Vengeful

But as Sydney climbed the steps, her resolve wavered. She hadn’t been around this many people at once, not since she went to visit Serena at college. Right before everything went wrong.

Syd closed her eyes, could see her sister leaning in the doorway.

You’re growing up.

Could feel the weight of Serena’s arms around her.

I want you to meet Eli.

The cold of the soda in her hand.

You can trust him.

The crack of the gun sounding in the woods.

“Kawai’i.”

Syd looked around and saw a dark-skinned girl in gladiator sandals perched on the front porch rail, long legs swinging as she smoked.

“Or is it chibi?” she went on, nodding at Syd’s costume. “I can never remember . . .”

The girl offered up the cigarette, and Sydney reached to take it. She’d never smoked, but she’d seen Serena do it.

The trick is to hold the smoke in your mouth, like this.

The tip of the cigarette had glowed red, Serena had counted on her fingers one, two, three, and then exhaled a perfect plume of white. Now, Sydney did the same thing.

The smoke filled her mouth, hot and acrid. It tickled her nose, crept into her throat, and she quickly blew it out before she could start coughing.

Her head felt cloudy, but her nerves were settling.

She handed the cigarette back and stepped into the party.

The house was teeming with students. Dancing, shouting, moving, sprawling. Too many. Too much. She felt jostled by elbows, shoulders, capes, wings, caught up in the sea of bodies, motion.

Sydney stepped back, trying to get out of the waves, and collided with a man in a black domino mask. Her heart lurched. Eli. Her fingers flew toward her backpack—but it wasn’t him. Of course it wasn’t him. This boy was too short, too wide, his voice too high as he shuffled past her, calling out to a friend across the crowded room.

Sydney was just starting to relax when someone caught her wrist.

She spun around to see a tall guy in a metal helmet and skin-tight spandex. “How did you get in here?” He raised her arm, and his voice, at the same time. “Who brought their kid sister?”

Sydney felt her face flush hot as heads turned.

“I’m not a kid,” she snarled, pulling free.

“Yeah, sure, come on,” he said, pushing her toward the front door.

What Sydney would have given, in that moment, for Victor’s power instead of hers.

The college boy shoved her across the threshold. “Go trick-or-treat somewhere else.”

Sydney stood on the front porch, face burning, as the party raged behind her and more guys and girls started up the path to the house.

Tears threatened to spill down her face. She fought them back.

“Hey, are you okay?” asked a guy in a cape, kneeling beside her. “You want to call someone—”

“Fuck off,” said Sydney, marching down the steps, her face on fire.

She couldn’t go home—not yet. And she couldn’t bring herself to text June, either, so Sydney wandered the town alone for another hour, as the sticky heat finally cooled and the crowds in costumes thinned. She kept the backpack in her hand, the zipper parted and the gun in reach in case anyone tried anything.

No one did.

When she finally returned to the apartment, the lights were all off.

She slipped off her shoes, heard the soft sound of a body shifting on the couch, and turned, expecting to see Mitch.

But it was Victor, stretched out on the sofa, one arm across his eyes, his chest rising and falling in the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.

Dol lay on the floor beside him, awake, eyes shining in the dark, tail swishing softly at her arrival.

As Sydney padded across the apartment, the dog rose and followed in her wake, padding down the hall to her room and climbing up onto her bed without invitation. Syd eased the door shut and slumped back against it.

A few moments later she heard the soft scrape of furniture, the sound of Victor rising, the soft tread of his own steps as he passed her door, and closed his own.

He hadn’t been asleep, she realized.

Victor had simply been waiting for Syd to come home.

XVII

FOUR WEEKS AGO

HALLOWAY

IT was late, but Sydney wasn’t tired yet—too much sugar in her blood, too many thoughts in her head—and besides, she needed to see the birthday out as well as in.

It was tradition.

A memory, like a splinter—of Syd trying to stay awake as the minutes ticked toward midnight. Serena poking her in the ribs every time she started to doze.

Come on, Syd. You’re almost there. It’s bad luck to fall asleep. Get up and dance with me.

