Lili Crow - Wayfarer

Now, though, the boyfriends didn’t come by nearly as often. Good for them. But it also made it harder to slip out and around.

Ellie slid through the house in an old pair of threadbare ballet flats, her hair scraped back into a small ponytail—it used to be a lot longer, but the Strep hated looking at it. So hacked short was how it was, getting in her face and being stupidly unmanageable.

Just like the rest of her. Ugly, clumsy, shabby, cringing.

She flattened herself against the wall—here the servants’ hallway made a T, the walls probably about as old as New Haven itself and made of cold stone, not dressed with wainscoting past the angle that someone coming out of the bedrooms would see. This place was a heap, and honestly, if she survived the Strep and ever owned the house free and clear, Ellie had a plan for dynamiting it into hell.

Like all plans, the first step was the most difficult.

Stop. Listen.

Little creaks as the whole pile settled, timbers breathing as a chill spring night dropped fine misty rain over the city. The invisible sound of the draft down the bedroom hallway, as familiar as her own breath. Her pulse, a steady metronome inside her ears and wrists. The scrape of her jeans against the wall as her body kept itself upright, making the hundreds of tiny little adjustments necessary to stay stuck to a whirling earth.

The first time she’d fully understood that the planet was round and hurtling through space, she’d been terrified. Now she was just unsurprised. Of course nothing could be steady. Of course it all had to spin. It just made sense.

A soft scrape. A padding. Not the Strep—when Laurissa was ghosting around at night, you could smell the Noixame on her, trailing scarves of sicksweet perfume waving like kelp beds, just looking to wrap around and pull an unwary swimmer down.

No, this was a heavier tread, a sloppy shuffling.

Ellie peeked around the corner. The same peach sweater—did she ever take it off , even to wash it? The same frayed brown plaid skirt, as well. Ruby would be rolling her eyes so hard right now.

I didn’t even Babchat. Homework is going to be dire.

Floating ghostly down the hall, the blur of peach and lank dishwater hair hesitated at the door to the room where Ellie was supposed to sleep. One soft round hand lifted as if to knock, Ellie slid around the corner silent as a suppressive charm, and by the time Rita had decided not to knock and slid the door open with a noiselessness that implied some practice with such a maneuver Ellie had already halved the distance between them.

She slid through the door just before it closed and put her finger to her lips as Rita stumbled toward the bed, a squeak of surprise loud in the hush.

Both girls froze, staring at each other. Rita’s mouth was a loose wet O of surprise. Ellie popped the silencer charm off her fingers, and the immediate deadening of the air around them—not that it needed much help, nobody breathed in this frosty pink room with ribbons on the untouched comforter—was a little gratifying.

“We can talk,” Ellie whispered. “But not too loud.”

“You’re a charmer ,” Rita whispered back, kind of like she would whisper you’re a cannibal or you’re a minotaur .

“Born that way.” She couldn’t help herself. It was a Ruby sort of crack, the sort of thing she’d just flip into the air and it would sound great. But immediately, she felt a sharp bite of guilt. “Look, I’m sorry. You didn’t have to distract her. Thanks.”

“You . . .” Rita’s soft hands fluttered. Now that Ellie was closer, she could see the shapes under the skin, the high cheekbones and pointed jaw. She could have been pretty, if she wasn’t so blurred. Her hair wasn’t greasy, it was just really fine, and the cut did nothing for her. It wasn’t even really a cut at all, just hacked off at a weird angle, as if she’d done it herself a while ago.

Her eyes were really extraordinary too. Big, and dark, and pretty, thickly lashed. She would really be something when she lost the baby fat.

That’s not baby fat , a deep voice whispered, and gooseflesh broke out over her entire body. Rita looked so . . . the only word Ellie could come up with was insubstantial . Like all that pudge wasn’t really weight that could hold her down.

She shoved the thought away, and it went quietly. No need to borrow trouble, right? They stared at each other for a long time. Finally, Ellie held out her hand, tentatively. “Look,” she whispered. “I’m your friend. If you want.”

Rita shrank back. She said nothing, her mouth working like a fish’s for a loose, wet moment. Those gorgeous dark eyes rolled, and Ellie’s hand dropped back to her side.

You should know better, Ell. There’s no such thing as friends in this house.

Still, she tried again. The girl had dumped the bottle out of the rack, and got bit pretty hard for it. “Look . . . you didn’t have to do that. I’m grateful. If we’re together . . . look, she can’t hurt us. . . .”

It was the wrong thing to say. Of course the Strep could hurt them, she could hurt them plenty , and thinking Rita didn’t know it was stupid. She could see the walls going up just by the change in the other girl’s expression, and there was nothing to say to fix her stupid mistake because Rita was already moving.

She brushed past Ellie like a burning wind, and Ell had time to think that’s weird, she doesn’t even smell right before the door opened—

—and Rita slammed it, hard , a sharp biting sound that broke the silencer and was sure to wake Laurissa up. Which meant Ellie had to move, and now . She did, just barely making it into the servants’ hall before the Strep’s bedroom door cracked, a dangerous golden slice of light falling out, cutting off the rest of the house. Ellie peeked around the corner, unable to look away, unable to breathe until the slice narrowed and the master suite’s door closed with a soft deadly snick.

Her entire body trembled. She was wet with sweat, and good luck sleeping tonight, even though exhaustion weighed on her like lead.

So much for allies, or friends, or anything else.

Bitch.

ZIGZAGGING SOUTHKING STREET WAS AT ITS LIVELIEST on weekends. You couldn’t park anywhere near, even on Highclere, which meant Ruby did her bargain hunting elsewhere when school wasn’t in. That was just fine, anyway, since Ellie didn’t want either of her friends seeing what she did when she could escape the four-spired house on Perrault Street on a Saturday. There was a list of chores as long as her arm to come back to, no doubt . . . but she could steal a little time.

Girls of a certain social strata didn’t ride the bus in New Haven. Which was why she was always careful. For one thing, she never wore her school blazer, even if it was old and ratty enough to be secondhand. And never, ever a white button-down with a rounded turndown collar, since that was a dead giveaway. No maryjanes, no jangles of silver on her feet, no ultra-thin headbands holding her hair back.

Instead, it was a sloppy gray-washed T-shirt under a jacket she’d traded a spinning gemcharm to a lizard-skinned jack for, a rough denim thing splattered with paint and with a faint odor of burning clinging to its creases. Jeans frayed at the knees, and a pair of battered trainers she’d done outside chores in for years, pinching her toes but still reasonably held together with dull gray tougher-than-titon-skin charmbind tape. She couldn’t do anything about the ring. Leaving it anywhere inside the house wasn’t a good idea.