For Marcus, Rivers, and Isla Doll, to whom all roads of magic lead



this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

—e. e. cummings



One

ALINE WEIR HAD NEVER BEEN NORMAL A DAY OF HER LIFE. At the clever age of thirty, she was quite happy with this knowledge, but that wasn’t always the case. There had been several years when she had tried to fit in, to be like the other people in her town of Whistleblown. When she was in middle school, she joined clubs, ran the bake sale, and organized the end-of-the-year party. She’d memorized all the names of the other kids in her class, and the compliments that seemed to make them feel best about themselves. She had a notebook with all her curated praises stored in it. If Aline understood anything, it was the need for and power of good praise.

Aline knew at the age of thirteen she wasn’t like the other kids in her class. She had discovered this for certain during a horrifying trip to the girls’ bathroom at W. B. Middle where she went to relieve herself from having one too many chocolate milks, sat down, and saw a list on the wall directly to her right.

It was scrawled in aggressive, certain lines by an ultrafine Sharpie.

It read:

“THE I HATE ALINE WEIR CLUB”

Beneath it were the names of nearly every female student in her class and the other eighth-grade class. Jen S.; Ashley; Devon; Rachel; Angie R. and Angie P.; Sara, Sarah, and Sariah; and even Whitney, for whom she had bought a chocolate milk that very morning when Whitney forgot her lunch money. The two Angies had even dotted their “I”s with hearts, which added insult to crushing injury.

There was a single line beneath all their names. It confirmed what Aline already knew.

There was something seriously wrong with her.

The weekend before the list was etched to life, Aline had been invited to her first-ever slumber party. It was for Jen S.’s birthday, and every girl in the grade had been included. Aline didn’t care about clothes and boys and makeup in the same way the other girls did. She preferred reading and getting lost in the woods. Losing hours on websites about druids of the forest and the history of trees and the forgotten magic trapped inside them. She assumed this was why she was often overlooked for parties, even with all her volunteering for school functions. The truth was, Aline wanted, above everything else, to belong.

Jen S.’s parents had purchased an older Queen Anne home on the edge of town and renovated it. It was three stories tall and looked like something from the pages of a storybook. The Slugger family had painted the brick a very trendy deep olive green and stained the wood mahogany. The home was large, but it wasn’t imposing. It was an updated modern dollhouse. The steep, gabled roof and highly decorative woodwork left Aline sighing in relief. Inside was just as ornate as the outside. A plethora of large rooms, quite a few with high ceilings, and a library filled with books of all sizes.

The night went well … at first. Pizza was ordered, and Aline had memorized a compliment and topic for each girl. She was able to ask Whitney about her crush on Michael G. and talk to Sara and Sarah about how pretty the streaks of pink in Sariah’s hair were. Then a new girl sat down next to Aline, one she had never seen before.

“Do you like books?” the girl asked, peering into Aline’s overnight bag on the floor where her copy of S. Campbell’s Tree Magic sat tucked inside.

“I am a huge reader,” Aline said, feeling bolstered by the pizza and success of the evening so far.

The girl grinned. Aline thought how the smile transformed her face, and then she realized the girl was wearing a most peculiar dress. It was beige with lace trim and much longer than any of the other dresses in the room. It was lovely, though, and Aline admired how confidently the new girl wore it.

“Have you read Anne of Green Gables?” the girl asked.

“Oh yes, I’ve read all of them.”

“All of them?” the girl asked, her eyes wide. “But there are only two.”

Aline stared at her in confusion. “No, there are—”

It was then that she heard the whispers. Aline turned from the girl to see every other person at the party staring at her.

“Who are you talking to?” Jen S. asked, her brows drawn together like an angry caterpillar.

“Oh, I didn’t get her name,” Aline said, and turned back, but the girl was gone.

“You were talking to yourself,” Whitney murmured, biting her lip. “About books?”

“No”—Aline shook her head and looked around—“I wasn’t. I was talking to…”

But the girl had drifted off like the end of a bad joke and everyone at the party was now staring at Aline like she had sprouted three heads and a tail.

The night did not improve from there. While no one whispered about Aline again, they also didn’t speak to her. She sat on her rolled-out sleeping bag, watching the shadows climb the walls, wondering where the girl in the odd dress had gone and if she might come back.

Eventually she fell asleep, crying only a little and very quietly so no one could hear. In the morning, she woke and planned to roll up her bag and walk the two miles home. She did not think the others would miss her or care.

And then she saw it.

Someone had gone from girl to girl and drawn on their faces, arms, and legs. Giving them mustaches and eyeglasses, beards and spots. Words had been trailed down a few of their arms: “a human girl who stings like a bee, kindred spirits are scarce here, I’m glad I don’t live in a world filled with petty girls.” On and on the lines went.

Twists on Anne of Green Gables. Aline knew the words right away. She looked down at her arm and did not see any writing anywhere. The other girls were waking as she sat up, and when they looked from one another, the room erupted in shouts and shrieks and angry growls as they all turned to look at Aline.

“You did this,” Jen S. said, her words dripping with venom, the drawn-on unibrow making her appear extra stern. “I told Mom I didn’t want you to come but she made me include everyone. You’re a freak, Aline Weir, and now everyone knows.”

The accusations flew, and Aline ducked and tried to dodge them, but they struck her in her side, her heart, her head. She balled up her sleeping bag, shoved it in her duffle, and ran from the house—her pockets filled with their angry words.

She didn’t try to stop the tears, and her nose ran as she hurried onto the sidewalk. She rubbed it clean with the back of her arm, pausing only long enough to adjust the bag that was tumbling from her hands in her haste to leave. She looked up, and there, in the third-floor window, she saw the girl from the night before. The girl smiled and wrote with her finger, against the glass, a single word.

“Dragon.”

* * *

ALINE SLUNK HOME, AN ELECTRICAL CURRENT DOGGING HER STEPS AS SHE DRAGGED HER BAG BEHIND HER. It was as though she were splintered into two people. One was trying to ignore the cramp in her stomach from humiliation, the way the other girls had looked at her like she was something disgusting the neighborhood dog had spat up. Aline wanted them to like her, and now—now that was going to be so much harder to achieve.

Her nose burned, and she rubbed it, unsurprised to realize her face was wet from tears. She wiped them with the back of her hand and thought of the writing on the forearms of so many of the girls at the slumber party.

She thought of “Dragon.”

Aline didn’t know how to process the fact that she had been making friends with a ghost, so she simply set it aside. She wasn’t scared. She couldn’t be afraid of another girl—let alone a kind one, dead or not. She thought she might be excited, but that was squelched each time she remembered the sneer on Jen S.’s face.

She walked the last ten blocks home, silently crying, wishing she could redo the night before. Wishing at least one of the girls hadn’t whispered about her or made fun of her—that one of them would have held her hand instead, and they would have left together. Gone back to that girl’s house to make brownies and watch movies and eat too much popcorn and fall asleep laughing and consoling each other.

She played it out in her mind. The way it could have gone. How safe and okay and ordinary it might have been. A chapter in a book of a feel-good story.

Instead, Aline reached her house with its long drive and overgrown shrubs by herself. She lifted her bag and carried it to the large front door, pulling the key out from where she wore it on a chain around her neck, and went inside.

Silence greeted her, making the sounds of emptiness that only those who live in the shadows can hear. She made toast and poured a glass of milk, then sat at the empty table in the cold kitchen with its hard tile floor and concrete counters. The house never held warmth, and she shivered as she picked at the toast, listening to the ticking of the clock across the hallway, in the study.

As she sat, she shifted from here to there, getting lost in her imagination. She thought of her parents coming home, finding her upset. Making her hot cocoa with tiny marshmallows and gooey grilled cheeses. How they would put on a movie about adventures and maybe cats, wrap her in a blanket like a burrito and rub her hair until she fell asleep, safe and content.

The door to the garage lifted, a grinding of gears and mechanical whirs. Aline stiffened in her seat. She threw away the toast and rinsed the cup, setting it in the dishwasher. She never knew what to do with her hands when her parents were around, so she held them tightly in front of her.

Her mother entered first, carrying a bag of bagels. Her tones were clipped and rushed, the only tones she had. Her hair was pulled into a low ponytail, and she wore a cream-colored sweater. Aline thought her impossibly beautiful. Her father moved like there was a small dog chasing at his feet, hurried steps that had him shifting around her mother to place a take-out tray with two drinks on the counter before reaching into the cabinets and pulling down two plates. Her mother got out the napkins, and they both moved to the table. Neither seeing her, or if they did, neither acknowledging her.

Once they were seated and making their plates, Aline cleared her throat.

Her father looked up. “Ah, Aline.”

He went back to his plate, and Aline swallowed the rejection, digesting it quickly. She was fairly used to it now.

“I’m home early,” she said.

“Are you?” her mother asked. “How was it then?”

“Um,” Aline ripped at her thumbnail, shredding a layer off. “Not great.”

Her mother looked up, her brow furrowed. “Why? What did you do?”

That was a very good question. Unfortunately, it was followed by her father making a soft huff. “It’s the way of it, isn’t it?” he said to her mother. “Young girls are like wolves.”

“You mean hyenas,” her mother corrected. “Eating their own.”

“Hyenas don’t do that,” her father said. “The bottlenose aardvark might.”

“More like bottleneck,” her mother said.

They both laughed and resumed their conversation about the wilds of the jungles in countries far away. Aline and her cloud of sadness ignored or forgotten. She was never sure if they didn’t see her or didn’t want to. She’d once heard her father compare their having her to a sociological experiment, to see which of their traits were passed down. Apparently, none of the good ones. For they did not care for her feelings or well-being.

Aline was certain they did not care for her at all.

She went to her room and read for the rest of the day, pretending she was a girl in a story, a better one than her own, surrounded by people who saw her and loved her and needed her.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY, WHICH LED INTO MONDAY, WHICH BECAME THE WORST DAY OF ALINE’S EXISTENCE SO FAR.

She took the bus, sitting alone, and went to class, where she was ignored. She made it to lunch, but when she carried her homemade peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich into the cafeteria, eyes and snickers followed her. Within a few moments she judged the lunchroom unsafe and hurried to the bathroom nearest her next class to eat in peace.

She chose the wrong stall, as luck would have it, because once she sat on the toilet and unwrapped her sandwich, she looked over to find a list had been created that morning. A list of names signed in agreement that they, too, hated Aline Weir.

The words swam before her eyes, a truth written in venom that scratched its way to her core. Name after name after name. Her cheeks and chest flushed from humiliation, her stomach curled in on itself, and her heart thunked heavy against her rib cage. The callous way they each autographed their signatures, like they were signing up for boxes of Girl Scout cookies or the latest craze of Jen A.’s mom’s “fresh and funky” hair-barrette pyramid scheme, brought tears to her eyes.

It was every girl she had in her notebook, and she had a momentary feeling of panic, as if she should pull it out and note that Whitney dotted her “I”s with hearts and Steph added curls to her “S”s, so she could compliment them about it later.

It was quickly replaced with shame, followed by rage. At herself for caring, at the girls for being so horrible. She threw the sandwich in the toilet and unlocked the door; she slammed it open so hard it swung back and banged into the other door. The noise filled the dark bubble boiling inside her, and she marched toward the sinks, slamming her bag on the ground.

Overhead, the lights flickered. Aline didn’t look up. She stared into the mirror, into her own eyes and the pale freckled surface of her face. “I wouldn’t like me either,” she said, her voice hiccupping on a sob at the end of the sentence.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I would not. Doesn’t matter.” She blinked the tears away. She ran her fingers over her face, tugged at her strands of red hair, and let out an angry laugh.

