“Who’s to say it didn’t? Maybe I traveled there and back before you could blink. Maybe I’ve been there for the last hundred years.”
One corner of his mouth edges into a knowing smile. “I like when I catch you acting oddly. Makes you less formidable.”
“I’m not formidable,” I shoot back, offended. Then I frown. “Wait. Yes, I am.Extremelyformidable. So…go on home, then. Leave me to my formidability in peace.” I don’t mind that I’m not a gregarious person, but one of the downfalls of being this way is that I’ve got no charm, no oil for the hinges of conversational doors to make them open and close smoothly. I am trying to conduct private business out here, and Morgan is impeding that activity, so my only path forward is to tell him to get lost. “Goodbye.”
“Why do you want me to leave?” He makes no move to do so, scanning our surroundings. “You got other plans?”
“I thought I heard someone back here earlier,” I reply, “who wasn’t in our party. I wanted to look for them.”
Morgan’s eyebrows knit ever so slightly before rising, his eyes a touch wider. “By yourself?”
Instant regret. There’s no getting rid of him now.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You heard someoneor something? Maybe you heard the coralote?”
“The coralote cannot exist. There’s nothing like it in any wildlife book, and believe me, I’ve looked through plenty of them.” I head out of the trees, over the red bridge. Back to Vallis Boulevard with its sleeping houses and lamps firing orange off the windshields of parked cars. Aside from an elderly woman rolling by on her bicycle, frozen pizza from an open-late gas station propped in her basket, nobody is afoot.
“Just because it hasn’t been found by others doesn’t meanyoudidn’t find it,” Morgan says simply. “What if it’s a paranimal? What if it’s magic?”
The word burns across the night, lighting me up with a warm, wonderful feeling—magic!
I
A G
C M
—before I wrestle it into submission.
I’ve pigeonholed myself, you see. By sticking to certainopinions for so long, they’ve baked into people’s perceptions of me. I’ll never be able to shed it.
Zelda Tempest: never stays in a relationship for long. She falls from man to man and eats their love like candy. Doesn’t believe in the supernatural.
If my sisters find out I’m entertaining even awhisperthat magic might be real—not because they’ve been telling me so for years but because magic is maybe happening tome—they are going to be disgusted. I can already hearToo late, we’re not accepting you into our witchhood because you’ve been so rude about itandI don’t believe you. Now, how doesthatfeel?
“It can’t be real,” I say helplessly.
“Come on. You want to believe, don’t you? I can tell.”
I squint. “How?”
He bumps the toe of his shoe against mine. “Your boots have pictures of zombies coming out of coffins. You’ve got aWerewolf of Londonposter on your wall.”
“So?”
He begins to speak, his cheekbones burning with color, but then stops. Studies me. “Maybe the paranormal isn’t real. But tell me honestly that if itwasreal, you wouldn’t want to learn every single little thing about it. If there is even the slightest possibility of knowing great big things, you need to find out.” He advances on me with interest as dark as the hollow of a tree. “It would drive you mad, not knowing for sure.”
My skin is hot all over, creeping down my throat, spreading like a rash. “How did you guess that about me?”
“Because you’re like me. Once you’re wondering, you can’t let go. And do you know what?”
“What?”
“I think you should stop worrying about being right, and let yourself explore this even if you might be wrong.”
I analyze his face, sharp lines and soft curves. It looks chiseled from white opal, but I bet if I stroked a finger down his cheek, it’d feel soft as feathers.
