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“You exorcised Agatha’s mother,” Rio says, and the green mist is too thick to see anything at all. “I owe you for that, Alice Wu Gulliver.”
Alice shivers. She thinks immediately of stories whispered in the night – of faeries, and what they could do with names. Each of Rio’s carefully measured words feel like threats, but this is more of a promise.
“Why did you do it?” Rio’s disembodied voice asks, and Alice’s fingernails dig into the palm of her hand.
“I don't- I don't know .”
And it's an awful thing, to not know what you died for.
“Okay,” says Rio’s quiet voice, and then a hand is spinning her away, and Alice can see nothing and everything, and the thick, overwhelming green blurs into something brighter, clearer, the light incense drifting in the breeze.
---
There is a little girl, with her hair in pigtails, drawing runes in the soft mud the rain has left behind. She grips her stick like a sword. Even now, the knight of wands. Her mother would say do you know that you’re very brave, Alice? Stay brave, child, always be brave.
But this little girl still has her mother to tell her that. She will repeat it to herself in the quiet for many years to come. When her mother traipses across the country, knowing her band better than her daughter, the words will be whispered, and the little girl will wonder if that’s where she misstepped, if her mother could read cowardice on her skin and had gone somewhere she would not have to see it.
A boy will arrive and he will read those words from where she has engraved them in the walls of her mind, but he will not come until much later. This little girl still has her mother.
Stay brave, child.
Had Alice stayed brave? Not always. Not even at the end, when she had rushed forward and saved the life of the witch killer. When gold had changed to purple, Alice had felt fear right down to her bones. When Alice had looked down at that shrivelled corpse, Alice had wanted to cry. But what was bravery, anyway?
The little girl raises her sword and nods her head. “When I grow up,” the little girl starts, and Alice’s heart twists, because this girl will grow ten years from this day, and then twenty, and will rise no higher than that. The girl does not finish this sentence. When she grows up, she will die.
The girl draws a heart in the mud with the hilt of her sword, and then she scribbles it out.
“You die protecting someone,” Alice whispers.
The girl looks up, slightly surprised by the continued presence of this woman with her fire orange bangs. “I know,” little Alice whispers back. “I’m very brave.”
---
There is a teenager with a blood red pocketknife that she is turning over in her hands. She sits on the wooden fence, and the talisman earrings her mother had given her are lying in the dirt by her feet.
She’s etching her name on the wooden post. She’s up to the swirl of the c, and very desperately wants to be heard, wants to leave something behind.
“One day,” Alice says, “you're going to wish you'd gone in.”
The teenager shrugs, and scratches absently at her arm, where the tattoo is hidden by her jacket, with the full edge of the knife. She doesn't look up the dirt road to the townhouse her mother is preparing to perform in.
“You know she loves you,” Alice looks the teenager head on, words tinged with desperation.
She shrugs again. “I know she's not well.”
Alice does glance at the townhouse, and then she climbs up on the fence beside the teenager, swinging her legs a little.
“You’re angry.”
“Of course I'm angry. We're all angry.” She runs the blade through the c one final time, then starts on the e. “I'm not a toy to be discarded when my uses have expired. You don't get to stop parenting when it suits you, you just don't .”
So fierce, so angry, so heartbroken. Alice wishes she could do something to fix it, but Alice never fixes anything. Everything she touches turns to shit.
“You’re not going to go in,” Alice says, because she already knows how this story goes. She's already sat on this fence and carved her name into something that will wear down and break and erase her, one day.
“No,” replies the poor girl, and she finally looks up after finishing the e, Alice staring straight at Alice, Alice staring back, “but you are.”
---
When she reaches the steps of the immediately empty townhouse, Alice turns around, sits down on them, and says “because what’s the point of being a protection witch if you can’t even protect the person you love the most?”
(If Alice knew of other things, of little boys who were born dead but lived six years all the same, she would wonder if Agatha would resonate with this statement, if Rio would. What was the point of power when you couldn’t use it for what really, truly, desperately mattered?)
(But Alice did not know of these things.)
She stands from the step and there is no reply, but the air is shifting like she’s viewing it through a screen of smoke, and its solidification is of no surprise.