“But still.” She wished they would. Wished someone did. “Why doesn’t anyone care?” She yelled the words at herself, raised her hands, and slammed her palms into the mirror, on either side of her head. She opened her mouth to scream, and a gasp slipped out instead …

As Aline fell through the mirror and tumbled to the other side of nowhere.

* * *

THE WORLD AS SHE KNEW IT WAS FULL OF COLOR. Harsh angles and bright lines, adornments and decorations. Overhead lighting that stunned Aline’s eyes and cacophonous laughter of students that left her wishing she could hide in a linen closet for an hour or eight.

When Aline rolled to a stop, she found the world around her was nothing like what it should be.

There was a haze permeating the ground, a rainy mist that felt like kisses when her fingers brushed against it and made her forget why she was upset in the first place. It lasted a few minutes, the daze from the haze. She stood, shaking out her hands and feet, making sure she was still real, because falling through a mirror certainly couldn’t be. But she was fine, a little tenderness at the back of her head and the base of her spine, but outside of that, not a scratch or bruise.

“I’ve lost my hopes,” Aline said, thinking she’d also misplaced all sense as she knew it.

“A perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” a familiar voice said. Dragon stepped through the mist, her curls bouncing. “That’s what she said, our Anne of Green Gables. Though I think you might be right, too. Or wrong. Or so wrong you’ve become right.”

“Are you real? Is this?” Aline asked, as Dragon drew nearer, her eyes bright and everything about her appearance screaming “authentic.”

“Sure am,” Dragon said, and she sat down next to Aline. She blew out a slow, exceptionally long breath, scattering the haze back toward the edges of the perimeter of the road. It was a dirt road, bordered by tall trees. It smelled of pine and cinnamon and spearmint. A mingling of scents that shouldn’t have worked, but together were soothing. “Aren’t you a bright penny, turning up and finding me.”

“I wasn’t looking for you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I was mad, and I was asking…”

Dragon smiled. “Asking?”

“Why no one cared.”

“But you see, I do care. I care very much.”

“They hate me,” Aline said, her eyes narrowing. “Because of what you did.” In a smaller voice she added, “Because you aren’t real.”

Dragon snorted. “If I’m not real, how are you talking to me?”

“I may have lost more than my hope.”

They stared at each other.

“You’re not real,” Aline said, which was ridiculous because the girl was standing right there, in the same beige-and-lace dress, her blond hair tangled and her stark blue eyes blinking.

“I’m as real as you,” the girl said. Then she held out her hand. “My name is Dragon.”

“Aline,” Aline said, and shook her hand.

“I felt stuck,” she said. “Until you came along.”

Aline looked up at her. “Why did you write on the other girls? They hate me now. That wasn’t right, either.”

“They’re mean,” Dragon said. “One day they might grow out of it, but from what I’ve seen of those girls, they like their mean. When you like being mean, you don’t grow out of it.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t know what you are, do you?” Dragon asked, her eyes losing some of their luster as she studied Aline. Her mouth pinched into a shape like a small rosebud. “How do you not know?”

“I’m Aline Weir,” Aline said. “I know who I am.” She cleared her throat, let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “People hate me.”

“No, they’re just scared of their own shadows. You’re a shadow witch. You can cross from the now to the in-between now and then. You can see ghosts, talk to creatures not of this world.”

“Like you.”

Dragon shrugged.

“How do I get back?”

“Same way you came.”

Aline looked around. “I don’t see a mirror.”

“Don’t need one. You only need a door.”

There were no doors in this forest of mist and magic. Only trees. Aline took tentative steps toward the closest one. It was a thick old thing, some sort of ancient tree that she didn’t have a name for. Too many limbs and roots, it reminded her of an angry octopus. To its left was a tall, thin pine tree. It reminded her of home. She closed the distance to it and realized it had a hole at its base. It reminded her of a dog door, and she squatted down.

“I need to get back to school,” she said. She needed to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, something she had done before when fevering as a very small child. “Do I click my heels three times?”

“Not unless you’re aiming for Oz, and no one likes a flying monkey.”

Aline grinned over her shoulder. She liked Dragon. “How will I find you?”

“You want to?”

Aline’s brow furrowed. “I … we’re friends, aren’t we? You stood up for me, with the others.”

Dragon nodded. “I did.” She smiled, and it transformed her face into such a blind radiance, Aline blinked against it. “Yes. Let’s be friends.”

Aline nodded, and then thought about slamming her hands into the mirror, screaming, and falling through. She screamed the name of her school at the top of her lungs and slammed her hands into the hole. She tumbled through the tree and onto the floor of the bathroom. A bell rang. Aline stood, dusted off her shirt and pants, and bent over to pick up her bag. The light shimmered across the floor, and she saw a sparkle at the edge of the sinks. She crawled to it, thinking of Dragon and shadows, and not sure how any of it could be real but desperately needing it to be.

A small charm winked in the sunlight. Aline picked it up, turning it from side to side. A little ballerina, standing in position with a small loop at the top of her hand. She pocketed it and scooped up her bag, hurrying from the bathroom, looking over her shoulder once, and finding the mirror was just a mirror.

It did not matter. Because Aline had a friend.



Two

THE REST OF THE WEEK AT SCHOOL WAS THE SAME. More names were added to the list; Aline ignored them as she ate in the bathroom. She thought about trying to go through the mirror, but she was a little afraid. She hated to be afraid, so she worked on strengthening her courage, and she placed the ballerina charm on her wrist and read in the last stall.

On Friday, she worked up enough nerve to approach the mirror. She thought about how Andrea called her cringe and Mary Beth stuck gum on her seat. She remembered her parents ignoring her tears at the dinner table, and as she stared into the mirror, a scream built. She silently let it out the way a kettle whistles, closed her eyes, and pressed her hands into the mirror. This time she didn’t fall but was pulled through.

It was like traveling underwater: one moment she was in the school and the next she was in a state of floating, and then she was standing in the forest in between here and there, holding Dragon’s hands.

“You’re having quite the week,” Dragon said, smiling at Aline until her eyes drifted to the charm on her wrist. “Sideways but rightways, that.”

“What?”

“The charm,” Dragon nodded.

“It shimmered,” Aline said, rubbing a finger over it. As she did, a glimmer grew at the edge of the trees, and she saw a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and bright-green eyes peering from behind a weathered sycamore.

“Who is that?” Aline whispered.

Dragon looked over her shoulder to where the girl stood off in the distance. “I’d say she’s the spirit looking for the key you’re wearing.”

“Key?” Aline looked at the charm, and it grew brighter, then flashed from a ballerina to the shape of a key and back again. “Whoa.”

“I told you, you’re a witch who opens doors,” Dragon said. “You find keys, too, and can return them.”

“She’s looking for this?”

Dragon nodded, a slow, thoughtful nod. Her eyes grew wider as she stared at the girl, and a vacant expression came over her face. It was like Dragon was there and gone and then she blinked and was back again. “She can’t move on without it.”

“But who is she?”

“Ask her,” Dragon said, giving her a nudge.

Aline cleared her throat. She thought, I’m in a forest in a place that shouldn’t exist, talking to one ghost who is my only friend and I’m about to try and help another. It should have sounded odd to her, but instead it rooted in her bones and felt precisely right.

“Oh,” she said, the sensation of having a purpose settling over her like a warm blanket on a rainy night.

She walked to the edge of the trees and stopped a few feet back. She took the bracelet off and held it up. It grew brighter as she lifted it in the direction of the girl. “Hi,” she called. “Is this yours?”

The girl’s head poked out from behind the tree; she was small and had green eyes and olive skin and dark curly hair. She was younger than Aline and appeared scared of her own shadow.

“It’s okay,” Aline called. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I’m Tera,” the girl whispered, her “T” coming out as a “Th.” She was missing her two front teeth.

“Are you … stuck?” Aline asked, unsure how else to phrase it.

“I was staying after school, and then on my walk home I saw a cat running into the street. I chased it to help it, and the next thing I knew … I was here.”

Aline bit her lip. She’d heard the story of the little girl named Tera who died in front of the school thirty years or so earlier. Everyone knew. It was almost urban legend how she haunted the pipes and the basement. No one Aline knew had ever actually seen her, and Aline couldn’t imagine this shy, terrified person being the ghoul of the school.

“I’m sorry,” Aline said, her voice soft. “Here, let me help you.” She crossed to her and dropped the charm into Tera’s small, curled palm.

Tera shimmered like the charm had done when Aline found it, and then she looked deep into Aline’s eyes. “Ash on an old man’s sleeve,” she said, and walked into Aline and then was gone. Aline shivered as she felt Tera’s spirit pass through her. She looked over at Dragon, who was sitting on the ground building a castle from dirt.

“She’s moved on,” Dragon said.

“Where?”

She lifted a single shoulder, dropped it. “Home, perhaps. To where the light gets in. I’m not sure, but she is where she was meant to be, and that’s because of you, and who you are meant to be.”

“I’m meant to give ghosts charm bracelets?”

“You’re meant to guide them home, to return keys to where they need to be to unlock the doors that are stuck.”

“That sounds a lot like homework.”

Dragon threw back her head and laughed. “It’s a calling and will become a craving.” She flashed her white teeth. “You’ll see.”

Aline returned to school, and the whispers and eye rolls cast in her direction didn’t bother her quite as much as before. She tried to return to a typical life. But an atypical girl is not meant for a typical life, and Aline began to find things others would not, could not see.

Shadows that walked and talked to one another, people moving inside mirrors and from one puddle of water to the other. Then she met another person like Tera, an older gentleman in a back alley behind Sam’s Sandwich Shop in town. He had lost his way home and needed her to find a key so he could open the right door.

She told Dragon, who had begun sneaking into her room at night and pulling her through the bathroom mirror during the week. Dragon nodded and simply said, “There are but a few who can find the keys to unlock the doors for those seeking it to find peace.”

Two weeks later, Aline was in Ballory Cemetery, cutting through to get home and avoid the main path where the kids from school walked. She saw a key glowing in a ditch behind the old church on Ballory Street, three miles from the local bookstore, and two miles from Aline’s home. She picked it up and the key shifted into a watch.

Aline slept with the watch under her pillow, waiting for the owner to show up. She dreamed she woke up to find the man sitting on the chair in her room. Aline took the watch out from under her pillow, stood, and walked over to place the watch around his wrist.

The man smiled. He bowed his head and Aline thought of Tera. She whispered, “Ash on an old man’s sleeve.”

Aline woke up. The man was gone, and so was the watch.

The next month, she dreamed of keys that, when she touched them, became a headlamp, a dog tag, and a gold ring in the shape of a singing sparrow. Soon after, she found more and more objects that did not belong anywhere, and yet she could not leave them alone. She told Dragon they were a strange sort of treasure. They didn’t belong in a vault in the Smithsonian and wouldn’t buy a small tropical island off the coast of a faraway land.

No, her treasure did something else.

It whispered. It sang. It shimmered and called to her to be returned home. Finding lost items, as Dragon had told her, was her gift. It was her magic.

Sometimes ghosts showed up for the items; other times the objects disappeared on their own. Being found, they could then be claimed. She could talk to the objects. Ruminate on them in her mind. They heard her, answered, and would always end up in her hands. Aline’s skills sharpened, her craft grew, and as she slipped further and further into a life in the shadows, she found out what she was made of and what she was meant to do.

