Page 33 of The Glittering Edge

Penny’s panic turns to something darker. Something like anger.

“You don’t have magic?” Penny says.

“I never have,” Alonso says, and his tone is forceful. Final.

“You’re lying.”

Alonso’s shock is quickly replaced with anger. Somehow, they’ve moved even closer, and his scent is overwhelming—amber and earth.

“What did you say?” he whispers.

“You said you don’t have magic,” Penny says. “So explain the cat.”

Alonso’s gray eyes open wide, and the expression takes away his hard edges. For a second, he looks like the boy Penny saw in the woods near Elkie Lake ten years ago.

“What cat?”

Penny’s feet are rooted to the floor. Too late to run away now. “The cat you brought back to life. I was there. I saw the whole thing.”

Alonso doesn’t move. He just watches her with that same wide-eyed, unreadable expression.

Then, without warning, he turns back to his work. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but you were wrong. I’m as magic-free as the rest of my family.”

“If you don’t want to help me, at least have the courage to say it,” Penny says. “Don’t give me some bullshit excuse.”

“If you’re done, you can leave. I would say don’t tell anyone about all this stuff, but half the town thinks my family is evil anyway. Just stay away from this curse unless you want to end up in the ground right next to your parents.”

Penny grits her teeth. “My mom isn’t dead.”

“She might as well be.”

The words bite deep, and all the fight leaves Penny’s body. She has nothing to say back.

Coming here was a mistake after all.

Penny’s feet take her out of the store, across the gravel, back to her car. She’s already crying as she turns it on. As she drives away from her last resort, all Penny can think is:What now?

Alonso

IT’S A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT ALONSO GETS BETTERat darts when he’s pissed.

“Wow,” Kiki says when he gets another bull’s-eye, except she sayswowthe way most people sayfuck off.

“You good, Alonso?” Aidan asks from the couch, where he’s flipping through oldPlayboymagazines to get ideas for drag costumes.

They’re on the first floor of the old De Luca Pharmacy. It was repossessed by the bank after the pharmacy went out of business, but the bank forgot it existed, so it became a repository for garage sale furniture and goths. A stack of dusty DVDs sits in the corner, along with an ancient nineties television somebody disemboweled. An old Colts blanket hangs on the wall, but it’s covered in graffiti that saysBEARS DEFENSE IS BETTER.

“I’m fine,” Alonso lies, and his next throw hits the outer bull.

It’s been a day since Penny showed up at Village Blues and single-handedly gave him an identity crisis.

Don’t youwantto break the curse?

Of course he does. They all do. But the De Lucas gave up on fixing Grandpa Gio’s mistake a long time ago. After Corey’s grandparents got married and the relationship between Charles Barrion and Giovanni De Luca soured, the Barrions started spreading all kinds of rumors about the De Lucas: that they cast hexes on unsuspecting citizens, or that they killed people and used their fluids to make thetinctures sold at the De Luca Pharmacy. That was some nasty Sweeney Todd shit. Alonso’s grandpa had promised his grandma Allison that he would write a blood oath to clear their name and save the pharmacy. Blood oaths are powerful contracts written and signed in blood, and if anything written in the oath is a lie, the witch that signed it will literally go up in flames. But there was never any blood oath—just his grandpa Gio, dead. And he wasn’t burned to a crisp. Instead, it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, because he’d apparently done something so terrible that he couldn’t live with himself anymore.

Alonso interprets this as an escape hatch. Grandpa Gio probably lied about the blood oath to get his family off his back. But Alonso’s mom and aunts had wanted to believe it, and they spent years tearing through the house and the pharmacy, going through all of Giovanni’s books and clothing and furniture, convinced they would find a blood oath that would absolve their family and maybe even prove Grandpa Gio hadn’t cursed the Barrions after all.

They found nothing. It was a waste of time.

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