back of my head. She was running the tips of her fingers over my hair, but the knots were so matted and thick I could barely feel it.

  When she spoke, her voice was smaller than before, and kind of lost. “It used to be so soft, like a bunny.”

  I reached for the dropped comb, touching the gaps where the teeth had snapped off. “Shiny, how long have I been gone, exactly?”

  She sighed and took her hand away. “You mean how long has it been since the Coalition for Purity flipped their shit and started burning out all the old families before Myloria or your mama or any of the church people could stop them?”

  I nodded, running my finger along the broken comb.

  “Pretty near ten years.”

  “Oh.”

  “I thought you were dead,” she said, keeping her chin down, fiddling with the corner of the crazy quilt.

  “I guess I should have been, right? A long time ago, I should have been.”

  Shiny nodded. The light shining between the boards of the room made thin golden lines on her face. “I thought you were dead, and at the same time, it was like you were this invisible friend I’d had. I believed so hard that you were real, while everyone else just forgot you were ever alive.”

  I reached into the pocket of my dress and held out the tattered trickbag that had been pinned inside the collar of my nightgown. “This might have something to do with that.”

  Shiny studied the bag, but made no move to touch it.

  “Rae Dalton knows a thing or two about trickbags,” she said finally. “And she knows a thing or two about you. She’d be one to ask.”

  I remembered Rae—her small, easy smile and her hair twisted into five fat braids, the ends fastened with plastic ponytailers shaped like gum balls. She was one of the clean, well-tended in-town kids, but her parents would visit with my mama over the sorts of things that other folks would only frown and whisper about, and they brought her out to play sometimes. I had liked her. Maybe not in the fierce, frantic way I’d liked Shiny, but Rae had been my friend.

  “If this kind of craft is too big for anyone to explain,” I said, “if it’s too powerful or bad, does it mean that I was put away by fiends?”

  All my life, I’d heard stories of the fiends that had settled Hoax County, but even in my family, where most folks were born with the power to do things, the fiends themselves were half a fairy tale. Now, sitting on the bed, holding Shiny’s broken comb, I was suddenly sure that if I could be shut up and forgotten so completely, it must be the work of something too huge and powerful to be accounted for by anything else.

  Shiny looked absolutely scandalized, though. “What? No, are you crazy? Why would you say a thing like that?”

  “When they took me out of the wall, one of the Maddox boys—Luke, I think—he said that bringing me to you and Myloria was messing around with crooked people. ‘Hexers and fiends,’ he said.”

  “Luke Maddox is an idiot. The Blackwoods may be crooked as they come, but he wouldn’t know a fiend if it punched him in the dick.”

  I laughed at that, a hard, rasping laugh, like a crow shouting over a button, and Shiny laughed too, tossing her hair back over her shoulders.

  I watched her, thinking how strange and glorious it was that I could be sitting on this wobbly little bed with my cousin, when just that morning, I’d been so sure that I was going to spend the rest of my life in the dark and never be anyplace else ever again.

  Shiny must have been thinking it too, because she reached over and gave my hair a tug.

  “Not to be indelicate,” she said, with a long, knowing look that was mostly about my chest. “But we should probably go down to Spangler’s. You’ve got a whole little situation going on right around here.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned away from her. “I know.”

  “So we’ll go into town, get you a bra. I’m supposed to meet Rae, anyway. We’ll get it sorted out about your piece of craft.”

  * * *

  Out in the front hall, Shiny stopped to dig around in a Florida Orange crate by the door. She yanked on a pair of beat-up cowboy boots over bare feet and was scrounging me up some sneakers when Myloria came shuffling in.

  The way she looked at us was like she was seeing something else—not Shiny and Clementine, but Shiny and the ghost of something monstrous. Her eyes were pink, like maybe she’d been crying.

  “Where are you going?” she said, sounding stuffed up in the head, and also like she was scared we might tell her.

  I started to explain about Rae Dalton and the trickbag, but Shiny stuck her elbow in my side and said, “Nowhere. Just showing Clementine the town.”

