Cordelia opened the door wide. Eustace rushed over to sign,dragging boxes in. “I shipped my personal effects before I left,” she explained.
Cordelia stared. “You were always going to stay.”
“I was never going to go back. There’s a difference.”
“There is?” A stray hair tickled her cheek. She curled it behind an ear, smashing waves against her head.
Her sister guided the last box in with a foot. “I didn’t know if Connecticut was my future, but I knew Colorado was my past.”
“You could have told me.” Cordelia’s heart tapped in the pause between breaths. Life would never be like it was before coming here.
An enormous crack echoed through the open doors, the world halved like a piece of fruit, followed by a thunderous boom. She felt the floors shake beneath her. A protracted squeal preceded a terrible crunch, steel meeting something more resistant than itself.
“That sounded close,” Eustace said.
“And bad,” Cordelia added. Mr. Browning’s popping eyes and barrel torso flashed across her mind, horror spiked with guilt surging through her. She started across the porch and down the steps, hurling herself onto the massive front lawn, Eustace’s words a cruel echo in her ears—You heard what Togers said about the house making its will known.
When the road was finally in sight, her legs slowed their pumping as she took in the terrible scene. A white BMW was folded like an accordion against the gigantic trunk of a fallen sycamore less than a hundred yards away. Leaves and branches littered the road, smoke streamed from the hood, and Mr. Browning’s carefully combed hair could be seen flopping over the steering wheel.
Cordelia’s heart lurched. In her rush to save one innocent, she’d doomed another. But maybe there was still time.
She dashed toward the car, wrenching open the driver’s door.Shaking the man’s shoulder violently as she called his name, she realized quickly he was unconscious. Behind her, Cordelia could vaguely make out her sister’s calls as she dug a hand beneath each of the appraiser’s arms and pulled him slowly from the car to the street. But his weight was too much for her, and Cordelia found it nearly impossible to drag him farther, even as the smoke she feared billowed from around the hood in angry gusts. She leaned over him, trying to check his breathing.
A moment later, Gordon was at her side.
“We have to help him! Do you know CPR?” she asked, panicked.
“He’s breathing,” Gordon told her over the sound of the car. “Let’s get him to the shoulder. It’s not safe here.” Together, they dragged the unconscious Mr. Browning to where they could lay him free of the road. “Call 911!” Gordon shouted to Eustace, only a few steps behind.
“There’s a wound on the side of his head,” Gordon told her, inspecting the man. “He’s probably concussed. I don’t know about anything else.”
“Should we have left him in the car?” Cordelia asked, afraid she’d made another deadly mistake. “Until the paramedics come?”
“See that smoke?” Gordon nodded toward the wreckage. “Fire risk. You were right to pull him out.”
Eustace trotted over. “They’re on their way.”
Gordon dug into Browning’s pockets and pulled out a wallet. He flipped to his ID. “The paramedics will need identification, medical card, anything like that.”
Next to the man’s ID, Cordelia saw the folded edges of the paper she’d signed, releasing the clock to him.Lifting onto her toes, she looked toward the car, where the clock sat perfectly unharmed in the passenger seat, its minute hand still ticking away.
Blood pooled in her feet like sediment. A brush of painlanced her head as the weight of responsibility swallowed her. Was this the truth of who she was at her core, the reason her mother had taught her to fear herself, her very nature? Because she invited chaos? Because anyone who got near her would suffer for it? Maybe it wasn’t their family’s magic that was black, maybe it was her. Maybe she tainted the power she’d inherited like a dirty filter.
“You can go back in,” Gordon told her. “I’ll wait with him. No use in two of you being unconscious.”
Cordelia realized she must look waxen, the color of sawdust. She hesitated.
“Go!” He told her. “You’ve done all you can here. You probably saved his life.”
Had she? Or had she cursed it?
She stood on shaky feet, looking down as a roaring rush of heat nearly threw her back to the grass. She looked behind her, coughing, to see Gordon shielding the appraiser with his body, the BMW now engulfed in flames.
“The tires are going,” he called to her. “The air is feeding the fire. You need to get back!”
But Gordon and Mr. Browning looked too close to the flames for safety. She clambered to Gordon’s side, head splitting from the blow, and tried to convince him to pull the man farther away from the flaming vehicle.
“It’s too risky!” he yelled over the sound of the fire. He pointed to Browning’s pants, where a dark stain had formed. “He’s lost bladder control. He could have a spinal cord injury.”