She learned no club could touch her, and she had something better than fair-weather friends. She had power, she had Dragon, and she was no longer afraid.

* * *

TIME PASSED, IN THE INEVITABLE AND INERT WAY IT DOES. Aline graduated from middle school to high school without another slumber-party invitation. She hid in the library, finding solace and a new plethora of friends in the books on the shelves. She read everything she could get her hands on about the paranormal, as well as the entire middle-grade fantasy collection and fifty-seven nonfiction biographies. Dragon sometimes showed up, asking her to read passages out loud or peeking over her shoulder. Aline might not have had friends in her peers, but she had something better in her Dragon.

Many times, she’d look for Dragon’s key, but when she’d tell her, Dragon shrugged it off. “We’re friends,” Aline would remind her. “Friends look out for each other.”

“We are friends, and that’s the biggest help of all,” Dragon would say, before launching into a discussion on the vibrations of magic or the unusualness of a turtle’s belly button. Dragon liked knowledge even more than Aline, although she also said things that didn’t make sense, like how she’d gotten in an argument with a star about eating planets or how the snowflakes were incendiary agents for good. Aline didn’t mind her peculiarity, considering Aline herself was so often accused of being odd.

High school proved a bit easier for Aline … at first. She skated through her freshman and sophomore years by keeping her head down. She did well in school, if not at the top of her class, and while she didn’t seek extracurriculars like debate or cheer or sportsball, as Dragon called it, she had plenty to keep her occupied after hours.

Her parents took to traveling more and more. Aline told herself it was fine, since it gave her plenty of time to look for keys in and around her town in her after-school hours, yet she found the constant emptiness of her home, and the dark that permeated there, settled deep into her. It was an ache that pulsed beneath the surface of her skin. An itch that never went away.

Dragon wasn’t always able to be there—perhaps she was off hoarding gold or treasure; Aline could never get a straight answer out of her. The constant loneliness would steal Aline’s breath at times. It was so awful she’d double over in pain as her stomach clenched and sweat broke out along her brow. Lonesomeness was a horrible kind of sickness.

It was during her junior year that three things happened to alter everything once again. The first being that Aline’s parents had a blowout fight in Greece and came home to stay. Where their indifference had reigned, now the house was filled with their anger, which turned into eggshells Aline had to tiptoe around.

Then came Noah Bones with his swoopy brown hair and rocker tees and scuffed Vans. With a crooked grin and eyes that saw everything, Noah noticed Aline.

She sat under a tree outside the school, between the football field and soccer field, trying to blend in with the foliage. It was her reading spot when the days were warm enough, and she found that grounding into the earth with her shoes off and feet dug into the soil recharged the ache she carried like a backpack she couldn’t put down.

Noah crossed through the soccer field. The wind brushed his hair back from his face, showing off his spectacularly stunning blue eyes and straight nose. The kind of nose on the sculptures in the museums her parents liked to visit before their pedantic personalities finally made everything go tits up. Roman, she thought. Like a soldier. He smiled and her stomach tried to drop into the soil next to her toes.

No one had ever smiled like that at Aline, like she was someone to be excited about.

“Hey,” he said, dropping next to her like he had a standing invitation and they weren’t complete strangers.

Aline sat, holding a book called The Conscious Ghost. Noah glanced at the title and smiled. “Light reading?”

“Research,” she said. Aline didn’t know how to talk to people, aside from Dragon. She wasn’t well versed in social conversation and had long ago given up her notebook with data about those around her. She preferred the shadows now, but here was a light, shining in her space.

“Cool.” He pulled out a ham sandwich and proceeded to eat it, leaning against her tree, crossing one foot over the other ankle, and not saying another word. She could feel him watching her. As he did, her cheeks flushed and her heart sped up. She didn’t know if she should get up and run or stay very, very still.

“I’m Noah,” he said.

She nodded. She’d heard his name. New transfers were always a popular choice on the whisper network, and news of the senior soccer captain had reached even her averted ears.

“Okay.”

He laughed, a deep rumbly sound that warmed its way down to her toes. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me who you are?”

“Aline,” she said.

“Aye-lean.”

“Something like that.”

“I like it. What’s it mean?”

“A place in a line. Meant to be parallel or straight.”

“Are you?”

She glanced up, found herself trapped in the bright blue of his eyes.

“Straight? Into boys, girls, both?”

She looked back down. “Haven’t tested the hypothesis fully, but you aren’t horrible to look at.”

He laughed again, that sexy rumble, and she shivered. “You’re funny,” he said, crumpling his empty wrapper and putting it back in his bag. “You’re also not bad to look at, Aline.”

Then he was gone, and Aline found the earth between her bare feet had warmed to mud.

For the next two weeks, Noah showed up at Aline’s tree spot. Some days, he was there before her. He arrived with books in hand, written by authors whom she thought of as part of the Dead Angst Society: Hemingway, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Salinger. Aline didn’t trust people who only read stories by dead people, but then she spoke mostly to dead people, so she decided to cut him some slack.

“Why do you only sit out here?” he asked. “There’s a whole world of, I don’t know, tables inside. Great places to rest elbows and plates and cups.”

“Also a lot of endless chatter and laughter and clanging forks.”

“Do forks clang?”

“Yes, and that you haven’t noticed says so much about you.”

“So you’re paying attention to me then?”

“It’s hard not to when you keep turning up.”

“I’ll be your bad penny,” he said. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a rock painted to look like the moon. He slid it to her and returned to his book and turkey-and-Swiss sandwich—a variation on the only two sandwiches he ever ate.

Soon, Noah wasn’t only eating lunch with Aline. He was also walking her home, five blocks from the north side of the school. When her parents weren’t home, he was coming in to work on schoolwork after soccer practice and binge-watch cooking shows and documentaries about dead rock stars. His ennui for generations of dead artists was fascinating. They didn’t have classes together, or cross paths during school outside of lunch, but he was always there, her first friend who was real.

“You have a lot of books on magic and ghosts,” Noah said, one rainy afternoon when Aline’s parents were out of town on separate trips. The house was quiet, but it wasn’t dark. It had Noah’s light and laughter and it felt like home.

“I have many varied interests,” she said, lying on her bed on her stomach, drawing a picture of Dragon in one of her notebooks.

“You really do,” he said. He sat the book down and crossed to the edge of the bed. “I like them all. I like you … all of you.”

Then Noah shifted the notebook out from Aline’s grasp; he lay down beside her and traced her jaw and the outline of her lips with his fingertips. “Is this okay?” he asked, his voice low, his eyes dilating.

Aline didn’t only read books on the supernatural and nonfiction biographies; she was also well versed in romance novels. She knew what he was asking, what it meant that his bright-blue eyes had darkened. Her stomach flipped as heat between her thighs built.

“Yes,” she said, her voice breathless.

Noah leaned in and brushed his lips over hers. Soft, promising, gentle. He took his time, taking the kiss deeper, nudging her lower lip open, nibbling and running his tongue across the seam there. Heat built in Aline until she was trembling with need. Her hands came up and into his hair, and she sealed their mouths, took the kiss deeper, growling as she did. He groaned and she rolled him over, finding the perfect position seated on top of him.

“I…” She paused, trying to catch her breath. “Don’t know what I’m doing.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked, his hands clenching her thighs, the touch still gentle but the urgency a current flooding into her.

Aline licked her lips. “Everything.” She wanted to do everything.

Their clothes were discarded with clumsy speed, then they were under the covers laughing and kissing, and when Noah pressed his thigh between Aline’s legs and rolled into her, she thought she might explode.

Then he was sliding on a condom and positioning himself over her. They locked eyes, and his were tender and dark. She nodded and he was slow to enter her, and when the pain came, it was fleeting and sharp. Then they were moving together. Her breath and his breath, lips and tongues tangled, moans and groans building. Then, it was over. He shuddered and shook, and slid off her. Aline blinked at the ceiling, curious as to what she might have missed. This was a big deal; she almost knew why, but hadn’t quite understood.

Noah pulled her to him, kissing her forehead and squeezing her tight. “Thank you,” he said.

She kissed him back, unsure what to say, until his phone alarm went off. Three shrill beeps. “Shit,” Noah said, rolling away and clamoring up. He grabbed his clothes, running to the bathroom. She heard the water run, then a toilet flush, then he was back out and dressed in two minutes flat, about the same amount of time the sex had taken.

“I have to get to practice,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

Aline shrugged. “Sure.”

He smiled, and his grin shot straight to the place between her legs that was still unsatisfied. Then he took off running, and Aline was left to sit in bed, feeling for all the world emptier than she had in a long time.

She showered and changed, preparing to walk through Ballory Cemetery and see if she could find someone. Someone, perhaps, who could help her. She could call on Dragon, but this felt like something she wasn’t ready to share … just yet.

Aline laced up her favorite pair of scuffed black Converse high-tops and walked to grab her bag, then saw Noah’s sitting on her floor.

“Oh no,” she said. She tried to text him and let him know, but he didn’t reply. Chances were good he was already to the field and perhaps on it. But missing his extra clothes. She could leave it, or she could try and drop it off. Maybe set it on the top of his car. She could be in and out and not have to see any of the students she needed to avoid.

It was a short drive, and Aline’s heart sank at the crowd of cars. She couldn’t tell which was his in a sea of so many gray and silver used and new SUVs. It was like trying to find a cobalt scarf on a rack of a hundred blue scarves in every shade.

“Shit shit shit,” Aline said. She got out, grabbed his bag, and did what she always did at school. She shrunk in on herself, trying to appear more invisible. She hurried, skittering not unlike a crab, between cars and into the fields, behind the stands and around to where the players sat. Noah was on the bench, drinking water from his favorite Yeti container. The green one that had the tricky top. She should really get him a new one; was that something friends who were more than friends did?

The idea left her smiling, a warm burst of hope flooding through her.

Noah stood up and looked around. He could sense her? No, he wasn’t looking at her, but behind her. Aline glanced over her shoulder. A girl with long brown hair and expressive eyes waved to him. She wore a jean jacket and pink lipstick and appeared happy and friendly, and everything about her made Aline want to scream.

Noah jogged to her, running past Aline—never seeing her standing there, holding his bag—and swept the girl up in his arms. He kissed her so thoroughly Aline’s knees knocked together and she had to grab hold of the fence post nearest to her to keep from falling over.

“Gotta get back, babe,” she heard him say in a low growl, one she knew too well.

Noah kissed the other girl once more and turned to hurry back to his starting line. That’s when he saw Aline. His face lost all its happy candor, going pale with shock. Aline lifted the bag and tossed it at his feet.

She spun on her heel and walked as slowly as she could manage out of the stadium and back to her car. Angry tears coursed down her face; great gasping hiccups escaped where she was trying to force them down. She was almost to her car when her knees gave out. She stumbled and went down hard. The skies overhead darkened, and thunder rumbled in the far-off distance. The storm outside also started building inside her. Humiliation, her childhood companion, had returned, but it had brought a destruction she’d not yet met. Devastation, a new heartbreak. She could taste Noah on her lips, smell him in her hair and on her skin. If she closed her eyes, she could feel his hands roaming down her spine.

“Aline!”

She crawled her way up. She refused to let him see her on her knees. She kept moving forward, ignoring him completely.

“Wait, Aline.”

She spun at the irritation in his voice. As though he had any right to be put out by this situation.

“Go away, Noah.”

“I’m—”

“If you say the word ‘sorry’ to me after what you’ve done, I will destroy you.”

He scrubbed at his jaw. “I got carried away. I like you, you’re funny and weird, and entertaining, but it’s not like that with us.”

