Chapter Twenty-One
Four hours later, Lily was still ruminating on how far her senior year had gotten off track. Her tarot reading, which had seemed so clear, felt more like a burden than a glimpse of a path forward. She felt nothing for Luke, so she resisted flirting with him. Even if pretending that she liked him was the wisest course of action to kick-start a relationship, faking it felt wrong. And who was she kidding, anyway? She’d barely thought about him at all since she’d begun fighting with Chrysanthemum, which was a painful irony.
After a hasty lunch that she’d eaten while texting with Sonia, Lily hurried back to work. Last weekend, she and Chrysanthemum had been released before four o’clock, but their to-do list was longer this week. Plus, painting over the dark green trim with a fresh, bright white was tedious work. Lily alternated between taping one window’s worth of trim and painting another’s to keep the task from being too monotonous. But there were several large windows, each with lots of tiny pieces of wood trim and muntins, and it was a painfully slow process if she didn’t want to be sloppy about it. Which she didn’t.
Unlike Chrysanthemum.
Chrysanthemum seemed to be taking the taping part as a suggestion. She’d started out doing it, but soon abandoned the task. As a result, Chrysanthemum had painted herself significantly more than Lily had. Not to mention the walls. But when Lily had pointed this out—the only words she’d spoken to Chrysanthemum all day—Chrysanthemum had snapped that they were painting the walls after they finished the trim, so who cared if some trim paint got on them?
No one should, that was who. The logic felt like another slap in the face, and Lily’s cheeks still stung from the last ones.
“Intent matters,”
she’d snapped back.
“Sloppy work makes for sloppy results.”
She’d dug in after that, doing her best to be even more meticulous. Unfortunately, that meant she was working even more slowly than she had previously, but it would be worth it when someone came by to check up on their work and Lily’s was praised and Chrysanthemum was told to be more careful. Surely that would happen.
Fortified by the thought, Lily slid her ladder another foot to the right. Through the window, she had a clear view into downtown, and it didn’t help her mood. The trees were starting to rain down leaves, and the colors that were left were nothing short of spectacular. Crowns of fiery oranges, golden yellows, and cozy reds made it look like the streets were ablaze. The town had finally pulled out all the stops, and every storefront was a vision of black-and-orange Halloween vibes. If she closed her eyes, Lily could practically smell the air, filled with the scents of pine needles and woodsmoke.
She stretched her arm farther, hoping she could reach the last bit of trim above her head without moving the ladder again, when a flicker in the hard-to-reach corner startled her, and she grabbed the ladder before she could slip.
Every window and doorway in the building was warded, one reason Lily had felt safer the moment she’d stepped inside. The wards were old but constantly reinforced by her father and other board members, and the elaborate magical sigils they used remained visible for days after they’d been updated. On those days, it was possible to see how they moved as they reacted to threats.
Lily had always assumed that those threats were nothing more than normies poking too close to the Society for the building’s comfort. That was why, although she was initially startled by a shadowy movement, she didn’t think anything of it. By the time she realized it had been too long since the wards had been refreshed for her to see them anywhere else, something moved again.
Not a ward, but a thin, pulsating black line.
Lily’s hand had been hovering inches above it, and she yanked it back.
Impossible. For a second, she refused to believe what she was seeing. Whatever had been going on at the high school couldn’t have traveled here. The Historical Society was the best-protected spot in all of Thornhaven.
But before Lily could finish that thought, before she dared look behind her to see if there were more lines or to consider whether she should alert Chrysanthemum, the wall around the window lit up like a neon sign. The warding sigils (there were always three per window) flared with power, spinning and writhing.
And then they burst. Silently, in a flash of multi-tinge-colored light.
Lily screamed, and she instinctively reached up and shielded her eyes, turning away as she did. Her foot slid on the rung, but with only one hand on the ladder, she couldn’t steady herself. This time, she lost her balance for good. Lily crashed to the floor, pulling the ladder—and the bucket of paint on its shelf—down with her.
The ladder landed partially on top of her, and white paint exploded everywhere. The trim. The windowpanes. The wall. The floor. The tables and nearest bookshelves, which were, thankfully, covered in drop cloths. It landed all over Lily, too, spattering her in the face and hair. The paint can clattered to the floorboards and rolled toward her, somehow vomiting up even more Avalanche White (such a hideously appropriate it name, it turned out) on its journey. How there had been any left inside had to be magic.
