For the first time, the occultist’s book showed us a love spell. Its ingredients were fit for a wedding bouquet: ribbons, roses, lavender. You could almost believe it was good magic.
“I don’t know,” Fee said, finger-combing the ends of her hair. “How does a love spell even work? Does it trick her into thinking she loves me? Does it tweak her brain so she does? I don’t want someone to love me if it doesn’t count.”
Marion’s voice was icy. “How does magic not count? Love is chemicals. It’s your own brain making you drunk. Magic is a hundred times realer than love. Anyway”—she narrowed her eyes at the book—“Astrid won’t show us anything else till it’s done.”
So we gathered our rosebuds, our pretty scented things. I lurked at the Rainbo until I saw the inconstant bartender sip soda through a straw, then I grabbed the straw and bolted.
It was the first time the three of us weren’t of one mind, and you could feel it in the magic. There was a resistance there, a sulfur-scented headwind that kicked our balance askew.
In the middle of the spell, Fee screamed. She reached under her shirt for the necklace that always nestled just below her throat’s hollow: her mother’s crucifix. She yanked until its thin chain snapped and sent it skidding across the floor.
“Gimme a mirror,” she said, voice wretched.
When she pulled her shirt up to look, there was a fine cross-shaped mark where the crucifix had lain. Not a fresh wound, but a pale scar. It was so pretty, positioned like a charm beside her remaining necklace: a cheap gold-colored chain strung with a slice of broken heart, part of the Best Friends set she’d bought for the three of us on Maxwell Street.
As I hugged her, smoothing back her hair, Marion scooted to the fallen cross and wrapped it in a square of black paper pulled from her bottomless bag.
“There,” she said, placing the parcel in a drawer. “Let’s start again.”
“Marion, no,” I said over Fee’s shoulder.
Her face tightened. “No?”
“It was a bad idea,” I told her pointedly. “Let’s do something else.”
“What else is there to do?” She put her arms out to encompass the room, the whole twilit city, nothing out there worth doing unless the first-drag burn of magic was in it. “Seriously, what?”
Fee pulled away, fixing Marion with a look. “That was my mother’s. She died wearing that crucifix.”
Marion was all ready to push back, you could see it. Then she made some calculation, and changed course. “Yeah, okay,” she said, and dropped it.
Things were fine after that. We listened to music and read one-card tarot and it was all just fine. But when Marion left the next morning Fee looked at me, and I nodded back, and we both knew something had changed.
* * *
We were done with the occultist’s book. Done with Marion’s jealous doling out of its darkening gifts, like ghostly footprints leading us deeper into a fog.
Astrid Washington wasn’t the only teacher. Her magic wasn’t the only kind.
Without a word to Marion, we started looking elsewhere. We combed through witchery handbooks and herbalists’ guides and one-off necronomicons dug out of bookshops the size of a closet. We picked up smudgy xeroxed witchcraft zines from Quimby’s and Myopic. We met some people that way who invited us to gatherings in parks and basements and daytime bars, where we hovered together at the edges. We found plenty of dead ends, but flickers of true magic, too.
And it felt so good to work without Marion watching. Fee discovered she had a keen herb-sense. Under her hands her dad’s potted kitchen garden grew preternaturally lush, carpeting the wooden porch that overlooked a weedy back lot. She spoke with curanderas in Pilsen, coming away with herb bundles and recipes written on squares of butcher paper.
Magic was a rougher, cheaper currency than we’d thought, the city a great living library of secret mystics, civilians with ancient knowledge embedded in their bones. We riffled their pages in search of information: tantalizing scraps of shtetl magic gleaned from a Rogers Park stoop sitter; a cracklingly uncanny Norwegian jumping rhyme recited by a waitress in Andersonville; a hair-raising anecdote about effigy magic teased out of a West African cabbie. It was good to be reminded magic had denser, older thickets than the occultist’s book.
We pulled away from Marion. But she was pulling away from us, too. There was no blowup, just a slackening. After the love spell we heard from her less and less, then not at all for days. She started skipping fish-shop shifts. We’d made up our minds to go to her house to check on her when she came to find us first.