---
“Be brave,” says a nineteen-year-old girl, her fists clenched tightly and her leg bouncing up and down. “Be brave, Alice Wu Gulliver, and stay brave.”
“You don’t always have to be brave,” Alice tells her quietly, and then repeats it louder when the girl doesn’t seem to hear. “You’re allowed to be scared. Some things are really fucking scaring. She doesn’t hate you for that. She’s not- she's not ashamed.”
But the girl keeps muttering it, on and on and on, always stay brave , until her breathing steadies out and she forces herself onto unsteady feet and makes her way to the door.
---
The tattoo artist doesn’t give the thirteen-year-old in the chair a single strange look, not even when Lorna refuses to sit down on the old, frayed couch by the door. This little girl is not his responsibility, after all.
There is no Lorna in this room, no tattoo artist with his spiked hair and thick black eyebrows, and the girl in the chair looks very alone, forever waiting.
“She does this,” Alice tells the girl, “because she loves you desperately enough to spend her whole life trying to save you.”
“A sacrifice,” the thirteen-year-old (and much older – it's all in the eyes, you see) nods knowingly, because it is not this girl, not this age that the anger had started. Then she grins widely, the bands around her braces a bright pink, and she just looks her age again. “I’m gonna be the most bad ass kid in school.”
“Damn right you will,” and somehow this, of all things, of all torments, is what makes Alice’s vision grow blurry, makes her brown eyes swim, makes them drown.
---
“Because it’s the sort of person I want to be,” Alice whispers, and the thirteen-year-old doesn’t hear. “Because it’s the sort of person I already am. Because it was brave.”
---
There is a room with a stack of hand painted tarot cards and a four-century old broach and a spellbook with smudged notes in the margins and a fine gold chain encasing a cut of pink crystal.
The twenty-one-year-old who had just lost her mother (and is so full of rage that Alice can smell it on her, like kerosene) grips the edge of the table and stares down at the array of trinkets.
“I don’t have any family,” she says without looking up.
Alice swallows around the lump in her throat. “You will.”
---
The thirteen-year-old meeting her gaze in the mirror shrinks and grows all at once, and when Alice looks around, she knows where she is.
There is a little girl with her hair neatly, perfectly done by her mother, smiling with one of her front teeth missing, the other wobbling precariously. There is a tween with an awkward, frizzy ponytail and a confident set to her shoulders. There is a teenager with a sullen curl to her lip, but a protection circle obediently clipped to her hair. There is a newly motherless woman with bleeding knuckles, and the cracks in the mirror have stretched there like spiderwebs for so long that Alice knows them by heart. There is a woman with a box of fiery hair dye in one hand, and a blazing look in her eyes. They had said it was a hotel fire.
The glue from the mirror in the cramped bathroom has begun to bleed through, causing dark, ugly streaks on the glass. Alice can see all the versions of herself she has ever been. And she remembers to love each and every one.
They don’t say anything, but they don’t need to.
---
The ground is shaking with the weight of the thunder, and the air is thick and hot despite the rain. There is a woman in the air-conditioned safety of her car, her arms crossed, watching the droplets hit the windscreen.
“You have to go in eventually,” Alice reminds her. And then she goes quiet because she knows what doesn’t help, and she can’t do it to the woman, even if it’s not real at all.
“So do you,” says the woman, one eyebrow raised, tit for tat.
“You’re avoiding her,” the woman continues.
“So are you.” Tit for tat.
“Obviously,” the woman rolls her eyes emphatically. It’s quite impressive, actually. “I’m not saying goodbye. I’m not .” She is shaking, and it is not from the cool air coming from the vents. Kerosene, Alice thinks, but doesn’t say.
“Alice, you gotta face the music, because you’re being a dumbass again and I can’t have that reflecting badly on me.”
“Alice, you gotta face the music, because you’re being a dumbass again and I can’t have that reflecting badly on me,” Alice parrots back, because, okay, she’s not above being an argumentative asshole, okay.
