Page 33 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It’s not eating someone that unsettles Mateo’s sleep as he tosses in the luxe hotel bed. It’s the memory of the cold dead weight of Ophelia’s corpse.
At that point, his mother had been missing for nearly seven months. Collection agencies were sniffing around and her acquaintances in the dark arts had been steadily popping up looking for her. Mateo had been trying to deal with the possibility that his mother wasn’t coming back while skating by on odd jobs, trying to find someone willing to employ a poorly homeschooled eighteen-year-old without a GED and no references or work experience.
Ophelia had lived next door since they were little. It was completely normal for him to let himself into her house, which he’d done that day with a mind to complain to her about getting the stink-eye from some guy who worked at the kitchen store in the mall. Like you needed a master’s degree to sell yuppies overpriced chicken motifs.
He hadn’t noticed her parents’ bodies in the living room. Hadn’t noticed Juliet’s either, walking past her room with no interest.
Ophelia was into grunge at the time, so she’d had on a fleece plaid button-up, crop tank top, and cutoff shorts, hair its natural dark brown, one knee-high sock with a red stripe, the other with two black ones. Her nails were a chipped gray paint that matched his because she’d done both of their nails a few nights before.
Before they’d met, she’d lived in an astral projecting, third-eye, hippy-dippy commune—a legit cult. Something had happened and her parents had fled the Oregonian forest for the outskirts of Seattle with their two kids. To his neighborhood.
Ophelia’s room was dark, her body on the bed. She practiced Traveling all the time. He’d meant to lie down next to her, wait for her to come back into her body like he’d done dozens of times before.
But lights on, it was clear she’d been dead for hours.
The smell made him gag before his brain fully registered how purple and plastic her skin looked, like someone had pulled it too tight and painted her the wrong color. It wasn’t his first time seeing death, but it hits differently when you love that person more than you love anyone who’s ever existed.
He stood in her doorway, just staring at what could have been peaceful slumber if not for the blatantness of her death. He’d been pretending his mother leaving was fine, pretending he wasn’t terrified of what his life would be, of what would happen to him, of what he might do to other people—do to Ophelia, specifically. So much worry that he might do something to her.
There were a million lies he could tell himself to distract from the unknowable dread of his future because Ophelia was right there with her shitty smile and her bad hair, making him live in the world, if only with her.
He only wanted to be in it with her. If she wasn’t there, there was no point to it.
Lights switched off again, he’d crawled into the bed beside her.
Sometimes he dreams about those three days, every detail as apocalyptic as it had been at the time. Holding her first stiff and then limp body, how heavy she felt, how excruciatingly light, the coldness of her death-blanched skin, the reek of days-old excrement and urine, like cabbage and peeled eggs, as he drifted between sleep and awake and hoped the awake would just stop.
She’d eventually—inexplicably—woken up, but he’ll never rid himself of those wretched seventy-two hours.
Which is why he sits wide awake on the hotel balcony with no hope for sleep, wishing he smoked so he’d have something to do while goth-ing about in the middle of the night with fangs in his mouth. Not like he can get lung cancer—he assumes. He should take up smoking. He’s going to take up smoking. Except cigarettes cost a lot.
What he really needs is something to silence his thoughts. Ophelia hadn’t even been in danger at the pool, except by her proximity to Topher. She’s a good swimmer, and the scream hadn’t sounded like her at all, but just the weight of the conceptual harm to her is making him really aware of every breath he pulls in and he can’t get his teeth to unsharpen.
There’s not even room to worry about the last interaction with Ethan, how he’s not even sure he said bye, just ushered Ophelia and Topher away from the cooling corpse. If they don’t learn something actionable at the mom’s house—Topher found the address before the pool debacle—he’s going to call it. Say sorry to Topher, walk out on the other half of the money. Fuckthe tarot reading. He doesn’t have to play along with the conceit that they’re in this together. That requires a healthy respect for fate, and fate’s been especially shitty to him.
Ophelia will be pissed. Say he’s being dense, which he is. And he’s not loving the idea of leaving Topher in whatever this fucked-up situation is—those sad tarsier eyes are going to haunt him forever.
In answer to this internal resolve, he catches motion. The balcony is enclosed but runs the length of the suite, which means the other suites along this side have balconies too. Frosted glass separates them. It’s in this frosted glass he sees the reflection from inside—of Ophelia. Exiting Topher’s room.
As if sensing him—she probably can—she makes her way out to the balcony. There are two padded seats, but he moves over and she sits down, half on his lap, and he puts his arms around her. She’s in a sleeping gown like the main character of a seventies horror flick, and her skin is warm from a shower. When he puts his face in her hair and closes his eyes, he can smell lavender from the hotel’s shampoo.
“You’re freaking out,” she says.
He wants to deny it but there’s no point. “You’re seducing Topher,” he counters.
She cranes her neck to look at him with a critical expression that could strip the outer shell off a bowling ball.
He flashes teeth to hide the wince. He’d been joking but also maybe not. She’s not denying it, which has the added effect of making him double down. “I thought we were playingstate obvious things.”
“You’re a riot,” she says, but settles her cheek against his shoulder again and he relaxes. “I was checking on him. He’s pretty freaked about his dad and the pool thing.”
Oh, right. Checking on him was a viable option he hadn’t considered in the slightest. Also a disconcertingly compassionate option for Ophelia, which makes him feel like a double asshole about it.
They don’t say anything else about Mateo’s alone-on-a-balcony freak-out. They don’t have to. She’s made herself clear in the way she obviously actually gives a damn about Topher, a previous-to-this-moment conceptual impossibility.
She won’t be dipping. And Mateo can’t go without her. There’s no world where he convinces her to do anything she doesn’t want to, though he considers it for as long as one full minute. Her proximity to death is a sour taste at the back of his throat, but he doesn’t verbalize it. Because that won’t matter to her. She’s in this. They’re in this.
