The Lingering Grace Read Online Free

of relief. Up to this moment, she had been trying to convince herself that she was normal—even after the hotel. Now, at last, after trying and failing to be a normal girl in a normal world, she knew that she wasn’t normal anymore. This girl—the girl who could do magic—was the new normal.
    In a moment, her world ripped open at the seams. Her world was no longer Monday through Friday with gasps of freedom in between. Her world was power. Her world was magic. Her world was anything she wanted it to be.
    She was about to open the book and hunt down the spell for fire again when something next to her buzzed. Her phone was partly hidden under her leg and she tugged it free. She read the text through once without really registering it, then slowed down and started again.
     
    Tony: Maybe I’m crazy, but when I heard about the accident I wondered if it had anything to do with … you know what.
     
    With the hotel. With the witch. With magic. There were about ten different ways to finish the sentence, and all of them had crossed her mind. Maybe he thought that, by merely hinting at the possibilities, he would spare her the pain of reliving those memories. As if she could just forget what had happened to her. She quickly texted back, feigning ignorance.
     
    Alice: I don’t know what.
     
    She was too preoccupied to spare much time for anything but this new reality she had discovered. She grabbed the book and roughly flipped through its pages. She wasn’t looking for the fire spell anymore. She needed something harder—something that would prove her abilities beyond a shadow of a doubt. Stopping at a page on glamours, she started to read through a spell.
     
    Three drops of walnut oil
    A spoonful of rosemary
    Six mustard seeds …
     
    The phone buzzed and she picked it up the same way she would rip off a bandage.
     
    Tony: Magic.
     
    The word startled her and, almost subconsciously, she slammed the book shut, as though Tony were spying on her. She had to reread his first text to realize what he was talking about.
     
    Alice: I’m sure it was just an accident.
     
    This time he responded so quickly that she didn’t even have a chance to look at her book again.
     
    Tony: You’re probably right. I’m being paranoid. I just never want anything to do with magic again.
     
    She inhaled sharply; the air was cold and tasted like cheap floral body spray. The book on her lap seemed to weigh a ton, and her fingers, still stuck between the pages, tingled.
    Downstairs, her mother was speaking sharply to someone—presumably, she’d finally gotten through to an unfortunate employee. Alice thought drily that the computer system was the lucky one; her mother could be brutal when upset.
    Glad to be far away from that conversation, she turned her attention back to her phone. If only she could find a way out of this conversation. Rereading his text, she decided it didn’t require an answer. Plus she wasn’t in any mood to come up with one.
    He didn’t want anything to do with magic. But magic was what had brought him to her. If he could only see that, maybe he would realize that magic wasn’t the enemy. It was the witch who set the curse that he should hate. Hating magic would be like hating gravity because someone knocked over a vase and it shattered against the floor. It wasn’t gravity’s fault that some clod bumped into a fragile object. Gravity was just doing its job.
    But even as she began to think through the many arguments she could make, she had a sinking feeling that Tony would not be convinced. He hadn’t been the one under a curse; he hadn’t experienced what life was like outside his limited reality, and frankly, he had never wanted to. Alice loved his stability but hated the intractability that accompanied it.
    It would be better to wait, she decided. In the meantime, she would quietly do some experiments, and learn more about this sudden power. And when the time came (if the time came), she would tell him. She