Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

spell gone wrong. That’s what the file said. I wanted to believe it—I wanted a reason to think that maybe this kind of thing just happened to people who got magic handed to them at birth, or whenever these things get handed out. It would have felt a little like justice. I’m not proud of thinking that,

It reported Sylvia’s cause of death as “a miscast version of a theoretical spell intended to facilitate instantaneous physical translation.”

“No,” he answered. His face had gone still. The lie was as obvious as if it were a tarantula perched astride his wide, thin-lipped mouth.

“Are you smart?” He seemed to chew on this for a minute. “I have to be.” “Says who?” He gave me the kind of shrug that probably made his mother’s ears shoot steam. “It’s complicated.”

“It’s in a Prophecy,” he huffed, leading me through a set of double doors. He said “Prophecy” with a capital P. “My family Prophecy. It’s a huge deal. It’s been passed down for like, centuries. It got smuggled out of Dalmatia, okay? It got saved from the Prophecy purges in the sixties, too, back when people decided that prognostication was a False Magic. So you know it’s one of the really important Prophecies.” He took a deep breath. “My generation is supposed to have a Chosen One.”

“I’m supposed to change the world,” he said.

“My very unofficial opinion, which I am not even giving, which we are not discussing, which you are not writing down or recording: Sylvia didn’t screw around with theoretical magic. She was too smart and too … wary.”

“I imagine the only person who’s ever explained magic to you is Tabitha? And she’s … well. She lives in the black box.”

Torres flinched. “Of course. Officially speaking, there was nothing suspicious about Sylvia’s death, and Osthorne is and shall remain a safe haven for students and staff alike.” Her words had the practiced rhythm of a letter sent to worried, angry, tuition-paying parents. “But unofficially … do whatever you need to do. Talk to whomever you need to. Solve this case.”

couldn’t connect the woman I was seeing with the girl I’d been so angry at for so long. The double vision that had been plaguing me since my arrival at Osthorne returned—I could see the Tabitha that was, and a Tabitha that might have been. Someone I could get drinks with after work. Someone I could make eye contact with at holidays. Someone I could trust. But that wasn’t this Tabitha. Not by a long shot.

the official NMIS report was a write-off: a lot of we-did-the-legwork-and-found-nothing-of-consequence.

The NMIS officers had clearly decided early on that the death was an accident, and had gone through the motions to ensure that their conclusion wouldn’t be questioned.

It struck me that this girl looked exactly like she was supposed to, which meant that she knew what people were looking for, what people would latch on to as weakness. She didn’t want anyone thinking she needed their attention, their approval. Don’t underestimate this one, I thought.

“She was weak,” she whispered in a voice devoid of cruelty. She left without a glance back to make sure I was watching her go.

Is this guy flirting with me? I wasn’t used to being around friendly men—most of the guys I met were jealous of their wives, or were angry that I‘d exposed their fraud, or were trying to dodge a bill. I didn’t like this, the way I felt slow and clumsy.

But if he was flirting with me, he would probably slip up and tell me things, right? It couldn’t hurt to go with it.

The thing about me is, I let things go. I let people go. I don’t know how to hang on to them—I try, but I hold too tight or not tight enough or something in between and they go. They always go.

We were sisters, after all. I thought of how it would feel to end our estrangement and patch things up, and my heart ached with a hope that I hadn’t let myself feel for a long time.

I didn’t like looking at myself, seeing my eyes, and knowing that she had them, the exact same ones, and had decided that they needed to be better.

“Yeah. You gave me that mirror before you left for school, and you told me it was a magic mirror. Like I could leave you—” “—magical voicemails,” she breathed. It was coming back to her. “Oh my god, I did, I told you that, and then—” “I didn’t figure it out for months,” I said. “I kept sending you messages and waiting to get one back, and I never did. It took me until Christmas to figure it out.

“Stealth-brilliant?” “Yeah,” she said. “She’s smart but she keeps it on the down low.” She had pitched her voice deep when she said “down low,”

“Alexandria, she curates people. She puts together her group of friends, but—” she hiccupped, took another sip of water. “But they’re only allowed to have one thing.” I

“what happens if someone tries to be two things? Or tries to be something that’s taken?” Tabitha smiled then, rueful. “Ask Samantha Crabtree. One day, she was in the Arty Friend spot. Then she went out for track.” Tabitha slid a finger across her throat; her fingernail left the ghost of a white line behind it. “Next thing you know, she’s in the headmaster’s office. Rumors of an inappropriate relationship with a teacher.”

She closed the half-mast eye, and I realized it was easier to look at her when her eyes were closed.

