Page 74 of Persephone's Curse
“I mean, this is going to sound very strange…”
“We sell antique Victorian baby teeth on eighteen-karat gold necklaces,” Jon deadpanned.
“Let’s just say, hypothetically, there was, like, a place where… you go. After you die.” To Jon’s credit, he wasn’t smiling anymore,he was listening carefully, nodding his head slightly, no indication that he was internally making fun of me at all. “And in this place, there’s a… spirit. A ghost. And you want the ghost to come back, you know. You have to… talk to it. This person. You have to. It’s imperative. Anyway. How might you… do that?”
“You want to summon the dead,” Jon said, putting it far more succinctly than I had. “Look, people have been summoning the dead for ages. You’re not asking to reinvent the wheel here.”
“I’m not?”
“Definitely not. People are fascinated with death. They want to understand it. They want to talk to their loved ones who’ve passed. In my case, I wanted to find out where my grandmother hid herveryexpensive emerald-and-diamond necklace.” He paused, considering. “I also wanted to sayhi,of course. But the necklace was very important to me, and she’d hidden itverywell.”
“Did you find it?”
“In a can of garbanzo beans, beans still in there, can resealed. Don’t know how she managed it.”
“You contacted your grandmother from beyond the grave and she told you where to find her necklace?”
“No,” Jon admitted. “I just got hungry one day. But anyway. What you’re asking isn’t impossible.”
“Okay…”
“It isn’teasyor evenlikely,but it’s not impossible.”
“Okay…”
“You’ll need a medium. A good one. Not a hack Instagrammer who’s directly responsible for the overharvesting of California white sage.”
“Right. So how do I—”
“Obviously, I know one. She might be down. She’s particular about what cases she accepts.”
“All right. How do I contact her?”
“She’s here most nights at seven.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” he confirmed.
“All right. I guess I’ll come back.”
“Here,” he said, reaching under the counter, withdrawing two small bundles. “Cedar,” he said, putting the first one down, a small pallet of three-inch long sticks, tied together with twine. “For protection.” He put the second bundle on the table. This one I knew was lavender, a dried smudging bundle of it, greenery mixed with delicate purple flowers. “For the invitation of spirits. And also, they both smell lovely.” I started to take my wallet out of my bag, but he waved his hand at me. “No charge. Any friend of Maybe gets the smudging sticks for free.”
“Oh, well, we’re not reallyfriends—”
“You will be,” he said, with a simple conviction that mirrored Clara’s, whenever she said things that weren’t true yet but that we knew would become true eventually.
Walking home, still early evening but also quickly getting darker (East Coast winters), I stared at the dark slice in the sky. I should have asked Jon if he could see it. I’d ask Maybe, maybe. And was it… getting bigger?
I stopped on our front stairs, halfway up, staring at it, directly above our home.
Above the slash, the moon was bright, its own crescent slice in the darkness. Next to the moon, there was one bright star.
“Mars,” Dad said, suddenly behind me. I’d been so engrossed in my skygazing I hadn’t heard him approach.
“What?” I said, jumping a little.
“Is that what you’re looking at? Mars?”
