“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 Iknowit’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, andfelt.
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.
