Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert

Author:Melissa Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The city

Back then

I had a shift that afternoon. Dipping fry baskets, making change, wishing I knew a spell that could make my mind sleep while my body kept trucking.

Something was happening to me. I was sure of it now. It wasn’t blowback or hangover or the scum of bad dreams. It was in my body, growing like a virus, making a home for itself inside my skin. What was it the spell had said? I heard Marion’s voice again, reading the occultist’s promises. That I may not die but live in you.

I looked at my hand on the counter and felt the raw red terror of not recognizing it as my own. Not knowing what exactly it might do.

“Dana. Dana.”

One of the shop’s full-timers, Lorna, was snapping her fingers in my face. I didn’t know how she managed it with her nails. Church nails, she called them, long as Elvira’s but painted a pearlescent Sunday color. When I kept staring she clapped her hands for emphasis. “Go. Home. I can’t keep looking at your miserable face.”

She was fifty and one of my dad’s first hires. She got to talk to me like that. On the way out I peed and washed my hands and sprayed down the closet-sized employee bathroom with watered bleach. Then I glanced at myself in the pitted camp mirror stuck to the wall and screamed.

Astrid was there, looking back at me. Pretty face, pretty dolly hair, bottomless golden eyes. I shoved a hand in my pocket. There was a toothpick in there, birchwood. I snapped it and spat a quick curse, the first piece of magic I’d tried since the summoning.

Undo unmake

shatter break.

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