by Devon Monk
Lu opened her eyes, staring toward the chair where I sat.
“It’s okay, love,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
Lu closed her eyes again.
“Can she hear you?” Stella asked.
“No. But we’ve been together for a long time. She knows…well, she knows.” I got to my feet and stretched, lifting my arms over my head and bending my elbow to pull at the catch between my shoulder blades.
Stella watched all that with interest. “You don’t really feel sore do you?”
“Yep.”
“But you are a…a…well, you’re not alive. You don’t have any muscles, blood, nerves left.”
“I know I must have one nerve left because you’re getting on it.”
Stella covered her mouth and laughed. “You did not just say that.”
I winked. “How about you show me that journal. If it’s as magic as you think, it might have something that will help us figure out how you get to talk to your sister.”
Her eyes widened. “Yes. Oh, yes, that’s a wonderful idea! Can you turn pages? I don’t have enough,” she wiggled her hands, “solidness to do it. I’ve tried. If I had even half a hand, I’d have written Dot a note. Maybe dragged a word or two across a foggy mirror like the ghosts in those TV shows. Do you watch TV? Or did you when you were alive?”
Lorde had lifted her head again, listening to the barrage of words.
Ghosts were talky. It was like they haven’t had anyone to talk to in a hundred years.
I tipped my chin at Lorde, and the dog got the hint and went back to lightly sleeping, her ears twitching at the subtle sounds of the old house settling in the sunlight, the brush and whisper of branches and leaves in the wind beyond the window.
“Or are you old enough to have only listened to radio? I can’t tell by your clothes, but maybe you can change yours? I’ve been stuck in this same dress and shoes since the day of the…since the day. But I’ve never felt sore or stiff. I can’t feel anything really.”
She frowned again and held out her hands, giving her fingers a wiggle. “I think it’s a memory of sensation. I remember what it’s like to touch something: fire’s hot, ice is cold, but actually touching something isn’t…it isn’t the same. Of course nothing is the same.”
“Where’s the journal?” I asked. I was beginning to think I would have preferred she just follow me around screaming instead of this non-stop babbling. No wonder she had something to say to her sister. Stella was a talker.
“What? Oh. This way.” She stepped through the exterior wall.
I followed, ignoring the house’s memories of sunshine and wind and snow piled up so high, it covered the windows.
Stella waited for me right there next to the pecan tree. “You gave me your word.”
“It hasn’t changed. I see the journal, you get to talk to Dot.”
She nodded, her sober eyes drinking down each word. “I’d forgotten… Well, I’ve forgotten a lot of things. You’d think with all the time I have, I’d be swimming in memories, but they seem to fade more and more. The journal wasn’t where I remembered putting it the last time I touched it. But a lot has happened since then. I died.”
She waited, so I nodded. “Do you remember that?” I asked.
“Every second.”
“White light calling you up?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “There were voices. Family, friends. My aunt Claire gave me a hug. She was…going to lead me, I think.”
“And?”
I’d always been curious about the dead who stayed behind. All of them had at least one peaceful happy thing happen when they’d breathed their last. Seeing a family member, a friend, a beloved pet just waiting to take them into that warm light.
Not me. I’d emptied my lungs and come out of cold blackness to the sound of Lu screaming.
“I couldn’t leave without Dot. Without telling her. Or…or being here when she dies.”
“Solid,” I said, letting her know I approved. “Where’s the journal now?” I asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
“Oh. It’s under the shed.”
I looked around. Grass, trees, road, more grass. No shed.
“This way.” She walked with a floaty stride around the side of the house to the back.
She didn’t seem distressed or slowed by the distance from her room. Some spirits were stuck within certain geographical areas. It looked like her area covered at least the house and property around it.
“There. It’s under there.”
She pointed at what could generously be considered a shed but what I would have called a burn pile.
The whole structure had fallen in on itself, boards and bricks tumbled into a mound covered by weeds and vines. Stuck here so far away from the house with a line of trees and bramble behind it, it would be easy to miss.
“I know it looks like a pile, but it was a shed. We used to dare each other to go in it.”
“Afraid of ghosts?”
“No,” she said, a fond look on her face. “Spiders and mice. We were so young…”
I left her to her reminiscing and did one circle of the junk heap. On closer inspection, there was more than just an old shed here.
Beer bottles, bags of garbage, old boxes, buckets, and a sink split cleanly into four pieces—all green with moss and age—poked up out of the pile, proving this had been used as a dumping place for some years now.
“You’ve seen the journal?” I asked, my hands on my hips, as I tried to decide how to navigate the mess. If I had hands, human hands, I’d be able to dig my way into it. But as an Unliving, there were limitations to how much I could actually affect the living world.
It was not easy for me to physically move physical objects.
I could do it. I’d spent years practicing and getting good at it. But practice or not, it always took a lot of focus and energy and will. And those things were easily depleted.
Death took its toll, and so did almost-death.
“It was there. I know it was there,” she said.
“What you’re saying is you haven’t seen it.”
She drew herself up. “I left it there. I haven’t seen it, but I know it’s there. Can’t you feel it?”