“You mean the part where you had sex with me? That’s not like that?”

“I mean…” He looked down at his cleats like there was an answer he might pry from one of them. “Look. I don’t know what I want. I just know I don’t want you.”

Then, as she reeled back, he turned and walked away. The rain coming down and soaking him and doing nothing to cleanse the pain that ate at her bones.

Every cell in her body was awake. On fire. Aline was dying. She had to be. Nothing had ever felt this bad, this layered with mortification, rejection, and truth. Because she was nothing. She’d known it all along. Her parents showed it to her by ignoring her and leaving her behind; the students in the school showed it by never seeing her; and Noah had shown it by tricking her into thinking he might be falling in love with her, only to discover he found her a forgettable joke. One barely worth using before he tossed her away.

The vibration beneath Aline’s feet increased. The road shook, the pavement breaking into pebbles. Aline reached inside herself, pulling out all the pain and rage and hurt, and she threw her head back and screamed. Light flashed into the parking lot, wind blew fast and furious, and the earth cracked. The pebbles rose into the air like a hundred thousand glittering lights, before they blew past Aline, and straight into Noah.



Three

THE PERK OF BEING INVISIBLE IS THAT NO ONE SAW ALINE AT THE SOCCER FIELDS. The meteoric storm, a freak of nature, came out of nowhere. There was damage to the stands, but thankfully no one in the field or on the stands was hurt. The same could not be said for the new soccer star, Noah Bones.

Noah was crushed by concrete that fell on him when a sinkhole occurred. It took two crews to recover his body.

Aline wasn’t simply a lonely witch anymore; she was a murderer. She did not go to the funeral. She stopped going to school entirely.

“I don’t feel safe,” she told her parents. A half-truth.

“You don’t have to feel safe. You just have to graduate,” her father said.

“Then you can leave and do whatever you like,” her mother said.

Aline didn’t want to leave. She still had Dragon and her ghosts, though she hadn’t been back to the cemetery since Noah died. His spirit was not one she wanted to cross. She cried a lot and stopped reading and watching her documentaries. Everything reminded her of Noah, and of his words. “I don’t know what I want, but I know it isn’t you.”

She was still a freak, and unlovable. And her anger had cost Noah his life. She might hate him, but she hadn’t planned to kill him. She wished she felt worse about that. And yet, she didn’t.

Aline tried to find Dragon, but she was nowhere to be found. It was then the third unexpected thing happened.

It was on the way home from getting a packet about completing her GED that Aline stopped into the bookstore tucked inside a historic building in the center of town. The kind librarian from middle school, Chlo Moirai, had opened it the week prior. Chlo’s library had been the only place Aline felt safe, and she needed to see if she could find such a space again. If one could even exist.

When she went inside, Aline looked for Chlo but didn’t see anyone. She wandered around until she reached the children’s section, with its brightly colored books and thick rugs and beanbags for reading chairs. She crumpled to the ground and reached for the first book she could find. For the rest of the afternoon, she shifted from the harsh world of Whistleblown and the destruction she had wreaked into the soft world of the Baby-Sitters Club. She was too old for such a book, but it was like going home again, so she read until the three owners—Chlo and her sisters, Liset and Atti Moirai—waltzed into the room in a cloud of Chanel N°5, chattering and carrying a tray full of chocolate milk and warm Pop-Tarts.

“Aline, dearest. You finally came,” Chlo said, her brown frizzy hair moving around her face like a cloud of cotton candy being blown in the wind. She took Aline’s chin in her hand and stared for so long into Aline’s eyes, Aline nearly forgot what it meant to blink. “It is temporary, dearest.”

“Oh yes, absolutely,” agreed Liset, adjusting her pearls and pressing a perfectly manicured hand down her skirt. “Nothing is permanent, after all.”

“Not a single blessed thing. You are always welcome here,” Atti added, her large green eyes blinking bright under her thick fringe of bangs. “This is a safe haven, and the books are happy for the company, as are we.”

Aline found her salvation with the bookstore and the trio of women who ran it. In the bookstore, Aline lived a life where she could escape. She didn’t have to pretend the indifference or whispers from other kids cut into her like the angry blade of a serrated knife, or keep the peace during one of her parents’ many arguments. She could study for her GED, and lose herself in worlds where the villains were clear and the heroes indefatigable. Where she could pretend for hours at a time she had not killed the first boy she’d ever loved.

“A broken heart is a terrible thing to waste,” Chlo said to her one day, setting a chocolate Pop-Tart in front of her. The sisters had the misguided belief that chocolate was its own food group. “You are clearly grieving, dear. Can it really be all that bad?”

“Worse,” Aline said with a grimace.

A wonderful thing about Chlo, and the other two sisters, was they never lingered. Once a period was at the end of a sentence, they were gone, back to their offices or a nook and cranny where they could gossip and knit. They never minded how Aline treated the shop more like her own personal library and less like a brick-and-mortar store, or that she left chocolate smudged on the corners of half the pages she turned.

“How come you let me stay?” Aline asked, after watching them hurry out a few teenagers with sneers from the store.

“You are our favorite kind of female: wild and free,” Atti said. “The shadows under your eyes won’t always be there, dearie. One day you will soar.”

Aline thought they liked her because she was as odd as they were. For owners of a store, they spent most of their time knitting and keeping an eye on the door for customers they more often than not ran off. On rainy days, they whispered in tones too low for Aline to properly hear, and on sunny days, they read Aline’s palm and compared it to those found in their anatomy books.

It was on one of the rainy days that Aline stopped being scared of what had happened with Noah and started thinking about what could happen in her future. She sat, turning the pages on the latest adventure of Nancy and Ned, when a book tumbled from the third shelf up. Anne of Green Gables.

Aline sighed in relief as she took in the cover. She looked up and saw Dragon, leaning against a shelf of science fiction and smiling.

“You’ve been busy,” Dragon said.

“I’ve been…” Aline’s eyes filled and overflowed.

“No, no,” Dragon said, rushing forward. “No crying, please.”

“You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“You mean burying the boy alive? That was impressive, to be sure.”

Aline sobbed harder. Dragon gave a huff. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Oh yeah?” Aline looked up. “And whose fault was it?”

“Okay, so maybe you pulled the trigger, but he was the gun.”

“Why don’t the things you say make proper sense?”

Dragon rolled her eyes. She was still the same as ever. Blond curls, blue eyes, lace dress, perpetually a child. It should have been unnerving, but it was soothing. That something comforting didn’t change.

“I told you that you are special. Your powers are too big, too unruly. You should have been trained, but you don’t have a line of witches to step up. I’m not able to do it.”

“And now I’m a murderer.” Aline’s sobs started anew.

“Stop that,” Dragon said, tugging at her curls. “You had an accident.”

“I didn’t spill milk.”

“And you didn’t spill blood. You spilled earth. Blame the elements.” She pointed to the door leading back into the bookstore’s greater sanctum.

“They can help.”

“The librarian and her sisters?”

“The three witches who guard the books,” Dragon said. “You never noticed how safe you felt with Chlo? How nothing bad reached you in that library? How safe you feel here now?”

Aline shook her head. “But…”

“You’re meant to be here. They’ve already cleaned up your mess once; why not let them help you find out how to prevent having another one.”

Then Dragon leaned down, brushed a cool set of lips across Aline’s cheek, and was gone.

* * *

ALINE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT DRAGON MEANT ABOUT THEM CLEANING UP HER MESS. She put the book back and went in search of the three women. She found them sitting in a circle, in threadbare green club chairs, knitting bags at their feet, yarn in their hands, and fingers curled around their needles. There was a fire in their old stone fireplace, and the red rug in front of it was worn and inviting. As though it had stories woven into its fibers from all the conversations it had overheard in the years gone by. Behind them was a long counter with three brightly colored glass Tiffany lamps. The type that looked like reproductions, but, knowing Chlo, were anything but. Twinkly lights were strung over the counter, and beyond it was the section of rare books the three owners were forever perusing. As Aline approached, she found them clacking their needles. Instead of finding the noise grating, like the discordance of forks in a cafeteria, Aline wanted to twist inside this soothing sound. Tuck herself into the threads and coil away there.

“Hello, dearie,” Liset said, looking up from where she was knitting the world’s teeniest pair of pants. “Did the snow fall in your sunshine?”

“My … what?”

“You look like your beach got washed out by a blizzard,” Chlo clarified.

“More Pop-Tarts?” Atti offered. “They’re a wonder. They don’t pop and they aren’t tart, but they can make mouths smile.”

“No, thanks,” Aline said. She picked at the cuticle on her pinky and bit her bottom lip.

“Ah,” Chlo said. She nodded to the others. “I think we might need a minute or four very long ones eight times over.”

“We’ll put the kettle on,” the sisters said, and got up, pausing to pat Aline on the shoulder, brush a hand down the back of her head. They stroked her like parents soothed small children in so many of the stories she read, and tears clogged the back of her throat at such unfettered kindness.

Chlo tapped the seat of the chair Atti had vacated. “Sit, darling. I think perhaps it’s time we have a talk.”

Aline sat, her face falling into her hands. She rolled her head from side to side, trying to shake loose the weight of the world on her shoulders.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing is wrong and that is a problem?”

“No, I mean. Everything should be wrong. I should be hunted by the police, thrown in jail, on trial, preparing for a life of an orange jumpsuit and bartering prison candy that I’ll never have enough of because I have a terrible sweet tooth.”

“Hmm.”

Aline looked up at her, eyes rimmed red, cheeks splotchy. “Hmm? That’s your reassuring reply?”

Chlo sighed. “I’m hmming, because I have good news, but it is big news and I really wish we had a Pop-Tart.”

“Oh my goddess.”

“No one is coming, Aline,” Chlo said. “You unlocked the wrong door, and the boy got caught in the crosshairs.”

Aline stilled. “Were you all protecting me?”

“It’s what we do. My sisters and I look out for witches, and I’ve been looking out for you ever since you showed up in my library five years ago.”

“You knew then?” she asked. “That I’m a … shadow witch?”

“I’ve known for longer, but it seemed it was the time to meet.”

“Why?”

“Because you were coming into your powers.”

“You never said anything, though.”

Chlo shifted in the chair and crossed one long leg over the other. “You’ve had enough on your plate, Aline. A sadness permeating, an inability to find your place.”

“Wouldn’t knowing why help?” she asked, a bite to her tone.

“Being a witch doesn’t make you unlovable. Having parents who don’t know how to love anyone other than themselves and being surrounded by children who are intimidated by you simply put you in a position of adversity. You crack or polish.”

“So you left me to crack?”

“I’d say you rather shine.”

“And Noah?” she asked, her voice breaking. “If you had warned me what I could do…”

“He might have lived, yes. He did not, and we should have taken better care with you. I admit it. You’d done so well the past few years, I didn’t see this coming.” She frowned, her gaze dropping to her knitting. “I was looking in the wrong direction and this was as much my fault as anyone’s.” She looked up and met Aline’s penetrating gaze. “So we cleaned it up.”

“You … how?”

“We pulled the right thread, dearie. It was an accident caused by a seismic shift in the weather pattern. A freak occurrence in nature, but nature is known for her reckonings.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“You lost control,” Chlo said. “But it wasn’t your fault. You can’t let your pain, anger, and hurt rule you. When a witch like you does, it creates a door. You help spirits, and you didn’t have one to help. You created one.”

Aline swallowed hard, feeling like she were trying to swallow glass. “I didn’t help Noah.”

