Page 73 of The Fantastic Fluke

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 idea. Oh well. That was his issue, not mine. The world had to move on, and my corner of the world was going to be what I needed, not what he did.

But Gideon didn’t have that problem. Maybe the people who had initially tied him to his own time had died, but now there was me. I was a connection to the world of the living, wasn’t I?

And he’d spent the last few weeks trying to tell me that the convergence was real, and it could do anything. So why couldn’t it do the impossible?

The theory on bringing the dead back to life was laid out inThe Sparkas an impossible theoretical, along with all the reasons it couldn’t be done. The main among those reasons, that the book laid out on hopeful terms, was that the kind of magic that made up those relationships hadn’t been discovered yet. They had run tests with social mages, dead mages, and even a rare death mage, but had no results. For a moment, reading the conclusion, my heart sank, hope flagging.

But the convergence wasn’t like those things, was it?

“None of this applies to us, does it?” I asked Fluke, who didn’t bother moving, or even opening his eyes, just let me scratch his head as I read. “These limitations on how far a power can be manipulated, they’re not for arcane magic.” I looked at Fluke. “Arcanists?”

He cracked his eyes and gave a tiny vulpine shrug.

I’d always complained about the technical term for social mages: “socialists.” Ugh. The puns and jokes in books and movies were endless and irritating. But the linguistic convention worked better with arcane magic.

It would be a ritual. If I wanted to have even a remote chance of pulling it off, I’d need to go the whole nine yards. I glanced at the athame, and when I looked back, Fluke was staring at me.

“Asshole.”

He blinked.

“Fine, come on. Ritual magic means a shower first. Got to clean off all that negative energy.” I frowned and glanced at the kitchen. Would it be worse to drink coffee, or to still be shaking off the remnants of the sleeping pill I’d taken? One drug or two, I guessed coffee wasn’t a great idea. I just had to stay awake, and I wasn’t in too much danger of falling asleep.

Hell, it would be downright impossible.

I’d decided to break all the rules of magic and throw caution to the wind. Who could sleep with that hanging over their head?

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