why anyone had thanked me. Her. Kurt. The EMT who had taken my place and tried to resuscitate him. I had failed completely, and a man had died. I’d accomplished nothing at all.
Chapter Eleven
The shop was a short walk, but by the time I got there, it was after nine. No one was waiting outside, but inside my father already had himself worked into a lather.
“Do you know what time it is?” he demanded the second we walked in.
I ignored him as I went through the opening ritual: alarm, lights, cash drawer to the register, open sign, unlock the door. It was comforting in an unthinking, numb kind of way.
Dad ranted for a lot of it, but I stopped hearing him after the first few insults about my integrity and how I was going to run his precious store into the ground. Part of me wanted to stop everything and defend myself, but I was almost thirty years old. Not that thirty is a magical age where you stop accepting people’s shit, just that I had years of experience with my father, and in this state, he wasn’t going to bow to logic.
Oh, I’d watched someone die and had to talk to the police? I should have gotten here sooner and told the police I could talk to them outside store hours. I should “man up” and get back to my responsibilities.
Because clearly my gender was related to my ability to brush off trauma.
Gideon took my cue and didn’t say anything, letting Dad rant until he wound down with a few huffs about how if I had been a decent son, I would be paying attention to him.
Then he turned to Fluke and scowled, his irritation ramping right back up. “What are you looking at, you mutt?” He spun back to me. “And that’s another thing! How many of my loyal customers are you going to chase off with that beast before you do the right thing and take it back to the woods where it belongs?”
I stopped counting and stared at the cash drawer. I’d lost track somewhere in the fives, and dammit, I just didn’t care enough to recount them. Maybe he was right, and I was going to run the shop into the ground simply by only managing to properly count the cash drawer once a day.
“A hundred,” I said aloud, without restarting, or moving on to the ones, or even pretending I’d finished properly. I had finished. I was done with it. I slammed the drawer shut.
“They’re not your loyal customers, Dad,” I said to him, my lip curling on the last word. “You’re dead. They’re not your customers at all. And they weren’t even loyal enough to show up at your funeral, so maybe you should stop defending them for half a second and think about the only person who did show up.”
I turned, marched into the office, and slammed the door behind me. It couldn’t keep him out, of course. Nothing could, if he wanted to keep bothering me. I pulled out my wallet and looked through it until I found Dr. Almasi’s card. I could make sure he never bothered me again.
Banishing him wasn’t like killing him, was it? He was already dead. He should have moved on like everyone else. Like Kurt.
Alternately, I could ask her about the immense reservoir of power I’d felt beneath me in the coffee shop.
Which was silly, because why would she know about it? Because we could both see ghosts, she would also be able to find that magic?
It hadn’t been people. It hadn’t been any kind of social magic. No, that had slipped through my fingers, as usual. This had been a chasm of magic, vast and impossible. It had somehow been both overwhelming and calming, sort of how I imagined water mages felt when they stared out at the ocean.
It had been a ley line.
Gideon was right, and somehow, I was able to feel it.
But why hadn’t I felt it before? Okay, sure, I didn’t reach for my magic often, let alone with such desperation, but I had never even gotten a hint of anything like that in the past. Surely it would have come to me in an earlier time of crisis.
I imagined what I would have done with a vast, impossible well of magic at age twelve. Maybe it was for the best that preteen me hadn’t been immensely powerful. I still wished I’d had it, but I might have done some unfortunate