“Did you lose that watch Dad gave you?”
Ivy felt confused, then annoyed. Her dad had let her borrow his diving watch for a game, and yes, she’d lost it, but that had nothing to do with anything.
“Hey.” Mom tapped her knee. “You’re not in trouble, Ivy-girl. I’m just … here, I’ll show you.”
She moved like a wading bird through the low sea of golden nightlight, then crouched in front of the bookshelf. On the bottom row, lying horizontally across the tops of the other books, was a copy of The Westing Game. Mom picked it up and pulled the watch from its pages.
Ivy looked between her and the watch, trying to find the trick. “How’d you know it was there?”
“How’d you pull me into your dream?”
Ivy set her jaw. “You first.”
Mom smiled. Really smiled, the with-teeth kind that made your belly feel warm as a dragon’s. Until right then Ivy still thought she was in trouble.
“Tomorrow morning,” Mom said, “we’ll both tell each other how we did it. Deal?”
They shook on it. The next day, Ivy’s second life began.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The suburbs
Back then
“Some kinds of magic are for everyone. Growing things, the weather. The moon belongs to all of us. Fingernails, spit. You can keep yourself like a garden.”
I wouldn’t tell Ivy yet about the weeding you had to do. There was enough of me in her that she’d find out for herself soon enough.
“Some kinds of magic are just for you—the magic that grows in your blood. Everyone is a well fed by different springs, different traditions. Folk magic, myth magic, we’ve got lots of that in our tree. You have to be careful, you’ve gotta keep your eyes off other people’s paper. Your aunt and I…” Here I tiptoed around the great ravine at the center of everything I ever told my daughter. “We learned when we were young not to siphon off springs that don’t belong to us.”
“Siphon?” Ivy’s smooth little forehead furrowed.
“Steal. Borrow, if you’re trying to make excuses for it. But you’re not. When you’re older we can dig more into what’s ours. For now let’s stick with the stuff that’s universal.”
I’d thought the well I drew my magic from had been permanently tainted by Astrid’s gift. That if you X-rayed me you’d still see her shadow cast over my bones. But the magic that came back when I worked with Ivy felt so pure. It ran through and out of me like clean sweat.
Magic was friendly to Ivy from the start. Fee and I started with softballs: healing tinctures, cleansing rituals, the guideposts of the tarot. Luck tokens, memory charms, energy manipulations that had her screeching with delight, making fingersnaps of firelight hop from candle to candle.
Ivy was a good pupil. She didn’t approach working with Fee’s warmth or Marion’s skinlessness or my bubbling sense of agenda. Magic to her was a living book, full of stories and secrets and maddening contradictions. She liked the grind of it, the physical preparation that came before the bang.
The hard part was convincing her to hide it from Hank. She longed to bring him into our secret but Rob put his foot down hard. Rob, who only knew this much of my history: that I had a youthful fling with the supernatural, and a girl I knew had died because of it. That sometimes after a nightmare I went away from him, deep within my skin, until the poison was diluted enough for me to resurface.
Hank made hiding it easy on Ivy. He was a sunny kid who preferred to see the world in black and white; gray shades simply didn’t register. They were my fairy tale, my Day Boy and Night Girl, one sweet and thoughtless, the other curious and tart. As they grew up, one with magic and one without but both so good, I felt lucky. I was so lucky.
What if I was allowed to be lucky?
* * *
Following the night of the bounce house, Ivy promised never to pull me into her dreams without my permission. After that she didn’t really talk about her dreaming, and I figured it was something she’d outgrown. Until the midwinter morning she woke me, frantic, having dreamed of a strangled tree.
I remember the white smoke of our breath, the tamp of our boots over snow. Her small shape in Hank’s hand-me-down coat with the corduroy collar, leading me through the forest preserve. Our search ended at a leafless hazel tree wound around with a mass of sticky, spiky vines, the only green thing we could see. There was a circle of empty ground around the tree, not quite a clearing. Within that circle was a feeling of wrongness so thick and physical you could almost scratch your nails across it.