The wind swept circles around us. Leaves whipped around our waists. A strange, desperate smile flooded Madeline’s face. She opened her mouth to laugh, but there were only straight teeth and blackness stretching all the way down. No sound. Her hair pulled free of its braids and tumbled loose around her jaw. Something glistened in my ribs. My pulse hurtled forward. I squeezed her wrists so hard my knuckles popped.
“Give us decadence!” I threw back my head and addressed the stars directly, heartbeat heavy in my ears. A laugh broke out of me, gutted me from throat to belt, and I couldn’t stop to swallow, couldn’t stop to breathe. I was practically screaming. The words flew out of their own accord. “Give us something obscene! Give us something to sink our teeth into! We demand magic! Fuck you, reality! Tonight is a dream!”
My skull hit the deck with a smack.
Something had me by the wrists.
I don’t know who was dragging me, not specifically. But whoever they were, they clamped hard and their palms were warm, and they dragged me over something that scraped against my spine, something blunt and metallic. Something like a door track. It hurt like a mother. I squirmed myself awake.
A ceiling rolled above me. There was a wooden fan that spun in slow, psychedelic circles, and everything was scaldingly bright. I winced, scrunched up my face. Daylight slapped me like I was goddamned Dracula.
Morning. Daylight meant it was morning. How the hell? Discordant birdsong hammered at my temples. I heaved in a breath and wheezed.
“God, she’s awake!” It was a feminine voice, a familiar one.
My arms hit the floor with a thud.
I spat, swore, and lugged myself into a sitting position. Every isolated muscle twitch weighed one billion pounds. I shrunk in on myself, winced away from lights and sounds and everything within ten feet. Covered my head with my arms. My entire body felt like a gigantic bruise. My skin was probably purple. All of it. I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was a human welt. I curled my knees to my chest.
“Sideways. Sideways Pike, I swear to God.” A different voice. Also a girl’s. Also familiar. Why wasn’t I connecting names to voices? I splayed my fingers across my face and peeked between them. There, looking supremely pissed, was Jing. Or her knees, anyway. I was eye level with her knees, and something told me that looking up was going to be a bad idea, because I didn’t need to look up to understand the level of pissed she was. It radiated off her in waves. She was the Chernobyl of being pissed.
I furrowed my brows. “What the fuck? ” Speaking felt slimy. I licked the inside of my shirt to scrape the sleep-film off my tongue.
“Good question.” Jing tapped her foot. “Care to explain what the hell you did?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I groaned, scowling into my sleeve. I was way too tired for tact. Besides. Fuck ’em for dragging me. Bastards.
“Cute. Sorry, no. You’re explaining now, and I mean now,” hissed Jing as she knelt in front of my face. She lowered her cheek until it rested on the cherrywood floors, angling herself so that I couldn’t avoid eye contact. Her gaze locked on mine. I could just make out my scraggly reflection across her blackboard irises.
“By the way, Sideways, I don’t know how you pulled all that off, but color me impressed.” It was the first voice. Daisy. I had zero doubts. Only Daisy would be so smug in overriding Jing’s authority like that. Also, her voice was way more nasal than Yates’, who was the only other member of the Jing triumvirate I could think of in my state of groggy semiconsciousness. Wait, “triumvirate” meant three. That was all three of them. So yeah, definitely Daisy. What the fuck.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my temples and swore.
“Listen. I swear to God. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you put in that punch, Daisy, but whatever it was really beat the ever-loving shit out of me. I must have been blitzed. I don’t remember anything post hanging with that East High girl.” Madeline. Where was Madeline? What had happened there? I silently prayed that drunk Sideways didn’t screw everything up for me. It wouldn’t
“Damn it,” said Jing. She looked me over, scowled, and stood up. “Goddamn it. You really don’t remember.”
“Where’s Yates?” I rubbed my temples and looked over at Daisy, who had tossed herself across a studded leather armchair and was currently scrolling some blog on her phone. Her pleated Creamsicle was creased in odd places and her hair, which currently resembled a tumbleweed, was twisted into a ratty bun. One sock on, the other sock in the void, probably.
Daisy wrinkled her nose and huffed. “God, I’m not Yates’ babysitter. She left. I don’t know where. She’s a big girl now.” There was a waver in her voice that suggested she wasn’t entirely sober yet.
That was how she normally sounded.
“You freaked her out. She went home,” Jing corrected. She clicked her tongue. “Okay. Up. If you don’t remember, I’ll give you a little tour of the disaster zone. See if that clears some of those cobwebs.” Jing didn’t wait for me to stand on my own. Her hands found my shoulders, gripped fistfuls of faux cow hide, and jerked me to my feet.
“Jesus, ease up on me, alright?” I rubbed my left shoulder with a scowl.
She gave me a once-over and spun on her heel, and for some godforsaken reason, I followed her. There was a snicker from my left, so Daisy must have tagged along. Man. Something about this was making my flesh crawl, and it was too early for anything as uncomfortable as that.
The house, all things considered, wasn’t in terrible shape. A few crushed cups, some popped balloons, a disembodied bra, and trampled confetti, but nothing impossible to clean up before the folks came home. The yachty living room still looked yachty. There was no vomit on the floor, which was a step above most party venues come morning. Jing picked up her pace and so did I. She stopped at the threshold between the hallway and the staircase to hell, aka the basement door.
Something flickered in Jing’s expression, something that made Daisy stiffen behind me. I couldn’t parse it. Jing flared her nostrils, pushed the door wide, and descended the staircase two steps at a time, and Daisy and I followed suit.
The walls were dripping with chalk.
Matrixes of spindly lines crisscrossed the floor, the ceiling, every inch of concrete in sight. Sigils, spirals, all varieties of rune and glyph. Sketchy symbols tattooed overtop of posters and streamers. None of them matched. Every mark had a different size, different shape, different level of intricacy. In the upper right corner of the room, there was something vaguely like an esoteric alchemical array, only it didn’t match any array I’d ever read about. Across from it was a distinctly Crowley-ish set of stars, which bordered a random smattering of Enochian letters and something that looked like stupid failed cuneiform. And then there were the scribbles. Jagged, careless scribbles, the sort of absent doodling a loser goth might give their homework margins. Layered Xs, eyeballs, flowers. A heart punctured by twenty-something arrows.
The only commonality to the sigils was their orientation, the slight slanting they all had toward the center of the room. They were pointing toward the circle. The circle was pristine.
“It was about midnight, maybe after. I was damn sure you’d gone upstairs. It was after the glow-stick thing,” said Jing. She put her hands on her hips. “We were screwing around, having fun. I’ll give you this, the glow-stick thing was rad. Everyone was majorly impressed. But then the chalk started. No one drew the shapes. They appeared on their own. I’m not screwing with you. All the drawings just showed up under our feet. Then the music got louder. Painfully loud. I had Alexis DJ for us, and it busted her speakers, it was so loud. It wasn’t her music, either. It switched mid-song. It was this freaky retro doo-wop. It was damned weird, Sideways.”