Page 63 of Avelina

Spirit shot me a dubious expression. “No, you don’t. You just like me for my body.”

I smiled at her. “Can you blame me? You’re pretty much the hottest girl I’ve ever been with. By, like, a lot.”

“Really?” she asked, seeming genuinely surprised.

I gave her the look. “Are you kidding? Please. You’re the hottest girl anyone has ever been with. I was so jealous of those Jermez twins that I ran out of the house and jumped into an interdimensional portal.”

Spirit grinned. “Not interdimensional. As far as I know, there’s only one interdimensional portal around here, and you have to be dead to go through it.”

“Right,” I said. “The death bridge. That’s so interesting. How far away are we from Earth right now?”

Spirit responded in her best McCoy voice: “Dammit, Lina, I’m a ghost, not an astronomer!”

I laughed. “You know, Bones never actually said the word ‘damn’ on that show, right? That phrase is a myth.”

“Okay, Grandma, tell me some more ancient TV trivia.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘classic.’ It’s classic TV trivia,” I said.

“Whatever. Unlike you, I was born this century. Keep searching through your mess of stuff. There’s one more thing under there,” she said.

“Oh, the survival kit wasn’t the surprise? By the way, how did you know that was in there?” I asked.

Spirit smirked but didn’t answer.

“Oh, it’s like that? Okay.” I didn’t see anything, so I picked everything up one more time, shaking it. When I shook the socks, a beaded bracelet fell out. It had a mix of what looked like pea-sized stones. “What’s this?” I asked.

“I made that for you, but I wasn’t sure why at the time, especially since you don’t really wear jewelry. But you know how crazy accurate my intuition has always been. It turns out I had actual magical powers, which I always suspected, of course. So, I made it anyway, and now I think Aaron is the one who needs it. You should give it to him.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The stones are mostly Mexican fire agate, the real kind. See the iridescence?”

I nodded, holding the bracelet up to the light. They were a deep orange red, almost brown, with subtle little bubbles of rainbow that shone out when the light reflected off them.

“Fragments are never perfectly contained in a reservoir,” Spirit explained. “They have a tendency to bleed out a little. The fire agate will absorb some of the ambient Evocation fragment that’s causing Aaron to lose control of his emotions, but he can also pull that back out and use it if he needs to. It’s kind of like an external reservoir for him. The blue ones are rough aquamarine,” she continued. “Not the clear kind you see in jewelry, but the kind with inclusions, which is why they’re more like stones than crystals. Those will bolster his Protection reservoir and calm him down a little.”

“Wow, Spirit. This is perfect. Thank you so much.” I looked up at her. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

“You’re welcome,” she said, staring down at her hands. I gave her a minute to collect her thoughts.

“What’s it like, Spirit?” I asked. “Being dead?”

“It’s not that bad,” she said, then bit her bottom lip. “It’s kind of nice, actually. Sort of worry-free in a way, but instead of feeling things, you have to know things. Knowledge is its own kind of magic, you know. Once you know something, it changes you. Everything you discover while you’re on that side will come over with you to this side because it becomes a part of you, a part of your . . . spirit, I guess.”

“Knowledge changes your spirit,” I repeated. “Like what Aaron learned when he looked into me.”

“He looked into you?”

“Oh, so you don’t know everything then?”

Spirit smiled. “Of course not. I observe. I listen. I experience, but I am not God, at least not all of God.”

“Is there one, Spirit? A god, or maybe a goddess?” I turned back to her in anticipation of some kind of profound knowledge. Spirit had always had a way of dropping truth bombs on me, and it usually left me a better person.

She narrowed her eyes at me, debating. “Yes and no.”

I groaned. “Okay, when you paused to think, were you trying to decide what would be the most frustrating answer? Because you nailed it.”

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