“The graffiti?” I said. “Yep,” she said, not opening her eyes. “I can’t prove it and she won’t admit it, but that’s got Alexandria written all over it.”

I tried to find the anger I’d felt just a couple of hours before, the bitterness—but her hand was in mine, and her head was on my shoulder, and I couldn’t break the spell just yet.

the last thing I could really remember between standing outside the bar and standing on the grass was the look Tabitha had given me—disappointed and satisfied, both at once. Like she’d seen it coming.

Background reports don’t go all that deep. They don’t explore why are you the way you are? or what would it take for me to understand you?

The red haze was not the metaphorical mist of rage that blinds a furious detective so they don’t have to explain exactly how they wound up with a gun in their hand. It was a literal four-foot-wide spray of blood and tissue, floating in front of me like a hologram.

My arm felt like it was filled with bees, but the bees were made of fire and the fire was made of lightning and the lightning was—and then, just like that, the fog of blood and muscle was gone.

She looked me over. Something about our conversation was sticking out—something that she didn’t quite like.

The more crumbs I found, the more certain I was that the whole cake was still at Osthorne. Sylvia hadn’t been murdered by just anyone.

“If anyone finds out what I have to tell you, my shit will be one hundred percent wrecked. You understand?”

The Prophecy had been passed down through his family for generations. It was from a time when soothsaying wasn’t considered a magical pseudoscience; his family had never let it go. It foretold that a child would be born into his generation, and that child would be the most powerful mage of the day and would forever change the world of magic (“and stuff,” as Dylan helpfully added).

“No, an illumine charm. I invented it. An illumination charm just casts sunlight. An illumine charm does that too, but it can also reveal secrets if you put the right twist on it.”

“All I know is, Alexandria and all her friends always talk about how gross he is. And how he makes them feel, I don’t know. Weird, I guess. Capley and Torres were always on his case about it, but he never did anything bad enough to get fired, so I guess they backed off, and it’s not like—”

The kid was lying his ass off. He wasn’t doing a good job at it, but he was committed. He was convinced that he had found something big. He was also convinced that he had to hide it from me. I debated calling him out for cowardice, seeing if that was a button I could push to make him talk.

Being brave means holding your fear in one hand and your responsibility in the other, and this kid was doing what he thought was right, even while he was pants-shittingly scared of whatever he’d found out.

Ms. Capley was … like. She was different, you know? She wasn’t like the other teachers. You could go to her for … stuff.”

I couldn’t be angry at Alexandria. It wasn’t her fault she’d interrupted. But damn, there had been something there. Something that kid thought was really important. And now it was gone, and I didn’t know if I could ever get it back.

something that Tabitha had told me about Alexandria’s little gang was sticking in my craw. Something about the ruthlessness of the graffiti on the lockers and the way Miranda hid her intelligence. Something about the way Alexandria’s lips had curled back from her teeth when I’d called her “Alex.” There was something dark there, a big shadow under the surface of the water, and I needed to know if it was a log or a crocodile.

felt like the ground was shifting under me, rippling with the waves of a wake I couldn’t identify. I blinked. This wasn’t a game I needed to play.

“Okay, here’s the deal. She was seeing someone. They were serious. But it was a secret, okay? Not just a ‘secret,’ but like … a total secret.”

Her eyes glittered with the story. Alexandria had been dying to tell someone other than Courtney, but her respect for the total secret—or her fear of the wrath of this clandestine couple—had been enough to keep her mouth shut. But now Alexandria’s teacher was dead, and she could crack the seal on what she wasn’t supposed to know.

I hadn’t tugged the information out of her, after all—she’d tricked me into putting my hand between her teeth. Her unblinking eyes were still on me, hungry for my reaction. “It was your sister.”

Tabitha and Sylvia. Why hadn’t Tabitha told me? We weren’t exactly in the business of telling each other things, but couldn’t she have dropped into conversation that she’d been dating—or at the very least, fucking—the woman whose grisly murder I’d been hired to solve?

I swallowed down a flash of anger at the way these kids wasted their magic. They could do anything, and this is what they chose.

Rahul grinned at me, and I knew that he was grinning at the Ivy I was pretending to be, but I loved the way his smile felt.

walked. I should have told Rahul that I wasn’t magic—but then, it was better for the case if nobody knew. They would talk to me differently if they realized I was an outsider. It wasn’t because I wanted him to like me—it was just for the case. For the job.

I let my eyes unfocus just enough that the written lines formed uneven, abstract shapes. Or were they abstract? The longer I looked at them, the more it seemed like there was something beneath the words, something shifting, something that was just beyond my grasp.