Chapter Five
Lily Woodson lay in the filth of the alley and contemplated ways to make herself disintegrate into the concrete.
Her body felt like it was on the verge of falling apart anyway.
Like she was full of cracks, and whatever was inside of her—whatever vile, rotten, awful thing—was pushing, pulsing, demanding to be let out.
And soon it would be free, and then she would be lost entirely.
That, at least, she was sure of. What she wasn’t sure of was how long she could fight it off.
Or if she would be strong enough to end herself before it broke out.
She pulled herself tighter into a ball. Her fingers were bone white against the dark blue of her jeans, despite the fact that it must be upwards of ninety degrees.
Her body was both hot and cold at once—burning up from the inside out, but frozen by the layer of dread that coated her like a second skin.
She hadn’t meant to do that to Noah. Sure, she’d been mad at him—he was blasting the TV while she was trying to scroll through her feed, interrupting a very dramatic thread about a girl who walked in on her boyfriend making out with her best friend.
She’d yelled at him to keep it down, and because he was ten, he yelled back that he was going to keep her big fat butt down.
It was a pointless comment, the type of thing she normally would have laughed off, but something about it snagged.
Made her remember the boys in the school cafeteria who would snicker about what every girl had put on her tray for lunch that day.
And that, that whiff of discomfort and danger she’d already trained herself to put in a box in the back of her mind, made her boil with rage.
It came at her in a wave then, this thing she’d felt twinges of before.
The other times, she’d been able to push it down, dismissing it as nausea or a sugar rush.
But now she couldn’t get rid of it, this tsunami that was drowning her, crowding out her ability to think of anything other than the white-hot anger that seared every corner of her body.
It overwhelmed her, coming and coming until she had no choice but to let it out.
At first, she thought there’d been an earthquake. One second everything was fine, and then the coffee table was flipped, the TV was smashed, the couch was upended. She hadn’t felt the shake, but sometimes these things were quick, right?
But then she saw Noah. Lying on the ground, his body thrown into the coffee table, shards of wood sprinkled across the floor.
A singed hole in his T-shirt, a bloom of red growing in the center of his stomach.
And her hands, hot with anger, hot with rage, hot with actual fire, sparks darting across her skin.
She threw up, right over her brother’s shoes.
Her dead brother, she’d thought, but then she’d seen the faint rise and fall of his chest. She managed to get herself to her phone to try to call 911, but when she touched it, the metal melted in her hands.
They were still covered in those red sparks. She was on fire. How was she on fire?
There were keys jingling in the door. Her mom, coming home from work. Her dad would be home soon too.
And she was on fire, Noah bleeding on the floor, with something inside of her screaming to do it again.
She went for the window. Crawled out, leaving burnt handprints in her wake, and then ran, and ran, and ran, until the fire finally gave out, and then ran and ran and ran some more until her legs gave out too, and then she wound up here.
She decided she’d die here, away from anyone she could possibly hurt. Alone.
Only she wasn’t alone anymore. She spotted the feet out of the corner of her eye as she shifted, white sneakers with scuff marks on the bottoms. She pushed herself closer to the wall, until she was hidden in the shadow of the building.
Whoever this was could just throw away their trash or smoke their joint and leave her alone.
But they didn’t leave. The white sneakers took a step closer, and then another, and then they were right above her, and then a female voice said, softly, “Lily?”
Lily closed her eyes tighter, buried her face further in her knees. Just wait for her to go away, she told herself. This is a test—ignore the voices in your head, and then you’ll stop being crazy and everything will go back to normal.
But the woman didn’t go away. She sat down, trash crushing beneath her, deciding—incorrectly—that Lily was a person worth sitting in the middle of a disgusting alley for.
That, Lily decided, warranted a glance. She lifted her head up, peering over her knees. The stranger stared at her, concern flashing through her hazel eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the woman said, and Lily laughed, because that wasn’t what she was worried about.
“And you’re not going to hurt me.”
That was enough to make Lily take her head fully out of her hands.
“My name is Katherine,” the woman said. She looked like Lily’s English teacher from last year, the one who let her write her final essay on Little Women even though the class was supposed to be covering John Steinbeck. “I’m here to help you.”
“Can you take it out of me?”
Lily’s heart fell as Katherine shook her head.
“But I can help you get to a point where what happened to your brother won’t happen to anyone else,” Katherine said softly.
Lily ran her hands through her hair, picking at the knots that had developed as she fled.
She wanted that more than anything, but she didn’t see how it could be possible.
Not with the strength of the fire still burning in her.
“I don’t think I can keep this in. It’s too much.”
“I know it feels that way right now.” Katherine reached out, gently pulling Lily’s fingers away from the tangle she’d been trying to rip apart. She rubbed her thumb along Lily’s palm, and Lily’s breathing calmed. “But I promise, you can learn how to control it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I controlled it. I thought my magic was going to eat me alive, but it didn’t. I’m here, talking to you.”
Magic? Lily’s brain stuttered on the word, the rational part of her saying that magic didn’t exist, that that couldn’t be what this feeling was. But the burning in her stomach danced when the word was uttered, glad to be called by what it was. There was power in being named.
And Katherine had learned to control it. Her … her magic. She was here, and she was alive, and she didn’t seem like she was on the verge of falling apart.
Maybe Lily’s life wasn’t over.
“Please,” Katherine said. “Come with me.”
Lily paused, hope warring with fear. Fear that told her to stay here, to let the pavement grow around her and take her, until there was nothing left but a bump in the concrete. Hope that screamed at her to go, to take the chance to find a way to live in this new reality.
She chose hope.
“Okay.”