“Brogan.” Lu pulled on my hand, drawing me out of my trance.
How long had I been stuck, standing right in the middle of the main flow of traffic like a rock that had tumbled from a cliff? The crowd diverted around me, but not without several judgmental glances and comments.
Lu pulled again. I let her guide us out of the walkway and up to a set of trash cans on a square of AstroTurf. One can was markedrecycle only, with little drawings of the sorts of things to put in it.
“You feel that?” I asked, all on an exhale.
She frowned and pressed her palm against my cheek. “Feel what? Is it your head? Are you hurting?”
I took hold of her hand, drawing it away from my cheek. “I’m fine—I’m not hurting. But I can feel, I can taste, I can hear—Can’t you? Any of those things?—magic. There’s so much magic here.”
Lu’s eyebrows dipped. She tipped her head as if she were trying to hear something far away. “Maybe? I can sense something. You think it’s magic?”
I looked around for Abbi. She was on tiptoe in front of the recycle can, staring into the hole in the top.
“Can you hear it? Abbi? Is the book here?”
“Here?” Abbi turned and stood next to Lu, staring up at me. “You think so?”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But something is here. Something that seems—”
—overwhelming, powerful, haunting—
—“strong. And magical.”
“Okay,” she said. “Should I try to find it?” She looked up at Lu. “Do you want me to check over by the candy stand? Maybe it’s by the bubble gum.”
“Can you tell where it’s coming from?” Lu held onto Abbi’s backpack loop so she wouldn’t wander off.
I shook my head. “Everywhere. It’s,” I turned in a circle as if that would help me get my bearings, “it’s everywhere. I think maybe more than one thing?”
“That’s possible,” Lu said. “You haven’t been…” She moved us all to one side as a woman with a double stroller rolled over to dump a McDonald’s bag into the trash can. The woman started opening several packets of disposable wipes, which she more or less successfully swabbed over the faces and hands of both squirming kids.
“You haven’t been…back all that long,” Lu finished. “And we haven’t been around magic much.”
“I’d argue: the Crossroads, Valentine, Hush, and our rabbit kid? Not to mention the seer and the god? Pretty magic. All of that.”
“Our rabbit kid?” Lu asked, and there was something in her voice. Something I liked.
“Well, I know she’s not actually a kid…”
“No,” Lu’s fingers brushed my arm. “I like it, though. As long as Abbi is okay with it.”
Abbi shrugged. “I can be your rabbit kid.” But her eyes said something more. Something that looked like pure happiness. “For while I’m here, anyway, if you want,” she said in a small voice.
Hado meowed.
I cleared my throat, surprised by the emotion. “Good. Yeah, that’s good. We want. So can you hear the book, rabbit kid?”
Abbi rocked her head side to side, ear to shoulder, ear to shoulder, once, twice, three times. “There’s a lot,” she said. “I think there are a lot of things talking here.”
“Magic things?” I asked.
Her nose crinkled. “I think so. This way?” She pointed at the candy stand and I almost groaned, but she quickly added, “Not just the candy. I think this way. Really.”
She took us deeper into the building. The crowd and competing flows of traffic were too dense to make holding hands easy, and I wasn’t moving quickly in the brace, so we settled into a line, Abbi in front, Lu next, and me bringing up the rear.
Abbi was small and bendy and fast. She bolted ahead through a hole in the crowd and was swallowed up by the press of humanity.