“No, but your instinct took over. We helped Noah. He has moved on, and you must as well.”

Aline shook her head. It was impossible, and surreal. Sitting in a library where the soft instrumental tones of Chopin played and a light rain fell outside the three arched windows at the far end of the store. Where lights twinkled, a fire crackled, and the two other sisters emerged carrying a pot of fragrant mint tea and a tea set with pine trees painted on the sides. She was in the coziest place on earth, and here in this cocoon of warmth her world had turned inside out.

“All is not lost,” Chlo said, as she accepted a cup of tea and nodded for Aline to do the same.

“No, not at all,” Liset said, smiling and pausing to rub the lipstick from her teeth.

Atti yawned and sat. “Lost is temporary, after all.”

“You are meant for greatness, Aline Weir,” Chlo said, “and more than that, you are meant for a great love.”

“Quite possibly,” Atti said.

“If possible is still true after all this time,” Liset added.

Chlo waved them off while Aline was tempted to put her hands to her head to stop the spinning of their words and the weight of all they had laid in her lap.

“You’ll stay here,” Chlo said. “Work for us this summer. The books will heal you, and one day, I promise, you will feel strong again.”

“What if I accidentally unlock a door and send you all through it?”

They laughed, loud titters that shook the saucer. Liset leaned over and brushed the hair back from Aline’s shoulder where it had cascaded forward. “If only you could, dearie.”

Aline decided, after two cups of tea and another Pop-Tart, to accept their invitation. She needed a job, after all, and the thing of it was she didn’t want to leave the bookstore. The sisters prattled on, speaking of magic and town gossip and the grooming habits of ruffian men and women. They asked Aline her thoughts from time to time, but also left her be.

They had protected her. They were clearly magical themselves. Aline didn’t have a family, and she didn’t trust herself, but she thought, perhaps, she could trust them. She hoped, in her heart of hearts, she might have finally found a family.



Four

THERE ARE LAWS OF MAGIC, MUCH LIKE THERE ARE DECREES FOR LIFE. The thing about magical law is, as Atti was fond of saying, “Laws are guidelines and guidelines are good to know. Once you know the rules, however, they are perfectly fun to break.”

Thus began Aline’s education on magic according to the sisters Moirai. As the months wore on, Aline studied with Liset and passed her GED. The sisters were accredited professors, among other things, and they enrolled her in an online college early. When Aline told her parents, her mother simply left the room, while her father told her, “I didn’t think you were particularly book smart, but if those ladies can help you get out on your own, good for them.”

Aline didn’t understand it. She had tried her best with the bad situation that was her family, and yet nothing ever measured up.

“They won’t see themselves clearly,” Chlo told her one day, “so they can’t possibly see you.”

It was a simple but effective explanation, and Aline took to spending more and more time in the store and less and less at home. She loved the routine of it. Stocking books when new shipments came in, listing them online (most of the sales were done over the “inter nettle,” as Atti called it), and tidying the shelves. The sisters even let her organize the children’s section, changing the system from alphabetical by author to colors of the rainbow. It was a rainbow of books, and being in the room left Aline sighing in happiness.

It was in the children’s and young adult section that Dragon finally returned one early September morning.

“Told you they could help,” Dragon said, causing Aline to drop the stack of books she was shelving. She spun around and threw her arms around her friend, surprised to find her solid.

Dragon hesitated, before raising her arms and squeezing Aline back. She barely came to Aline’s ribs, and Aline dropped her chin to Dragon’s head. “I missed you. Where have you been?”

“Where I always go when I’m not with you.”

“Which is?”

“Keeping an eye on things.”

Dragon looked around the shop, her eyes narrowing at the edge of the worn carpet. Musty, and the unfortunate color of a ripe avocado, the carpet waved up in the corner of the children’s room where the padding had gone from aged to tatters.

“I know, I told them they should consider natural wood flooring in here.”

Dragon didn’t move, just huffed a bit at the corner of the room. Aline followed Dragon’s gaze to where an odd brick stood out on the far wall. When Aline looked at it directly, it blended in, but seeing it from the corner of her eye, she realized the brick was the wrong shade of red. It was, in fact, much lighter than the rest of the wall. More faded persimmon than burnt sienna.

“That’s not right,” Dragon said, a note of worry creeping into her voice.

Aline didn’t know what to say to that, but she couldn’t help but reach out for the brick.

“I don’t think you should touch it,” Dragon said.

“Dragon.”

“No, Aline. I’m not sure about that.”

Aline hesitated. She trusted Dragon. Hated to go against her wishes. But … a small voice in the back of her mind whispered, what did a ghost, even her ghost, know? Aline rubbed a single finger along it. She climbed to her knees, and the brick whispered. The brick told her it was not where it belonged. It was in the wrong place, and it wanted her help. Aline knew what it was like to need help. And before she came here, she knew what it was like when no one did anything. Aline pushed hard against the brick and told the wall to move. The wall groaned, and creaked, and puffed an awful stinky puff of air … and it slid back three inches.

Aline jumped up, gaping at the wall. Her hands shook; her heart thudded like angry thunder in her chest.

“Aline,” Dragon said, her voice a slight tremble.

Perhaps Aline should have been scared. Dragon certainly sounded it. But the simple truth was the things that scared Aline were far more complex than a wall with a secret. Aline feared the way her mother looked at her like she was a mistake her mother couldn’t undo, and how her father looked through her as though she didn’t exist. The hollow emptiness in her house, a place where love should live … that terrified her.

In the store where she had found safety and hope—nothing worried her here.

“It’s going to be okay. I’m not afraid, Dragon,” she said.

She found it surprisingly easy to slide the wall farther in once it was opened. She slipped inside. She left enough room between the movable wall and seam for Dragon to join her, though she didn’t seem inclined to follow.

Behind the wall was a shelf of books and an old vintage desk. Lined up along the floor was a row of the most eclectic hats. Bucket hats, bowler hats, sombreros, deerstalkers, fascinators, dunce caps, ball caps, fedoras, fezzes, half hats, hard hats, top hats, whoopee caps, mushroom hats, party hats, pillbox hats, and Aline’s personal favorite, the porkpie.

She studied the hats, and as she did, the ground vibrated beneath her feet. As the first bud of worry bloomed, Aline dug her heels into it, sniffed the air, and caught a whiff of a familiar, happy scent. The room smelled of lavender, like Chlo. She scooped the porkpie up, dropping the felt hat with the low, flat crown, narrow brim, and small bow on the back on her head. As soon as the hat hit her hair, a wave of heat rushed over her. Her cheeks warmed, her hands tingled, and her nose tickled. A little dizzy, Aline stumbled a step forward and dropped into the swivel chair in front of the old-timey desk. After a moment, the heat passed, and she looked up to see a book tucked along the corner of the desk.

Mischief, A Beginner’s Guide.

“Don’t touch that,” Dragon said, standing outside the room, looking in but not moving closer. “That’s not a book. That’s a story.”

“Books are stories,” Aline said. She scooped up the book, sat on the floor by the chair, and began to read.

Mischief told of a town called Matchstick where magic began. It was the story of a powerful witch who was lonely, and magic was lost, so she created a safe place for it. A place along the ley lines that would keep them both safe and protect them always. Soon the magic there drew other powerful witches, and those who lived in the shadows. Ghosts. Oddities. People like Aline. Like Dragon. Like the sisters in the bookstore. Magic was more than magic.

It was a story like nothing Aline had ever read, and she found herself in the pages, in the people who wanted to be seen but hid, who made mistakes and lost people. Witches who wished they belonged, but knew they lived in a world where they never could. She fell in love with the powerful being in the story, the one who was broken but desperately wished to be whole. Who was aloof but terrified, who had dark hair and brooding eyes, and Aline understood him in those pages as well as she’d ever understood herself.

Aline cried when the story was over. She put the porkpie hat back, kept the book, and crawled out from behind the secret wall. Dragon was nowhere to be found, and neither were the sisters.

Aline went home to a house where one parent yelled at her for walking too loudly and the other didn’t hear her footsteps at all. That night was the first night Aline dreamed of a town that did not exist. Of night and day, of magic, and of a crack between the worlds. Of a young man with eyes like a vortex, who whispered her name and ran his fingers along her forearm, causing sparks to rain from the sky.

The next day Aline returned to the bookstore. In the children’s section, she found the curious brick that did not match the other bricks alone on the floor. In its place was a newer, shinier brick. The wall was now a wall, the strange brick just a brick, and the way in sealed shut. Aline scooped up the brick and went in search of the wise women who owned the store. When she told them of her adventure, and Dragon, and the book she had taken home, they exchanged a look. When she apologized and tried to pay for the book, they laughed and offered her more chocolate.

“I’m sure I’ve never heard of a secret room in this store,” Chlo said, smiling. “Let alone a story hidden inside that is more than a story.”

“But how nice to find a floor filled with hats and be able to put on any one you choose and become whomever you’d like to be,” Atti added.

“Or whomever you are meant to be,” Liset said.

“Yes,” Chlo said, pushing a tray of pastries toward her. “What wonders there might lie ahead for you if such a thing could exist.” Then she winked at her, and the three went back to their knitting and debating the future of trees.

Aline returned to work at the bookstore every afternoon as before, but she never found a way back into the secret room. She kept her copy of Mischief, A Beginner’s Guide, and the brick, and every night she dreamed of a man with dark eyes, a knowing smile, and when he would touch her, sparks would flutter from the ether, wrapping them in a snow globe of their own. Inside that orb, Aline had everything she’d ever wanted.

A few months into working for the sisters, they took her into the forest beyond the town.

“It’s one thing to open a door,” Chlo said. “It’s another to open a soul. If what had happened with Noah had occurred with a witch, you would have kept a little of their essence.”

“What does that mean?”

“A bit of madness, a spot of magic, a hint of their power. It shows up in different ways,” Liset said, studying the fading sun as it set in the sky.

“It’s why there are no more hedge witches left,” Atti said, leading them to a row of privets. “It’s one thing to help the spirits cross. It’s another to make them.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Aline said, her eyes filling again as she pictured Noah’s face before he was gone. “I don’t know how to live with what I’ve done.” She didn’t, outside of the bookstore walls; she was beginning to hate herself as much as it seemed everyone else disliked her.

“We all make mistakes,” Chlo said, her shoulders rolled back, eyes on Aline.

“How are you feeling really, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“Any … cravings. Need for more doors? Desire for something beyond this world?”

“I would like to go back inside and read a book and eat a Pop-Tart, while ignoring the way your eyebrows are pointing toward your widow’s peak. Is that what you mean?

Liset bit back a giggle, poorly, and Chlo smiled. “Some are bitter pills to swallow; others blow away with the lightest breeze. The key is to understand whether you want to do it again.”

“I don’t want to do that ever again.”

The others nodded.

“How do you know?”

“I’m not a psychopath,” Aline said, her voice rising. “I messed up.”

“True,” Atti said.

“You know how to cross over into the in-between,” Chlo said. “Right?”

“Right,” Aline said, her jaw aching from how tightly she held it.

“You must get more adept at going in and out, and doing so while there are obstacles in your way.”

“Like a bunch of chairs and snowballs?”

“No,” Atti said. “Like dead bodies.”

“What?”

“Kidding,” Atti said. “We rarely throw dismembered heads anymore.”

Aline stumbled back as the sun set and the sweet, quiet forest beyond the store filled with ghosts.

“Cross,” Chlo called, as she and the three women shifted back closer to the entrance of the shop. “Don’t be afraid.”

