A Star-Cursed Heart

I.

Hector's Tavern

The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

The gravel surface of the parking lot clawed her cheek open on impact, and for a moment all she felt was the sting. Ashes Steadfast pulled her knees into her chest and gave herself one self-pitying second to breathe. Breathing was a good way to figure out if she'd fractured a rib.

Lucy stood six feet away with her short whisper of a dress blowing against her legs in the January wind. She wasn't cold. The devil didn't get cold. Or tired. Lucy Prynne didn't have a soul to vigilantly defend against temptation. When she tilted her head to look at Ash curled up on the ground, her eyes didn't need to be guarded. Lucy's eyes were knowing and kind, understanding and fascinated. Eyes that were easy to surrender to.

Ash had done it before. Once, she'd belonged to Lucy, and Lucy had belonged to her. Back when they were just girls and none of this seemed inevitable. Back when they believed their love could defeat a three-hundred-year-old bargain to balance good and evil.

Ash and Lucy's fights were one part metaphysical fisticuffs, one part ex-girlfriends who knew where the buttons were and how hard to push. The Prynnes, humanity's devils, tempted and reaped. The Steadfasts, dressed in unadorned black (hair shirt optional), tugged innocents back from the brink with a charming side of puritanical idioms too boring even to embroider on a pillow.

Powers may vary. Lucy's sneaky dropkick had sent Ash flying on more than one occasion. In addition to controlling the weather, she had a knack for conjuring seductive backdrops to unburden people of their souls. Ash, like all Steadfasts, had the super strength and the super knack for a guilt trip necessary to fight the devil.

Blood dripped from her chin, soaking the gravel. Her rib seemed okay. She knew her role. She wasn't interested in feeling her feelings.

"Lucy," she croaked.

"Ashes." Lucy always called her by her full name. No one else did. Footsteps crunched across the gravel, and then the illusion of her oldest friend filled her field of vision. Light brown hair in teetering stacks of tumbling curls. Those eyes. "You're still breathing."

Ash couldn't tell if this was an expression of disappointment or merely an observation. Instead of wondering, she made herself pay attention to the pinching sensation of drawing cold air into her lungs. She imagined the beat of her heart as slow and strong, easily moving steady pulls through her muscles. The longer it had been since they last met like this, the harder it got to keep her head in the game.

It had been a while. Months.

Focus on the fight, she scolded herself. Not the shape of Lucy's body under the thin, creamy silk of her dress. Not the rough fry of her voice that always sounded like she had just awoken to the welcome sight of an indulgent lover.

Lucy held out her hand to help Ash up. The pulse in her wrist was visible beneath a thin gold bracelet. Temptation. Evergreen.

There had been a time when Ash looked a lot more like the fallen than the savior. She wore colors, for example. Kissed girls (one girl). Felt the sweat bead at the back of her neck and gleam over her bare shoulders while she held an instrument under bright lights in front of dancing people hazed with smoke. Back then, she was unscarred and unbothered. She was in love. She had dreams. She had a future. She had Lucy.

Lucy. Not this apparition who didn't even feel the cold that seeped into Ash's bones.

Focus.

She grabbed Lucy's wrist, not her hand, never her hand, and forced the muscles in her hips and thighs to lurch her body upright. She kept her knees bent, her grip tight, until she had enough leverage to bring the other woman's forearm forcibly across her chest, turning her into a tidy missile that Ash grasped by the hips and tossed.

An enormous charge of golden light detonated from Lucy's body. It raced across the ground, illuminating the night, sparking the bulbs in the parking lot and drawing shadows from the dozen or so silent figures in black who stood in a solemn circle surrounding them. These were her Puritan ancestors, Ash had to assume, spectating on these fights to remind her of her duty.

It was a never-ending tug-of-war. If she let go of her end of the rope, the territory these forebears had paid for in violence would be forfeit. Her absence from the battle would feed a swell of lost, entitled souls. The balance that kept people safe would tip, knocking over the world.

