Page 52 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
Even though the sun was still hidden behind the clouds, the top of Beatrice’s head warmed. “I love it.”
Minna gave her a brilliant smile. “Yay. Oh, my god, Aunt Bea, we’ve got alotto go over.”
Beatrice opened the grimoire, flipping through it until she found the page that had been folded back on itself, almost to the very center of the book. In the two-millimeter gap where the edge of the page touched the middle, a thin layer of wax had been laid down, sealing the page to itself. “Can we go over this?” She pulled at the half page to see if she could peek down into it without breaking the seal.
“No.” With a look of horror, Minna yanked the book out ofher hands. “We don’t open that page. Ever. Unless it’s the end of the line.”
Beatrice felt chastened. “I was only teasing.”
“Seriously, we don’t even joke about that.”
“Okay.”
Minna’s expression was fierce. “I mean it.”
When had Beatrice turned into the kid and Minna the adult? “Fine.” She tried to believe it really was, in fact, fine. “Tell me some things about magic.”
“Tell you? I’m going to make youdomagic.”
For the next two hours, Minna tested Beatrice, getting her to say and do things that made no sense. Minna would open to a page, then she’d give Beatrice a collection of words to say, sometimes in verse, sometimes just a jumble of disparate phrases that felt ragged in her mouth.
Then a solid block ofnothingwould happen.
As the morning wore into afternoon, the clouds overhead darkened, and the scent of impending rain rolled in. They stayed seated, though, Minna correcting Beatrice’s pronunciation.
Still, nothing.
Beatrice found this unsurprising, but every time she did a magic belly-flop, Minna seemed flummoxed. “Huh. That should have been an easy one. Okay. This one—you’ll totally be able to do this one. I could do it when I was five. This will make the grass move.”
When Beatrice said the words, the grass did move.
“Good job! You did it!”
Beatrice licked her finger and held it up. “The grass moved because: wind.”
“But maybe—did it blow the opposite way for a second?”
No. It hadn’t.
That morning, when she’d sat with Cordelia in the galley ofthe boat, Beatrice could admit that she’d felt a poignant tug of hope. Silly, of course, but anyone might have. It had been a fresh new day, the book had looked so beautiful, and who didn’t want magic to be real?
But now, she was sitting in the real world, humoring her real niece, and she didn’t want to keep disappointing Minna. “Maybe that’s enough for one day? Try again another time?”
Minna looked up from a page covered in red and black ink. “You still don’t believe. You need more proof.”
She sighed. “Minna, I’m a math person. I’ll always need more proof until I can see for myself that something is true. It’s okay, I believe thatyoubelieve it.” Even as the words came out of her mouth, she regretted them. What a stupid, unhelpful thing to say.
Minna frowned. Then she closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but what she said was too quiet for Beatrice to hear.
“I’m sorry—”
Minna held up a hand. Her lips kept moving as her eyelids fluttered, as the wind lifted and dropped her hair.
Fine. Beatrice would wait for whatever this was, then she’d praise the girl for whatever she eventually said, and then she’d go check to see if Reno needed her for a bookcase consultation, before returning the grimoire to Cordelia at the store.
Minna’s eyes flew open. “In your home, you have a secret shrine to the woman who was your alternate mother inside a blue suitcase that you keep at the top of a closet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
