Page 86 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

“Best way to learn,” Marcus said grandly, while Evangeline glanced at me curiously.

“If the problem is the wards your parents left behind, and you’re the heir to their magic, could you remove the wards?” I asked.

Evangeline cocked her head to the side. “Huh.” She looked down at the pile of charred wood. “Huh.”

“That might work,” Marcus said.

“Only one way to find out,” Evangeline said.

We spent the next several hours picking through the debris, searching for anything that looked like a still-active spell. My job was lifting things the witches couldn’t manage, and Marcus and I gathered a pile of items and components that seemed like likely suspects. Then Evangeline looked them over, turning each item in her hands and staring down at it intently. She was sitting in the back of the truck, slowly and carefully removing the spells from everything we found. Some of the items were, if not simple, at least straightforward: a horseshoe that had presumably been hung above a doorway, or a shard of windowpane with runes marked into it. Some were more complicated.

One of the complicated ones was a half-burnt child’s shoe with sigils carved into the rubber sole. The protection signs cut through a pattern of small hearts and stars. Evangeline held that one for some time.

“Evangeline, if this isn’t helping, we can try something else,” I told her softly. I was leaning against the side of the truck, taking a break while Marcus found sandwiches in the glovebox. My arms were black with charcoal up to the elbows, and Marcus wasn’t faring much better. “There’s no point in making you look over all of these things for no reason.”

Evangeline leaned against me, and I brushed my sooty knuckles against hers. “No, it is helping,” she said. “I can feel the fragment more clearly now. And it’s… I dunno. It just feels right to do this, I guess. Like I’m laying them to rest.”

She seemed like she had more to say. I waited her out—a trick I’d learned from her.

“I don’t even remember them,” she said finally. “Like, I sort of hoped I’d see this place and it would all come flooding back, but it’s still…” She shook her head. “It’s like they’re strangers. But seeing all of this… I don’t know. It’s just so weird.” She picked up the tiny shoe. Underneath the soot, it had once been alarmingly pink. “They were strangers who loved me,” she said. “All of these protections, they were all to protect their family. If… if part of them, somehow, is still trying to protect me, if they’re, like, putting in effort from beyond the grave, I feel like I have a responsibility to show them that I’m okay.”

“Evangeline, I’m aware that I’m absolutely filthy, but if you’d like, I’d be more than willing to—” I began, spreading my arms awkwardly.

“Oh, my God, you dweeb. You can just hug me,” she said, but she sounded lighter than she had all day.

We hugged tightly. The side wall of the cargo bed pressed into my torso, trapped between us, but she still dropped her forehead to my shoulder with a sigh, and I felt the muscles of her shoulders relax under my touch.

“Ah, here we are!” Marcus said, popping out of the interior of the truck. “A muffuletta for the lady, and a Marmite and Swiss for me.” He started to set down the paper-wrapped bundle on the bed of the truck, then looked at the sheer quantity of charred rubble and glanced around for somewhere more suitable. “Perhaps food intended to be eaten with the hands was unwise,” he muttered.

Evangeline let out a surprised, slightly wet laugh, and pulled away.

“God, you’re so weird,” she said, watching Marcus dig a packet of wet wipes from his cargo pants.

“With age comes whimsy,” Marcus said sagely, scrubbing the soot off his hands. “And whatever doesn’t kill you makes you much odder at parties.”

We were making good progress, but the sheer quantity of work was daunting. So much of what we found seemed to still have a bit of magic to it, according to Marcus, and Evangeline could only power down the enchantments so fast. Besides, as we kept going, our work went slower and slower. Marcus and I, in an unofficial agreement, were taking turns trying to convince Evangeline to take breaks. What worried me was that she was starting to take breaks without arguing about it, which meant she must have been truly exhausted.

For every dozen minor items—enchanted hinges, a charmed boot-scraper, a magic-imbued screwdriver—there were at least one or two things that caused Evangeline to spend a while staring into the woods unseeingly. A gold ring. The spine of a journal with whatever pages that hadn’t been taken by the fire eaten away by rot. A miraculously intact handmade mug with a mark on the underside that Marcus told us identified it as Ewan’s handiwork.

By late afternoon, Evangeline had a small pile next to her of things to keep, and we were all extremely tired.

“Perhaps it’s time to call it a day,” Marcus said gently, patting Evangeline’s shoulder. She was staring at the mug, which was the same rich green as her eyes. “We can come back tomorrow. Start fresh.”

Evangeline looked like she was about to protest, but then she looked up at me and something in her eyes softened. “Yeah,” she said. “A fresh start sounds good. But if you try to get me to sleep in tomorrow, I’m kicking both of your asses.”

“That seems fair,” I said. Marcus’s eyes were on me, unnervingly assessing, but I did my best not to let it bother me. “I hope you won’t find it unnecessarily devious if I get dinner delivered.”

“I think I could live with that,” Evangeline allowed, hopping down from the bed of the truck. “I’m thinking Auntie Wong’s, but I’m gonna need the?—”

“Congee with extra chili crisp and a side of dumplings,” I said. She stared at me, her mouth still open. “What? I listen.”

Marcus laughed to himself on the other side of the truck. It might just have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that Floyd made my seat a bit larger for the drive back into the city.

Later, after watching with morbid fascination as she demolished a plate of dumplings the size of her own head, I managed to talk Evangeline into having an early night. Without talking about it, we both went to my suite. Neither of us were particularly keen to sleep alone. A few weeks ago, if I had imagined sharing a bed with Evangeline, it would have been something torrid and probably impressively athletic. The idea of spending my evenings slowly stroking her hair while we watched a documentary wouldn’t have entered my mind at all.

I was surprised by how much I liked it. Most of my relationships—if they could be called that—were either one-night stands or no-strings-attached hookups. The closest I’d gotten to this sort of simple companionship was probably with Gwendoline, which was somewhat horrifying to realize. Especially since I didn’t really trust Gwendoline enough to sleep around her.

“Okay,” Evangeline said as the credits rolled on the documentary—Love to the Point of Invention: the surprisingly romantic history of rubber gloves. “I think I’m ready to talk about stuff. Are you cool to let me, like, process out loud, or should I call Isabella?”

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