“Dear Rhonda: I think the IT guy at my office is sabotaging my computer to have an excuse to flirt with me. My friend says I’m crazy, but no one else in the office has even close to as many problems with their computer as me, and it is so frustrating. He is always asking me what I did on the weekend, which I know everyone asks, but it’s somehow different when he asks it. I was thinking of complaining, but I don’t have any proof. Also, my boss isn’t very good at being confidential, so word will get back to him, and then who knows if I’ll even be able to use my computer after that?
Help me Rhonda,
—Unlucky in I.T.”
My mom looked confused. She was trying to tell me something, but I ignored her, pointed my Homunculus Totem at her, and finished the spell, “This pastry blender inspires you to answer my next question truthfully” The pastry blender erupted with yellow bile and dissolved in my hand.
I had thought a lot about what I was going to ask my mom over the last two days. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, so I got right to the point: “Mom, do you love me?” The words had almost caught in my throat. I was embarrassed by the sincerity of the question, but I needed the answer.
Her expression became cold, impassive. “No,” she said, her mouth opening just enough to let the word escape.
I groaned involuntarily and searched the air with my hand for the work table to lean on.
Kaliah’s voice, solemn: “Let’s go, Charlie.”
My mom was no longer compelled to answer truthfully, but another question came to mind, and I blurted it out: “Why did you give me Kaliah’s totems?”
“Because I wanted you to think you could escape,” she said, almost hissing. The hate in her eyes was agonizing to see, but I couldn’t look away. “Then Blanche would finally see how dangerous you are and let me kill you. You had always been her favorite. She was the one who sang to you before bed, through my lips. So many nights. She was your mom, not me.”
I heard incongruous applause and cheers beneath me from the graduation audience, then spinning black graduation hats flew up all around us like a fountain. They reached the peaks of their flights and paused for a moment, reflecting sunlight. As they fell, I saw Brad walking out of the bleachers and through the air toward us. Kaliah controlled who walked in her projected whorls, except for him. He was a trespasser.
Chapter 30
HE WORE BOARD SHORTS, a tank top, and a black, down parka. He waved and tapped a staff in front of him like a blind man as he navigated Kaliah’s whorl. He had a black eye. He smiled at Kaliah and said, “There’s my little Testarossa. I missed you. Can’t wait to have makeup sex.”
My mind had been flailing, trying to process my mom’s betrayal until I saw Kayak Brad and heard the disgusting words out of his mouth. Rage gathered and swaddled my thoughts, pinning them comfortingly to a single purpose. I took the three strides separating Brad and me in such a way that I was swinging when I reached him.
“Charlie, don’t,” Kaliah said, but she was too late to stop me.
My knuckles smacked against the side of his head. I’d been aiming for his chin but he ducked at the last moment. As I threw the left, he knocked me square on the nose with his staff. I stumbled back, eyes watering. Taking advantage of my temporary imbalance, he swiped my legs out from under me with his staff. My head and back slammed onto the concrete floor. As I scrambled onto my feet, Kaliah’s projected whorl failed, and we were in the kitchen of the bakery again.
Brad turned and sauntered toward Kaliah, who backed into a corner, slid down, curled into a ball, and began crying like a frightened child.
“No,” I said, realizing the stupidity of what I’d done. By punching Brad, I’d opened the gates for him to reenter Kaliah’s whorls.
I took the two bottles from my pocket, drank Kaliah’s blood from one, and dropped bloom on my skin from the other. Then I punched myself in the face and tried to graft . . . but failed. I punched myself harder. This time the graft caught, and the voices in the cackle formed the Lodge around me and put me in Kaliah’s twelve-year-old body.
Already, Brad had inserted seven corruptions in this whorl that weren’t here when I’d last visited. As long as he had a foothold in Kaliah’s cackle, he would never leave her alone.
As I deviated from the path of pain and reached for the familiar letter opener to gash my hand, the Brads scattered like crows that had seen a gun. I chased them down the hallway where they’d disappeared before. But because I’d drunken Kaliah’s blood, they now remained visible to me. And I was able to follow them into a dining room where people sat in groups of two to five, drinking mimosas and eating omelets at tables with white tablecloths. The Brads screeched and made a mess and a racket trying to escape from me, but I tracked them all down and purged them from Kaliah’s whorl.
I’d strayed from the pain of this whorl