  I wondered whether Myloria might argue over that, or say it was off-limits, but she didn’t. The way she studied my face was grave, like she was really seeing me for the first time. “You say you know me.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And Bastiana, she remembers you from way back.”

  “Yes.”

  The way Myloria spoke was careful and slow. I could see her wanting something from me—needing something—but I didn’t know how to give it to her. Her eyes were red and wet, and I crossed the hall and reached for her hand. There was a split second where I was certain she’d pull away. Then she let me take it.

  Her hand felt fragile and cold in mine and she leaned closer, like she was whispering a terrible secret. “You look so much like my sister.”

  I nodded, because her voice was sad, and it was true. When I’d stood at the mirror in Shiny’s room, it had nearly been my mama’s face looking back at me.

  “But you’re not her,” Myloria said, leaning so close that the messy wisps of her hair almost brushed my cheek. “What are you?”

  “I’m her daughter,” I said, so afraid that she would shy back from me again, call me a liar like she had in the kitchen.

  Her eyes were so sad I could barely stand it and she held my hand like she was clinging to a past I could never quite know. Sisters and mothers were different people. I thought that I had never seen someone look so undone.

  “You be careful where you go and who you talk to,” she said finally. “And stay well away from the boys hanging around Carter’s Garage. Town is town, and they’ll leave you be for the most part, but those ones are not good boys. And don’t go around mentioning yourself to anyone if you can help it.”

  Shiny was standing by the door, picking off her nail polish. “And just how are we going to explain where she came from, if we can’t mention her?”

  Myloria hugged her elbows. She didn’t look much braver than before, but she put her shoulders back, like she was pulling herself together. “This whole business is a bad one, but I’m not so sure that whatever trickery is at work here doesn’t work a little in our favor. If the craft is as strong as I think it is, and Eric Fisher and his Maddox boys don’t go shooting their mouths off about digging her out of what’s left of the DeVore house, I don’t imagine we’ll have to explain at all.”

  It took a second to realize what she was saying—that I’d been put under a spell so strong that no one in the world would remember me. And for all the questions I might be able to avoid, it wasn’t reassuring. The other part was even less so, as it seemed to depend a lot on Fisher being right and
the Maddox boys being too scared to say a word against me.

  Even Myloria looked doubtful, like maybe she was considering that, but none of us went so far as to remark on it.

  “You look nice,” she said finally, as though it were an afterthought, or like someone remembering their line for a play a beat too late.

  I knew I was supposed to tell her thank you, but the words felt wrong. She was still watching me like she expected me to go wild and tear up everything, and anyway, I didn’t even really know what it meant for me to look nice anymore. When I was little, nice was a pink dress and a pair of shiny shoes. Now I was just some strange, grown-up girl, with matted hair and someone else’s clothes.

  “You be good in town,” she said, and then glanced at Shiny. “Because I know this one won’t.”

  Her voice was almost too thin to hear. I wanted more than anything to make her back into the aunt that I remembered, make her not be scared anymore. Not just of me, but of everything.

  TRICKS

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The front of the Blackwood house was nearly as bad as the inside. The porch sagged where the boards had begun to rot, and everything felt squishy. There was a jar of sun tea at the top of the steps, the Lipton bags floating like giant soggy beetles.

  Shiny clomped past it and down into the yard, kicking at some of the milkweeds that were taking over the flowerbed. I started to follow, then turned back to look at the house.

  Most of the top floor was gone, and where it wasn’t, the boards were burned nearly to charcoal. The only spot that hadn’t been touched was the kitchen corner of the ground floor. There, the windows still had their glass and the paint was a watery yellow instead of just charred.

  “It’s ruined,” I said, and my voice was dry and ragged. “Oh, Shiny . . . it’s awful.”

  She twitched her shoulder and looked away. “Fire will do that. This place went toe-to-toe with the reckoning and didn’t even creak, but a few cans of gasoline, and there it went.”