This was it. It was the crackle before a storm. My lungs pinwheeled and my body quaked, and my fake leather jacket was suddenly three sizes too small for me. The sleeves were bindingly tight, tight enough to jeopardize my circulation, and strips of fabric clung to my back like wet papier-mâché. It was suffocatingly hot and there was no chance I could shuck off my jacket now. Once a spell starts, I’m not so good at stopping it. I’d warned the three of them before I got paid.
The space between the five of us felt thicker, and particles science hasn’t named yet went ricocheting infinitely fast in the vacuum between our kneecaps. I couldn’t peel my eyes off the ceiling, but I knew what was in front of me without having to look. There was a presence in this basement. The shapeless, electric something shimmered over the chalk.
“Do you feel that?” The words whistled through the gap between my front teeth before I could stop them. The incantation had been brewing in my throat since this started. Now it fluttered up in my jaws, and I was just keyed up enough to open wide, to let it pour out. “All that power, do you feel that? All that bristling? The Pop Rocks in your skin? That’s it. That’s the magic crawling in. It’s that slow and raw and buzzing thing. If your bones are aching, let them ache. Let all of this sizzle and fester.” The misty air was blooming red spots above our heads—or maybe that was the blood in my temples. Adrenaline rammed through my ribs. My pulse quickened, thickened, turned into something else.
There was an inscription imbedded in my sigil. The incantation. I’d only practiced it a few times, but I knew it like a reflex, like a Hexennacht Hail Mary. It dripped off my tongue without effort or intention, and I didn’t self-edit, didn’t think about how anything looked, anything sounded, anything seemed. The words bled out and I didn’t stop to breathe.
“We’re inviting the liquid night, the molten magic. We’re inviting the star-spiked darkness inside and calling it to this circle. Our hands entwined are a chalice. Flow through us and spill. All this dancing is in triumph and our booze is all libations. We’ve brought you beats and lights and glamour, we brought fresh meat, new blood, and booze, and in return, we want some chaos. We want havoc. Bring us hell.”
A sound tore the crowd down the middle. The sound was thin and itchy, like dead skin tearing, and something wet splashed the back of my hands. I jerked my head down, hissed a breath through my teeth. The glow sticks: all of them had snapped clean in half. Plastic tubes sprang off limbs and clattered to the floor, and dancers’ wrists splattered rat-poison blue and scalding pink liquid from wrists to elbows. Madeline’s glow halo split and fell. Lavender chemicals trickled down her temples like from a candied head wound. Acid green pooled above Daisy’s collarbone. Jing’s forearms splashed phosphorescence on the chalk.
Yates balked. She tore her hands away from Jing and Daisy, yanked them to her chest with a force that propelled her backward, away from the circle. Her eyes stretched wide with terror.
I felt it like a smack.
The magic snapped back like a rubber band. It struck hard and all at once. I pitched forward, caught my hands on the concrete just in time to keep my head from cracking. My lungs slammed against my sternum and went ragged, and my nerves all twinged at once. My vision speckled like I’d stared at the sun. A jagged, painful pulse reverberated from my limbs to my core, and I heaved in a breath through my teeth, wheezed a cough. There was a whistling in my ears loud enough to rupture my skull. The crowd howled. People yelped and laughed, and someone was screaming, and it all blended into a single thorny cacophony. Voices had no definition. It was loud enough to cleave my brain into bits. I’d have covered my ears with my fists if I could, but I couldn’t seem to pull them off the concrete.
The world looked inverted and garish. I blinked a few times, tried to snap myself out of it, but all I could see were Jing’s teeth and how long and sharp they looked as she laughed. She jumped to her feet and out of sight, and she let out a triumphant cry just loud enough to cut through the ringing. “Fuck all of y’all. That was some magic.”
The room roared in response. Everybody eased up. Grimaces flipped into smiles . . . or most of them did, anyway. An out-of-sight DJ changed tracks, and the crowd sprang to life again. The glow on their splatted throats and arms made their already shadowy torsos look like voidspace. I couldn’t name the song that was playing, but I knew all the words, and so did everybody else, apparently. They all shouted along as they thrashed together, bobbing in the darkness, in the heat. The room sweltered and smelled like brine.
Magic doesn’t do well with being cut off early.
I wanted to throw up.
In the periphery of my vision, Jing shot finger guns my way and seized Daisy by the waist. She hauled her into the dancing throng. Yates scrambled close behind them, ducking between swaying couples in an attempt to match their pace. She didn’t bother making eye contact with me. Amid the waves of bodies, I thought I saw Austin Grass, whom I hated more than any other person who I knew in real life, put his arms around all three of them at once. Didn’t know you girls were into lezzie shit. Nice to have some hot ones around here with that East High piece, huh?
Usually, I’d be pissed, but fuck. It had worked. It actually worked. It worked with fucking witnesses.
I wiggled my fingertips against the floor, mostly to prove to myself that I still had fingers. My body felt pinched and cotton stuffed. Pins and needles shot down my shins and my body screamed stay down, stay down, but I didn’t. I put my feet underneath me, made myself crouch. My tongue felt thick between my teeth, and my cheeks felt raw. I forced my right hand off the ground and pressed it to my mouth, snagged the corner of my sleeve between my teeth.
Something dead cold and calloused locked around my wrist.
Madeline crouched in front of me. The strobe lights flashed on her eyes and her hair, and her whole body flickered like a phantom’s. If her hand wasn’t so icy, I’d think she was a dream. She wasn’t real enough to be real. Madeline ducked her head, forced herself into my line of sight, and her mouth twisted up into a grin. It was a weary half-grin, but a grin regardless. Teeth and everything. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her. She didn’t let go of my wrist. The way my skin pinched, she must’ve gripped it tighter.
Dull pain bloomed around her fingers, and I cleared my throat, tried to fish my voice out of my stomach. “I can’t hear you,” I said. It sounded like a mouthful of gravel. I tried to smile, but my face hurt too much to do it properly. I landed somewhere around a grimace. The strobe lights felt like rapid-fire ice picks to my temples and looking at her dead-on was tricky. She shimmered too much. I felt like my soul was leaking out of my shoes.
Her mouth moved slower. The syllables were syrupy and distinct. Follow me. She rose to her feet and dragged me up with her, cast a glance over her shoulder as she moved. She pressed her back against the kissing couple, who didn’t notice, and then she turned in slow motion, took a bracing step through the crowd. She led me toward the stairs, and I let myself be leashed along, my feet moving faster than my head. My heart twisted itself to bits in my chest, and I had the notion that it’d be a useless fist of cells by the end of the night, too worn to go on beating, because I was going to have a panic attack if this girl—or, really, any girl—liked me. I wasn’t built for this kind of emotional wear, I swear to God. I was built for skulking under bridges. This was too much.