Blood Like Magic, page 10
“So… then Eden will be okay?” The family isn’t going anywhere. If we can keep up with our loan payments, we’ll still have it, and everything will be fine.
Priya lets out a sharp laugh. “A living witch, Voya, a witch.”
It hits me then, sharp, cruel, and almost funny because it suddenly seems so obvious. Because of course. As if the choice I had to make wasn’t hard enough.
As long as there is a living witch of my blood.
If I accept Mama Jova’s task and fail, every person tied to our family, present and future, will lose their magic. There will be no more Thomas witches to power our ancestral house. No more magic running through its bones.
And nothing left to keep my sister’s heart beating.
“I think… I’d like to sit.” I drop to the grass, parking myself on it and staring out at nothing.
Priya sits beside me, gathering my limp hands into hers. “We agreed that it was better for you to know everything going into this decision.”
“Right.” That explains why Mom and Granny were acting so strange when Priya asked me to come to the park. Mom probably wanted to come to support me while this cake splattered on the floor, but Granny wouldn’t let her. It’s my task, but what I do could mean life or death for my sister, for Priya’s child, who I thought was safe from all of this before we went on this walk.
“I want to be a good mom, but even I don’t know what’s best.” She bites her lip. “If you don’t do the task, Eden will live as long as someone of your blood stays in the house. Will and I, of course, would stay to help however we could. But then… would she have a life like my sister? One filled with feeling like she doesn’t belong or that she’s missing something? Lost and angry. Dependent on the rest of you, unable to leave to have her own life. Only able to go on so long as one of you does.
“If she had the chance to become a witch, if she passed her Calling, she would become that Thomas with magic in her blood. A witch with her own will and independence, giving life to the house that gives life to her, so long as she stays there. But she would have a full life. And magic is… it’s so much more than power. Everything I am and ever will be is wrapped in it. The power to know your ancestors as intimately as we do is a privilege, a gift, and to think of her not getting to have that…”
Everything she’s saying, I know. It’s everything I’ve thought of losing if I fail. How it would feel to be around my family, who, even if they were supportive, couldn’t fill the hole that not having magic would leave. Maybe I could find a way to make it through without it, but I would forever be on the fringes of the community where I was born and bred.
And Eden, she’s not even old enough to know what she would want. To know what she could be missing. But I also imagine that she would rather be alive than not. “If I fail…”
“I know,” Priya whispers, gripping my hands tighter. “I have faith. I do. I believe that the ancestors are trying to better our lives, to help us. I mean, maybe Mama Jova doesn’t mean it for real. Maybe she just wants you to make the choice, to trust her. Maybe that’s the task.”
She takes in another deep breath. “Either way, this is your decision. I promised Will, your mom, and your grandma that I wouldn’t try to tell you what to do. But I want a vow from you, too. All I ask is that if you decide to do this task, you commit to it. I know that choices are hard for you. That you struggle with them. But if you make this decision, you need to do whatever it takes to get it right, because failure is not something any of us can afford. Not this time.”
I am so hacking tired of everyone telling me how pathetic I am.
My fingers shake within Priya’s, Eden’s juice pouch that I’m still holding crumpled between our fingers. Even Priya, who’s only known me a few years, is familiar with the way I struggle through my decisions. Enough to be afraid of me messing up because of it. To be scared that I would let it stop me from keeping my baby sister alive.
“Promise me!” she cries, staring into my eyes, her whole body trembling. “Promise me that if you choose to do this, if you choose to chase a future where we keep our magic, that you’ll succeed. There isn’t room to just try. You need to do it.”
“I promise,” I say, my hands clammy in hers.
And I mean it.
If I choose to accept the task, I’ll do everything to make sure that I complete it. Because Priya’s right—there aren’t any chances to take when it comes to Eden’s life.
But the truth is that I still don’t know if that’s what I want to do.
And now making my choice feels more than hard.
