Page 75 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
Linnéa, somehow sensing this absolute nonsense thing was going to happen, had taken a few steps back and miraculously avoided all splatter. “Very good,” she says with the pure delight of someone watching their toddler do a little dance just for them.
“I ruined your couch,” Mateo says weakly, lightheaded and disoriented from the magical vomit.
“It’s okay,” Topher offers from across the room. “We don’t like it. Or need it. We’re selling the house.”
Mateo is still staring at his mom’s spell book. No.Hisspell book. He reaches a hand down and tentatively taps the cover. It doesn’t do anything—like light him on fire or disappear—so he picks it up. He tries to shake it clean, but then realizes the black stuff is sliding back up the simple cover and into him.
Spreading the spell book open on his lap, he runs fingers over the bright white pages and the small black script. When he’d found the book in his mom’s office, there’d been a steady pull, a thread of connection trying to get him to use the book.And when he had used the book to try to talk to who he later found out was Linnéa—for at least a few moments—everything had felt right.
Then he’d gotten freaked out, the spell had gone to shit, the book had gone inside him, and he’d partially transformed. But why did the spell book go inside him, and why did he transform?
Studying the cover of the book, he focuses on how touching it makes him feel. Content. And angry. While transformed, he’d been furious and confused about everything, but one of the clearest thoughts had been about not fitting together correctly anymore.
He’d assumed his mother had always had this spell book, but what if she hadn’t? What if she’d made it after he was born—or summoned or whatever the fuck. Because the cover looks like him, the pages are written in his blood, holding it feels correct, she definitely did something to him when he was young with that ass-smelling yellow smoke Ethan had also used, and nothing she told him about himself was true.
It really isn’t his mother’s spell book at all. It’s his. It’s the pieces of him she carved away.
But just having the book isn’t why he transformed. Between the first partial transformation and the secondcannibal timetransformation, the book had been inside him.
Linnéa keeps telling him intentions matter. Topher was in jail and then Ophelia and Topher were both in danger. He’d been desperate. He’d wanted to use the demon’s—his—powers. Before the first transformation he’d gotten scared and it had half messed up, but before the second one, he hadn’t given a single fuck.
Having the book and wanting to use his powers is why he transformed.
Ophelia drops down beside him as he carefully closes the book on his lap.
“Looks like the magic was inside you all along,” she says with a completely serious face.
She is the absolute worst person on the entire planet.
Two days later and he hasn’t eaten anyone else—or anything at all—so it’s determined that Ophelia and he should go home. Topher and Linnéa have a funeral to prepare for and an entire life to re-figure out. They decide to rent a car to drive back to Seattle. It just doesn’t seem prudent to trap Mateo in a tube in the air with a bunch of people right now.
Mateo spends way too long folding and refolding the mismatched assortment of clothing he’s borrowed over the past week. He runs fingers appreciatively over a gray V-neck t-shirt that’s unreasonably soft yet bears no tag to tell him the material. There’s a metaphor for Topher in there somewhere, a smile curving his lips because he’d made such a stupid yet apt comparison. Still doesn’t finish folding, moving to fuss with a pair of sweatpants he belatedly realizes must have been the late Christopher’s because they’re way too big to be Topher’s.
It’s not that the folding is hard or anything, it’s just that, once he finishes, he has to hand the pile to Topher and say goodbye. Topher’s been an exceptional host, possibly playing the sameavoidance except when absolutely necessarygame Mateo is.
Or he’s just, like, grieving.
Or remembering that time Mateo ate a guy a foot from him and feels rightfully spooked.
Or it’s the reality of finding out he’s not entirely human and his powers killed a lot of people.
Or maybe he’s uncomfortable about how much demon tongue Mateo put all over him.
That last one makes Mateo stare unmoving into the middle distance for a really long time. It’s cosmically unfair that he’s the singular being able to unlock a whole new level of mortification based on things he did while dead and transformed into another state of being or whatever.
Although … Topher hadn’t seemed particularly uncomfortable at the magic book vomit ritual, which could be politeness or the concussion. And really, didn’t Topher always look uncomfortable? How was he supposed to parse what was Topher’s defaultnice guy who is normal uncomfortableversusnice guy who is exceptionally uncomfortable? Not that Topher had looked uncomfortable while he’d been actively putting tongues all over—
No. Absolutely not. He can’t finish that thought. He folds the sweatpants with urgency.
This is stupid. He’s being stupid. Get it together, you absolute jackass.
Rising from his bedside crouch, he gathers up the very folded clothing and makes his way through the ridiculously long halls of the house, aiming for Topher’s room tucked into the back. The hope that someone will waylay him finally dies as he reaches the open door to Topher’s room.
The space is in scandalously slight disarray—startling only because the room had been so sparse and neat before. Now the bed is unmade, the night’s pajama pants hanging limply off the end of it. More books have appeared on the desk, another laptop, and a pile of things that look like they have something to do with computers. Square flat boxes with wires and a power strip that weren’t there before. There’s even a bowl of what was once cereal but is now a single fattened O floating in an inch ofmilk, sitting atop one of the stacks. It’s almost like a totally normal room that someone actually lives in—albeit someone rich enough to have multiple computers and a wall of windows.
Back toward the door, Topher sits curled forward at his desk, cross-legged in a rollie chair definitely not meant for that, attention on a laptop. Weird-looking black headphones curve around his earlobes, and with the way he’s lightly bobbing his head and scrolling around with abandon, he hasn’t heard Mateo come in.
All at once, Mateo’s seeing Topher in his natural habitat, without the stress of an accidental murder, a dickhead dad, or a missing mom threatening from every angle. His hair’s puffy but corralled backward, the worry lines that have been knitting his brow since moment one are gone, and he’s mouthing something—maybe the words to whatever he’s listening to. None of that vibrating tension of anxiety rolls off of him. Taking advantage of this voyeuristic moment, Mateo also checks out his outfit: dark gray joggers with a trendy seam down the front of each leg and an oversized linen tee in pale gray with raw hems. He’s like a soft custom rain cloud, scrolling and vibing out to what sounds suspiciously like screamo music.
