Fiendish Read Online Free PDF

“This might have something to do with that.”
    Shiny studied the bag, but made no move to touch it.
    “Rae Dalton knows a thing or two about trickbags,” she said finally. “And she knows a thing or two about you. She’d be one to ask.”
    I remembered Rae—her small, easy smile and her hair twisted into five fat braids, the ends fastened with plastic ponytailers shaped like gum balls. She was one of the clean, well-tended in-town kids, but her parents would visit with my mama over the sorts of things that other folks would only frown and whisper about, and they brought her out to play sometimes. I had liked her. Maybe not in the fierce, frantic way I’d liked Shiny, but Rae had been my friend.
    “If this kind of craft is too big for anyone to explain,” I said, “if it’s too powerful or bad, does it mean that I was put away by fiends?”
    All my life, I’d heard stories of the fiends that had settled Hoax County, but even in my family, where most folks were born with the power to do things, the fiends themselves were half a fairy tale. Now, sitting on the bed, holding Shiny’s broken comb, I was suddenly sure that if I could be shut up and forgotten so completely, it must be the work of something too huge and powerful to be accounted for by anything else.
    Shiny looked absolutely scandalized, though. “What? No, are you crazy? Why would you say a thing like that?”
    “When they took me out of the wall, one of the Maddox boys—Luke, I think—he said that bringing me to you and Myloria was messing around with crooked people. ‘Hexers and fiends,’ he said.”
    “Luke Maddox is an idiot. The Blackwoods may be crooked as they come, but he wouldn’t know a fiend if it punched him in the dick.”
    I laughed at that, a hard, rasping laugh, like a crow shouting over a button, and Shiny laughed too, tossing her hair back over her shoulders.
    I watched her, thinking how strange and glorious it was that I could be sitting on this wobbly little bed with my cousin, when just that morning, I’d been so sure that I was going to spend the rest of my life in the dark and never be anyplace else ever again.
    Shiny must have been thinking it too, because she reached over and gave my hair a tug.
    “Not to be indelicate,” she said, with a long, knowing look that was mostly about my chest. “But we should probably go down to Spangler’s. You’ve got a whole little situation going on right around here.”
    I crossed my arms and leaned away from her. “I know.”
    “So we’ll go into town, get you a bra. I’m supposed to meet Rae, anyway. We’ll get it sorted out about your piece of craft.”
    * * *
    Out in the front hall, Shiny stopped to dig around in a Florida Orange crate by the door. She yanked on a pair of beat-up cowboy boots over bare feet and was scrounging me up some sneakers when Myloria came shuffling in.
    The way she looked at us was like she was seeing something else—not Shiny and Clementine, but Shiny and the ghost of something monstrous. Her eyes were pink, like maybe she’d been crying.
    “Where are you going?” she said, sounding stuffed up in the head, and also like she was scared we might tell her.
    I started to explain about Rae Dalton and the trickbag, but Shiny stuck her elbow in my side and said, “Nowhere. Just showing Clementine the town.”
    I wondered whether Myloria might argue over that, or say it was off-limits, but she didn’t. The way she studied my face was grave, like she was really seeing me for the first time. “You say you know me.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “And Bastiana, she remembers you from way back.”
    “Yes.”
    The way Myloria spoke was careful and slow. I could see her wanting something from me—needing something—but I didn’t know how to give it to her. Her eyes were red and wet, and I crossed the hall and reached for her hand. There was a split second where I was certain she’d pull away. Then she let me take it.
    Her hand felt fragile and cold in