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 now 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 washere, 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 waseverywhere.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 somethingshould 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.
