“Lots of people say they have magic things. Most of them are lying.”
“I know, but this…I know it was magic, Brogan. I saw what it could do.”
We didn’t have much time. The movement between our planes was starting to change, like the second hand of two clocks ticking away at slightly different rhythms.
“What was it?” I asked.
“A journal. Small. Made out of leather and wood and metal and bone. He showed it to me. The man. Then he opened it to a page and called rain right out of the sky.”
Trick. Lots of easy ways to make that happen without magic.
She must have been following my thoughts.
“It was a clear sky, Brogan. I might be dead, but I’m not that gullible.” She dragged the memory out and shook it like snapping a rug.
And there I was, standing in the parking lot of the Dixie Truck Stop, clear blue sky buttoning down the edge of every horizon I could see.
The man was short, maybe only four and a half feet at best, and dressed in a tailored, pinstriped suit.
He didn’t look like a god to me, nor could I tell from her memories if he were some other creature. Stella had assumed he was human, so that’s how she remembered him.
Assumption went a long way toward monsters—human and otherwise—hiding in plain sight.
He drew the little book out of his breast pocket. It was the length of his hand and narrow, but even in a ghostly memory that thing shone.
It was magic. Stella was convinced of it.
I tried to look past her assumption. The book was a soft, tawny brown, worked with gold threads and bits of stone and metal. The hook was a bone carved into the shape of a bird in full dive, the loop of leather clutched in its talons.
He did something with the clasp, and the bird’s talons flexed and released the leather.
A nice bit of hinge work there.
I couldn’t see the writing on the page, but had the impression the paper was red, which seemed strange. Then the man recited something that sounded like a poem.
It was not a poem. Or at least it was not a human poem. It was a Faefolk song. Beautiful, haunting, and undeniably magical.
The sky boiled with clouds, white into gray, into chalkboard black.
The rain fell.
Hard, marble-sized droplets poured over the parking lot, the strange man, and the much younger Stella.
“How much?” the memory of Stella asked. “I can pay. I can pay you anything.”
The man lifted one thick eyebrow, his eyes gone steely and cruel. “Anything?”
“Oh, Stella,” I said, knowing what she must have promised. Her life. Maybe her soul. “Is that why you’re here, stuck between the living world and those places beyond?”
“What are you saying?” she sounded annoyed. “What do you think I traded?” And before I could censor any of my thoughts, which was getting harder and harder by the minute, the second, she barked out a laugh.
A real, happy laugh.
“He wanted half a million dollars,” she said, mirth giving her voice a burry warmth. “I wouldn’t have offered my soul to anyone. I’ve read the Bible. I know Satan wears plain clothes.”
“Well, if that was Satan, he upgraded to a pinstriped suit.”
“Instead of paying, I stole it.”