Truth was, I hadn’t tried. I was good at finding magical things. Good enough Lu had made a living trading in trinkets and tricks and antiquities for years. Good enough she supplied Mr. Headwaters who trusted her eye and would pay half again above any other bidder when Lu put something magical up for auction.
He had remained a mystery to the both of us, having only sent messages via delivery services and, more recently, texts.
But looking for magic, opening up for it, well, that took energy, focus, and will too.
Spend a penny, lose a pound. I didn’t want to exhaust myself. I needed to talk to Lu tonight.
I stared at the pile, wishing the journal would bubble up like some kind of leaf knocked free in a storm gutter. But since that wasn’t happening, I cleared my mind, took a deep breath, and felt.
It was like stretching my arm out into a dark hallway and feeling my way forward as I took small steps. I was blind—this had nothing to do with my eyes, but still, it felt like I couldn’t see. Like I was surrounded by darkness.
Breathe out.
My senses exploded.
Magic is everywhere in our world. There’s not a single stone, plant, or person who doesn’t have at least a little of it on them. Like a fine dust, magic sticks to things. Some things and people, it sticks to a bit more. Or sometimes a thing or person can be in a place where the magic is so thick, it covers them in thicker and thicker layers. Maybe they breathe some of it in, maybe they swallow some of it down.
Maybe it becomes a part of their blood, their sweat, their tears.
Then they carry that magic around and they spread it, leaving little bits of it on the things they touch, or in the people they love.
I didn’t believe in magic when I was alive. But no
w that I was dead, I wondered how I’d ever ignored it.
I could smell it: sweet apples and the hot spice of cloves, the sharp sap of broken sticks and crushed grasses. I could taste it on my tongue, at the back of my throat, and I swallowed it down as easy as warmed wine that spread through me with a soft wash of pleasure.
I could hear it, a song of bells, chimes caught in a distant wind, horns calling, a hushing burble of a stream.
It was here, here, here, calling, reaching, clinging, drawing me in, as if I were made of infinitely small grains of sand, and magic was a tide pulling me apart, piece by piece, out into the depths of the sea. Pulling me home.
I opened my eyes to a changed world.
Magic was everywhere. It flowed in streaming pastel rivers over the earth, down the trees, around the rocks. It glowed out from under the heap of junk that had once been a shed. Whatever was in there, I assumed the magic journal, pulsed with the blinding white of powerful, bound magic.
Dangerous magic.
“Can you… Do you feel it?” Stella asked again.
“Yeah,” I said, that hot white magic buzzing like lightning across my lips. “I can feel it.”
Stella looked different too. Less of a ghost and more like the living woman she had been.
No longer drifty and translucent, she cut a solid figure. Her hair was tied up in a bun and loose strands fell free, a few sticking to the side of her face in soft curls. Her eyes were brighter—hazel like Dot’s—and I caught the hint of the flowery Avon perfume she must have worn in life.
“Can you reach it?” she asked.
I stepped up to the edge of the pile, crouched down, and shoved my hand into the ruins. My hand passed through all the solid bits easily enough, then my arm, shoulder, and head. The harsh light of that concentrated magic stung my eyes and made it hard to breathe.
Whatever was down there, it was hellishly powerful. Stronger than anything else we’d dug up over the years.
I wondered how it had stayed buried this long. Surely someone or something should have found it by now.
I stretched a little more, holding my breath as I reached.
My fingers brushed the edges of something smooth and flat. A book. I was sure it was a book.
Then lightning shot out of the sky—
—hot hot agony—
—pounding me into the ground like a two-ton hammer.
Chapter Ten
The dream was always the same.
“What about today?” Lu asked, helping me upend the chairs and stack them on the tables.
The bakery, which was now also a soup and sandwich shop, had been closed for an hour. It belonged to her family. It had fallen to Lu to run, now that her dad had passed. It was 1936 and Lula Doyle was a modern woman with dreams of growing her business.
She had lived in Chicago all her life. I’d only arrived a few years ago, on my own since my parents died and us siblings scattered rather than get thrown into orphanages.
I’d made it through the last year of high school here, working the rail line, farms, shipyards, and any other job I could find.
I slept in a broken shack on the outskirts of town with more holes than walls. It was enough for now, but wasn’t where I planned to live for long. I’d been saving up for a future. I was a modern man with dreams too.
But work was scarce, and they said that wasn’t going to change now that the country was depressed. Every headline assured us all it was only going to get worse.
I’d tried to get work in a library, a radio station, or with the government. I had the grades and the brains for any of those, but as soon as anyone got a look at me—built bigger than an ox—the only jobs they thought I’d be suitable for involved swinging some kind of hammer.
Not that I was complaining. I had health, youth, and grit. I could weather any storm.
Especially if Lula Doyle was in my life.
“Where’s your head, Brogan?” She sashayed behind me and flicked the towel off her shoulder, smacking me in the arm with it. “I thought you liked working here.”
“Oh, I do,” I said fast, because I didn’t ever want her to think I didn’t want to be with her. I didn’t ever want her to think I didn’t want her.
“Then work.”