Aline blew out a slow breath as the ghosts drifted closer. A child no more than ten wearing a ball cap; a man in his thirties with a large headset over his ears; a pair of octogenarians holding hands; a woman holding a baby, tears tracking down her cheeks.

Aline walked toward the hedge that the ghosts were all circling. She told herself it was simple; she’d part the brush and call for Dragon. Dive through into the in-between.

The spirits moved closer, their fingers running along Aline’s arms and down her back, the baby’s cry reaching her and settling into her palms where she cupped it and tried to give it back. Their sounds and pain swooshed into her.

“I don’t have your keys,” she called, her temper rising, her eyes flashing as she swallowed fear. “I can’t help. You have to get back.”

The whispers started low, like wind blowing across individual blades of grass before rustling leaves. Keys, needs, all seeking her.

The sisters stood from the door, talking loudly. “She can’t do it,” Chlo said. “We were wrong. She hasn’t got the power.”

“She’ll muck it up for sure, might even get caught in the hedgerow,” Liset added.

“Half in and out, the poor spirits will forever be stuck.” Atti sighed the words.

“I’m not sure what kind of a witch we need,” Chlo said, her voice rising, “but it isn’t her.”

Aline’s feet shifted. Her body tightened; her muscles screamed. Her ligaments were as taut as a spring on a bow and arrow. Aline Weir, the odd girl who had no place, whom no one wanted, whom everyone poked and prodded at like she was a pincushion meant to be stabbed by rejection. The sky overhead shifted from a pale, cloudless gray to charcoal. The wind whipped up twice before it faded completely. Not a weed stirred, not a bird called. Static filled the air, lifting the hairs off Aline’s arms and neck. She let out the growl, incapable of holding it back.

She was never enough, and she was tired of being underestimated.

“That’s it,” Chlo said, and Aline realized she was right there. Standing at her side. “That’s the trigger, and that power is seeking its way out. All of life, all of magic is made of light and dark. You choose which you embrace. Right now you believe the hate that is rained on you, but words are only as powerful as you allow them to be.”

Liset stepped forward. “You can release your power, decimate the land, the person nearest you, take your revenge on those words that cut you to the quick.”

Atti moved to her other side. “Or you can send it out through your hands, open them, let go. You can shift it from dark to light. Tell your power to open the door, Aline.”

“You can do anything,” Chlo said, her whisper brushing against the shell of her ear. “You only have to believe and choose.”

Rage was a lit fuse, the words of rejection, the slashes of pain. They were rivers raging inside of Aline’s very soul. She’d never been enough, never been made right.

Aline tasted grapefruit on her tongue. Bitter with a hint of honey. She stared at the hedge, cloaked in a haze, the way to the in-between visible. The spirits around her were quiet, but she could sense them. Could close her eyes and locate where each of them stood, waiting. Hoping.

Aline liked power. It was a secret truth she kept tucked in the bottom of her shoe. She liked the strength coursing through her, how she could decimate anything that got in her way, anything that tried to break her. The dark was seductive, honest.

But it wasn’t her. It wasn’t who she’d spent her life trying to be. It wasn’t Dragon, with her quirky goodness, or the spirits who were as lost as she was. It wasn’t the loving compassion of the three sisters who had taken her in.

It tasted delicious, though.

Aline hesitated. For five seconds, ten. Tempted, so, so tempted to give in.

She heard the baby cry, and she felt the nudge of that sound—even more broken than what she carried. They all had scars, things they carried. Wounds and broken bits. She and the spirits. She knew that. She held out her hands, releasing the dark and letting the light shine through. She couldn’t be certain, but she thought she heard the collective exhale of the three sisters surrounding her in a semicircle.

The hedge parted, and Aline stepped into the beyond.

* * *

DRAGON SAT ON THE PATH, HER CHIN IN HER HANDS, HER BROWS HIGH ON HER SMOOTH FOREHEAD. “Golly, ducky, for a minute there I wasn’t sure which way you would go.”

“Neither was I.”

They laughed, and Dragon helped Aline find the different spots along the in-between to cross through. In and out, over and under, through the hedgerow she went.

For the next few years, Aline lived in and out of the shadows. The sisters guided her in her education, making sure she studied hard. She passed her college entrance exams with flying colors, enrolled in a well-regarded state school’s online program, one with a secret study of magic and the occult. Though she lived at home, she spent less and less time in the house that had never been hers. It was as though she was turning into one of the specters she guided. Her parents saw her less and less, no matter how solidly she stood before them.

“People can’t always see around themselves,” Dragon explained. “The key is not to become one of those people.”

Dragon was a favorite of Aline’s and soon the sisters’. They were cagey with her at first. It did seem a bit unnatural to spend time with a ghost who didn’t wish to find their way home, but Chlo said, “That one has a path of her own to walk, and it’s good she has you now to walk it with her.”

One year turned into two, two into ten. Aline’s degrees piled up. She held a Master of Business Administration, Master’s of Library Science, and Mistress of the Dark Arts. As her knowledge of running the store grew, and her ability to cross back and forth into the in-between and help guide spirits and their keys to their proper space, the sisters began to travel more and more.

“You don’t need us as you once did, dearie,” Atti said.

“No, the world needs us more, and it’s a far more complicated puzzle than even you,” Liset offered, while pouring Aline a fresh cup of lavender tea.

“The winds are changing,” Chlo would say. “We must change with them, or all is lost.”

Aline never fully understood what they meant, but they had always spoken this way, in fragmented riddles. She found it comforting. Almost as comforting as the nonsense Dragon sometimes spoke.

The three sisters’ trips away grew longer. “We’ve the wheel of fortune to attend,” Chlo said, “and you’re on the path solid now.”

Aline missed them, but they sent back books and journals for Aline to fill. Chlo sent notes wrapped around rose crystal hearts, reminding her that her heart was still out there, love was waiting, and to stay the course and believe.

Aline tried, but mostly she believed in Dragon. In the books, and in the few townspeople who became her acquaintances as they shopped at the store. Until one week turned into two, and Dragon didn’t show up. Aline searched in the in-between for her; she tried everything she could think of to summon her—setting out her favorite cookies, reading passages from Anne of Green Gables, playing her favorite recording of the violin. Nothing worked.

Aline couldn’t sit still, waiting for the sisters and her dearest friend to return. She tried to reach the sisters, but the numbers they gave didn’t work. Which wasn’t a surprise. They hated technology and were forever losing their phones or “accidentally” misplacing them. Aline hired a local college student with a sweet disposition and experience in retail who had previously helped during the holidays to watch the store. Aline explained she had book festivals to attend, and the sisters wouldn’t be back for a bit.

Then she went abroad to help spirits in Venice and Ireland. In Scotland and Iceland. It was on her return trip home that reports came in from around the world like a flood of group texts from befuddled leaders.

Aline returned to news that trees had stopped producing yellow leaves that fall, leaving only crimson and orange, and rivers in certain parts of the world had run completely dry. There were whispers of growing pandemonium across the world, and rising despair that rolled through towns like a common virus.

Aline tried not to worry. She focused on her work with spirits and the quiet of life in Whistleblown. She waited for the sisters to return, waited for Dragon, surrounded by books and memories, backed by a series of degrees.

She was thirty years old, tired and alone. She spent her days curled up in a silver-and-gold wingback chair pilling at the edges, staring at stacks of middle-grade novels that once felt like home, wishing—quite desperately—the sisters would return.

It was on a particularly gray afternoon, when the wind wouldn’t seem to die down and the shutters on the windows banged against the stone every few minutes, causing Aline’s eye to twitch, that a new door opened.

* * *

THE CHIME TINKLED AND THE SIDE DOOR HARDLY ANYONE KNEW WAS THERE SLID OPEN. Aline sat up from where she was slouched. Business at the bookshop was slow, particularly on Tuesdays.

A tall woman wearing a long maroon dress that dipped dangerously in the front entered. She had hair the color of silver spun with cream and moved with the sort of grace Aline had only seen in old black-and-white films starring Katharine Hepburn or Grace Kelly. Aline couldn’t take her eyes off her hair, the way it seemed to move of its own accord. The longer she stared at it, the more she felt herself losing focus—as though she were turning inside out.

The woman cleared her throat and Aline blinked, shaking herself from the reverie. She clearly needed to get more sleep. Aline’s gaze shifted to the stranger’s face. She was beautiful, with a striking jawline and brown eyes that were piercing and a little terrifying as she trained them on Aline.

“You’re not Chlo,” the woman said, her voice deep and gravelly as though she didn’t use it often.

“No, I’m Aline,” Aline said, slipping the book under the counter where she kept it when it wasn’t in her bag. “The sisters are out.”

The woman tilted her head, her swanlike neck elongating and showing off a sharp, square jawline. “Interesting.” She turned and looked around the shop, then back to Aline. “I was afraid of this.”

“Of what?”

“The winds are changing, and mischief is afoot.”

The way she said “mischief” reminded Aline of her favorite book, the one that never failed to bring her dreams of the man with the dark eyes and gentle touch, who in her dreams was everything she was not. Everything she wanted love to be.

Aline pushed herself out of her chair and made her way closer to the woman. As she did, she found gravity arguing with her feet, trying to root her to the spot.

Aline paused. Power comes in many forms. Aline had come across witches and druids and so many Others over the past seventeen years. But none of them made gravity afraid.

“What is it you’re looking for?” she asked, leaning on the long wooden counter, crossing one Converse-clad foot over the other ankle.

The woman looked down to Aline’s feet and back up. She smiled in a way that had Aline wanting to duck. A knife thrown in the form of a flash of perfectly white teeth.

“Help.”

Aline’s eyes drifted to the key around her neck. It glowed bright.

“That’s not yours,” Aline said, her voice soft.

“What isn’t?”

“The necklace.”

The woman took a step closer to Aline.

“No?”

Aline’s own movements were slow, as though she were moving underwater. The key whispered to her. It begged.

Help me, help me, help me.

She reached up and brushed her fingers across it and the key shifted into a shape.

Of a small, green dragon.

Dragon.

Aline met the woman’s eyes. “That is most definitely not yours.”

The woman laughed, a full and happy sound that filled the room and caused the books to shake on the stacks. They began to fall, one after the other, until the once organized books were scattered across the floor.

The woman reached out a hand and plucked an envelope from thin air. She dropped it on the counter as she walked past Aline.

“It’s not yours, either. But perhaps you can help me find the one it belongs to.”

“Dragon?” Aline said, and her heart fluttered in her chest. Mournful notes rose up, the sounds of Dragon, the lazy violin and cello, sounds she heard whenever her friend was near. But Dragon wasn’t in the shop. She hadn’t been for far too many months. “Stop that,” Aline said to the witch, who was rubbing her two fingers together, back and forth, a tiny violin making a large sound meant to cut into Aline’s soul.

“We have a friend in common,” the woman said. “About yay high, unruly curls, and a mouth that runs too often.”

“You have her necklace.”

“Yes. She came to me, not for the first time. She needed our House of Knowledge, and when I went to check on her this was left behind, and she was gone.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that Dragon tried to access very old, unpredictable scrolls. The kind that should never be opened. She’s looking for a key, and I would assume, now that I see you, she’s looking to help you.”

“Why would she be trying to help me, and who are you?”

“I am a friend, and Dragon knows change is at hand. The sisters are gone, and they never leave; and you are here, and the world is shifting. The forests are unhappy, the leaves are revolting, the soil hardening. Soon the stars will take notice and the tides will run away from the shores.”

