Only Saints

« xvi. »

"Your family is really cool."

"Yeah." I toss a flat pebble into the creek and listen to it hit the water. A couple of raindrops are already falling, teasing at the storm that still hasn't fully made it here. Maybe it'll hit us tomorrow. Maybe it got delayed at the coast.

"'Yeah' is not an answer," Drew teases. He sits back on the grass, his legs crossed in front of him, and stares up at the sky where it's growing slowly darker. It's barely two in the afternoon, but the sun could be setting already for all we can tell. "I'm serious. I think they're really chill."

"I think so, too." I can't muster the energy to be angry at him any more. It's like my bones have been hollowed out and filled with molten lead; everything is so close and so warm and so heavy. It's hard to drag my arm up, to toss another little rock down into the water, to drop my hand back to the soil and sand and dig for another pebble.

My eyelids are heavy. My body is begging me to go back to sleep. I haven't gotten a good rest since—

Yeah.

Since then.

"I like your cousin," he offers. "Florie. They're really...nice."

I blink at 'they,' but shake my head. Whatever that's about, it's none of my business.

If it was my business, she would have told me.

And maybe it hurts a little that she hasn't told me. What is it about Drew that makes her want to spill every secret, when she can barely look at me? Why doesn't she trust me the same way?

If it was my business, I have to tell myself, she would have told me.

"I'm glad," I say, mustering up the most basic of basic responses. Something to fill the air so it doesn't feel so empty in the time between Drew saying things. I don't think I have the energy to hold a real conversation right now. I just want to go back to bed, to curl up under my covers and close my eyes and maybe not wake up until after tomorrow.

I'm not sure I want to go through with the spellweaving.

How am I going to explain it all to Drew? Do I tell him about all of the hocus-pocus bullshit, or do I tell him that my family has some weird religious ritual we have to do, and while we'd love to include him, he's not part of the religion?

He would call me on that so quick. We both know that I'm barely Catholic and nothing else. As much as Dad would like for me to be emotionally invested in the resurrection of Christ and the Immaculate Conception and the bodily ascension of Mary into Heaven and all the fun stuff that comes along with a two-millennia-old church, it's just not something that interests me.

I learned just enough to skate by. It's the exact opposite of school, where I threw myself so heavily into my work that I'm lucky I ever climbed out of that hole.

But the spellweaving is something else entirely. It's nothing that Drew has ever seen before; it's nearly nothing that I've ever seen before. I'm more used to little spells, the ones that take one or two witches to complete. Fixing leaks, growing plants, mending clothes and plates and rusty hinges, keeping food fresh for longer. The most detailed small spell I ever saw was the one my family did to hold the road together.

The one that's fallen apart, now that Old Mère is dead.

I guess I have to face it, don't I?

"She said you guys have a family thing going on tomorrow?" Drew looks over at me, and even though he said it like a question, it's obvious it's more of a demand for an answer.

"Yeah. A family thing," I mumble. "It'll take a few hours, at least. We have some—family friends—coming up from Sebring to help out."

"That's cool. I was thinking I'd maybe go into town," Drew says. "I saw a cute little bookstore that I want to check out. Maybe they have some really old stuff, you know?"