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That was too normal to be Juniper’s doing. My heart sank into my gut like… well, a swallowed piece of avocado.
Portal magic was rare and complicated. I only knew of one way of casting the spell: by using the Astrosmos, a magical relic that made portal magic possible for anyone.
And if someone in Silver Springs had the Astrosmos, they had stolen it from my friends, who were completely fucked without it.
Chapter 4
Itiltedmychairback in the prison library and waited for the man I was going to shiv.
In the meantime, I watched a portal swirling on the other side of the library’s sole window as rage and worry grew inside me like the weeds in the prison yard: unbeatable, no matter how much you tried to stomp them out.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever was opening the portals was using the Astrosmos. The random shit that spilled from them was similar to my early attempts at learning how to use the relic.
Once I had figured it out, I used it to create Free Jinx, a bubble dimension for fellow magical outcasts. It was a refuge. A place where we wouldn’t be chased out of town for using a form of magic others disliked.
A place where we belonged.
The lost souls and misfits who lived there had dubbed themselves the Eclipses because they were often viewed as portents of evil. But they had light inside them, even if many people only saw the shadow.
The problem was that the Astrosmos kept the bubble dimension open and stable. If someone had stolen it, Free Jinx would collapse like a dying star and take the ninety-three people who lived there with it.
Please, please don’t be the Astrosmos, I thought as I watched a portal spit a bunch of random bullshit and the cow that had plopped it. I hoped she was okay.
A munching sound filled the library as Beverly chewed on the leg of the library’s big wooden table. She had already chewed apart three chairs and stacked their pieces in a makeshift dam against the nearby bookshelf.
As the new librarian glanced at her, I eyed him for signs that he would intervene. He wasn’t my shivving target, but if he took away that poor animal’s one joy, I’d jump him too. I couldn’t get Beverly out of here, but I could at least give her wood to chew.
The librarian—a fellow prisoner in bright orange—sat behind the library’s check-out desk with a tome big enough to be some ancient spell book. He had rolled up the sleeves of his jumpsuit to reveal his ebony forearms, and my gaze kept straying back to his hands and wrists. His black hair was a halo of abundant curls, and his nose was wide. He kept glancing up to Beverly, and smiling small and sly like he held a secret.
That secret better not be that he had or was going to narc on poor Bev.
He had yet to say a thing about the beaver destroying the library’s furniture, but that didn’t mean anything. In prison, if you were smart, you didn’t broadcast that you planned to tattle on someone, and you didn’t pick fights with other prisoners and their beaver friends unless you knew you could win.
He smiled at Beverly, then turned back to his massive book. Through the window above him, a group of beards with no faces attached shot out of the portal and collided with a purple-skinned pixie who was flying nearby. The pixie twisted in the air, arms flailing as they tried to detangle themselves from the beards before they dropped from the sky and out of sight.
I let my chair legs drop to the floor and pinched the bridge of my nose.
The librarian looked at me with wide eyes as though I had appeared out of nowhere like the flying beards and cum rain.
“Oh… do you and the beaver need anything?”
His voice was deep like a forest pool, but it trembled, and that made me tense. If he was expecting trouble, he meant to turn Beverly in. I shot him a glare. I was tired of all this waiting: waiting for the man I meant to shiv, waiting for this librarian to cause trouble, waiting to see what the fuck was going on with the portal, waiting for a chance to free Beverly.
“If you’re going to tattle on Beverly, just run off to a guard and get it over with already.”
“Tattle?” He leaned back as though trying to dodge the accusation. “But… why? She looks so happy! It must be hard being cut off from rivers and trees and… what else do beavers like? Maybe there’s a book on it.” The more he spoke, the more the tremble in his voice faded. Maybe he had just been nervous to start a conversation.
“You don’t think she’s a shifter?”
He gazed at Beverly with soft eyes, like he was looking at a kitten. “If she is, she should still get to be happy. Right?”
I raised my brows. No one was that nice; he must be lying. But then everyone who had looked at Beverly with puppy eyes had been sincere so far. We didn’t get pets in here, and many people missed their fuzzy friends. The rest… looked at her like starving wolves eyeing rabbits. They were predators seeing a chance to fill the hole inside them left by being cut off from their magic. A hole that the beaver could never fill even if she wanted.
Beverly’s chewing sounds grew louder, and the big wooden table next to me partially collapsed, one end slamming into the floor. I startled, and Beverly ran toward her dam, dragging a table leg.
I smiled at the happy baby despite feeling like I was living in a spin cycle full of shit.
“I’m Elliot, by the way,” the librarian spoke in a rush as though he thought his throat would close off at any second. “You can call me Ellie or El, my friends do.”
