I move down the candle. I start again, smoother this time.
“L”
She was my best friend.
“I”
She was my best friend and I betrayed her.
“L”
She was my best friend and I betrayed her and now she is getting her revenge on the city.
“Y”
She was my best friend and I lost her and now I am getting my revenge on the city.
When I run out of candle space, I tug thick, curly hairs from my scalp. Wrenching them at the ends, where they hurt most. Good. Pain is good. Sacrifice is good.
Wrapping each hair tightly around the candle, whispering my made-up chant as I go. I try to copy the shopkeeper at Divination, making it rhyme so it’s easy to remember, and less clunky to say.
“Retrieve Lily, protect Maeve;
Forgive a friend, her life to save
“Retrieve Lily, protect Maeve
Forgive a friend, her life to save.”
I go on and on like this, wrapping and burning, carving and chanting, until I hear birds waking up. The words start feeling like wool in my mouth, and after a while I lose sense of what they even mean. Forgive who? Save whose life, exactly?
At some point, I must fall asleep.
I wake up before anyone finds me, lying in the middle of my protection circle, huddled in a ball in my great-grandmother’s rabbit-fur coat. A drop of water falls on my forehead.
Then another.
And another.
Water is leaking through the old roof of our house, falling through the ceiling tiles and onto the floor.
The snow is melting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“WELL, THANK GOD FOR THAT,” MUM SAYS AT BREAKFAST. She managed to get the gas cooker working, so we are eating fried stale bread smeared with Ballymaloe Relish and drinking tea made with water boiled on the stove. “Apparently the cold snap finally broke overnight. The power should be back on at some point this afternoon.”
“When?” Jo asks irritably. “I have an essay due and nothing to write it on.”
“I’m sure they’ll extend your deadline, given the apocalyptic weather.”
“Well, if this is the Apocalypse,” Dad says, heading outside with a shovel, “at least we know the scale of it.”
I can barely eat my fried bread. I did this. I melted the snow. I ended the cold snap. I invented a spell.
And it worked.
Flexing my hand, I see that the snow isn’t the only thing that has changed. The gash on my hand has papered over with fine scar tissue, the kind of scarring that usually takes at least a week to form.
Maybe I am capable of summoning demons. But maybe all this crazy Housekeeper energy that lives inside me could do good as well as bad. Maybe the same power that pushed Lily away could be part of the solution to bring her back.
I’ve been so angry with myself for being angry. For flying into sudden rages, for throwing the shoe in class, for having so much frustration living deep within my skin that it would occasionally just spark out in moments of white-hot fury. But what if I could take all of that, and direct it into something else? Into … well, into magic?
I pick up the house phone every few minutes, searching for a dial tone. The O’Callaghans’ landline is pretty much the only one I know, aside from my own. I need to talk to Roe. He needs to know about the spell, about what I can do. I hop from one foot to another in frustration. Dad says drivers have to be even more careful, now that the snow is melting. He doesn’t want me leaving the house, despite my desperation to find Roe and Fi. We could devise a spell to get Lily back. Now that I know how, it would be easy.
“You’ll slip and break your back, Maeve,” he says, eyebrows furrowed, hand protectively around the dog.
“Make yourself useful, Mae,” Mum urges. “We need to do a big clean-out in the study. Throw out all the crap books—”
“There are no crap books,” Dad interjects.
“We have two copies of the same Jeffrey Archer book.”
“Well…”
“Frankly, I’m offended we have one.”
There’s nothing better to do and it’s still too cold to sit still, so I agree. The study is a tiny room at the back of the house with floor-to-ceiling shelves and is far enough away from the TV and the kitchen that you have no excuse not to study in here. I still remember Joanne, the year she did her Leaving Cert, holed up in here and breaking out in tiny skin rashes all over her body from the stress of it all. Poor Jo, I think, suddenly filled with empathy for her. She’s only ever doing her best. I remind myself to apologize to her for yesterday. Maybe, I think excitedly, I can even come up with a spell that will help her chill out a bit.
I get to work clearing out the books. Most of them really are a bit crap. Even I can tell. They are mostly unofficial biographies of sports stars and ex-presidents, the kinds of thing my brothers would have bought my dad for Christmas. I fish out my Walkman from the Chokey and slot it on to my waistband, weeding away at the books contentedly. Everything is going fine until a rogue copy of The Second Half by Roy Keane catches on my headphones and wrestles the Walkman free, smashing it on the floor.
I scream in surprise, grappling at the tape player to see if it’s completely ruined. I could easily find another one on eBay, but it makes me realize how attached I am to it now. I analyse the pieces, trying to calm down from the sudden shock. It’s just the plastic bit at the front, the bit that keeps the cassette in, that has snapped off. It can be superglued back on, easy. I practically wheeze in relief.
I gather the tape and the shattered pieces in my hands, trying to keep everything together while I find the
