She releases me and starts to weave between the round tables set around what had once been the living room of the little house. I always wondered if Riley felt comfortable here because she also lived in the same building as her family’s business.
Unlike the Greenway Funeral Home, not much has been done to disguise this room’s original use. A velvet rope is stretched across the bottom of the staircase next to the door, keeping people from wandering up to Toby’s bedroom. The long glass case with the cash register blocks the path to the hallway leading to the rest of the house; packs of tarot cards and handblown glass wands sit inside the case, obscuring the view of what’s beyond. The fireplace is uncovered, stacked with wood waiting for the cold to deepen. There are expensive statues lining the mantel and the windowsills. The books on the built-in bookcases sit face-out with neon orange price tags stuck to their covers.
There are no other customers. There rarely are.
Toby scoops small gemstones into her palm and opens a tiny velvet sachet to pour them into. I recognize the beginnings of a charm bag. I have one in my underwear drawer to summon my true love to me—way to ignore the call, Xander—and one in the glove compartment in my car that’s supposed to increase my luck—which it failed to do the day that Dan Calalang dinged my side door.
“Now would be a good time for you to come join my circle,” Toby says, pivoting toward the farthest wall. A scoop of dried rosemary goes into the bag, followed by salt. Sometimes, magic looks a lot like how my mom prepares chicken. Riley would say that’s because food is magic, too. “I always worried about you girls practicing on your own, away from a guiding hand. Too many prepackaged, inorganic spells. Plastic will choke your magic like soda-can rings around a duck’s neck. The Goddess can’t reach you through fossil fuels.”
Says the biker.
“Toby, most of our store-bought spells came from you.”
“Most,” she underlines. “You have so much unfocused power inside of you. It’s a gift and a curse in someone so young.”
I try not to roll my eyes. Toby’s campaign to get me and Riley to join her coven has been long running. Riley thought she was probably lonely. There couldn’t be that many other witches in the area. I agreed, but was still not down with the idea of hanging out with a bunch of strange adults, working spells together.
I mean, I like Toby, but I don’t know her well enough not to have some stranger-danger alarms go off at the idea of hanging out alone with her and her friends. The risk of there being some kind of nudity or blood ritual seems way too high for my comfort level. At the very least, I never want to get high with someone older than my parents.
“I think I’m going to stay solo for a while,” I say. “I’m not really a group-worship person.”
I focus on the nearest table of gemstones. For the resurrection spell, I need a stone strong enough to help ground my magic and open the link between me and wherever Riley is. There’s a beautiful iron rose hematite on display that would empty out my bank account, leaving me a pedestrian until my grandma sends my yearly Christmas cashier’s check. But I can’t really put a price on bringing Riley back, can I? Plus, the petals are naturally formed, not carved like the polished quartzes and trashy ambers next to it. If that isn’t real-life magic, then I don’t know what is.
Toby nods, looking crestfallen as she slips a white candle into the charm bag. She draws the strings closed and ties them in a loose knot. “It’s an open invitation. We’re here whenever you want company, even if it’s just for the holidays.”
I run my fingers over the iron rose’s petals. They are rough and sharp. “Like my family only going to church on Christmas?”
“Hopefully less grudging than that.” She hands me the charm bag, her face softening as much as its sun damage will allow. “Here’s a little something to help you rest. You can always come to me for magic help. Any questions at all. You know you can’t trust any of the spells you find on the internet, right? Most of it is rhyming bullshit made up by tweens and people trying to make us out to look like Satanists.”
“I know.” I laugh. “You made me and Riley swear never to use untested spells.”
“God damn right,” she says, pointing a finger at me. It’s a hilariously cliché witch pose, very Wizard of Oz.
I tuck the charm bag into the pocket of my jacket and feel the cold screen of the phone. All the ingredients I need to bring Riley back are saved to my photo gallery. It seemed more practical than dragging the giant old book around. Especially since there’s literally nowhere in my room that my sisters wouldn’t be able to track it down. The last thing I need is Izzy and Nora accidentally drying up the town’s water supply because they burned the right series of kitchen herbs at the right point in the moon cycle.
I wonder if I can trust Toby. Bringing someone back from the dead—even for only seven days, if the title of the spell is to be believed—could cause a fuss. But the book is old enough that there’s no way the spells are untested. Riley was too smart to buy bunk. And if I work the spell without telling Toby, it could hurt her feelings. She’s only ever tried to help me and Riley. She said herself that she would have gone to Riley’s funeral if the Greenway parents wouldn’t have gone berserk.
“Actually,” I say on a shaky exhale, “there is something that I need your help with. Before she—well, it doesn’t matter when—Riley bought a really old grimoire. It has some really intense spells in it with the longest ingredients lists I’ve ever seen. But it has a resurrection spell in it. They call it The Seven-Day Breath—”
I start to reach for my phone to show her the pictures, but her hand shoots out and stops me. The tips of her nails bite into the soft skin at my wrist. Her grip is at least three times as strong as I would have guessed. I can feel my bones bruising as the muscles in her forearm strain against the faded dream catcher tattoo she got at whatever point in the past appropriating cultures eternally onto your skin was the cool thing to do. The pain forces me to make eye contact with her, falling deep into the unfamiliar fury that has replaced her wizened stoner sleepiness.
“Is that a joke?” she hisses.
I swallow, attempting to pull my arm back an inch. I can’t budge it. “No. I’m serious. The grimoire is hand-lettered, and there’s no copyright, so I’d guess it’s pretty old.” I make a fist and her nails dig deeper. “You’re hurting me.”
She doesn’t appear to hear me. Or she doesn’t care. “The dead do not walk. Not ever. Not even for a moment. In metaphors or allegories, maybe, but never literally. It’s against nature. It defies the will of the Goddess.”
“You don’t understand.” I yank my arm back and cradle it against my stomach. Red crescent welts stare up at me where her nails cut into me. “Riley didn’t kill herself, Toby. She was murdered. The police aren’t investigating it because they think she’s just another Fairmont Academy suicide, but it’s not true. There’s a murderer loose in Cross Creek. And Riley needs to tell us who it is. She needs to come back.”
“Whatever magic you work comes back against you times three,” Toby says, her face pinched into a possum sneer. “You know that! I’ve told you that a thousand times. What do you think the price of bringing back the dead is? Of working in opposition to nature? Did you ever think that maybe that’s what happened to your friend to begin with? She always had designs on magic too big for her capability and dragged you along with her. Always wanting to see the future, throwing money into magic like she could bribe a better result out of the Goddess.”