When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey (novels to read txt) 📗

which is long and slim and covered in these fine hairs that look like they’d be really soft under your fingertips.

Anyway.

Roya’s always mad at someone. Right now, the person she’s mad at is me.

I thought I wanted this.

“Okay, here’s what we’re doing,” Iris says. Her voice has taken on this businesslike tone that she uses whenever she’s being bossy. She’s bossy a lot. It’s great. Seriously, we all love it—she takes charge like nobody else I know. She’s going to run the world someday.

“The spell should clean everything up. And then it’ll get rid of the body.” She frowns a little. “I think.”

“You think?” Marcelina mirrors Iris’s frown.

“I’m not sure. It’s kind of vague.”

“Wait,” I say. “That’s not what I meant when I said ‘make it right.’ ”

“Oh?” Iris looks at me sharply. Her eyes are flashing, and I know what she’s thinking: that I’m the one asking for a huge favor, here, and can I really afford to be picky? Still, I press.

“We have to … we have to fix it,” I say, hating the whine in my voice. “We have to make it right, we have to bring him back. There has to be a way to bring him back.”

Iris laughs. Her laugh is only a little cold, not mean, but she’s in that mood she gets sometimes, where she knows best and we’re all just failing to keep up. “If you think we can bring people back from the dead … That’s ridiculous, Alexis,” she says. “We aren’t miracle-workers. It’s going to be hard enough just to get rid of him.”

It stings when she talks to me that way. And it stings even more because what she’s saying is that I’ve done something that can’t be undone. I feel stupid for ever having hoped that things could go back to the way they were before.

I feel so small, and I’m so afraid that they’ll leave me all alone with this thing I’ve done if I ask them for too much help. So I don’t argue.

“It’s not like we can make it any worse,” Roya mutters. Someone knocks on the door, and we all jump. Roya shouts that the room is occupied, suddenly sounding a lot more sober than she did a few seconds before.

“Can we please, please get this over with?” Paulie growls, and everyone nods, and I can’t argue with them anymore. I can’t ask them for more help than I already have, and I certainly can’t ask them to risk getting caught with a dead body with me.

Besides, Iris is really smart. Like … really smart. If she says this is the only option, I believe her.

“Are you ready?” Iris asks. We all say yes, and then—

Magic.

How can I explain what it’s like?

It’s like that feeling when you’ve been cooped up inside all day and then you finally go outside and remember what fresh air tastes like.

It’s like when you get up in the middle of the night and your mouth is gross and dry and you take a drink of water and the water is sweet.

It’s like watching someone dive into a pool without leaving a ripple.

It’s like waking up.

Threads of light swirl up around each of us like spun sugar rising up out of a cotton candy machine. We all do different things with our magic, and we all usually look different when we do it. It’s always kind of like light, and kind of like thread, and kind of like neither of those things at all. But when Iris is in control, we all make magic that looks similar. It looks like raw material. Pure. When we work together, Iris’s magic is white, and Roya’s is pink, and Marcelina’s and Paulie’s are both blue. I can’t see my own. I can see when my hands glow a little, but I can never see the magic coming out of them. Almost none of us can see our own, except for Iris. So, I don’t know what mine looks like, but Roya told me once that it’s a bright dark purple. I asked how it could be dark when it’s bright, and she shrugged and said she didn’t make the rules.

She also said it was really pretty. Not that it matters, but she said it, is all. She thinks it’s pretty.

A cloud of power roils overhead as we all give ourselves over to Iris. We’ll be exhausted after this, but it’s worth it to see what she can do. To see the shape of her plan. She reaches up and swirls her hand through the light that’s filling the room. She pulls at it and pushes it and wraps her light around ours and clenches her fist tight and then she says “NOW” and we all stop.

Stopping feels like holding your breath—awful and suffocating and a little dizzying after the first minute. But you get used to feeling like that.

Iris lets go of the gathered light she’s holding. It settles over Josh’s body in a big sheet. We all slump a little as the magic leaves us. The light flares, and as it does, time slows. This doesn’t happen with every spell, but this is a big one, and I guess things are different with magic this size. Or maybe it’s just adrenaline making me see every single detail of what happens—I don’t know. All I know is, his blood shimmers like oil on water. I can feel it growing hot on my face, on my lips, on the tip of my tongue where I didn’t even notice it until now, which seems wrong. You should notice when a boy’s blood is on your tongue.

I feel his blood get hot, and I watch it shine on every surface in the room. The pink water lets off a few wisps of steam. The blood that’s on my skin hurts. It hurts so much, but I don’t let myself cry out and I don’t let myself flinch because I know in my