It’s impossible.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I lie on my bed, alone in my bedroom. I’m thankful that I didn’t see anyone when I dragged my feet up the stairs, barely able to say bye to Eden, whose comically furrowed brow suggested that she didn’t understand why I wasn’t as happy as she was about our park visit.
The sun is low in the sky now, its darkness seeping through my window. Time counting down. It’s like there’s a ten-ton weight on every limb—pushing me down and making me stick to the yellow banana-print duvet. There’s a dress that matches somewhere in my closet.
I flick my finger on my phone screen and get a projection playing on the ceiling. It’s some sort of sitcom where every twenty minutes a decision comes up, and you’re supposed to choose what they do next. I tap my thumb, and the male lead leaves his current girlfriend for one in Peru.
Contrary to my family’s belief, I can make choices. Ones like this are easy. They don’t matter.
Other decisions are different. It’s like kneading dough that’s too sticky. One piece gets stuck to your fingers, and then it builds, until every single one is covered. The harder I try to work it, the more the pieces stick—each one a nagging thought in my brain telling me I’m going to mess it up. I could just throw flour on the dough and everything would be okay. But even that seems wrong. Like I’ll add too much and dry it out. And so I end up in this cycle, kneading a too-sticky dough endlessly until someone comes to take it away from me, or I overwork and ruin it.
I can’t do that this time. This is one dough that I have to get perfect.
Mom opens the door and lets herself in. She sits down at the foot of my bed and tosses something at me. “Surprise!”
It lands on my chest, and it takes me a couple of seconds to realize it’s the brown, crunchy, sugarcoated goodness that is kurma.
I sit up and rip open the plastic package like a girl starved. Mom watches me, her fingers twitching in her lap.
The sweet stick goes soft in my mouth. “Priya told me.”
She lets out a long breath. “Guess where I got the kurma.”
“At the International Market, where you apparently went without me.” She knows that’s my absolute favorite place. But this time, talking about it doesn’t make me feel better. “Mom, Priya told me about Eden.”
“I got it from Jessa, you know her, the woman with the two kids at Toronto French School who’s always buying our face masks?”
“You mean the one who can never stop bragging about how her kids go to Toronto French School?”
Mom smirks. “Yes, her. She had gone to the market earlier in the day and gave me a pack as a gift when I dropped off her face masks for the month.”
“Oh. Thank you. And thanks to her, too.” Now I kind of feel bad for hating on her. I shove another piece of kurma in my mouth and crunch down on it. Sweet sugar floods my taste buds and comforts me in a way only food can. “Mom.”
She steals a stick out of my package and sucks on it. Which is gross and the worst way to eat it.
“Mom.”
“I know!” she snaps, swallowing the kurma in her mouth with a loud gulp.
“What do you think I should do?”
She presses the palms of her hands against her eyes. We’ve been here before. Both of us on this bed while she tried to talk her way around telling me that Dad was leaving. “I can’t make that decision for you.”
I lower my head and my shoulders droop. It’s always been easier to have other people make my choices. I could sidestep making a decision without even trying. But this one is too much and no one will help me. “How am I supposed to know what to do?”
“This is your task. All you have to do is complete it.”
I scoff. “Oh, that’s all?”
Mom narrows her eyes at me. “No sass. I mean, do whatever you think is best.”
“I don’t know what I think is best.”
“At the end of the day, this is a choice between giving up or going for it.”
I shake my head and let out a laugh. “No, it’s not. It’s a choice between Eden dying or staying alive.”
“No,” Mom says, voice sharp. “That’s only the choice if you plan on failing. And I would like to believe in a world where you pass. You can do this.”
“Except we’re living in a world where I’ve already failed once.”
Mom takes another piece of kurma and twirls it between her fingers. “Do you think you’re better off not doing anything?”
