Remembering the blood dripping down his cheek still gave me a visceral little thrill of satisfaction, but I wouldn’t have Fluke get hurt in the name of such a pointless, pyrrhic victory. That would be worse than getting stabbed. Just the thought of it being Fluke lying there on the kitchen floor made me sick to my stomach.
“Don’t you dare get killed to protect me when the bad guys come,” I told Fluke, while hugging the hell out of him. “You go back to the woods and live the rest of your foxy life. You can’t beat them. Just run.”
He wouldn’t. I didn’t need to be a temporal mage and see the future to know that. He’d die protecting me even though it was a lost cause. Part of me wanted to borrow Beez’s car, drive him out to the middle of the woods, and leave him there. He’d be safe from murderers out there.
But that was horrible and made me sick to even think of. Plus, I was sure he’d just come home, and be—rightfully—pissed at me.
Three weeks earlier, I’d had next to nothing. How had I come away from being given so many incredible things—magic, family, a familiar, a budding relationship . . . with even less?
Fluke gave my face a few licks, but then squirmed away and picked up the athame yet again.
“Fluke,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands. “I—”
What the hell did he want? An athame wasn’t for defending myself; it was purely for ritual magic. It wouldn’t help when the killers came back. If Fluke was going by experience, I was capable of basically one spell, and that was making Gideon corporeal for short periods of time. Of course Fluke’s first concern was Gideon. His concerns were mine, and all I’d been worried about for days was Gideon and how he was leaving. It was like a stab in the gut. I’d been worrying Fluke with my own selfishness.
“Even if I managed to make him permanently corporeal, it wouldn’t bring him back to life, buddy,” I told him, pulling him in for another hug. I let him keep the damned athame. He was more important than my not-entirely-ridiculous fear of knives. “There’s nothing we can do about Gideon being dead.” The words were a whisper, but Fluke whined at them, and I felt like the noise had come from my heart as much as his.
Except . . . hadn’t one of the books from Iris been something about life and death magic? I’d ignored it before, not seen how it played into the notion of making Gideon corporeal, which had clearly been what she was angling at.
I hopped up out of bed and padded down the hallway to where the books were laid out. I ignored my father’s books strewn across the living room; they still weren’t relevant here, just a library on why my entire existence was morally wrong.
No, the book from Iris had been something about . . . The Spark. A Theoretical Primer on Life and Death.
It looked newer than most of them, a slim volume bound in leather but not worn or weathered. Fluke followed me to take a seat on the couch, and he’d brought the damn knife.
“You’re not gonna let it go, huh?”
The way he lowered his head and looked up at me with wide eyes said “duh,” and he dropped it on the empty coffee table, then hopped up to put his head in my lap.
The book, oddly enough, wasn’t all that dry. Or maybe it was, but it was just too damned interesting to bore me. Fluke just lay there and closed his eyes as I read it aloud to him.
“There is clearly magic in the connection between the dead and life—not the living as a whole, but the living beings with whom they have powerful connections. This, it is theorized, is why ghosts fade over time whether they intend to or not. As their relationships falter with people who can no longer see them, or even as those who can see begin to die off, ghosts lose their ability to cling to the mortal dimension. Once a ghost has no emotional connection to anything alive, it fades.”
What the hell tied my father to the world? The store. Maybe the store wasn’t a living thing, but it was the only thing my father had ever loved.
Maybe he knew the store changing would take away his tether, and that was why he was angry about the