The Hawley Book of the Dead by Chrysler Szarlan Read Free Book Online Page B

tame animals, even the wildest—has had raccoons and flying squirrels for pets. Even a bear cub once. She is a falconer, and trains others to handle birds of prey.
    My mother is a healer. She discovered her ability when she was in college and her roommate had a grand mal seizure, which my mother quelled with a touch of her finger. She volunteers at the local hospital, which for many years now has had the highest recovery rate of any in New England. My aunt Gwen will let you know where any lost or misplaced object is. Aunt Viv has a compass in her head, and can tell you right off how to travel to any place at all, even places she has never been. My Caleigh, as I’ve said, can affect her surroundings with her string games. The twins’gifts have not yet been revealed to them, and I often worry over them. Will their gifts be simple and straightforward, or difficult and sometimes dangerous, like my own?
    Disappearing
isn’t exactly the word for it. It’s as if I walk through a curtain, enter the passageway to another world. I sometimes feel that I could go further in, but I never do. I remain in the antechamber of that other world, while I can see, and even take part in, events around me in this world. I stay close, then I return, performing the perfect visible vanish and reappearance.
    I moved to Las Vegas when I was twenty, worked as a change girl in a casino, and went to shows every night before my shift. I thought that with my gift, I could surely find a place in that world. I had no skills but my one turn, so I went to the smaller clubs and casinos, looking for someone on the rise. Someone who might be willing to hire me with no obvious experience. One evening I went to see a young magician perform. He asked for a volunteer and I was onstage before I knew it, choosing cards and cutting open lemons to reveal dollar bills with my name written on them. At the end of the show, I slipped out, too shy to approach him. But the next day I walked out the service door of the casino after my shift and there he was, sitting on the wall, making doves appear and releasing them into the bright air. He’d tracked me down.
    I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought I’d have to do some fast talking to get signed on as a magician’s assistant. Not even my wildest imaginings featured a young, handsome magician with a Colin Firth accent falling in love with me. My boyfriends after Jolon had never lasted more than a few months. I wasn’t overly confident in the relationship department, but with Jeremy, everything seemed easy, right. So I quit my job and we formed the Amazing Maskelynes. In the beginning, I was relegated to the role of the Three Part Girl, the Girl Levitating. The magician’s assistant, the pretty girl in the skimpy costume.
    I was still the magician’s assistant the first time I revealed my gift to Jeremy. He’d asked me to marry him, and I was stalling, uncertain how to break it to him. I felt it was wrong to conceal it from him before I accepted, and he was committed to my aberration forever.
    But then it just happened, without any thought on my part at all. Wewere working out a trick in which I was to disappear in a sheet of flames. It was a little frightening, although perfectly safe. I was always nervous just before he lit the flame. Fire had always frightened me.
    I was in a large box made from metal poles, behind a piece of non-reflective glass. When the fire was lit, a trapdoor opened beneath me and I plummeted down under the stage, jumped up and raced to the back of the house, where I “reappeared.” The audience would be distracted by the flames, and we’d worked it out so that it took me only about fifteen seconds to reappear, to walk down the center aisle and rejoin Jeremy.
    That day, instead of gritting my teeth, staying put, and dropping down as we’d rehearsed, I stepped away from the flame and right out of the box. I was about to apologize, but I saw that Jeremy was watching for me, timing me. When I