Cold Kiss

understand what it would mean.
    Before I can say anything, though, he squeezes gently, and nods. “I know. I can … I know that part. Tell me the rest.”
    Bringing Danny back was nothing like what I had imagined.
    I wasn’t exactly functional those first few days after Ryan called with the news. I remember snatches—the smoking hole in my floor, my mother’s hand on my head, steady and soft, Jess and Darcia hovering in the door to my room, their faces blurred through my tears and sheer exhaustion. Until the funeral, I didn’t move far off my bed, curled up under the covers, even in the July heat, holding on to a green and blue wool scarf of Danny’s because it smelled like him.
    It wasn’t until two days after the funeral, when I saw the pictures of the crash, that I thought of the fragile white paper bird I had created.
    I spent the next week on the internet, holed up in my room with the groaning laptop I shared with Mom and Robin. By the end of the third day, my eyes were burned dry and my head hurt from staring at the screen too long, but I had a few ideas about where I could look for spells. Just the thought of it made a nervous thrill ripple beneath my skin—whatever it was that I could do, it had always just happened before. The most I had ever done was concentrate on what I wanted, like the rain in Robin’s room. A spell seemed so foreign, strangely official. But I was pretty sure I couldn’t just wish Danny back to life.
    Once last year, before I met Danny, I had asked Aunt Mari about whether she’d ever looked into incantations or lore about the craft. We were shopping at the thrift store on the south side, picking through old clothes and vintage stuff for her Halloween costume, and she looked up at me over a rack of circa-1980s dresses and frowned.
    “I don’t think of it that way,” she said, and narrowed her eyes as she thought about it. “I know other people do, even people who can do what we do, I guess. But it’s more natural than that to me, and that’s part of the gift. Figuring out what you can do, using your skill organically, the same way you would if you figured out you were a good cook. Then you might add ingredients to things or create your own recipes.”
    It sounded a little woo-woo even to me, and I was thankful she’d lowered her voice. But she was serious, and I knew it. When I thought back, I couldn’t remember her or Mom ever reading a book of spells, and certainly not brewing up some potion on the stove, what I remembered was how spontaneous it always seemed, spur-of-the-moment magic that just sort of happened.
    She grabbed a long black dress off the rack and sucked her cheeks in as she held it up to her chest. “Morticia Addams is probably too much for the preschool Halloween parade, huh?”
    And that was that. I didn’t push, not then, and after Danny was dead I definitely didn’t want anyone to suspect what I was thinking about, so I just started poking around the web and the library, looking up anything I could find on the occult.
    The occult. Even the thought that what I was doing qualified as the occult seemed wrong somehow, not that it stopped me. I hopped a train into the city one Saturday morning, and it was sort of frightening, how easy some of the stuff was to find, once I knew where to look. Maybe no one without the power I had could work a spell, but maybe they could. And there were road maps all over the place, it turned out, for anyone who wanted to make the trip.
    I found the book I needed in a little store way down on the Lower East Side. It was tiny, down a short flight of steps in the basement of an old row house, and the whole place wore its coat of dust as if it just couldn’t be bothered to take it off anymore. Half of the shelves were empty, and the signs behind the register were all badly hand-lettered on ancient, yellowing pieces of notebook paper.
    I don’t know what I was expecting, but the guy behind the counter looked like my seventh-grade science teacher. His hair was combed over sideways to hide a bald spot, and he had on a stained white button-down and khakis that looked like the grime was the only thing holding them together.
    “We do a lot of business on the web,” he said when he caught me looking around, “special orders.”
    “I’m thrilled for you,” I said, and started through the books lining one shelf. A lot of them looked like they were Wicca Lite, but there was a good handful of older books, too, well-thumbed