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 have one friend, 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. “Hell yeah. 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?”
“And I’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 is just 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 people want to believe.”
“Oh. You need a bullshitter.”
She grinned at me.
Briefly I turned my eyes to the pressed-tin ceiling. “I’m not wearing any pointy hats, Linh. Also I’m allergic to cats. I don’t own a single cape. You sure you want me?”
She laughed. “You’ve got that red hair, man. It’s, like, red. My grandmother would’ve chased you down the street to take your picture. Hundred bucks a gig, and you’re never there more than two and a half hours. Sometimes less than two.”