“This is so not about me. Or well, you know,” the woman’s lips twitch, and then she’s steamrolling ahead. “Mom’s not going to be angry at you. Duh. You didn’t protect her and she didn’t stay for you, I get it, it’s complicated. But Alice. She left for you, Alice.” The woman gives Alice a second reprieve, a second to feel the air leave her chest, before she’s continuing on.
“And you were a kid. Kids aren’t meant to save everyone, that’s stupid. Being a protection witch does not mean any death is your fault, not unless you like, commit murder. Death comes for us all, remember?”
“Yeah. Obviously,” Alice mutters.
“Alice,” the woman turns, and her eyes are so intense that Alice has to look down, “it isn’t your fault. It was never your fault, or Mom’s fault. You’ve been so brave. It’s time to go in, now.”
“Only if you do, too,” Alice says, and so her younger counterpart sighs and reaches for the doorhandle, and just like that she is one step closer to her mother’s funeral.
Together, they step out into the rain.
---
“Because Agatha saved me first,” Alice tells the vicious wind. “The curse was a chain and a death sentence and she helped me cut myself loose and that was everything, enough to die for. And because I want her to live, now, because I fucking died for her and I’m furious and- and- but I want her to live, now. Is that a good enough reason? Can I go in now?”
“Well, that seems like lots of reasons,” says Rio’s pleased voice. The wind goes faster, makes having her eyes open uncomfortable. “And for the record, you could have gone in whenever you wanted.”
Alice rolls her eyes behind her closed lids, because she doubts even Death can sense that.
Her eyes are closed, and all she can smell is burning incense.
---
She pushes back the shawl that’s been draped over the doorway like a curtain. The dressing room is bright with artificial lighting, and it smells like that goddamn incense, and it smells like comfort.
A chair turns, and a woman rushes to her, and this one, finally, is not Alice herself.
“My girl,” Lorna reaches out and touches Alice’s cheeks with her hands, her full cheeks that do not look withered and shrunken and dead, even though they should. “Alice,” she whispers, and Alice feels a horrible lump rise in her throat once more.
Her hands rest easily on Lorna’s shoulders. Lorna Wu gives the best hugs in the entire world, Alice has always maintained, and now, here they are. Lorna Wu and her little girl, clutched together, threaded into matching twin braids, an entwinement of threads that had separated into parallel lines, running across familiar, well-worn tracks, finally meeting again.
“Mom,” Alice gasps into her mother’s shoulder.
“Baby,” Lorna smiles. “You’re home.”
---
“Don’t be a pig, Lorna,” barks another voice. A young woman shoves her way in front of Alice, looking her up and down. Her hair is dark and her eyes darker, and despite her smooth skin and youthful look, Alice inexplicably thinks she should be wrinkled and wise, silver and sharp. But of course, the Wu witches never lived to age. “Hmph. The hair’s a bit radical-”
“It suits her,” Lorna interrupts. She hasn’t stopped smiling.
“Well of course you would think so, you got all those dreadful tattoos-”
“ Mom,” scolds Lorna.
“But we’re very glad to have you here,” sighs Alice’s grandmother. “Congratulations on dying, dear. Now you get to lose to me at cards.”
“We’re so proud of you, Alice,” says Lorna, tears cascading down her cheeks towards her cheek splitting smile. She has no burn marks on her shoulders. Alice can feel the twisting grief of all that she’s left behind, of all that she’s never going to get to do and say and accomplish, discarded like a rusted, broken shield. But all is not lost – out of the green mist shines this. Alice still has words left in her, and a voice box, a throat, a tongue to say them with.
“Deal me in,” she says.
(She does, indeed, lose to her grandmother, who she is certain is slipping cards up her sleeves).
---
“I’m sorry,” Alice whispers. “I’m sorry I couldn’t-”
“Hush,” Lorna rubs circles into Alice’s back. “You’ve been so very brave.”
Lorna has still not learnt the burden bravery is in the face of such world rocking terror. But that’s alright. Alice has time, now, to teach her mother everything under the sun.
---
“It’s not a half bad place to wait, I guess.”
“It could do with some tea,” Alice’s grandmother grumbles. Despite her general less than sunny attitude, she seems to have taken a shine to Alice.
One of these days, she’s going to teach Alice her card cheating tricks, Alice is sure of it.