I begged for this second chance and told Mama Jova I wouldn’t fail if I had one more shot. But now I don’t know. Things were different then. No lives were on the line. Maybe it is better if I do nothing. Eden will live as long as one Thomas is alive and stays at home. Me and my cousins are about ten to thirteen years older than her. She can still have a fairly full life.
Only, without magic.
Our family motto is we suffer and we survive. Is it better to survive a life without ancestors or magic, or suffer the possibility of having no life at all? Put like that, the choice should be easy. Except Mom is right. That’s only the reality if I fail. If I pass, we can have it all. Is magic worth that risk?
I curl my fingers into fists in my blanket. “We can’t afford my failure.”
Mom steupses and stands up. “You need to get your mind straight! Stop talking like you’ve already lost. Take some time and let me know if you want to discuss this more before you decide.” She stomps over to the door and yanks it open, only to make a surprised yelp and stumble back.
Keis, Keisha, and Alex are huddled up against the other side. Out of instinct, I shove the kurma packet under my pillow. Alex’s eyes narrow at the motion. If there’s anyone who loves food as much as I do, it’s her.
Mom throws her hands up and leaves the room, and they flood in. It’s only once my cousins make it through that I notice Eden sneaking in along with them.
Keisha jumps on the bed beside me, closely followed by Eden, who squishes between the two of us, her sunhat abandoned and her hair flattened from it.
Alex reaches over and snatches my kurma packet from under the pillow.
“No!” I screech.
She takes one out of the packet and shoves it in her mouth before tossing the pack to Keisha, who passes a stick to Eden after taking one for herself and tosses it to her sister. By the time Keis gets her share, it’s empty.
I might cry.
Keis collapses onto the bed and crunches on her kurma. “I’ll get you another package later.”
You’d better.
“I may have found you an internship opportunity, through the Huangs.” There are more relevant things I could say, but this is the only one that makes me feel good. My one positive thing for the day.
“I’m not helping you avoid talking about your Calling. I could hear your struggle all the way from my room.”
“Because you listen to me constantly,” I say, my voice clipped, though I don’t mean it to be.
Keis snaps back, “That, and because you’re having emotional thoughts. They’re loud.”
Eden examines my head like my thoughts are projecting in a way she can see.
“If you practiced even the tiniest bit, then you wouldn’t have to hear them.” I cross my arms over my chest. “Must be nice to pass your Calling, get a strong gift, then hacking ignore it just because you feel like it. Must be nice to be too good for magic that some of us may never have.”
“Don’t get mad at me because you don’t know what to do,” my cousin says, her voice flat and searing.
It’s only once I’m done speaking that I notice my chest heaving, the rage behind my words simmering in the air like an overspiced curry. I stare down at my lap, not wanting to look around the room at my cousins and sister. At the people whose lives will change forever if I fail.
Keisha pokes me with her sharp nail. “You’re uncomfortable.”
I wince and fight the urge to scream at her. She’s the only one who would be better off if I accepted and failed Mama Jova’s task.
“I don’t think I’m too good for magic,” Keis mutters.
Keisha snorts and Alex’s eyebrows shoot up.
“I don’t!” Keis shakes her head, curls flying. “I love magic. I do. I love being able to connect with our ancestors. I love casting for fun. I love being part of a magic community, however messed up ours is. I would never want to live without magic if I didn’t need to.” She looks at me. “I just don’t want magic to be the only thing about me that matters. Granny and the adults act like your powers and gifts are the only important things about being a witch. My protest isn’t about hating magic. It’s about proving that it’s not the only thing I can be good at. Witches could be so much more than that if we tried. We could change the world.”
I’m too much of a coward to apologize aloud, so I mumble a sorry to Keis in my head. She’s my best friend, and I never quite understood that’s how she felt about magic. I was over here getting sparked, thinking she was taking for granted what Eden and I stood to live without.
“What should I do?” I say for what feels like the hundredth time that day.
Keisha opens her mouth, but Keis cuts her off. “No. This is your decision.”
