Page 40 of The Fantastic Fluke

I was going to have to reread them all. A lot of reading wasn’t usually a hardship for me. At my happiest, I read a book a day. Sometimes two.

These were different, and not just because they were going to be dry as dust, about magical theory and physics and other sciences.

“What’s the one with the blank cover?” Gideon asked.

I shuddered. That was the one I wanted to read least of all. “It’s a journal in my father’s handwriting.”

He inclined his head to it. “Let’s see.”

So I flipped it open. That, of course, was when I realized it was in some kind of code. Oh, that was just fucking lovely. I groaned. “I didn’t realize it was coded.”

“It doesn’t look complicated,” Gideon assured me. “Probably just a cypher. If I could write, I could figure it out.”

For a second, I thought he was telling me he was illiterate. Then I remembered what he meant.

Ghost.

Couldn’t hold a pencil or turn pages.

I sighed and fell back against the couch, journal still clutched in my hands. “Beez would be able to figure it out too. She always liked puzzles, and she’s really smart.”

“But?”

“But my mother was murdered, Gideon. It was”—my eyes strayed to the kitchen archway again—“bad. It was bad.”

“You don’t know she was a link,” he hedged, but it was half-hearted. Whether my mother had been dubiously gifted with the same kind of magic or not, she’d known Meredith Johnson, who had been. Who had also been brutally murdered. It seemed reasonable that my mother had been Meredith’s successor, trained by the woman herself. Maybe one of the Adlers had been my mother’s. I didn’t remember either of them, but that didn’t mean anything. He turned and stared off into space for a moment before nodding decisively and turning back to me. “Maybe you should ask your grandmother.”

“Do you think I can trust her?”

“I don’t think you should trust anybody. But you can beat around the bush. Say you think your Dad was looking into something, and, I don’t know, imply something about the convergence.” His lips were drawn tight, and I wondered if it was causing him physical pain to suggest that I lie. He was always so honest, it had to be a little counter to his character.

He was right, though. I could give Iris half the information and see if she filled in the rest. At the very least, it would give me a way to gauge if I could trust her.

Unless she was a really good liar.

I definitely wouldn’t tell her that I was a... convergence link. Fuck, I couldn’t even think it with a straight face. Might as well call myself a pretentious porn star.

“I won’t tell her I know about, um, arcane magic.”

He smirked as though he could read my mind but didn’t question me. Instead, he dipped his head in the direction of the kitchen. “You should eat. Then you can call Mrs. McKinley, and then we can work on training.”

I swallowed hard but nodded and followed him toward the kitchen. We hadn’t gotten too far into me actually learning to use the ley lines. Beyond the fact that people were supposed to learn their chosen magical discipline starting as a teenager, so it was going to be far more complicated for me, there was the deadline waiting at the end of my training.

Deadline in the literal sense, because Gideon was dead, and as soon as I was trained up, he would be gone.

He was sitting in his chair in the kitchen when I got there, dragging my feet the whole way.

I had bought that chair. The whole dining set, in fact. I’d painted the kitchen, had the cabinets redone, and changed literally everything in the room. The stove and refrigerator weren’t even in the same place. The man who’d installed the new ones had started to argue their placement with me, then recognized that he was in “the McKinley Murder House,” and my name was Sage McKinley, and he’d shut up.

My mother had kept everything bright and cheerful in her kitchen. The walls had been yellow gold, with vegetable accents like a painting of a garden on one wall, and a border near the ceiling with cartoony tomatoes and corn and peas. She’d painted the cabinets white herself. It had all looked horrific splattered with blood.

I couldn’t even stand the color yellow anymore.

So I’d gone with a cool green in the remodel. Sage green, if you will. Dark wood everything, including the floor, and black appliances. No blood spatter would show up on those.

I wouldn’t say it was logical, making sure it wouldn’t be such a garish house of horrors if I were murdered in the same room as my mother. It was just what I’d needed in order to live in the house.

The remodel had been finished by the time I was nineteen, but I’d only finished paying off the loan for it at twenty-eight. My father had been disgusted by me taking out a home improvement loan when I, in his words, fell into a free house. I never told him that as long as the only thing I could see in the kitchen was blood-spattered-gold, it would never be anything like a home.

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