“What? ” I said. “You’ll stay on? I’m not the investigator here! I’m your assistant. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what I’m seeing.”
“You’ll be marvelous,” Jackaby said earnestly. “You’re already more keen than I ever was about putting together clues and looking in dustbins and questioning people and all that. Besides, you have something I never had when I was first starting out.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Me!” His smile was incorrigible.
“It would be really wonderful if all this could be a dream,” I said.
“Come now, you’ll get there. Focus on one aura at a time; that helps. What do you see when you look at me?”
I took a breath. “A kind of idiosyncratic bluish with a happy patch of crimson right around your middle. You’re a bit dark—but also very light in funny little ways.” I blinked. “There are also notes of a sort of rosy color hanging all around both you and Jenny. No, not rosy, exactly. How would you describe it—a buoyant sort of flush?”
“Buoyant is not a color,” said Jackaby. “You sound ridiculous. But an excellent start! The sight will take time to understand. I’m here to help.”
“I’m here for you, too, Abigail,” Jenny assured me, putting a hand on Jackaby’s shoulder as she glided forward to join us. “We can practice together and take it slow. It’s the least I could do after everything you’ve done to help me figure out my own abilities.”
I nodded. “It’s nice to see that you’re not having any more trouble in that area,” I said. Jenny’s hand was still on Jackaby’s shoulder. The flush around their auras increased when I mentioned it.
“I’m not even sure how it happened,” Jenny said. “I just needed it to happen, and it did.”
“Not surprised about it at all,” said Jackaby.
“Not surprised?” Jenny said. “Yesterday I couldn’t so much as brush a hair out of your eyes, but today I reached inside your chest and held your heart in my hands—and you’re not surprised?”
“Not at all. My heart was always yours,” said Jackaby.
Jenny leaned back and looked at him, startled. “That is about the sweetest thing I think you’ve ever said.”
“Was it good?” He gave her a goofy grin. “I was trying to work out how to phrase it the whole ride over.”
“Not good at all, no,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to keep a smile off her face. “It was sappy and maudlin and positively terrible. Sweet, though. Excellent effort.”
“You’re just jealous because we’re both technically undead now, and I’m clearly so much better at it.”
“Jealous? I’m not jealous. For the first time since I’ve known you, I have the power to shut you up.” She leaned in and kissed him right on the lips.
Chapter Thirty-Four Jackaby slept. It was the first time I had ever seen him do so. He nodded off in the library’s comfortable armchair while we were talking. He looked peaceful, so I let him rest as I gazed around the room.
Sleep would not come so easily to me. I tried to settle my nerves. I slipped out and made myself a cup of chamomile, only I couldn’t tell if I had used the wrong tin, or if now that I was the Seer, chamomile really did taste like riding a hot air balloon in the mist on a nondescript Saturday afternoon. I was plagued by visions and sensations and emotions I could not put into words, and worse, looming right behind all of this was a cold, swelling ache.
I took the ring out of my pocket. I turned it over and over, watching the glow that was Charlie leave little trails of light in my third eye. I focused, as Jackaby had suggested, until there was nothing in my world except that aura. And nothing changed. And Charlie was still dead.
Jackaby’s head bobbed back up a few minutes later.
“I—wha? Who did? Was I sleeping?”
“You were, sir.” I put the ring back in my pocket.
“Mmm. Delightful. I’m looking forward to a lot more of that. What were we saying?”
“Not important,” I said. “I was just looking at all the books. I could never see it before, but they really are meticulously shelved. It’s an elegant gradient of auras.”
“Thank you,” said Jackaby. “Nice to be appreciated.”
“Yes. I can see the magic in them now. All of them. Even the ones out here with the beige auras. Your whole library is magic, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is.”
“Would a book without magic have any aura at all?”
He considered the question. “I have never found a book that did not have at least a little magic in it,” said Jackaby. “They can’t help it. They’re made out of words and sometimes even pictures.”
“The ones toward the back are beautiful,” I said. “They’re so intense.”
“You should go look in the Dangerous Documents section sometime, now that you can really see them. I’ve got a few on thaumaturgy that glow like hot embers, a tome on invocations that pulses like a heartbeat, journals by an artificer that vent magic like hissing steam.”
“Have you any about the afterlife?” I asked before I realized I was thinking it.
There was silence for several seconds. “He’s gone,” Jackaby said.
“I wasn’t—”
“I don’t need to be the Seer to see some things.”
I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “It isn’t fair,” I said.
“No, it is not.”
“You can’t tell me it isn’t possible for a person to come back,” I said. “We met the boatman—the underworld is a real place. There are souls there—”
“Not his,” said Jackaby. “Charon told us last time. Half humans can’t enter his underworld. They go—well, someplace else. Mag Mell, perhaps? That might just be fairies, though.”
I let that sink in.
Jackaby and I sat in silence for a long while. “Well, I think I’d best be off to get some rest now,” Jackaby said, pushing himself up.
I nodded. “Of course, sir. You have spent twenty years earning it.”
He nodded and patted my shoulder as he left. “Just remember—you’re stronger than you think, Miss Rook. And you’re not alone.”
“Good night, Mr. Jackaby.”
When his footsteps faded up the stairs, I took the ring out again, holding it between my finger and thumb.
He was right. Charlie was gone. Not only was Charlie gone, but when the time came for me to go, Charlie wouldn’t be there waiting for me. He would be—somewhere else. The swelling ache in my chest finally burst, and the lights and auras in front of me blurred with hot tears. A door in my chest quietly closed and locked itself forever.
I don’t know how long I remained in the library—nor whether I had slept at all—but the sky through the window was full of stars when I heard a voice above me.
“Why did you say no?”
I looked up. Perched on the bookshelf was a squat little man all covered in fur. Through my new eyes, I could see the twain’s power and potential spinning within him.
“You could be with him,” he said. “He is your twain. You were given the choice. Why did you say no?”
I wiped my eyes. “You mean, why didn’t I join Charlie in death?”
He nodded. “I often think about my twain. I miss her, every day. I am incomplete without her. I am . . . I am—”
“Lost,” I suggested.