Page 56 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
“Mateo Borrero,” he puts in, not wanting this to sour but unsure how to question someone whose whole vibe implies you shouldn’t ask them things. “You know Linnéa how?”
“Sisters,” Ophelia and Ulla both say, then narrow their eyes at one another. Holy shit.
Ulla extracts another half an inch of chemicals through her cigarette, gaze moving from Ophelia to him. Her eyes aren’t unsimilar to Topher’s now that he’s looking. A darker, more normal hazel. She must dye her hair. Topher’s and the missing mom’s are pale blond verging on white. Ulla’s is black, pulled back into a second skin of a ponytail. Or Hamingjas can looklike anything. No clue. All the things he’d ask if he wasn’t trying to get Topher out of jail right now.
“What’s wrong with you?” She gestures with a vague circle at Mateo’s face. “Your mother’s a horrible person, but she’s still a person. You’re not.”
Harsh. And true. Mateo reaches up and takes the shades off. Her eyes widen fractionally, and she sucks on the cigarette with more fervor. “My mom, the horrible person, did something to me a long time ago. I accidentally … set it off. As utterly unbelievable as it sounds, it’s not related to this Topher-in-jail-for-murder thing. Just an unfortunate complication. Why were you looking for my mother? And no, I still don’t know where she is. I meant that.”
The lip curl that revelation causes could sear skin, melt paint, and make babies weep. “There’s blood magic at play. At my sister’s house and around that dipshit Christopher. When Linnéa disappeared, I started keeping tabs on Topher, including his little jaunt to Seattle, where the most horrendous blood witch I know happens to live. I went to ask if she had anything to do with it, but all I found was you.”
So many dots connected.
He’s jarred from potential musings by Ulla stalking forward and leaning down to stare into his face, suddenly very close. “Take it all off,” she demands.
A sideways glance to Ophelia, who shrugs, so he peels off mask and gloves and rolls his sleeves up. Ulla doesn’t lean back even an inch. She has a deeply uncomfortable stare.
She straightens. “You’ve lived the last—what are you? Fifteen?”
Wildly incorrect. “Twenty-three.”
“The last twenty-three years without this horrible face popping out. Just bring the other one back to the fore.” She saysit with real disdain, like even an infant can hide their demon face.
“I’m not disagreeing with the concept,” Mateo says, though he might be. “But if I could do that, I would.”
“Try harder,” she says unhelpfully.
Closing his eyes, he tries to try harder without actually knowing how to do that. Ophelia and the—he is just now realizing unnervingly not-human—luck spirit are silent while he doesn’t say what the problem is. He’s only been like this for a few hours, but he’s having a marked inability to recall his normal eyes, mouth, or teeth.
If casually asked if his hands have always been demon claws, he might say yes. Which is disorienting because he also keeps missing things he’s reaching for, the claws ending way beyond where his fingers used to.
“Open,” Ulla says, and his eyes snap open to a phone screen held an inch from his face. An inch is too close, so he leans back and sees it’s Ophelia’s phone displaying a picture of someone flipping double middle fingers.
It’s like he’s doused in cold water while also taking a bucket of cold water straight to the face, up the nose, down the throat, and into his lungs. The shock forces out a gasp. Ulla’s saying something—presumably about the picture but that’s a guess from context clues because the picture makes no sense.The picture is terrible. So terrible he can’t understand anything she’s saying around staring at it. He wants to grab the phone, smash it on the ground, smash it down her throat that isn’t actually her throat but a throat she’s chosen to wear, frustration building because she’s forgotten what it’s like not to be limited like this, stuck in a tiny meat sack, forced to use lungs to pull in air through feeble flesh balloons and use gelatin eyes to see this hateful world.
The phone is gone, replaced with Ophelia’s face, her hands on his cheeks.She’s warm, calming, perfect. Lips to his forehead, then his face in her hand, and he wants nothing else.
“Look,” she says softly,and he makes a desperate keening to behold another awful picture from the phone. He wants to pull away, but her arm is around him, her mouth against his ear, and she’s whispering. The meaning is lost in a riot of confusion, brain rebelling against the new picture, but the soft tone keeps him rooted. She wants him to look, so he looks.
Ophelia’s in this photo, flipping double middle fingers with someone he doesn’t want to look at. He tries to focus only on her, but Ophelia doesn’t take pictures with other people. She doesn’t like other people. Only him.
Her family moved in next door when he was eleven. Ophelia’s older sister, Juliet, caught him creeping and called him over and trapped him in a perfectly normal pre-teen conversation he couldn’t follow because he never hung out with anyone and was barely allowed outside. He’d been unsociable, even in pastels, hadn’t known what to say, and so had given her a lot of one-word responses. The whole time Juliet had talked, Ophelia had been crouched in the yard a few feet away in shorts, a tank top with spaghetti straps, and bare feet, inexplicably ripping grass from the lawn in a methodical fashion. He’d finally asked what the hell Ophelia was doing. Juliet had rolled her eyes and said she was “being edgy.”
But Ophelia, absolutely wretched human creature that she was, used one hand to keep plucking grass and the other to give him the middle finger, shitty smile in place and locking eyes while she did it. She would have held his gaze and the middle finger up all day if her mom hadn’t come out and dragged Ophelia inside. Ophelia had flipped him off the whole time.
Enchantedisn’t the right word because it implies something delicate, whimsical, and positive, not the feral nonsense feud that followed—but he’s never come up with a better one.
They’d spent the next week engaged in a war of middle fingers, flipping each other off from afar, hanging out windows, and running by making weird noises so the other was tricked into looking. She’d found the perfect spot on her roof, just visible through his bathroom window, and waited, who knows how long, until he tried to use the bathroom and saw her. He took a photo of his middle finger and printed it out on his mother’s crappy printer, folded it into a cute-looking note, and waited for her to emerge from her house to shove it through the fence between their yards. She’d cackled and ripped it up and started shoving it through the spaces between the fence and he’d started shoving it back, until they were in a frantic war over the scraps.
Real normal kid stuff.
At some point they were together every chance they could be. At some point, he’d beaten another boy with a length of lumber—cheap shots from behind—because the boy had stuck his hand up her shirt. At some point she’d stabbed a boy in the thigh with a dull steak knife because the boy had shoved Mateo off the top of the slide on the derelict playground the too-old kids hung out in.
They were completely savage and senseless about one another.So he hates whoever is audacious enough to pose with her. The meat is tall and skinny, with dark eyes, well-shaped brows, black hair in a messy shag swept to one side, black eye makeup and lips, and a really slick jacket with a fluffy collar.
Oh.
It’s the other him.
