And that’s my cue. I conjure my sun manipulation, the glowing globe, breathe life into it, make it fuller, until Alex takes over and breaks my sun open, letting the sunrise fall like a sideways waterfall over the crowd.
I can’t help but steal a glance at Boss Colletto, to see what he’s thinking. His head is angled up, his eyes are wide and childlike. He’s enchanted. They all are—just like any audience on any night—looking up as a sorcerer-made sky sizzles, cracks, and breaks open just for them. Rendered children by our magic, our magic that wraps around and hugs them tight.
When the immersion’s over, Grace turns only a few of the space’s lights back on, keeps the mood sexy, seductive, and we step up, one by one, onto the back stage. But unlike other nights, I’m going to have the final word. I’m going to be the finale.
Thanks to the stagehands, seven bottles of water already rest on the altar in the center of the stage. We line up behind them, left to right: Ral, Billy, Grace, me, Alex, Tommy, and Rose. By this point, we have our rhythm down—there are no pauses. Together we reach for our bottles, and the water inside each jumps in response. Whirls of cherry-red tendrils swirl inside each bottle, the water surrendering quickly to the magic, the hisses and pops of the shine echoing through an otherwise silent show space.
On a normal night, in a normal show, this would be the cue for the stagehands to head up the stairs with trays of shot glasses, pour our shine into them, and pass them out to the crowd. But tonight is different.
Almost like he’s finishing my thoughts, Gunn interrupts the nearly hour-long silence. “On a regular night, it’s at this point in the performance that our stagehands pass around my sorcerers’ shine. The sorcerers brew the shine live every night, of course, and just enough, because up until now, shine, like all pure magic, doesn’t last more than a day.”
Colletto grunts in assertion and shifts in his seat below us.
Gunn ascends the stairs to the stage, angles himself next to me and picks up my bottle of shine. “Shine’s the highest trip on the black market. Euphoric. Transcendent. Lets you see the magic in the world. Some say that it lets you see God. Rendered even more rare and coveted because it’s impermanent, and fleeting.” Gunn looks up. “Until now.”
He nods to the three sorcerers on my left, and then the three on my right. “Please step away from the altar,” he tells them. But I don’t look at my troupe, especially not at Alex. I’ll just get more nervous. So I stare straight ahead and wait for my cue.
“Now, the full extent of the magic I can give you, if we find a way to put the past behind us and join forces. A shine that can be stored, and shipped, and transported all over the world. Joan, if you please.”
ETERNAL SHINE
ALEX
The rest of the troupe takes a step back, completely in the dark about what Joan’s going to do, as she holds the spotlight. And the dread I’ve managed to dam, as I’ve played the dutiful cop playing the dutiful troupe member during the performance, starts flooding in. There’s a shine that defies the laws of magic, a shine being sold by a gangster who wants to take over the underworld—
And the girl I’m falling in love with is taking the stage to somehow bring it home.
The room falls completely, deathly quiet, as Joan places both of her hands back on her bottle of shine. She mumbles words of power, words I can’t quite hear, even this close to her, but in seconds, a glass stopper appears and lodges itself right into the mouth of her bottle. Colletto and his men shift below us, mumble speculation.
Then Joan takes one of her hands off the glass, digs around the shelf under the altar, and pulls a switchblade out from it. As she pushes up the right sleeve of her dress, I have to stop myself from reaching out and grabbing her hand, telling her that whatever she’s about to do, it’s not worth it, not for them. Grace gasps on Joan’s other side, and her hand flies to her mouth, while a strange, deep regret floods through me and settles into my skin. On Joan’s forearm is a patchwork of scars, some fresh and red, some pink, older. She leans her arm over the bottle, and with a calm precision, presses the blade right into her arm.
After a trickle of blood wraps around her skin and drips into the stoppered bottle, she caps the bottle and begins another spell. Again I can’t hear the words, but this time I strain to: “Less of me . . . offering . . . eternity . . .”
Her bottle begins to tremble, quake, then settle, just like it’s alive. What did she just do? Some dark sorcery, a spell of blood? Devil’s magic?
As Joan backs away from her new creation, again Gunn goes to her side. He takes Joan’s bottle into his hands, lifts it up for the crowd to assess: a bottle of glistening shine, stoppered with a cork of bloodstained glass.