Page 16 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“Gran, this had better not be another attempt to teach me your potato bread,” I muttered as I reached in to pick it up. “The machine gun popcorn wassonot worth this recipe.”
The moment my fingers touched the wood, a tide of dark, suffocating energy spooled around my body, and the room went black. Joe Strummer’s voice muted; it was as if I now existed in a vacuum. My body felt weightless, yet bound, drifting in groundless oblivion. It was the opposite of my crowded nightmares—isolation in the purest sense—and yet I began to panic, push back against the blackness with my mind. But nothing would budge.
I felt with my fingers, trying to grip something, anything…and realized I was still holding the box. Holdingonto it. Like it was moving, pulling at me, as my arms followed it up and out. Positive it would fly away into the blackness, maybe even take me along with it, I pried my fingertips off and let the weight fall into the oblivion.
The familiar shapes of my room returned—the large Art Deco print hanging over my bureau, the shuffle of papers and books across my desk, the muted grays of my bedspread, where the box lay, seemingly unharmed.
The taunting chords of “Jimmy Jazz” gradually came back into earshot as I fell onto the bed, dizzy and nauseous, unable to suck enough oxygen into my lungs. With my last shred of self-awareness, I threw my head between my legs, focusing on breathing. What did they always do in movies? In-two-three, out-two-three, in-two-three, out-two-three…
Once the dizziness began to recede, I slowly raised my head and glared at the box. Whatwasthat? Some piece of terribly black magic, that was for sure, and I couldn’t imagine for the life of me why Gran would send me something so foul.
A prank? Surely not. Gran thought a bit of disturbance was funny, but she’d never sent me something that was truly horrifying. Was it someone else’s awful memory attached to it that I’d sensed instead? Or was Gran trying to tell me somethingby enchanting the contents in this horrible manner? Or trying to dissuade someone else from discovering it?
I wrapped a hand around my stomach, feeling like I was going to be sick. I would have to call home for further instruction before attempting another look.
The gleaming red numbers on my phone informed me it was now close to three a.m. Which meant I’d been caught in that terrible vortex for several hours. And it had only felt like seconds. Aja was probably asleep, and Gran too.
With the edge of my sleeves serving as a barrier once more between my hand and the box, I carefully set it back into its cardboard packaging. A thin sweat still broke out over my brow from the effort of keeping that horrible void at bay. My vision still went hazy but didn’t disappear completely, and I was able to fight off the looming sense of dread long enough to get the box safely into the back of my closet.
I stepped away, completely out of breath.
There, it looked innocuous—about as dangerous as the rain boots sitting next to it. But my heart was pounding, and the night seemed to press at my windowpanes just as that swirling blackness had threatened to engulf me.
“Good goddess, Gran,” I murmured as I lay back on my bed, as fatigued as though I’d run a marathon. “What on earth did you send me?”
5
THE TELEGRAM
There’s a great roaring in the west, and it’s worse it’ll be getting when the tide’s turned to the wind.
— JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE,RIDERS TO THE SEA
The next morning, after sleeping close to fifteen hours straight, I sained the bathroom again and took the longest bath on record before emerging a new woman in a cloud of lavender oils and one of Gran’s pine-scented beeswax candles.
The world was peaceful again as I shuffled into the kitchen to make a cup of Irish breakfast tea, my drink of choice on Sundays.
The Box of Terror, as I’d named it, was still in the back of my closet, its darkness somewhat bound by the saining bundles I’d set on top of it. I figured we had an agreement, the Box and I—I would pretend it didn’t exist, and it could pretend I’d ever touched it.
So far, I was struggling on my end.
“Morning!”
I twirled around from the stove at the sound of Aja’s voice. Back on the sofa, this time she looked considerably more alert than yesterday, with her corkscrew curls freshly washed and a pile of books around her. Study time. What I needed to be doing too.
She bookmarked her page and flopped over the back of the couch toward me. “How’d it go?”
I frowned. “How did what go?”
“The talk, silly. I figured it must have been stressful if you walked through the snow all the way home.” She pointed at my boots, which were still drying out next to the heater.
I sighed. Gods, yesterday morning felt like eons ago. A pair of bright green eyes flashed through my head, along with that brief touch that seemed to reach all the way into my chest. Then the box that I had honestly thought might swallow me whole.
I took hold of the counter’s edge to steady myself. “It went well, actually,” I said, then turned back to the kitchen to prepare my tea.
To my surprise, Aja’s lingering energy seemed to remain at bay. It was there, certainly—she’d enjoyed a pot of macaroni she’d picked up with this oven mitt. But it still wasn’t jumping on me the way it would normally. Odd.
“Dr. Cardy is amazing, and it was a packed house,” I continued. “By the end of it, everyone seemed to forget that I was late. What are you reading?”
