Page 5 of The Sisters of Crimson House

“Please,” the woman asked again, her pain sanding the question down into a prayer. “Please.” Please.

“Please,” said Miranda, whispering the word, surprising the woman by taking her hands in her own.

“Please,” Miranda said again, her voice rising. More urgent this time. The woman stopped speaking. She tried pulling away, but Miranda pressed her hands harder.

“Please, please, please, please, please,” she chanted, the words an eerie incantation.

“Let go of me!” the woman cried, jerking backward.

“Please!” Miranda responded, her voice high and reedy as her eyes locked onto to the frightened guest’s. It was not clear who sounded more terrified.

“Let her go!” her husband yelled, desperately trying to pry Miranda’s hand from his wife’s, but she was shockingly strong. His eyes met Charley’s who stood rooted in place.

“Do something,” the man pleaded, and Charley snapped out of her fog, sprinting to her sister.

“Miranda, let her go!” Charley grabbed her sister’s wrist and recoiled. Her skin was cold, clammy. Like a reptile. Flexing her fingers to rid them of the chill, she knew that whoever she’d just touched was not her sister.

Like a trap springing open, Miranda suddenly released the woman’s hands, and she collapsed backward into her husband, who half carried, half dragged her away in shock. Charley stood very still, too frightened to move as her sister’s black eyes locked onto hers.

“Please,” Miranda said in a strangled whisper, her jaw suddenly too rigid to move as if an unseen hand muzzled it in place. A tear escaped one black eye before they rolled back into her head.

Miranda went down, her head connecting with the antique marble top of a coffee table before hitting the floor, hard. Charley started crying, from relief, from fear, from watching her sister’s body convulse at her feet.

“Baby?” Nicole was already by Miranda’s side, one hand hovering helplessly over her daughter on the ground, the other clutching Charley’s leg. “Who did she let in?” she screamed up at her.

Charley just shook her head, her face wet with tears. Her dad was kneeling before her now, his calloused hands on her face before attending to Miranda, a triage of two daughters.

She didn’t know who Miranda had let in. It wasn’t her job to know these things, and she felt a sick gratitude that she would never know, that she was just an ordinary, jealous, nonmagical girl safe from the thing making her sister bleed on her grandmother’s floor.

Three

“Are you eating it or dissecting it?” Sadie gestured at Charley’s plate with her free hand, repetitively swirling champagne in a crystal flute with the other.

“It’s midnight. I’m not hungry.” Charley poked at an egg and olive sandwich with a miniature cocktail sword, committed to looking anywhere but at her grandmother. Sadie had ditched the Athena costume for an only slightly less formal long-sleeved black dress. Emergency or not, Sadie would be managing it as the best-dressed person in the room.

“Your sister is going to be okay. Your parents are gonna look after that cut, and she’ll be right as rain.” Swirl. Another swig of champagne. Nothing seemed to be blooming inside her glass unless you counted her completely baseless optimism.

“A cut?” Charley challenged. After Miranda had been hustled out the back entrance, Nicole and Charles flanking her on either side, Celeste scrubbed the floor with the intensity of Lady Macbeth cleaning up evidence. There had been so much blood. Miranda was going to need stitches for sure.

“Yes, baby. She’ll be fine.”

“But how do you know?” Guilt had turned Charley’s stomach into an acidic stew. If her sister’s haunted pleas didn’t chase her through her dreams tonight, the way her mother had looked at her surely would.

“Because your mama is your mama,” Sadie said with a wry smile, opening up her palm and studying the shape upon it. Her star was like Nicole’s, but a wider pentagram stretched across her palm like an expanding universe. “It’s her job to fix these things.” Charley knew she was alluding to more than just the “cut.” What Miranda needed healing from this evening was a much more fraught operation. “The Seeker’s Star always points us in the right direction.” The supernatural equivalent of because I said so.

Charley pressed the little cocktail sword into her own palm to keep from rolling her eyes into the back of her head. The thing was, Sadie wasn’t wrong. She always knew to look in the right direction. Her accuracy when it came to missing people had endeared her to an international clientele, so much so that she could pick up the phone from someone calling five thousand miles away and somehow know their story. Charley looked at her own palm, pressing the tiny cocktail sword harder at its center.

“Then what’s my job supposed to be?” Her question—or the boldness with which she asked it—surprised her, but she held her ground, expanding her fingers to reveal her blank palm. Sadie stared at her, her eyes fathomless as black holes. Charley fought the urge to squirm. She knew better than to think her grandmother was trying to peer inside her head and divine the mysteries within.

Sadie sighed. “Sometimes I think maybe you are like that sweet blond girl who lived with the strange family on TV. The father had a head like Frankenstein.”

Charley stared at her, thrown by the direction this was going. “Are you talking about The Munsters?”

“Marilyn. Marilyn from The Munsters,” Sadie agreed. “I think every family has a Marilyn. She is their center of gravity. You are our Marilyn,” she pronounced, sounding satisfied with this label.

“But I don’t want to be the Marilyn. I want to be like you,” Charley said, feeling the rage she forever fought to keep tamped down threatening to erupt. She didn’t have to be psychic to know what her grandmother was going to say next.

“You are a Bryde, and that means, by virtue of your birth, you are a very gifted young woman.”