her face warm and smiling. "You have been practicing. Good girl."
I ducked down behind her. "What the hell are you talking about?" I pointed at the bat. "Kill it, kill it!"
"I can't kill it." She motioned up toward the bat, her face aglow with joy. "That there isn't a bat. Bats don't fly during sunlight. They also don't have glowing numbers on their bellies, and they aren't made of plastic. That there" - she pointed to the bat, which bounced blindly off the living room wall and course-corrected into the opposite wall - "is your magic."
"My what?" I asked.
Davina turned to where I was crouching behind her and pulled me up by my shoulders. She positioned me in front of her and said in my ear, "That's your magic, baby. Isn't it beautiful?"
Chapter 5
Magic. I straightened, breathed in, and felt a hesitant calm wash over me.
Do you believe in magic?
Maybe.
I blinked a few times, and stepped through the open archway into the living room, leaving Davina a few feet behind in the hallway. I watched the bat fly in circles, bouncing off the occasional wall with a hard clink, leaving puffs of plaster behind with every collision. The harsh buzz-buzz-buzz sound of a phone that's been left off the hook grew stronger as it circled over me, and faded as it moved to the other side of the living room. I glanced down at my hands, still hot and tingly, just like with the trash-can-lid dog, and I came to a sudden, calm realization.
I'd just turned my phone into a bat.
I looked behind me at Davina and pointed. "I did that."
"Yes," she said, her voice soft as if talking to a small child. "You did." She patted my shoulder. "Don't worry. It probably won't last too long. You got some good juice there, but it's still early days. We got awhile to go yet before you start to mean some business."
As if soothed by her voice, the bat slowed a bit. Then, suddenly, its wings pulled in and it jolted into complete stillness.
Then my phone landed, with a lifeless plop, on my couch.
"Oh, that's a shame," Davina said. "Such a pretty bat phone."
There was a tap-tap-tap on my living room window and we both started, but then I released a breath and said, "Oh, hell." I walked over and pushed the window up. "Hey, Peach."
Peach pulled her broomstick back into her house. She wrapped her fleece bathrobe around her and said stiffly, "What's going on in there? I thought I heard screaming."
"There was a bat in the house." I glanced at the broken phone on the floor. "It's gone now." I looked back at Peach, looking for some kind of regret in her expression; there was none. "Sorry to bother you."
"It's no problem."
There was a long silence, and then I said, "Okay, then," and reached for the window to close it, just as Peach leaned even farther out her window and waved pointedly in Davina's direction. "Hey, Davina!"
Davina moved in next to me and waved back. "Nice to see you again, Peach."
Peach turned her smile on me, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I figured you wouldn't mind, Liv, I gave your aunt my key when I saw her out there earlier this afternoon."
I nudged Davina with my shoulder and whispered, "Aunt?"
Davina shrugged. "By marriage."
"I couldn't very well let her sit outside on your porch all day in this heat," Peach went on, her eyes shimmering with hurt. "And what a surprise to find out you have an aunt none of us knew anything about."
I sighed. "Peach, it's ... complicated."
"You don't have to explain anything to me," she said. "I'm just your neighbor."
And then she shut her window and went back inside.
I shut my window and turned to Davina, who was looking through it at Peach's house.
"Nice girl," Davina said. "She told me you two were like family. I think that's nice."
I held up my hand to get her to be quiet, and amazingly enough, she shut up. In my head, I set the tension with Peach aside; I would deal with that later. For now, I had a dead bat phone to think about. I blinked a few times, indulging myself in a distanced, packed-in-cotton feeling. Something was very, very wrong, and my rational mind (brain tumor!) was beginning to go to war with my gut (magic!) and it was giving me a headache.
"I'm gonna go get my drink." I turned on my heel toward the kitchen.
"Good idea,"