Page 75 of Our Crooked Hearts
“Hey. No.” Linh put her elbow in a coffee spill, reaching across to grab my hand. “I didn’t mean to freak you out, that’s just the question everyone asks. Like people wanting free rash advice from a doctor. You’re clean, I promise you. No ghosts.”
I looked down, focused on dragging a triangle of crepe through a puddle of lingonberry without letting my fork shake. My mother and father joined Marion in my mind’s eye, gathering behind me like a bouquet of fog roses. It was almost soothing to imagine Marion in the dust tones of the dead. Too often she appeared to me in shades of mirror-world green, or—far worse—in the colors of a living lost girl.
Don’t don’t don’t,I told myself, the closest I ever got to prayer.
Linh kept her eyes pointed politely toward her plate. “It’s a funny thing,” she said, as if I weren’t unraveling. “No matter how much sugar I eat, my own ghosts won’t come near me. I can dig through three generations of someone else’s dead to find a long-lost recipe for jollof rice, but I can’t even ask my own—”
She cut herself off. Stared at her plate while drawing her nails through her bleach-and-apricot ends. Then she looked squarely at me. “Your problem with that spirit. It got worked out?”
I laughed unhappily. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“I felt bad about what I did. Sending you away. I should’ve at least listened.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Nobody came out of that situation okay.”
“You’re not okay?”
The way she asked it, I think she actually wanted to know. So I told her.
“I have no job as of today, and even when I did I could barely afford my half of a studio. My parents are gone. I haveonefriend, and she’d never ever say it but I know I’m deadweight. And every morning when I open my eyes, I think, ‘Man, I can’t wait to go to bed tonight!’”
I laughed. Linh didn’t. She raised her cup of wet sugar to her mouth, and I could see her working out what she wanted to say.
“Do you need a job?” she asked.
“Really?” I leaned forward. “Hellyeah. Is the Metro hiring? I’ll be nineteen soon. Is that old enough?”
“Not the Metro. This would be more of a… freelance thing.”
It took a second to click. “Oh. Sorry, no. I don’t do magic anymore.”
That stopped her, fork halfway to her mouth with a hunk of smoked salmon. “Don’t, or can’t?”
“Don’t. Won’t.”
“You want to talk about why?”
I shook my head.
“Fair.But.” She held up a hand, violet nails cut to the quick and rings studded with chunks of blue kyanite. “Before you say no, listen to my pitch.”
“You’ve got a pitch?”
“AndI’m buying you breakfast. Have more coffee, the refills are free. So. Magic.” She cupped her chin in her hand. “It is the loneliest thing in the world.”
A dozen different memories hit my head at once, an overlapping movie montage of the way it was when I was in a coven of three.No,I thought.It’s not.
Or was Linh right? Even when we started together and ended in the same place, there was a point in each spell in which you had only yourself and the magic.It’s like giving birth,a practitioner had told Fee once.If you’re lucky, you go in with a partner and come out with a child. But in the middle, you’re alone.
“Almost no one in this city can do what I can do,” Linh went on. Not bragging but getting it out of the way. “So I don’t have a circle, you know? Not a power circle, at least. What I have instead is a business.”
“A business for practitioners.” I crossed my arms over my chest, leaning back on the wooden bench. “But I don’t do that. You need a secretary?”
She looked me up and down, like she was fitting me for something in her head. “Some of the stuff we peddle is real, but some isjust theater. I need someone who knows what it looks like when it works, how it feels. Someone who can make people believe they’re seeing the real deal.”
“You need a faker.”
She crinkled her nose. “I need someone who can appreciate the theatrical side of magic, you know? Make peoplewantto believe.”
