Lili Crow - Wayfarer

When did I ever make you do anything? That was something Ruby might say. Channeling Rube at a time like this would probably be hilarious, but not really guaranteed to calm anything down—

An ominous creak overhead. The chandelier jingled, jangled. Like thin icy bracelets on a skeletal wrist.

Laurissa took another step, dragging her foot. The charms on her shoes hissed angrily, raindrops hitting a hot griddle. Her face was still a shadowed hole, and Ellie was dozily glad of that.

“Ungrateful girl.” The Strep reached the first stair, twitching her good foot forward and landing heavily, wobbling. “With your nose in the air like you’re so special , at your little school with your little friends. I teach you everything, and this— this —is how you repay me? By stealing ?” Her free hand flicked forward, and the smoking wad in it was paper credits, fluttering like trapped birds.

The silver scrollwork box hit the foyer floor and crumpled into a ball, shrieking.

Ellie made a shapeless sound. Her escape money, four hundred twelve credits, unleashed itself from Laurissa’s bony fist, shredding and sparking into flame. Smoke curled, a tang of heavy charmed credit-paper sharp and nasty under the burnt cedar of the Strep’s rage. There was another nose-stinging reek too, one she couldn’t quite place. Whatever it was, it made her vision blur, and a hot trickle of water slid down Ellie’s cheek.

“I worked for that!” Her sudden shout smashed the whispering tinkling of the chandelier. Another sharp groan from overhead, this one full of creaking and popping. “I earned those credits, you leech !”

A sneer twisted Laurissa’s face, rising from the shadow of her hair like a cottage-cheese moon. “Who would pay you?” She hobbled down one more step, and another. “Little slut, who would pay you ?”

I’m not a slut! I go to chapel! The injustice of it closed Ellie’s throat, and the mounting buzzing vibration in the middle of her bones demanded words to let it free. “ You’re a whore! That’s not my father’s baby! You got it off one of your boyfriends, and I hope it rots in you! ”

The curse flew free, stinging-black and sharp-feathered. It shaped itself from trembling Potential and flashed through space before Ellie could pull it back. Ever afterward, she would sometimes wonder if maybe she would have been able to pull it back . . .

. . . but just didn’t want to. Which made what happened afterward her own damn fault.

Just like everything else.

Laurissa screamed, the familiar, piercing, Potential-laced noise; she was so used to disorienting and overpowering her prey. Ellie’s own cry was higher pitched, a terrified animal struggling in a snare, and the curse hit her stepmother’s face with a bonebreaking crunch.

Ellie backpedaled, not realizing she was still screaming until her shoulders hit the front door and she had to stop to whoop in a long, endless breath full of choking smoke.

The Strep tottered, her dead foot pulling itself up in a terrible corkscrew, blood spattering in a bright hideous rain as the curse clawed and shrieked in its own train-whistle voice, not heard with the ears but felt like a drill through the front of the skull. Ellie scrabbled for the door latch, her battered maryjanes striking deep black marks on the marble, the mended buckle—when had that happened, maybe Auntie had done it—chiming as luckcharms sparkled and spat. She was too slow, caught in hardened syrup again, nightmare-time making her fingers clumsy and scraping as Laurissa fetched up against the bottom of the stairs, legs indecently splayed, her body twitching nauseatingly.

Oh God I’ve killed her oh my God I killed her with a curse Mithrus Christ forgive me—

She barely had time to finish breathing in to scream again before the Strep sat up, the curse falling away and shattering into shards of smoking obsidian, and her mad gaze focused on Ellie through strings of frosted, writhing hair.

“You little bitch!” she yelled. “Look what you’ve done!”

Yep, that one was me, Ellie thought, dark hilarity bubbling under the panicked beating of her heart. This one was all me. You should see what I did to an ink bottle last week. Or was it last month? How long ago was that?

The thing about time was that it slipped through your fingers. Like Potential, and charm, and one day you woke up in your own house with your parents dead and a madwoman lurching up from the marble floor, her once-immaculate hair daggers of dyed string and her nasty bruise-making talons twisted into claws. The red suit was more than askew now, and Laurissa’s flesh underneath its gaping was dead white.

Fishbelly white and somehow, in some way, wrong . Something twitched under the gravid lump of the Strep’s middle, reaching out. Bile slapped the back of Ellie’s throat. She fumbled for the door afresh, its handle slipping greasily against sweating skin. None of this was very important. There was no use in fighting. The Strep was going to cross the white and black floor, and then everything she’d done up until now would look like picnics and chapel compared to what she was about to do.

A crunching squeeze on her right hand, the star sapphire shrieking as it flashed. A splintering, creaking moan, iron staples popping free of roof beams, and the entire pile of Perrault Street stone shuddered on its foundations. The chain holding the chandelier made a horrifying sound as it slithered through rusted hoops, and the entire tinkling, chiming thing descended with ponderous grace, a slight arc bowing it toward Ellie before the ring spoke again, a Tesla’s Folly flash of blue lightning, and she found her hand had flung itself up as if it could stop the Strep from lurching into the path of the chandelier.

The funny thing was, it maybe did, because the chandelier was jerked off its course. By a single degree, maybe; Ellie didn’t have time to calculate.

But that single degree was enough.

It hit the marble floor to one side, fetching up against the rise of the staircase instead of its foot, and shattering bits pierced the air in all directions. Laurissa screamed again, a cheated howl, and the door finally flung itself open, spilling Ellie backward onto the front steps.

She tumbled down, bruising her shoulder, her head hit the pavers with stunning force; for half a second everything grayed out. That brief starry interval was all the rest she was granted; the ring gave its tongueless shriek again, and she remembered the only time she ever saw her mother truly angry. There had been a car, and a screeching of tires, and Mom hunched protectively over a much younger Ellie, her hand flung out and the sapphire ring sparking just as it did now as metal shredded and her mother’s face for a moment turned dark as a storm cloud. The shadow on her mother’s face, that was why Avery looked familiar, because sometimes his cheekbones looked—

The sky was purple now, and the wind was chill and damp.

Ellie scrambled to her feet, every muscle rusty-screaming like the chandelier’s chain, and backed up, her head tossing nervously as a horse’s. The open door spilled a crazycrack flutter of blue-white light, Potential fluorescing as Laurissa snapped a firecharm and eldritch flames splashed against the steps, smoking.

She means business , Ellie thought, and skipped back a few more steps. She’ll roast me alive.

Only if she catches you , a quiet, determined voice inside her head that sounded like Cami’s answered, and under that depthless twilit sky, Ellie ran.