Sydney shook her head, trying to dislodge her sister’s voice. She turned in a slow circle before the mirror, letting her blue hair fan around her face, and then tugged off the wig and undid the clips beneath. Her natural hair—a curtain of straight white-blond—came free, falling almost to her shoulders.

Syd caught her reflection again, but this time out of the corner of her eye.

Sometimes, if she squinted a little, she could almost, almost see someone else in the mirror.

Someone with sharper cheekbones, fuller lips, a mouth tugged into a sly grin. The ghost of her sister. An echo. But then the illusion would falter, and Sydney’s eyes would come back into focus, and all she would see was a girl playing dress-up.

* * *

SYDNEY shed the red bomber jacket and unlaced the steel-toed boots, turning her attention to Victor’s gift. She took up the blue box and carried it to the room’s small desk. Dol watched from the floor as she carefully lifted the box’s lid, examining the contents. The bird’s small skeleton was immaculate, intact. It looked like something out of a natural history museum—knowing Victor, it probably was.

Syd sat down, ran her fingers thoughtfully over the bird’s wing, and wondered how old it was. The longer a thing had been dead, she’d learned, the harder it was to bring back. And the less of it remained, the more brittle its life was. So likely to crumble, or break, and when it did, it was gone forever. No second chances.

Nothing to grab hold of.

Sydney glanced at the red metal tin beside her bed. And then she took up a pair of tweezers and began removing bones, erasing the bird one piece at a time, until only a few fragments remained. The long bone at the top of one wing. A section of the spine. The heel of one foot.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, resting her hand on the partial skeleton.

And then, she reached.

At first she felt nothing beyond the bones under her palm. But she imagined herself reaching further, deeper, past the bird and the case and the desk, plunging her hand down into cold, empty space.

Her lungs began to ache. The chill spread through her fingers and up her arms, sharp and biting, and when she breathed out she could feel the plume of cold, like fog, on her lips. Light danced—far off and faint—behind her eyes, and her fingers brushed something, the barest hint of a thread. Syd pulled gently, gingerly. She kept her eyes closed, but she could feel the small skeleton beginning to rebuild, the ripple of muscle, of skin, the blush of feathers.

Almost—

But then she pulled just a little too hard.

The thread vanished.

The fragile light behind her eyes went out.

Sydney blinked, withdrew her hand, and saw the remains of the bird, its fragile skeleton now beyond repair. The bones—so carefully arranged in their velvet—were split and broken, the pile she’d set aside caving in, crumbling under their own weight.

She still wasn’t strong enough.

Still wasn’t ready.

When she moved to touch the bones, they fell apart, leaving only an ashy streak on the blue velvet lining, a pile of dust on her desk.

Ruined, thought Sydney, sweeping the remains into the trash.

XVIII

FOUR WEEKS AGO

MERIT CENTRAL HOSPITAL

I will ruin you.

I will ruin.

I will.

I—

Marcella opened her eyes.

She was greeted by sterile fluorescent lights, the antiseptic smell of scrubbed surfaces, and the papery thread count of hospital sheets. Marcella knew she shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t even be alive. But her pulse registered, a wavering green line on the machine beside her head, inexorable proof that she was. She drew a deep breath, and then cringed. Her lungs and throat felt raw, her skull pounding even through the high-grade painkillers being piped into her veins.

Marcella tested her fingers and toes, rolled her head gingerly side to side with calm precision and—she commended herself—startling composure. She had long ago learned to compartmentalize her feelings, shove the inconvenient and the unbecoming into the back of her mind like an old dress in a dark closet.

Her fingers crept along the sheets, and she tried to pull herself up, but at the slightest movement she was assaulted by her own body—her bruised and broken ribs, her burned and blistered skin. Marcella had also learned to embrace the various stings and aches and sears that went hand in hand with maintaining her appearance.

But this pain put those nips and tucks, those elected inconveniences, to shame.

This pain made a home in her skin, in her bones, moved like molten fire through her blood, her limbs. But instead of cringing away, Marcella focused in.

She once had a yoga instructor who compared the mind to a house. Marcella had rolled her eyes at the time, but now she imagined going room to room, switching off the lights. Here was fear, switch. Here was panic, switch. Here was confusion, switch.