Page 3 of Magic for Nothing

Artie burst in through the front door and thrust a rectangular object at Tyler.

“Hey,” he said, panting slightly. “You wanna play RoboRally?”

The nightmare bled back out of Tyler’s face, replaced by an expression of deep, profound confusion. I could sort of understand where he was coming from. This wasn’t exactly normal procedure.

I put a hand over my face and groaned. “I asked for backup, not a comedy routine, Artie.”

“This is backup,” he said, sounding stung. “I was an eleven-year-old boy and you weren’t, and I’m telling you, this is backup. C’mon, Tyler. When’s the last time you sat down and played a game?”

My cousin is an enormous nerd—and when I’m the one saying that, it means something. After all, I’m the girl who shares her room with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of X-Men trades, and who once stayed up for three days straight to organize an attack plan for the Comic-Con hotel lottery. Somehow, despite all that, Artie out-nerds me.

But he’s got good instincts. I lowered my hand. Tyler was looking thoughtfully at the box in Artie’s hands.

“Is this a trick?” he asked. “When you open the lid, will it be a Ouija board or something?”

Artie looked hurt. “I don’t screw around with the spirit world,” he said. “Aunt Mary would hit me in the head.”

“Damn right,” said Mary, appearing next to him. “And you shouldn’t believe all the press about Ouija boards. They can’t be used in an exorcism. Trivial Pursuit can, but that’s another story. Come on, kid. What can it hurt?”

Tyler looked at Mary, frowning. Finally, he heaved a heavy sigh and said, “I guess. But I get firsts.”

“No problem,” I said.

The four of us sat on the floor around the board, which Artie had laid out with the utmost care, as fussy as if he were getting set up in a clean, well-lit game store, and not in a decrepit house that would probably be condemned as soon as it stopped being haunted. (Most construction firms are sensibly hands-off about really haunted houses, even if they don’t like to admit that ghosts are real. There’s making a profit and then there’s getting possessed. Only one of them is good for business.) I was going to need a six-hour shower when we got out of here, after all the things I’d touched without meaning to.

On the plus side, the game seemed to be helping. Tyler was still blue and faintly transparent, but at least he looked like a kid again, and not the sort of thing that had been designed to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

Our little robots were making good progress through their robotic death factory, even if Tyler never touched the cards or pieces. He just looked at them and they moved. There was a good chance he was cheating, since he could presumably control which card he pulled from the deck, but it didn’t seem worth pointing out, especially since we were supposed to be calming him down, not getting into a weird family game night fight. Besides, it wasn’t like he was hurting anyone.

Unlike Tyler, Mary used her hands when it was her turn to move, pulling her cards with relish, leaning across anyone who got in her way in order to reach her avatar. Like Tyler, she had allowed herself to grow less and less solid, until she’d become transparent enough for me to see right through her. It seemed to be helping him calm down. He kept stealing little glances in her direction, like he couldn’t believe another ghost would take this sort of interest in him. Or that anyone would take this sort of interest in him. Like most poltergeists, he’d been confined to the house he was haunting since his death. And he was lonely.

The more relaxed Tyler got, the more he talked, going on and on about shows he liked to watch and movies he was looking forward to seeing. He didn’t seem to realize that it was all four years out of date. Most of his shows had been canceled; most of those movies had not only been released, they had come out on DVD and been consigned to the bargain shelf. He was a boy without a country in more ways than one.

Artie caught my eye and grimaced. I wrinkled my nose in apology. Artie and his sister Elsie are only half-human. Their father, my Uncle Ted, is an incubus. Artie inherited his father’s empathic abilities, which would be a neat superpower to have if we lived in a world where wearing spandex out of the house was not only socially acceptable but magically automatically flattering. Instead, poor Artie gets to pick up the emotional state of every living person around him, whether he wants to or not. Since Mary and Tyler weren’t alive, they weren’t putting off emotions he could read. But I was. And I was feeling so much pity for Tyler that it must have been like swimming through treacle.

“Sorry,” I mouthed.

“’S okay,” he mouthed back.

“What are you whispering about?” asked Tyler suspiciously.

We hadn’t been whispering—we hadn’t been making a sound—but it was a good opening. “Whose turn it is to do the dishes. It’s Artie’s. He always tries to get out of it.”

“So do you,” said Artie.

I stuck my tongue out at him. Tyler giggled.

He was starting to sound like a real kid again. “What did you want to be when you grew up, Tyler?” I asked, trying to make my tone light.

He glanced at me through the translucent fringe of his hair. “A football player. Or maybe a fireman. I was trying to make up my mind when I got hit.” His lips drew downward. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Mary. “I know some ghost kids who still like to play football. Best part? You can’t get hurt when you’re dead. So they can just tackle and shove and do whatever they want, forever. And it’s never time to go in for dinner, and there’s never homework to make them stop playing.”

“Yeah?” asked Tyler. “What if I wanted to be a fireman?”

“You’re a poltergeist, right?” asked Artie. “I mean, if you figured out how to control what you can do, and you decided what you really wanted to do with your time was fight fires, I bet you could. You could get the water and the foam deeper into the building, you could move smoke away from kids who are trapped . . .”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” said Mary. “There are lots of constructive ways to haunt.”