An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 14

Someone cursed. For an instant, Ellory thought it was her, but her voice was not that deep or that far away.

The table to the far right of where they’d been sitting was no longer empty, and the carpet beneath her feet was no longer present. Shiny mahogany wood formed the floor, its lines distorted by a thin layer of mist that coated everything like freshly fallen snow. It reminded her of summers spent at the public pool, diving deep to watch the sunlight warp as it pierced the chlorinated water.

But the figure at the table noticed nothing wrong. He ran his thick fingers through neat brown locs, which fell over the wrinkled collar of his starch-white oxford shirt. Dripping from the top rail of the chair was a black hoodie with the Japanese characters for Lupin the Third embroidered across the back. His sleeve was rolled up to reveal a detailed tattoo on his inner forearm of a crow with small black eyes and short black legs. Its feathers pointed, knifelike, toward a flat, square tail near the bend of his elbow. Above its head was the far-too-familiar symbol from the museum: a sun with a line through the center.

And she knew, without knowing how, that this was Malcolm Mayhew. The Graves Ghost, resurrected—or perhaps not yet entombed.

Vision blurring, Ellory crept closer, taking note of the undercut that his locs had hidden from the back. His eyebrows were faded. His mustache curled above his upper lip in a paintbrush swipe. His face was a light brown that darkened closer to his neck, and his round nose bore a silver septum piercing. Below his oxford shirt, he wore plaid patchwork pants in red and black. He scratched his cheek with ring-laden fingers. His large black eyes were walnut shaped.

She smiled when she noticed he had a half-eaten bag of Twizzlers by his textbook. At least her research had been sound.

Wait. She still had lips?

Ellory looked down at herself and tried not to scream. She was a translucent shadow, a figure made of the endless void between worlds, limned in skull-white stardust. She had known—she had seen —that she’d been severed from her own body, but it was one thing to watch herself walk away and another to see what little remained. Frost gathered in her chest, an invisible chill that seemed to root deeper the longer she and her body were separated. She staggered, catching the edge of the table to keep herself upright. A pen went flying as she fell through it.

Malcolm Mayhew cursed again. He grappled for his pen, and still he didn’t look at her. “I swear this bitch is haunted.”

Picking herself up, Ellory stifled a hysterical laugh. If only he knew.

“All right,” said Malcolm, “I think I know what I did wrong. But let me check one more thing before I try again.”

His chair scraped across the wood. It echoed through the empty library. Moonlight snuck through the skylight, casting a ghostly glow in the shape of a spotlight, but Malcolm sat too far away to bask in it. She could see everything perfectly in the dark, but could he ?

He rubbed his eyes as he ambled toward the nearby stacks. A watch was on his wrist; it was nearing three in the morning. His pants had suspenders clipped to the back and front pockets. Silver chains swung like pendulums from his belt loops. The shelves consumed him, until not even his shadow remained.

Ellory realized she was about to watch him die.

“WAIT!”

He didn’t hear her, couldn’t hear her. Maybe it was because she wasn’t really here, the memory unaffected by her spectral presence, but no matter how loudly she screamed, her own voice echoed back to her, sounding more mocking each time: “ WAITWAITWAITWAIT .”

Ellory sprinted after Malcolm Mayhew, reasoning that if a table couldn’t hold her, then the shelves couldn’t crush her. He’d found a ladder and hefted himself up to the second rung, scanning the higher titles. Dust flaked from their aged spines. He coughed into his elbow twice before he hopped to the floor for a fit of sneezing. This time, when he climbed the ladder, he found the right book and freed it from the shelf in a grimy cloud of neglect. He wiped the cover on his pants and turned the yellowing pages with care, lips soundlessly forming the words of whatever he was reading.

All the while, the mist rose from the floor, climbing up Ellory’s legs, her hips, her shoulders. The room fell away until all she could see was the silver fog that gathered outside a perfect circle carved for Malcolm Mayhew alone. Behind him, the shelf creaked and groaned like a grandmother standing.

Suddenly, she couldn’t move any closer. Her feet were rooted to the ground.

Her stomach clenched. It was time.

Despite the dedicated efforts of those who posted graphic videos to social media of the police’s extrajudicial killings, the endless public shootings, the ever-worsening genocides, and the tragic natural disasters, Ellory had never seen someone die before. Her last two trips to Jamaica had been for funerals, but those ceremonies were for the desolate aftermath of death, when tears in stone churches were dried with evening parties outdoors to celebrate the life that had been lived. She had never walked this closely with death, locked in the same room as someone taking their last breaths. It was unsettling in a way she couldn’t describe. Her fingers twitched at her sides, aching to intervene. Aching from the knowledge that it was useless to try.