“Dragon went looking for a key because Chlo, Liset, and Atti left the store?”

“No, she went looking for a way to help. It’s clear the reason is you. You stand before me recognizing her necklace, because magic is fractured in the world. It started twelve years ago. Cracks in the foundation. A slow eruption, leading to a larger disruption over time.”

Aline’s stomach clenched. Twelve years ago, she had lost control and Noah had paid the price. The sisters had covered it up, and they had all pretended like everything had gone back to normal. Or as normal as it could be for a coven of witches.

“You think Dragon, what, stole the manuscript?”

“The manuscript is still in the House of Knowledge. I think someone stole Dragon.”

Aline stared at the woman. “You haven’t said. Who are you?”

“I’m a friend; that’s all I can say now.”

“How could anyone steal Dragon?”

“Magic has gone missing, Aline Weir. The world is crumbling. Your Dragon needs you; the sisters need you, and I need you.”

She slid a card across the table to her. “I have said all I can reveal. It is up to you to decide.”

The mysterious witch sauntered out of the room, not bothering to clean up the books she upended or look back.

Aline’s mind raced. She flipped the card over and saw a line of trees shimmer across the surface with the name of a town printed across it. She grabbed the invitation and her book from under the counter and ran upstairs to the little apartment over the bookstore. She pulled a brick, heavy and pink, from under her bed. The invitation listed a name Aline dreamed of most nights when she was standing beneath the stars with a man who could not exist.

She flipped open the book she’d kept all these years, the one that was like an extension to her being. Mischief, A Beginner’s Guide. She looked from the name of the town written in the book to the name inscribed on the brick, to the invitation. They were all the same.

Matchstick.

She blew out a slow breath. It didn’t matter how powerful the woman who refused to give up her name had been. Or that being in her presence left Aline wishing to run and hide under the bed. It only mattered that Aline hadn’t been able to contact Dragon in months, and the sisters were gone. It didn’t make sense, but nothing about magic ever made sense; nothing about her powers ever ran off logic.

If there was even an iota of truth to what the woman told her, if something had happened to Dragon and the sisters, there wasn’t a choice. Aline was going to Matchstick. She was going to find them or bring the world down looking for them.

Magic’s Rules for Keeping Mischief Out (found crumpled in a yew tree in the forest of Matchstick)

Item One

DO NOT INVITE IN STRANGERS

Item Two

DO NOT ALLOW ANYONE TO SEE YOU

Item Three

DO NOT REVEAL THE ESSENCE OF MAGIC EVEN IN THE MOST DIRE OF SITUATIONS

Item Four

NEVER TRUST A PRETTY FACE

Item Five

STOP WRITING DOWN ITEMS



Five

THE TOWN OF MATCHSTICK, DURING THE DAY, WAS AS PICTURESQUE AS A NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTING. If, that is, the painting featured a cherubic human licking a caramel apple while peddling down Main Street, USA. It was a slice of provincial life, and Day liked the idyllic.

There was so much to see in a town like Matchstick, with its unique layout of hamlets instead of neighborhoods, and witches riding around on golf carts instead of brooms. Even the houses were hopeful. Burnt-orange cottages, yellow federalist homes, robin’s-egg–blue farmhouses, and gray Craftsmans. Then, there were the flowering crepe myrtles and pink and white dogwoods standing proud in the manicured front yards, pear and apple trees tucked in the back, and a large organic farm spanning the length of three football fields along the far north hamlet.

Matchstick was the kind of place people would visit and never wish to leave … if people were allowed to visit at all.

Day spent quite a lot of time listening in on conversations in Matchstick. Learning about the latest brew at the Witchery or the newest shipment of books into Alchemist’s Tales. Plus, the General Store always afforded a revolving door of witches to eavesdrop on as they went in for a sandwich and came out with a mouthful of gossip. The town wasn’t so different from other towns Day had heard about, except, of course, for Magic. Magic was terrifying. It was also part of why Day was trapped.

There were so many things about Magic that confused Day. Rules that shifted and changed. Day wished Night were around more often, so Day could ask Night why change was so confusing, and why Day was stuck here. When the sun set, Day could almost remember why, but then the thought was gone, and Night was always quick to brush in and rush out so that even when he tried to stay, he ended up pulled away.

The sound of an unusual growling caught Day’s attention. Day shifted focus to see a surprising sight coming into the perimeter of Matchstick, on the road that led in and out of the town.

Someone, a new someone, was coming. Day watched the vibration rumble across the air, a golden glittering light distending down across the perimeters of town, as a car cascaded down the road. The song of sunrise filled her, even though she was approaching Dusk. The power from the witch driving down the road was familiar, free, focused, and had a darkness Day had known once before.

Could it be? A new arrival? Driving erratically in an ancient truck that sputtered as it hurried up the road. The woman looked kind, with her clear, hazel eyes and the focused tilt of her heart-shaped face.

Day had an eerie worry settle over her. She hoped she and Night could find a way to keep her safe from Magic and the powers that be in Matchstick. Day feared not even Night would have the answers to this new development.

* * *

ALINE TOOK LESS THAN TWO MINUTES TO DECIDE TO FOLLOW THE STRANGE WITCH TO THE MYSTERIOUS TOWN OF MATCHSTICK. She wasn’t impulsive by nature, or at least she thought she wasn’t—though her past actions might have disagreed with her if actions were allowed to speak. But she loved Dragon, and she was worried for her and the sisters … and she was going to find a town she thought had only existed in her favorite fairy tale. So really, there was never a choice to begin with, though she was sure that if Chlo were there she would disagree.

“There is a choice every day to be who you are, and become who you want to be,” Chlo was fond of saying.

Aline wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t hesitate to help her family. So that was that. She hired Louise, the college graduate from down the street, to run the shop. Louise had previously stepped in when Aline had gone on trips abroad to return lost keys. The bookstore was mostly self-sufficient, in ways that didn’t make sense, but the girl didn’t know that electric bills never came, and mortgages were never late, regardless of payments not coming in or going out. The fridge was always stocked with chocolate milk, the pantry full of Pop-Tarts, and the books seemed to look after themselves just fine.

Whatever type of witches the sisters were, and Aline had spent a decade trying to figure it out and never got further than powerful, they were an authority unlike any other. One that preferred to remain unknown. Though their power was not quite as seductive as the stranger who had come bearing bad news.

Once Aline had the shop covered, she packed her bag with enough clothes for one week, the strange brick from so many years ago, and a handful of magical objects stored in the emergency pocket of her handbag. She always traveled with a few charmed objects, usually those that became talismans and those that served as protectors. These were keys she’d never been able to return.

Aline shifted from fourth to third gear, her body jerking as she ground in the clutch. In Whistleblown, she never needed to drive anywhere. It was a walking town, consisting of a main street, second, third, fourth, and a few back alleys before you reached the outer edges that led to byways into other, bigger towns. Whistleblown was small and unassuming. Even with the minimal square footage, Aline barely knew her neighbors. People kept to themselves in Whistleblown … and away from Aline. She might know their preferences for the books they enjoyed, having shifted from keeping a notebook full of compliments to an Excel sheet full of purchases, but no one knew anything about her. They still liked it that way, and so did she.

The aging pale-yellow truck she was working hard to tame had sat in her garage for over a year. Chlo reminded her to “drive the damn beast and prevent the battery from corroding and falling out,” which Aline wasn’t entirely certain was a thing a battery could do, but she wouldn’t put it past the vintage C10. The truck had been a graduation gift from Chlo, Liset, and Atti. She wondered what they would think of her driving it all these hours to a place that didn’t exist on Google Maps as far as Aline could find, but decided they would love it and remind her that all magical mysteries are meant to be followed. She could hear them now.

“Let me tell you a story,” Chlo would begin.

“A story is the evolution of something,” Atti would add, before Liset leaned her pointed chin on her slender hand and said, in her crisp, cool tone, “A piece of the past.”

A bluebird darted down toward the front of the truck as Aline took a sharp curve too fast, her hands gripping the wheel like she could crush it. She forced herself to blow out a breath as the bird flew off, unharmed.

Birds and the sisters and Dragon weren’t the only ones good at leaving. People flew away without a backward glance. It’s what her parents did when they moved abroad, what every single guy she had slept with had done since she lost her virginity to Noah. The recurring factor in everyone leaving was clear; it was the thing she whispered to herself in the middle of the night when she woke from the dream about the man who didn’t exist.

It was her.

Each time she was left behind, she felt the loss like a tear in her soul. And at thirty, she had so many cracks she might as well be asphalt. The little dot that she took for herself on the charmed invitation was moving up the map, nearing a spot that had appeared only an hour before. It looked like an upside-down exclamation point, if the point sat on top of the line. It was a tiny matchstick, and it would have been charming if the wind weren’t blowing so warm.

It was the beginning of October, and the outside world was a cool sixty degrees. Or so it had been, before Aline paused at the crossroads twelve miles back. Once she crossed the intersection, the earth rumbled beneath the tires and the air warmed to a balmier seventy degrees. The heat, she knew, was caused by how the trees vibrated. It rumbled beneath the car, shaking her hands as they gripped the steering wheel. Magic was energy manipulated. And this magic was manipulating the earth at such a level that Aline had to grit her teeth to keep from losing focus. She took another curve and the trees shifted from maples and oaks to a sea of firs. Tall, lean, and imposing. They leaned forward as she drove past, craning their tall necks.

A long enclosure ran alongside her to the left. It looked like a wall, impenetrable … and not quite right. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle forced together. Aline’s scalp tingled painfully—a call of magic she knew too well. Magic didn’t like being wrong, and if you gave it a misdirection, it was ready to do more than ignore it. The painful tug meant Aline was going the wrong way, and magic wasn’t having it.

She stopped looking at the invitation and turned the car around. Aline understood tests. She’d been taking them all her life. People calling her names to see if they could bait her. Her parents forgetting to make her dinner to see if she would react or be able to fix her own. After the horrible slumber party in eighth grade, and with the guidance of Dragon, she rarely, if ever, failed.

She drove up the road and put the truck in Park. She grabbed her knapsack, where she kept her copy of Mischief, A Beginner’s Guide, and exited the vehicle. The magic hit her like a hundred bees climbing through the strands of her thick auburn hair. It coated her, pushing and pulling, leaving her to clench her hands into fists. She walked on toward the wall of tall pines. She turned three-quarters of the way to the left and discovered a gap in the trees. A hidden section made of stone and brick, with one solitary gray stone in the center. The rest of the stones were faded. Aged or magicked … to the color of ripe persimmons.

Aline studied that gray stone, adrift like an unseeing eye in a storm, long and hard. It wasn’t an easy task to do. Staring at the brick made her palms itch and her heart race. It made her throat dry and her eyes water. It was a mystery doused in magic, and one she solved without trying.

She stalked back to the truck, stumbling as she went. Tall yellow wildflowers and prickly weeds brushed against her calves, scratching across her skin. She reached the truck and yanked the door open. On the passenger seat sat her suitcase. Aline threw it open, digging through her pile of poorly folded clothes and meager belongings until her fingers closed over what she was seeking. She marched back to the wall, leaving both the suitcase and the door to her truck wide open. Squared off in front of the stones, she took a deep breath and crouched down until she was eye level with the odd brick. The one that was soft gray in color. The one that did not belong among its persimmon sisters.

Aline’s scalp pulled tight as she studied it, and she heard the whisper. Wind, wind, wind. She leaned forward and blew on the stone in the wall. Ten letters floated to the surface in a row.

