Page 86 of The Glittering Edge

make it visible to every open eye.”

As he speaks, there’s a tugging in Alonso’s chest, and his magic moves up through his throat to coat his words. If he were good at this, he’d only have to say the spell once for it to work. But he’s an amateur, so he says it three times before he feels any heat in his scar. His eyes are bleary as he removes his hand.

Straight on, the scar is completely invisible. But when he moves his hand to the left, it becomes visible again. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope.

Alonso looks up at Nimble. “Why is this so hard? When I brought you back to life, I only got the flu. Now I do a tiny spell and I want to take a nap right away.”

Nimble’s tail swishes.

Alonso sighs. “Maybe I’m not holding the image in my head the way I should?” He gears up and does the spell again, this time on his pinkie nail, which has chipped black polish on it. As he says the words, he focuses on the image of a perfectly polished fingernail, the clean lines, the even color. But then he never paints his nails perfectly and he doesn’t really care to, so in his mind he adds a small dot of black paint on his skin.

And when he takes his spell-casting hand away, the nail looks exactly as it did in his mind. Tiny mistake and all.

“Whoa!” Alonso says, launching to his feet and gaping at his nail. “I did it! Nimble, look!”

Nimble yawns, unimpressed. But nothing can ruin Alonso’s mood, and he scoops his familiar into his arms and holds her up like Simba, spinning her around.

“I’m a witch!” he whispers. “A real live witch, bitch!”

He collapses onto his bed, finally letting Nimble go free. She hisses at him, but she still curls up on the pillow next to his head. Alonso laughs, scratching her head. This isn’t the first spell he’s done successfully, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s never been truly good at anything in his life. He gets As and Bs in school, but nothing has ever felt natural. Not like magic. Alonso gets it now—why his family feels so lost without it, even if he’s afraid of what will happen if he loses control.

“And to think I could’ve been doing this for a decade,” he says, and Nimble purrs.

Alonso is too wired to go to sleep, so he grabs another one of the spell books he’s been hiding under his bed.

The Light.

Alonso told Corey he wouldn’t subject Dylan to his magic. But Corey is too soft; there’s no way he’s going to confront Dylan about her family secretly being a coven. By giving Dylan a truth serum, Alonso is basically doing Corey a favor.

But behind Alonso’s confidence is fear. Because magic hurts people. Isn’t that why he’s avoided it for so many years?

He can’t let that fear hold him back anymore. What if he can prove that it wasn’t the De Lucas who cursed the Barrions after all? He lets himself imagine his mother’s face. This fantasy is exaggerated—her pride in him, the tears in her eyes—but it’s enough to make Alonso open the book of spells to the recipe for a truth serum.

Alonso cracks his knuckles. “Sorry, Corey. But if anyone is going to be a guinea pig, it should be Dylan.”

Penny

SKYCAT HAS A TON OF INFORMATION, SOME OF WHICH MIGHT BE HELPFULin the long run. Unfortunately, the website hasn’t been updated since approximately 2003.

“Come on,” Penny mutters from her table at the empty Horizon Café, which is now cleared of customers after an unusually busy Tuesday afternoon. SkyCat’s cursor is a tiny wand with sparkles shooting out the end—a weird attempt at witchy humor, since they don’t even use wands—but it’s turned into the I-refuse-to-load spinning wheel instead.

When SkyCat finally loads, Penny sits up, resuming her search for information on the Shadow. She’s tried a bunch of different terms—apparitions,specters of death, and even the wordshadow, though that felt like a long shot. She’s read a hundred pages of historical records on curses that made people gravely ill (less common) or hexes that made them lose all their shoes (surprisingly common). But all of these curses occurred over two hundred years ago; since the Council started punishing covens by sealing their magic, witches have mostly left curses in the past. Which also means there is hardly any recent information about them to indicate what the Shadow really is, or why Milton wouldn’t have wanted Corey to know about it.

Penny presses her palms to her eyes as she tries to think. Her mom saw the Shadow that day at the cemetery, and Penny saw it later at the hospital. Then it appeared in her dream.

But no, there was one more time Penny might’ve seen it. It was the night of Corey’s Fourth of July party, while she and Naomi weresitting on Penny’s roof. She saw movement in the trees, but at the time, she thought it was—

A ghost.

Penny clicks on the search engine again and typesghostsandcurses. There’s only one result, about a curse from the eighteenth century. This one was cast by an English witch named Eldrice Bayer, who was so in love with a woman named Annette that she cursed anyone else who looked at her “with lust.” And the curse itself? It shrank people’s hearts.

“Toxic,” Penny mutters. She keeps reading, and she finally finds mention of ghosts:

Bayer herself grew to regret the curse, for it killed the man Annette had decided to marry. While Annette was not in love with him, he would’ve provided her with safety and wealth, and so Annette scorned Bayer ever after, until Bayer became a ghost of her former self.

Of course ghost is being used as a metaphor. Penny almost shuts the laptop, but something keeps her scrolling. Another paragraph catches her attention:

Bayer was inspired by spells of yore that bound afflicted spirits together and used their combined energy to make the magic stronger over time. This methodology is particularly effective in curses, but it has also been used in earthly covenants between witches and mortals.

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