Chapter 21
This close to midnight, Powers That Bean was a wasteland.
A table at the back housed four customers, all of them on their laptops with bags beneath their eyes and coffee cups the size of trophies half-empty beside their keyboards.
Ellory had consumed a large coffee of her own before pinning on her name tag, tying her apron with a double knot, and stuffing her hair into a jaunty cap with a praying coffee bean on the front.
Her leaden feet had to be forced into heading to the counter to relieve the other barista, because Tai was waiting with questions Ellory didn’t know how to answer.
But all Tai said was “Can I get a small Earl Grey tea with three sugars?”
Ellory went through the motions, keeping one eye on the back table in case they flagged her down for more coffee.
Tai drank her tea while flicking through her phone, giving Ellory time to wipe down the counter and check the espresso machine.
Her shoulders eventually lowered, the knot of anxiety in her chest easing.
Part of her knew Tai was doing this on purpose, letting Ellory have this space to speak in her own time; even so, she was grateful.
“I heard you and Cody one night,” Ellory said, which wasn’t where she had meant to start at all. Tai’s brow furrowed, so she charged on. “You were talking about magic—or they were. You had each other to confide in, and it felt like I was outside of that. Like I needed to have my own secret keeper.”
“Who did you pick?” Tai asked. “Please tell me it wasn’t Blackwood.”
“Graves.”
“Oh, of course.”
Ellory frowned. “Why did you say it like that?”
“You’re obsessed with each other,” said Tai, matter-of-fact. “Of course you’d ask him. Of course he’d say yes.”
Ellory retreated to collect an order from her only table.
Whether the coffee shop swelled with crowds or dwindled to a single table, she treated her work-study with the reverence it deserved.
Textbooks and clothes and school supplies weren’t covered by her scholarship—nor were her tickets home to see Aunt Carol during breaks.
Powers That Bean was her kingdom and her captor, where she kept order and pleased patrons with ruthless efficiency at the cost of studying time and social engagements.
At least on slow nights, she could have a textbook open under the counter to stay on top of her classes.
The times she worked late, watching raucous students stumble from party to party on the other side of the glass—well.
It would all be worth it when she graduated.
Tai was waiting with her chin propped up on her hand, her Earl Grey tea drained.
The scent of bergamot lingered in the air, making Ellory think reluctantly of Hudson.
Tai’s phone was face down on the table, her full attention like a blunt weapon.
“This isn’t about Cody or me. Are you ready to tell me what else has been going on? ”
And Ellory finally was. Her entire school year, recontextualized through the framework of true magic, from the séance and the murder she had witnessed to the field and the nature she had healed.
The longer she spoke, the more relieved she felt.
Every moment had seemed so surreal that keeping it to herself, preserving it only in her notes, had helped her feel in control.
But Tai listened without judgment, so much so that Ellory couldn’t believe she had taken so long to confide in her best friend.
“Wow,” Tai said when she was finished. “Magic, huh?”
“I know.” Ellory deflated atop the counter, her arms dangling dramatically over the front. “I couldn’t believe it either.”
“It’s been an unusual school year. Even before the séance, I’ve felt like…
something is off.” Tai stared to the side, where nothing but empty tables and scattered chairs waited for acknowledgment.
“I tried calling my aunties, but they couldn’t explain this inexplicable familiarity.
The way the universe seems to bend to me sometimes.
The way I feel too small and too large for this world.
” Her expression melted into something sheepish.
“I sound confused. I didn’t want you to think—”
“No, I—I’ve been feeling the same way.” Ellory had straightened at some point during Tai’s confession. Now her hands closed over Tai’s wrist, a comforting gesture to ground them both. “Graves has been trying to help me figure it all out, but part of me was still fighting this…until today.”
“What was it like?” Tai’s eyes were wide, her voice breathless. “Doing magic?”
Several words crowded the back of Ellory’s throat, each of them inadequate.
It felt like loss—draining and all-consuming—and also like strength—as rightness in a world that had always been wrong.
It felt like sickness; it felt like panacea.
It felt limiting and limitless. Instinctively, her hand found the back of her neck again, rubbing against the tattoo she couldn’t see.
“It was like stepping into a memory,” she finally said, clearing the counter of Tai’s empty cup and abandoned tea bag.
“It’s not a good memory, but it’s not a bad one.
It just…is. You wonder how you could have ever forgotten that life could be like this—and you dread what it means for you, for the world, that life can be like this. Words don’t do it justice.”
“I want to see.”
Ellory glanced at the back table, where one of the students had fallen asleep on their keyboard.
Their laptop screen was illuminated with an incomprehensible PDF scan, incomprehensible not because of the distance but because the text was illegible, letters bleeding into one another from age.
Ellory would have passed out rather than deal with that, too.
“Maybe during my break,” she allowed.
On the night shift, her break consisted of being allowed to sit down behind the counter; with no one to relieve her, she couldn’t abandon her post. Tai called Cody, who showed up in a long hoodie and leggings, their hair beneath a navy baseball cap.
While Tai and Ellory went out back, Cody hung around the counter, ready to summon Ellory if anyone needed anything—or, worse, if her boss did a surprise drop-in.
Outside, the moon was almost full, lined by a slip of darkness no larger than a hangnail.
Dumpsters were wedged against the back of the coffee shop, and gray garbage bags peeked out.
The grass was dull even without the wash of moonlight, wheat-yellow patches broken by soil and stone.
Tai leaned against the building, wrapping her winter coat tighter around her as the cold tore through the night, sinking into places it didn’t belong.
Ellory flexed her hands at her sides, trying to find that string of power that had wound within her at Bancroft.
But there was nothing.
It wasn’t even as though there were a notable absence of something.
That would have roused her suspicions, given her a mystery she could sink her teeth into.
Instead, her heart beat, and her breath flowed in and out of her lungs, but there was a lack of that something more that had overtaken her on the field.
She felt no more powerful than a leaf swept along by the wind, and it scared her, this impotence, how easily it rendered her weak.
Ellory clenched her eyes shut, rifling through a lifetime of memories. She opened her mind in offering, inviting the magic in to take and to create. A field of grass. A ball of light. A pack of birds. Something. Anything.
Her eyes jumped open.
No goose bumps flared along her arms. No pain singed her nerve endings. If there was sentient power in the universe, it was ignoring her. Her mind was intact, and she should have been happy about it, but this left her empty in a different kind of way.
This came with the sour taste of failure.
Tai shifted, her puffer jacket crinkling in reminder of her presence.
Ellory’s cheeks heated as she stared at the ground until her eyes watered.
It was like Bancroft had been a dream, and she had awakened into the real world where magic was the stuff of Disney movies and fairy tales, reserved for girls with golden locks and evil stepmothers.
The fire in her face spread to her stomach, a kind of shameful resignation that said, You should have known better.
“Your break is over,” said Tai. Her gentle voice was like a slap.
Ellory didn’t turn. “Tell Cody I’ll be in soon.”
Tai took a breath, as though to say something, and then decided against it.
Ellory waited until her footsteps faded to drag the back of her hand across her eyelids, wiping away the gathered tears.
She glared at the grass as though it had personally betrayed her, but the only response she got was the rattle of the dumpster lid in the wind.