folk at a time, and so he needs all the blood he steals. But in his book are spells for turning stone into gold and discovering lost items. He’s used them to accumulate his power, but now that he is comfortable, he leaves such things alone. But I do not. I practice transforming air into fire with a snap of my bloody fingers, and I turn water into ice, or boil it with a word
.
Who could imagine such magic in the twist of ribbon or a dried-up duck’s beak? Who could imagine blessed water could cure a cough, if only there were a drop of my blood mingled with it? And the stones! Rough and small, oftentimes sharp. Philip showed me how to hold them in my hand and breathe magic into them with intricate patterns of almost-words. They focus my spells and hold my power. With one tucked into my pocket or down my corset, I feel the tingle all the day, feel it pulsing there with my heart
.
I never want to lose this
.
We can do anything
.
SILLA
I didn’t make it to school on Thursday.
Reese and I had stayed in the cemetery until after midnight, digging into the spell book together. For Reese’s first attempt at his own magic, he used the regeneration spell to heal the wound on my palm. It was pink and aching still, but closed. No bandages necessary.
After the healing, we regenerated a hundred dead leaves, experimenting with the words and amount of blood and how many leaves we could do at once. It was intoxicating—only a single drop was needed, and if we bled onto the salt circle, we could make them all snap back to life together in a great, blossoming pattern.
We’d both felt more alive than we’d been in months, excited and laughing with each other, tossing the leaves up into the air with a smear of blood on them so that they unfurled into emerald life as they slowly fluttered back to the ground.
I imagined Mom and Dad, brought back to life with a whispered word.
But then I remembered the bird falling out of the sky in aheap of bone and feathers. The spell wasn’t permanent. Reese thought the energy of our blood was only enough to give a kick start, not to create real life. I thought it was because the little bird’s soul was long gone.
Like Mom’s and Dad’s. Their spirits had fled.
Unreachable.
When I’d finally crawled into bed, I’d fallen into such a deep sleep there’d been no dreaming, and I didn’t hear my alarm. Judy came in to shut it off, and shook me awake. My tongue had been heavy and thick and my forehead sticky with sweat. It felt like my flesh was melting off my bones, and so Judy’d called the school and I had a day off to sleep and recover. Reese stayed home from work, too, though he felt less drained than me. We spent the afternoon between bowls of Judy’s tomato soup whispering to each other about the ingredients we should get online and what spells to try over the weekend. Clearly we needed rest between spells, and the magic itself used more energy than we could readily spare. Neither of us had lost enough blood to account for the lethargy.
But I never wanted the day to end. Watching Reese talk about the magic was like seeing him reborn into the brother he’d been before the summer. For his whole life, Reese had learned as if his brain was a sponge: he’d choose a subject, like grafting or genetics, and for three weeks or so read every book he could get his hands on. It had been common to find him in his bedroom surrounded by a pile of twenty library books and Internet printouts. And then they’d be gone. For a week or so, he wouldn’t mention the subject, like everything was beingprocessed into all the parts of his brain. Finally,
blam
, the information reappeared, woven into the rest of his life as if it had always been there. It would be the same with the spell book.
Friday, Reese had to be back out in the fields and I was energized enough for school. I’d have rather stayed home and worked on more magic, but there was no getting out of school when both Reese and Gram Judy
.
Who could imagine such magic in the twist of ribbon or a dried-up duck’s beak? Who could imagine blessed water could cure a cough, if only there were a drop of my blood mingled with it? And the stones! Rough and small, oftentimes sharp. Philip showed me how to hold them in my hand and breathe magic into them with intricate patterns of almost-words. They focus my spells and hold my power. With one tucked into my pocket or down my corset, I feel the tingle all the day, feel it pulsing there with my heart
.
I never want to lose this
.
We can do anything
.
SILLA
I didn’t make it to school on Thursday.
Reese and I had stayed in the cemetery until after midnight, digging into the spell book together. For Reese’s first attempt at his own magic, he used the regeneration spell to heal the wound on my palm. It was pink and aching still, but closed. No bandages necessary.
After the healing, we regenerated a hundred dead leaves, experimenting with the words and amount of blood and how many leaves we could do at once. It was intoxicating—only a single drop was needed, and if we bled onto the salt circle, we could make them all snap back to life together in a great, blossoming pattern.
We’d both felt more alive than we’d been in months, excited and laughing with each other, tossing the leaves up into the air with a smear of blood on them so that they unfurled into emerald life as they slowly fluttered back to the ground.
I imagined Mom and Dad, brought back to life with a whispered word.
But then I remembered the bird falling out of the sky in aheap of bone and feathers. The spell wasn’t permanent. Reese thought the energy of our blood was only enough to give a kick start, not to create real life. I thought it was because the little bird’s soul was long gone.
Like Mom’s and Dad’s. Their spirits had fled.
Unreachable.
When I’d finally crawled into bed, I’d fallen into such a deep sleep there’d been no dreaming, and I didn’t hear my alarm. Judy came in to shut it off, and shook me awake. My tongue had been heavy and thick and my forehead sticky with sweat. It felt like my flesh was melting off my bones, and so Judy’d called the school and I had a day off to sleep and recover. Reese stayed home from work, too, though he felt less drained than me. We spent the afternoon between bowls of Judy’s tomato soup whispering to each other about the ingredients we should get online and what spells to try over the weekend. Clearly we needed rest between spells, and the magic itself used more energy than we could readily spare. Neither of us had lost enough blood to account for the lethargy.
But I never wanted the day to end. Watching Reese talk about the magic was like seeing him reborn into the brother he’d been before the summer. For his whole life, Reese had learned as if his brain was a sponge: he’d choose a subject, like grafting or genetics, and for three weeks or so read every book he could get his hands on. It had been common to find him in his bedroom surrounded by a pile of twenty library books and Internet printouts. And then they’d be gone. For a week or so, he wouldn’t mention the subject, like everything was beingprocessed into all the parts of his brain. Finally,
blam
, the information reappeared, woven into the rest of his life as if it had always been there. It would be the same with the spell book.
Friday, Reese had to be back out in the fields and I was energized enough for school. I’d have rather stayed home and worked on more magic, but there was no getting out of school when both Reese and Gram Judy
Similar Books