KCITSHCTAM

She held up the brick she had pulled from her suitcase and ran the tip of her pinky along the inscription she had studied for so many nights of her life.

MATCHSTICK

She turned the brick around and lined up the words, so they were facing the one in the wall. Then, with a sure hand, she pressed the two bricks together. The air cooled, the wall trembled, and the brick hovered off her palm. It slushed forward, like water being pooled back into ice, and merged with the gray stone sitting in the wall. As it did, the color shifted from reddish-orange into a sharper contrast.

Two became one. The rumbling of the wall grew, and the ground began to shake. Aline backed up, stumbling over her feet as she went. The trees cracked and groaned around her. She fell to the ground and crawled farther away.

The strange section of brick wall was sucked down into the earth. The ground sealed over where it had been, a fresh patch of green grass dotted with purple daisies popping up in its place.

Standing in the center of where the stone wall had been a moment before was the woman from the bookstore. She looked Aline up and down, and Aline felt the blush creep over her cheeks.

“Aren’t you as fragile as a feeling?” the woman asked, her voice as quiet as the middle of the night.

Aline pushed herself to standing, dusting her pants as she went up. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve fight, good. You’ll need it,” the woman said, before pulling a timepiece with six hands instead of two from her pocket and checking it. “You’re excused, and you may call me Florence; I’ll have to apologize for not introducing myself in your shop. Names spoken outside of Matchstick have a tricky habit of falling into the wrong hands or getting swept into the gutters and lost below. Consider me the welcome committee.”

Florence spun on her heel, stepping to the other side of the wall. Aline gaped at her. The tall woman with the imposing lip stain and gorgeous brown eyes looked over her shoulder at her.

“I’m short on time and I’m not one to repeat what has been spoken. Come along.”

Aline looked back to where she’d come from. “What about my truck?”

The statuesque woman calling herself a welcome committee and exuding as much warmth as a doused fire snapped her fingers. Aline’s sleeping truck revved its engine to life. It swung its open door closed, turned on its lights, and took off—undriven—down the road.

“Your transportation here has more sense than you,” Florence said, cocking her head. “Get out of the street and onto the road to your future, Aline Weir, unless you prefer to be left behind.”

Florence stalked off ahead, through a dense grouping of pines.

Aline didn’t like being questioned and she hated being told what to do. But she wasn’t going to stop now that she was so close to seeing Matchstick and finding Dragon and hopefully where the three sisters might have gone, so she shook out her shoulders and charged ahead.

* * *

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE THE VIEW FROM THE STREET. There was a dirt path worn before them, one that cut through the thick woods. To the left were tall pines showcasing needles that boasted little nuts and tiny pine cones that looked as though they belonged on a holiday wreath instead of in a forest. Aline looked up and nearly lost her balance. It was like looking into a maze. Thick branches snaking into the sky, surrounded by yellow and green leaves that bunched together blocking the sun so only slivers of light blue and gray could make it through. She dropped her gaze and glanced to the right where maples with golden leaves browning at the edges and beech trees with crimson leaves the color of an angry sunset bordered the wall. Between them were scrawny birches with peeling bark the color of ash.

Aline found its beauty picture-worthy, and yet couldn’t dampen her disappointment at the ordinary view of the forest. She had expected something more from the mystical town she’d been reading about since she was eighteen. This was the place that would tempt her Dragon to leave her behind?

Then Florence turned to look at her and offered a smile the Cheshire cat would have envied. She took a step forward … and disappeared.

Aline’s breath caught in her chest. She hurried ahead. One step. Two. A thin gauze, invisible to the eye and smelling of hibiscus and lime, brushed against her face like the strands of a spiderweb catching her cheeks. Aline pressed forward against the magical barrier, and the unsettling fabric moved over her.

She blinked her eyes to clear the haze of magic, and Aline faced an entirely different view. A picturesque village sat before her. It was surrounded on one side by a long curving stone wall. Streets lined with alabaster paths paved in stone ran to the left and right, with a roundabout directly ahead. On both sides of the street were houses differing in size, style, and craftsmanship. Each featured a well-kept lawn with sunflowers, zinnias, jasmine vines, and gardenias. A twisted iron street sign featuring Holliver Lane was posted at the end of the street to her right, as well as a handcrafted stop sign wrapped in ornate metalwork. The houses themselves featured an array of tin, darkly shingled, and thatched roofs. The houses’ sidings were the color of an orange robin’s chest, pale blue, soft cream. Then there were those with stone and brick exteriors that looked like something from a time lost long ago.

It was twilight in the village, and the lamps on the street and the porches glowed warm yellow. Daybed swings, oversized rockers, and sleek tables hand-carved from wood sat in yards and on verandas.

“This is—” Florence started, waving for Aline to keep up.

“Matchstick,” Aline interrupted, unable to keep the wonder from her voice. The view was entrancing, charming. But that wasn’t why her breath caught in her throat. No, the racing of her pulse was entirely centered on the acute awareness that it was all true.

The story had been true. Matchstick was real. Which meant the man she’d been dreaming of, the love Chlo had prophesied, could be just as real, too.

“I’m here,” Aline said to Florence. “Now tell me what you meant at the bookstore. Who took Dragon, where have the sisters gone, and why did you say magic is missing?”

Florence leveled her gaze. “First things always come first, and you’re the first thing. We’ll get to the second thing soon enough. Come along.”

(MORE THAN A FEW FULL MOONS AGO…)

Night gets lonely. It seeks. It yearns. Night, for all its bravado and supposed fearlessness, waits impatiently for the moments it brushes up against Day. Nonmagical humans no longer remember this. They assume Night and Day are two separate entities, never thinking they might have been forced apart, forced to interlock. As if they didn’t have a choice in the matter to be side by side for all eternity.

Night is also an impeccable watcher. And on this, the night before the autumnal equinox, Night is paying close attention to the hidden town of Matchstick. The town responsible for Night’s place in the sky.

East of the Sun and west of the Moon, tucked in the foothills of a state known for its southern roots and rolling range, Matchstick is forgettable. So forgettable, in fact, no one remembers it exists.

No one except those who call it home.

Esther Chatham does not live in Matchstick. No, she is a bit lost on this misty evening, maneuvering her car down the quiet back road of Hickory Bend. It has been a very long time since Esther has felt so free. As she drives, she is thinking about the words sung to her on the radio. About women, and glasses of beer. About waiting for summer, and pastures to change. “Change” is a sacred word, one she once believed a myth. She is not thinking about the town of Matchstick, or Night. She is not really watching where she is going … until it’s too late to see.

An impenetrable wall of pine trees runs alongside Hickory Bend. No one is sure how the trees came to stand so close together, only that they have been there for as long as the locals living outside the wall can recall. It’s a surprisingly solid grove of trees, with few cracks between them to peek through to the forest beyond.

It is unfortunate that Esther happens to drive by a very specific break in the wall. It is horrible timing that a deer runs across the road, right as Esther’s headlights flash across the night-soaked street.

The deer knows the wall. It knows where the gaps are. The deer, unlike the humans, have not forgotten the secrets of Matchstick.

This deer, a doe, bounds across the road and into the path of Esther’s aging Jeep Wrangler. Esther doesn’t have time to do more than gasp as she yanks the wheel to the right and careens toward a ditch. She glances in her rearview while her car skids across the narrow road, checking if the deer is alive, and sees the wall of trees shimmer.

A woman with bright-silver hair materializes in the space of the missing wall, holding a broom and wearing a dour frown. Esther opens her mouth—to scream, to cry out, to curse the reckless deer—and the woman snaps her fingers and disappears.

The Jeep careens down a cliffside that did not exist three seconds before. Esther plummets to her demise as the singer on the radio calls good night to the moonlight ladies.

Night gives something akin to a shudder, cold wind blowing through the trees, as the woman on the other side of the wall bows her head. A cream mist rises from where the car has gone over into a ditch that should never have been a ditch to begin with. The woman lays her broom down across the gap in the stretching pine. The space, and the cream mist, disappears. The woman is gone. Esther Chatham is gone, and Night is left to bear one more secret about a town that barely exists.



Acknowledgments

So many incredible people championed and supported me in the writing of What Became of Magic, and without them, this book would be but a twinkle in the ley lines.

I am forever grateful to my editors, Monique Patterson and Vicki Lame, for their support, vision, and brilliance. I am also over-the-moon thankful to the following rock stars at Macmillan and St. Martin’s Griffin: associate editor Mara Delgado Sánchez; assistant editor Vanessa Aguirre; jacket designer Olga Grlic; mechanical designer Soleil Paz; designer Gabriel Guma; managing editor Chrisinda Lynch; my marketing team, Rivka Holler and Brant Janeway, and my publicity team, Sara La Cotti; production editor Layla Yuro; production manager Jeremy Haiting; copy editor MaryAnn Johanson; audio producer Steve Wagner; and audio marketer EmmaPaige West. It’s such a team effort to create a novel, and I have the out-and-out best team!

My dream agent, Samantha Fabien, you are one in a million. Thank you for helping me to grow into the best writer I can be and believing in me. I adore you.

I have an incredible community of fierce and fantastic women who encouraged and aided me in the creation of this novel. From The Porchies to my Shield Maidens, I am the luckiest lady to have such a loving sisterhood of story.

Megan Niedzwiecki and Kayleen McTurner, thank you for letting me cry, rage, and roll through a litany of grief and emotions. You are the witches who keep me sane, and I love you dearly.

Ben and Evan, thank you for listening to me work out the conceit of this book, and telling me that it was not ridiculous, and I should in fact go for it.

My full moon sisterhood in Serenbe, you are legion, and you are magnificent. Thank you for making the world (especially mine) brighter.

JT and Myra, thank you for always holding space for me and carrying my heart in your hearts. Nell and Amy, thank you for having more vision than even I could, and making all launch dreams a reality.

Katy, Sara, Juls, Mel, and Dali, thank you for the decades of always having my back, front, and sides. I love you all to the moon and back.

Amy Mass and Marcus Crutcher, thank you for being brilliant speed readers and helping me pull the knotted threads of this story out and weaving it back together. You are unicorns and you are both forever the cat’s meow in my book.

Daddy, I love you. Josh, you are the best big brother. Brin, you are pure magic. Jocilyn, you can do anything.

Lynne, thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you.

Marcus Crutcher, you are my everything. Thank you for keeping me going, feeding me cheese and encouragement, and getting lost in the forest with our two beautiful children whenever I need a break.

Isla Doll and Rivers, this, and every story I create, is for you. Always.

I wrote What Became of Magic in a sort of fevered dream, in about six weeks’ time. I lost my mother during the writing of this book, and it was through the story of Aline and Magic that I was able to grieve, and make sense of the deepest level of loss I have experienced thus far. I hope this book of magic has reached my Meme and my Granny in the in-between, and that they know they are forever and always loved.

I hope you know, dear reader, that you are forever and always loved. If you should be lost, may you find your way home again with a little magic on your side.

Finally, to the girls who created the I Hate Paige Club when I was in elementary school … thanks for letting me get the last laugh.



Also by Paige Crutcher

The Lost Witch

The Orphan Witch



About the Author

PAIGE CRUTCHER is the author of The Orphan Witch and The Lost Witch. She is a former journalist, and her work appears in multiple anthologies and online publications. She is an artist and yogi, and when not writing, she prefers to spend her time trekking through the forest with her children, hunting for portals to new worlds. You can sign up for email updates here.


WHAT BECAME OF MAGIC. Copyright © 2023 by Paige Crutcher. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.