Lily lay there, too stunned by everything that had happened to notice she was in pain and too horrified to remember she wasn’t alone until she heard Chrysanthemum’s voice.
“Are you okay?”
Chrysanthemum must have turned as the paint can hit the floor, because white flecks splattered one side of her face and clothes.
Lily almost laughed; Chrysanthemum would never be caught dead in white.
She was losing her mind.
“I …”
Embarrassment flooded Lily’s veins. After she’d been lecturing Chrysanthemum about being careful, she was the one who’d created a hellish mess. Lily looked like a fool, and she knew it.
Pride, or a sense of self-preservation, it was impossible to tell which, urged Lily to snap something nasty back. Her tongue itched with a do I look okay? retort, but something else, something Lily wasn’t sure of, stopped her.
Chrysanthemum wasn’t smirking, and there had been nothing mean in the way she’d asked the question. She looked genuinely worried.
Lily didn’t know what to make of that, but it melted the snippy retort right off her tongue.
“I think so. The wards, though, I think they all broke.”
Chrysanthemum wet her lips, then seemed to realize they were splattered with paint. She grimaced, wiping her mouth on the inside of her flannel shirt.
“I saw. The ones on the door, I mean. This seems bad.”
That had to be a vast understatement, but Lily couldn’t make fun of her for it. Lily’s own brain, her emotions, and her mouth were struggling to link up. Although, she did feel the tiniest bit vindicated for having asked Chrysanthemum to work together on the hex problem, and she hoped Chrysanthemum was also feeling the tiniest bit of regret for refusing.
“Here.”
Chrysanthemum shoved the ladder over, making it easier for Lily to worm her way out from beneath it.
Lily’s knees throbbed with a pain that she tried not to show as she sat up. Her palms, too, were scraped, or so she assumed. It was hard to tell beneath the layer of white paint. She must look a hundred times more ridiculous than Chrysanthemum. The paint spatter, combined with the mostly fallen-apart bun, softened Chrysanthemum’s stark features. Or maybe it was that she wasn’t acting evil at the moment. Whatever the reason, Lily had a hard time glancing away as Chrysanthemum set the ladder aside.
This was weird, and she had to snap out of this daze. The wards had broken. Black lines were slithering around the library walls. Of all the times for Chrysanthemum to distract her …
Lily closed her eyes and just as quickly opened them when something in the room went thump. Her heart thumped with it.
“What was that?”
Chrysanthemum spun around slowly, and Lily couldn’t fail to notice that she’d inched closer to her. Almost protectively. “There!”
With her gaze, Lily followed the direction Chrysanthemum pointed in and caught a book sliding off one of the shelves. Even though she watched it move, the sound it made when it hit the floor jostled Lily’s frayed nerves.
Another book on another shelf followed. Then two.
Chrysanthemum started to say something, but she never got to finish because things escalated rapidly until the library resembled a book tornado—or, on deeper reflection, it was like the books were imitating the crows that had been circling the town hall this morning. One zipped by Lily, its pages and cover flapping in a poor imitation of flight.
Screaming for help, Lily crawled across the paint-sticky drop cloth and sheltered under a table. Chrysanthemum had started off trying to minimize the damage by grabbing for books to prevent them from flying around, but she gave up quickly and crouched next to Lily.
Then, just as unceremoniously as it had started, the chaos stopped. The books fell to the floor, and the silence that ensued was as loud as anything Lily had ever heard.
Warily, she inched out from beneath the table, surveying the lifeless books and empty shelves with dismay. Chrysanthemum climbed to her feet on the table’s other side. She wore a devastated expression as she gently ran a finger down the spine of a book that had landed with its cover splayed open, paint oozing from between its pages like white blood.
Footsteps heralded the approach of Mr. Stephens, and Lily broke away from gaping at the mess to face the Society’s librarian.
“Oh no.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“Are you girls okay?”
“The wards,”
Lily began.
“The books,”
said Chrysanthemum.
Mr. Stephens nodded, somehow managing to appear even older than he was.
“The wards broke all over the building. Luckily, this is the only room that appears to have been damaged by whatever did it.”
Luckily, perhaps, but it wasn’t a coincidence. As much as Lily wanted to believe that she and Chrysanthemum weren’t involved in whatever was going on, this made it a lot harder for her to do so. She glanced over at Chrysanthemum, and her nemesis, who didn’t seem especially nemesis-like at the moment, met her gaze. For once, Lily managed not to look away.
For once, she thought she and Chrysanthemum might be agreeing on something.