“We don’t need magic,” Keisha says, ignoring her sister. “We’re passing down a bunch of weak gifts, and what we can do with blood spells isn’t much to celebrate. There’s important shit on the line.” She gives Eden a significant glance. Keis must have shared the thoughts in my head, so now they all know. “Why push for more generations of this? Why risk it?”
In some ways, it’s easy for Keisha to say we don’t need magic. Her gift isn’t exactly useful, though it has made her more perceptive than she already was. But she’s always just been interested in having fun, whether it’s going on her endless dates, or feed modeling, or hanging out with her friends. The complete opposite of her ambitious sister. But she still has a point. Is more magic worth the risk?
Keis glares at her. “This isn’t about whether your gift is cool or not. Magic has run in our family for centuries. It’s what got us here. When our ancestors were dying of thirst and starvation in slave boats, the magic that runs in our veins kept them alive.”
“Yeah. And they were still slaves in the end.” Keisha scowls at her sister. “Name a single thing about magic worth risking… worth risking you-know-what over.”
“What’s you-know-what?” Eden interrupts, looking between the sisters.
“Kiddos don’t need to know,” Keisha says.
My baby sister scowls.
“It’s not a risk if you actually hacking believe in Voya.” Keis turns to me. “Why can’t you just believe in yourself for once? Every single one of us passed. You can too. Passing your Calling is about trusting yourself and the ancestors.”
“But Papa Dalton’s Calling,” Alex says, leaning on my pillows. “He didn’t even know it was happening. He just picked a book.”
“Exactly! He didn’t even need to think about it. Believing in them and believing in you should be that automatic.” Keis points to Alex. “How did you know you were making the right choice in your Calling?”
Alex shrugs. “I guess… I just figured that I was.”
“Exactly! Vo, you’re making this harder than it needs to be. Some of them may feel impossible, but none are. It’s a task an ancestor designed specifically for you because they believe that you can do it.”
I curl my knees into my chest. I get what Keis is saying. It’s like what Priya mentioned, that maybe the real task is just trusting Mama Jova and accepting it. But I also get what Keisha means. We have magic, but it’s never quite saved us from hardship. We have a house, but we’re constantly on the edge of losing it to debt collectors. And why risk everything just to keep passing that magic down? Thomases are supposed to be powerful, but we’ve been on the decline since becoming pure. Rejecting the task would change our futures, but maybe the next generation would do better without. “Maybe we should take a vote?”
“No,” Keis snaps. “You need to decide. It’s your Calling.”
The weight comes back and dumps itself on me. I wish I could sink into the bed and disappear. No Calling. No task. No Mama Jova. Just layers and layers of soft, comforting sheets.
When I was little, I used to have hope for the future. I lost a lot of that when I couldn’t stop Dad from leaving. It felt like there should have been a third option other than leaving Mom to go with him, or letting him leave to stay with her. I should have known how to make being with me more important than whatever he expected to find by going. But I didn’t. I couldn’t choose anything, so I said nothing.
When he came back with a new family, I realized he didn’t leave to find himself and come back to me. He left to start over without me.
And just like that, the sticky ball of dough came into my life.
Eden wraps both her arms around one of mine. “Daddy says it’s better to try and fail than to never try at all.”
I almost laugh and tug her closer, pressing my face into her neck. I’m getting my fatherly advice not from my father but through my baby sister. What would Mom and Dad think knowing they’re giving out the same sort of wisdom?
I look at Alex, who’s flicking invisible kurma pieces off her fingernails. “What about you?”
Keis makes a huffing sound.
Alex lets out a huge sigh. “I mean, Keis had a point about the whole Papa Dalton thing. I support you and whatever you decide, but I won’t pretend my gift doesn’t mean something to me.” She shrugs and throws an apologetic look at Keis. “I’m sorry, but you all here, right now, are my family. Future generations can figure their own stuff out. I would leave things as they are. There’s no risk to that.”
