Page 39 of Hell Bent

“Who was that anyway?”

Alex hesitated. “Who did she say she was?”

“A friend of your cousin’s.”

Lies came easy to Alex. They always had. She’d been lying since she’d learned she saw things other people didn’t, since she’d understood how easy it was to slap the words crazy or unstable on a girl and make them stick. She could feel all those friendly lies ready to unfurl from her tongue, scarves from a cheap magician. That was what Lethe and the societies demanded. Secrecy. Loyalty.

Well, fuck them.

“Darlington isn’t my cousin. And he isn’t in Spain. And I need to talk to you about what happened last year.”

Mercy fiddled with the laptop cord. “When you had a giant bite mark in your side and I had to call your mom?”

“No,” Alex said. “I want to talk about what happened to you.”

She wasn’t sure how Mercy would react. She was ready to back off if she needed to.

Mercy set her computer aside, then said, “I’m hungry.”

Alex hadn’t expected that. “I can make you a Pop-Tart or…” She reached into her satchel and took out Dawes’s chocolate chip pancakes.

“Do you just walk around with breakfast food in your bag?”

“Honestly? All the time.”

Mercy ate most of a pancake and Alex made coffee for both of them, and then she started talking. About the societies, Darlington, the mess of their freshman year. Mercy’s eyebrows rose slowly higher as Alex’s story spilled out. Occasionally she would nod, but Alex wasn’t sure if she was just encouraging her to continue or actually taking it all in.

Eventually Alex didn’t so much stop as wind down, as if there just weren’t enough words for all the secrets she’d been keeping. Everything around them felt too ordinary for a story like this. The sounds of doors opening and closing in the echoing stairwells, shouts from the courtyard, the rush of cars somewhere on York Street. Alex knew she was risking being late to meet Dawes, but she didn’t want to look down at her phone.

“So,” Mercy said slowly, “is that where you got the tattoos?”

Alex almost laughed. No one had mentioned her sleeves of peonies and snakes and stars that had suddenly appeared at the end of the school year. It was as if they hadn’t been able to grasp that such a thing was possible, so their minds had made the necessary corrections.

“Not where I got them, but Darlington helped me hide them for a while.”

“Using magic?” Mercy asked.

“Yup.”

“Which is real.”

“Yup.”

“And super deadly.”

“It is,” said Alex.

“And kind of gross.”

“Very gross.”

“I prayed a lot this summer.”

Alex tried not to show her surprise. “Did it help?”

“Some. I went to therapy too. I used this app and I talked to someone for a while, about what happened. It helped me stop thinking about it all the time. I tried talking to our pastor too. But I’m just not sorry Blake’s dead.”

“Should you be?”