Surrender was the only way to end it. If she died fighting, or Lucy did, the next paired set of Prynne and Steadfast descendants would just be tapped to take their places. The curse reset its players like bowling pins, frame after frame, forever.

She and Lucy had tried to break the pact with love. Total bust.

Ash had even tried to end it on her own, by running away to New York, but Lucy found her.

When she'd limped home last year from that failed escape attempt, she'd wondered if their fathers had the right idea. Don't fight. Instead, nurture a cold war of stasis. Circle each other with fingers on the trigger but the safety engaged. Never let the other out of your sight. Exchange defanged diplomacy and ignore the sweetness of blood at the back of the throat. But even this noble experiment had failed. Ash's father died, if only briefly, and the curse passed itself along.

Ash had come to the weary conclusion that the only choices this bargain offered were to fight or to give up and let the world go to ruin.

She wasn't ready to give up. Numb as she'd become, she still felt obligated to the innocent. The biggest dream Ash allowed herself these days was don't die. Not today. Not dying was no way to live, but she hadn't come up with anything better. If she survived tonight, she could look forward to waking up tomorrow and not dying. But if she gave herself an opportunity to feel her feelings, she might feel something dangerous, like hope.

She unzipped her black motorcycle jacket. The cold stung, though her underarms and the skin beneath her breasts were slick with sweat. "What's brought you here tonight, Luce?"

Panting, Lucy wrapped her arms around her middle and heaved herself to her side. "Such an incredibly existential question."

It wasn't. It was a practical question, one Ash needed the answer to in order to hold these meetups at bay. She hadn't been thinking of her lost love. She hadn't been thumbing through old photos or strolling over memories of the good years. She knew better than to indulge nostalgia. Any strong emotion called the devil to her door, which was why Ash kept her life as straight as a ruler.

She'd even told herself it wasn't Lucy when she'd felt the compulsion to come to Hector's Tavern tonight-that her body's insistence was only about how long it had been since she'd seen Hector and how much she'd been missing him lately. But she'd arrived to find the parking lot dark, the lights out except for a perfect golden circle. Inside it, a couple leaned against the front bumper of a cherry-red pickup truck. Drifting, swirling sparkles filled the air around them. As she strode closer, she could make out a handsome young man talking with both hands, his face lit up with more than the preternatural light around him, his words tumbling over themselves in his mesmerized excitement.

It wasn't exactly true that people were talked out of their souls. Once a person believed they could have anything they wanted, they would gladly talk the devil into taking it.

Free will was tricky as hell.

Ash had stood in the shadows, camouflaged by her black jacket, boots, and jeans (though the near-white blond braid that snaked over her shoulder was a dead giveaway). She listened to the man, Nathan, who turned out to be a regular at Hector's and an employee of the factory across the street. He wanted to be a country music star. He was sketching out his dream of touring the Southeast when Ash crashed the party.

Now Nathan leaned against the tailgate of a truck, frozen in a sphere of gentle snow, perpetually waiting for Lucy to finish what she'd started or for Ash to stop her.

"Allow me to clarify. Why are you at Hector's?" They'd never fought on the property of their mutual friend before.

Lucy lifted herself up on an elbow, merciless gravel rolling under her bare arm. She paused at every new position of her body to hiss through her teeth. She was vulnerable, on the ground, within reach of Ash's heavy black boots. Ash could finish her.

The thought made her stomach twist, sick.

Lucy got her feet beneath her. She brushed gravel dust from her bare arms. "You're here. That's why I am."

It was what she always said.

Ash rushed her, coming in with her shoulder low. She anticipated the crunch of Lucy's ribs against her collarbone and the knob of her shoulder. She was an instrument. She was a knife. She was sorrow stopping the source of tears.

She was flying.

This time, she managed to skid on the seat of her jeans and keep her breath in her lungs, but she'd never get used to the force Lucy commanded in her own defense.

"Will you give us a freaking minute?" Lucy shouted.

Ash brought her feet flat to the ground, ignoring how the ass-first landing had made her lower back feel like it was on fire. "Us? You mean you and that guy?" She glanced at Nathan in his supernatural bubble.