The shelf tipped, books tumbling like raindrops from the top row. Malcolm turned in time to let out a cry drowned out by the falling tomes. For an instant, their eyes locked, and Ellory’s heart dropped to her ankles. Of course he could see her now, in this pause between living and not living. She forced an apologetic smile. Malcolm’s eyes were wide as plates, sclera ghost white around his dark brown irises.

Before he’d taken even two steps to safety, the other shelf collapsed atop him.

Ellory felt cold for an entirely different reason. Wood creaked and cracked, forming a jagged grave that buried the now-silent Malcolm Mayhew. Books continued to strike the ground, sounding like a boxer hitting a punching bag. One fell open before her, its pages shuffled by the breeze of the fallen shelves.

Then she realized the wind wasn’t coming from the fallen shelves. It raked across her shadow skin, and her shadow body prickled with unease as the mist cleared enough for her to see another figure beyond the wreckage. She couldn’t make out the details of their face and clothes, but their hands were tucked into their pockets, and she could tell, somehow, that they were staring at where Malcolm had once stood.

“Sorry, man,” the figure said, lifting one hand from their pocket. Their fist clenched, and the wind stopped as abruptly as it had started. When they turned into the mist, she caught a flash of a crow tattoo almost identical to the one on Malcolm’s skin—except the bird’s eyes glowed an eerie silver. “You’re more use to us dead than alive.”

Ellory’s heart raced. The cold was still there, but fear had crept back in, squeezing like a vise until she couldn’t breathe. Because even now, she wasn’t alone.

Another figure made of shadows and stardust stood beside her, and she knew without seeing that it was Malcolm Mayhew. She looked at him—at the lack of him—and she could feel his eyes boring into her, as if to say, Do you see? Do you understand?

But she didn’t understand. Not at all.

Because it seemed almost like that person had used magic. Real magic.

Because, if so, then Malcolm Mayhew’s death had been a murder.

And if he’d been murdered, then why? And by whom?

Malcolm gripped her shoulder as tightly as an eagle would a mouse. He had no fingers, yet she felt them digging into her until her bone threatened to snap. His touch was so icy that it burned , but she refused to scream. She refused. His jaw, or the shadows where his jaw would be, elongated until his head looked like a gaping hole, and from that hole exploded a dozen birds, a hundred birds, a thousand birds, all of them shrieking until there was no room for the sound of her own thoughts—

And she lurched up in bed with a scream.

“JESUS CHRIST, ELLORY,” Stasie screamed back from her bed. Her Bambi-brown hair was a mass of silk scrunchies tied together with a bathrobe’s belt. She had cream smeared on her face and murder in her eyes. “SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO TO SLEEP.”

Ellory struggled out of bed, ignoring the muttered curses of her roommate. In the time it took her to find a pair of shoes, Stasie had buried her head beneath her pillow with her back to Ellory. A muffled “Where are you going ? It’s four a.m.—” followed her out the door, but Ellory didn’t stop until she was down the hallway.

Before she could bang on Tai’s door, her voice filtered through it.

“—a stupid dream.”

“One we both had?” Cody shot back from within, their voice faint, as if they were on the other side of the room. “What in the hell?”

“We just came back from a séance. Of course we’d dream about ghosts. That doesn’t mean anything.”

Ellory stepped forward until her ear was pressed against the wood. Was it possible that Cody and Tai had seen the same things she had? Even the fact that they were awake right now was promising. She didn’t have to hold the claustrophobic burden of this memory—this vision ?—by herself.

“Look, I know it’s been a strange year for us,” said Tai. Her voice was farther away now, perhaps as she joined Cody on the bed. Ellory could almost picture them there: tangled brown limbs and fond dark eyes; Cody’s fingers buried in Tai’s hair; Tai’s arms locked around their waist; two hearts beating in concert. “But life is weird. That doesn’t make it magic.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Quote Shakespeare to me again,” Tai purred.

Cody made a sound halfway between a laugh and a moan, and Ellory jolted back from the door with burning cheeks and a complicated emotion swirling in her chest. It wasn’t the sharp edge of jealousy that briefly knifed through her when she witnessed her friends’ harmonious relationship, but a feeling darker and more cutting. The conversation had told her nothing, and her suspicions were already running away from her. Because it almost sounded like not only had the three of them had the same dream but the three of them had also been experiencing strange phenomena since the school year had begun.

And Cody and Tai were hiding that from Ellory.

She was assuming things. She had to be. The séance had her seeing conspiracies where there were none. Tai—her best friend, her first college friend—wouldn’t let her drown in her flights of fancy alone without telling her she’d seen the same things. And even if Tai would, Cody had been willing to hear Ellory out, to believe her. They would have said something. They would have confided in her, with or without Tai.

Besides, there were many things that could be described as strange and magical.

Ellory repeated that to herself as she shuffled back up the hallway, but she felt suddenly, utterly alone.