I hoisted a chair in each hand and settled them on the table with ease.
“And answer my question,” she said.
“If we should get married now?” I tried to say it casually. As if this one thought wasn’t taking up all the room left in my brain. As if it wasn’t eating all my reason out of house and home.
“The courthouse is open for another fifteen minutes,” she said, and maybe she was trying to hide the excitement in her words. But I knew her. Better than I knew anything else in the world. I could hear her hope, giving each word shine. “I’ve got the fee saved back.”
I scowled at her. “No, I’ve got the fee saved back. I’m not going to let you pay the judge. I told you, if we go to the courthouse, I’ll pay the fee.”
“So let’s do it!” She spun and her hair spun with her, tied back in a band, but still long enough to brush along her back and shoulders like flame bending in the breeze. She was fire, this woman, and I couldn’t wait to warm myself to her for the rest of my life.
“I thought…you know, we have almost enough to hire a preacher. Almost enough for cake and lemonade. We could have it here, right here in your shop. Or out back, under the big ash tree.”
“You want a wedding.” She wasn’t asking a question because she already knew the answer.
“Yes. I want a wedding. More than just a courthouse and a judge. I want…”
How did I tell her this? That I’d dreamed of it, hoped for it, ever since I first put my eyes on her. There would be flowers and cake and maybe even ribbons. She’d wear a dress, and I’d have a suit and top hat. And we’d join hands and hearts and lives right there in front of people who cared about us.
She would smile and that would be my world. My whole world in her smile.
“I want everything. For you. For us.” I closed the distance between us and took both of her hands in my own. “If you can be patient. Just wait a little more. I know I’ll have enough money.”
“We’ll have enough money,” she corrected. “We are both saving. We could both pay for it. Together.”
“All right. Yeah. I like that. If we wait.” I pulled on her hands, bringing her even closer to me. She tipped her head up, that quirk of a smile telling me she’d gotten what she wanted.
“You’ll wait?” I said. “For me to get everything arranged?”
“For you,” she said, and her voice was honey and spring and sun on my skin, “I’d wait forever.”
I raised one hand to cup the side of her face and bent toward her, slow, slow, slow, so I could savor this, being here, being hers.
She lifted, her whole body flowing like a chorus through a choir, and I was her audience, mesmerized by every movement. I dragged my thumb gently across her lower lip as she smiled, amazed once again that she was mine. That I would know her, touch her, love her for the rest of my life. It was a gift I never thought I’d be given, and one I didn’t think someone as poor as me could ever earn.
“Kiss me?” she whispered.
“Always,” I answered.
Her eyes were green and bright and oh, how I burned as I gently pressed my lips to hers. Briefly. So foolishly briefly.
I woke, cold and shivering, frozen in the night. Alone.
The sky hung spangled with stars, a breeze hushing leaves and grasses around me. A slug slowly pushed its way through my ankle, unfazed by my presence.
The moon was up, full and heavy, nearly at the height of the sky. Time had passed. Hours.
I bent knees, planted my boots, and sat, holding still as my head swam and the world rocked. Whatever kind of magic had hit me, it had done damage. I felt like I’d been tied to a barbed wire fence and electrocuted.
The shed was a good twenty feet away, Stella was nowhere to
be seen, and the glow of magic from the buried journal still shone out of the junk pile like a headlight stuck on high beam.
“All right,” I grunted as I stood. “Plan B.” I ached from my heels to my molars. I didn’t dare touch the buried journal again. Not until I knew what kind of magic bound it.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and waited out another dizzy spell. A small vibration, light as a moth’s wing, fluttered in the center of my chest.
Lu was waiting for me.
Our soul connection was strong. There wasn’t a place on this earth where I couldn’t find her. But the farther away from the Route either of us traveled, the harder it was to feel each other and the longer it would take me to track her down.
East. She was east.
I traveled toward the pull of our connection, passing through the world, across the flat land faster than any living thing. Houses, trees, fields, and more fields slid by so quickly, they were a ghostly blur.
Then I was there. In the graveyard, the moon slanting down through the branches of an old white oak tree, neat rows of sparse gravestones stippling off to either side of me. Lu was right there, right in front of me, sitting on a curved white headstone.
“Hey,” she said, her gaze searching for me and missing by just a few inches. “You’re late.”
I huffed a laugh and stepped to one side so I could pretend she could see me. “I’ll tell you all about it,” I said. “One minute, love. Let’s do one.”
Lu angled her chin up, exposing more of her pale neck to moonlight. The dull glimmer of the chain around her throat caught my eye, and I followed the links down to the pocket watch hidden beneath her shirt.
She inhaled, exhaled. I watched as her shoulders settled and her heartbeat picked up. She was excited, afraid, hungry.
I was all those things too.
She ran her finger along the chain and pulled the watch free. “One minute,” she said.
She cupped the watch in her palm, exhaled through her mouth, then pressed the stem with her thumb.
It was strange, this magic. We’d never found any other like it in the world. It snapped hot, a violent, phosphorus flame suddenly alive, surrounding the watch, eerie in the shifting colors of amber, blood.