"I do not mean me and that guy." Lucy's brown eyes had lost their softness. "I mean us. I mean that I want a minute, one minute, to talk to you."

That got Ash's attention.

She could not trust, at all, that the devil had put Nathan inside a hell-made light-up mirrorball after his factory shift as a way to bait Ash into coming and talking to her.

Ash had a routine, a rhythm. She worked wherever the temp office sent her to file or enter data or answer the phone. She took her dad to his appointments and did the chores he couldn't do for himself anymore. When the weather started to get cold and the nights came early, it was easier. If the dull ache in her chest got sharp, she could go to bed at six o'clock.

But even her most rigid devotion to the modern equivalent of nothing but chopping wood, carrying water, and walking the earth could not prevent a confrontation with Lucy forever, any more than it could kill the part of her that howled in protest against her ascetic life. That part of her wanted a triple espresso with extra cold foam. A septum piercing. To crack open the case that entombed her double bass and play until her forearm muscles seized up. It wanted sweaty dancing and stupid, sloppy sex. That part of Ash sometimes made decisions that ended in knifing abdominal pain and throwing up blood, or migraines like glass breaking inside her skull. Other times, Lucy herself extracted the price of sin from Ash's body.

They didn't talk.

"Let him go first." This seemed like a safe move. After all, she had already made this demand. It was what she'd done right before Lucy picked her up and slid her face across the parking lot like an air hockey puck.

With a toss of her hair, Lucy strode over and through the perimeter of the bubble of light to Nathan. "You can leave," she said.

The young man's expression was that of a Labrador retriever confused by the rain. "But I need to play you the song I'm working on. It's the one I told you will hit." He turned the volume up on a recording of his voice humming over a halting chord progression.

Lucy gave him an indulgent smile that flipped her Cupid's bow into a round upper lip and sunk double dimples into her cheeks. "Seems like he wants to stick around," she told Ash. "Unless you'd like to change his mind?"

Uneasy, she glanced at the man caught between them. The devil could compel a person to bare their soul, but only Ash could feel what would give someone the strength to hold on to it. In the throes of more than one of their fights, she'd wished for a more useful power. Psychic chains. The ability to heave up chunks of asphalt with her mind and remorselessly fling them at people.

The kind of thing that would be helpful for escaping a trap.

She turned her full attention to Lucy's captive. "Nathan. Do you remember what your mother said?"

His brow folded with the discomfort of emerging from a beautiful dream. He frowned, then tapped his phone silent. "She said to remember that Joni Mitchell made her own way. The only path for Joni to do something no one else had done was one she made for herself." As he spoke, the light around him began to gather up and sink into the crown of his head. "No compromises. The audience can tell if you've had it too easy."

He was gazing at Ash now, his expression stuck somewhere between bewildered and sad. No one who was caught up in Lucy's thrall welcomed rescue. Ash murdered their false hope, and they resented her for it. Her duty was the definition of thankless. "That's good advice your mom gave you," she said.

He came the rest of the way back to himself, looking as scared as they all became when they started to realize they didn't remember how they'd gotten to the place where they found themselves alone with two strangers in the dark. Both hands in fists, he gazed toward his pickup. "Hey, could you tell that girl I had to take off?"

"Yeah." The lights over the parking lot came on. "I'll tell her."

She watched him get into the cab of his truck and peel out of the lot. When it was quiet enough to hear the soft drone of twenty-four-hour sports news from inside the tavern, Lucy brushed her hair away from her cheek. The wind was mixing up her curls in every direction. "I guess that's one point for your team," Lucy said. "You must be proud."

Ash had a spider plant hanging in the window of her monkish studio apartment. She watered it. It got sun. She removed its browned leaves and checked it for pests and fed it with dark green liquid fertilizer every so often. But if she let herself feel pride in that plant, nearly bursting its pot and overflowing with little hanging clones of itself, then her nose started to bleed. Or a handful of her hair fell out, dropping to the floor in lifeless webs.