---
“Who are you waiting for?”
“I wait for my legacies,” her grandmother reaches for another card but stares directly at Alice. She has a habit of doing that, Alice has noticed. She had never known that before. Never noticed it, perhaps, or it had been a habit cultivated in this place, where no one breathed, and everyone needed to be watched. “Our cursed family passes through here often, and I am waiting for them with a winning hand.”
“And what will you do now? That the curse is over?”
“I will move on,” she replies simply. “There is always somewhere to move on to, my dear Alice, and one day we shall move on to the same place and be reunited there.”
She pauses and takes a dainty sip of her liquor. “Some things are forever. Like your mother’s tattoos.”
Alice thinks, studying her cards intently. “My hair dye would have faded eventually.”
“Yes,” her grandmother agrees quietly. “It would have.”
“I do like it, though,” she looks up, suddenly, meets her grandmother’s eyes with a little fire in her own. “Mom’s right. It’s very... I don’t know, it’s very me.”
“Yes, well, your mother’s bound to be right occasionally,” her grandmother snarks, and that’s that.
---
“I have a tattoo too, you know,” Alice says quietly. She has a shot glass of water in her hand, and she doesn’t know how it got there. Memory is thick and sluggish in this place.
“Quite a practical one,” her grandmother nods her approval. Alice sends a triumphant grin to her mother.
“God, the two of you,” she mutters.
Alice’s grandmother holds up her hand. “High five? Have I used that right?”
“Perfectly,” Alice whispers back. And her grandmother grins too.
---
The door that appears is well varnished and contains a pretentious door knocker, a dragon twisted into a circle that Alice’s grandmother explains is Ouroboros.
“Why is it here?” Alice asks.
“Well, you can’t stay in the dressing room forever,” Lorna says, brushing a stray stand of hair away from Alice’s face for her. “It’s only preparation for the big show. I’ll see you in the afterparty, Alice, I promise you.”
“Yes, yes, dear girl you’ll be back. The next time we see each other I’ll make you some tea. Lord knows your mother never did get the hang of it-”
“Uh, harsh,” replies Lorna, and Alice smiles at the familiar sound of their bickering. She’s fairly convinced that Lorna and her mother are closer to sisters than anything else. At least in this place, where time doesn’t exist, and age means nothing.
Alice squares her shoulders and breathes out and decides that now is a time for bravery.
She reaches for the door.
---
“ Lilia!” Alice gasps, horrified. “Oh, no, Lilia, you weren’t supposed to die!”
“I’m quite certain I was,” Lilia replies, amused. The pub is small, but still far too large, too hollow for the two of them. From behind the bar, Mrs Hart – Sharon – pops up.
“I don’t know what kind of fine print resulted in me being roomed with the bad boys,” Sharon says, “but I know I wouldn’t be staying without the wine, not with the bar service at this place, it’s ghastly, you wouldn’t believe, you two, you just wouldn’t-”
And Alice, with tears still wetting her eyelashes, begins to smile.
---
“So, what happened?” Alice asks Lilia eagerly, sipping on her admittedly pleasant wine, and it’s at this moment that she learns that Lilia is a truly fantastic storyteller.
---
“I hope the rest of them are alright,” Alice frowns.
“I hope this wine never ends,” Sharon pipes up, and then adds “and that they don’t get any blisters, not without me and my remedies there with them, it just wouldn’t do-”
“I think,” says Lilia, who tends to have all the answers, “they’re going to be just fine.”
---
And so that is where they sit, waiting. They are not joined by Agatha, but they don’t expect to, so this surprises no one. Lilia insists that Jen is going to fly, one day. “It’s as certain as the fall,” she says, and nods. Alice, who has heard shaken tales of the fall, nods back.
“After which comes Winter,” Sharon babbles. “I hope the neighbours remember to water my pansies.”
Three women sit at that table, with their deep maroon wine and their bubbling champagne and their bottles of apple cider, and their endless conversation, one long stretch with pauses and lulls but no ends, and their poker faces and their cards clutched close to their chests, because it turns out that all three of them are peekers.
And deep in their contentedness, they wait.