The Ghost Office looks a bit better now that we’ve tidied up. A little less desolate now that there are snacks in the fridge. The signs of the old building’s new purpose are everywhere: a cardboard box filled with intact reading glasses on one of the counters, a fire extinguisher added to the wall, my spare phone charger plugged into one of the few working outlets. We found an old coffee table out with someone’s trash and dragged it to the center of the room. We’ll be recreating the setup that used to be on Aiden’s long-suffering desk. The photograph of William, we pin over the workbench that has all our stuff on it. I take a red Sharpie and circle his blurry figure.

“Are you worried you’re going to forget which one is him?” Aiden asks, watching me.

“No, I did it because it’s fun. Is it really an investigation without a photo with people circled?”

“You’re right. Silly me, without my magnifying glass.”

“I’ll remind you to bring it next time,” I tell him, capping the Sharpie. “Okay, man, walk me through it. Step one is the setup, right? The glasses in the middle, the stones in a circle around it, the plants in a circle around that?”

“That’s the approximate idea, yes.”

“Does it matter what order they go in?”

“Actually, it does. Come here, I’ll show you.”

Aiden withdraws a pouch from his bag and turns to the coffee table at the room’s center. He tips the pouch over the table, and a small cacophony erupts as all of the stones tumble onto the wooden surface. Aiden drops the bag and smooths the stones out so I can see each one.

“These were my mother’s, like I told you before. She didn’t show me how to use them, but this was one thing my aunt was kind of able to explain to me. My mother had told her that the stones are a way to channel your asking energy. I send energy at the reading glasses, to try and make them work. The stones, and the order they’re arranged in, help me to be clear about what I’m asking for.”

“Okay.”

He scoops up the closest one, a shiny green stone.

“An example. This is malachite. It’s a gemstone. If you cut it in half, it’s full of bubbles. It’s used for a lot of things. A pigment in paint, for example. You have to grind it just right or it loses the green and becomes gray. Ancient Egyptians used it as eyeshadow, to protect their eyelids from the sun. They were the smart ones. The Swedes used green pigment formed from copper arsenite. It has arsenic in it, and a lot of people died before the common denominator was figured out. Green food dye, green bedrooms, green clothing.”

“You know a lot about this.” I stare at him, surprised. He really would have gotten along with Kasey. It’s a fucking shame they never had the time to figure that out.

“I’ve been doing research on them ever since I decided to try and do magic again. I read some books that haven’t been checked out of the library in like fifty years.”

“Hipster.”

“Stop. The point is.” He holds out the malachite on his palm. “Each of these stones means something. I know I sound like a yoga mom right now, but bear with me.”

“No, go on.”

“Stones themselves carry symbolic meaning. They’re eternity, immovability. There’s a reason some of the earliest monuments from human history are formed from them. The Greeks believed that the sacred omphalos stone was a representation of the birthplace of the cosmos.” He drops the malachite into my hand. “Throughout history people have ascribed understandings to them based on their particular qualities. What’s the difference in significance between a green stone, or a heavy one, or a light one? Or between a stone that can absorb water and one that can release warmth, or refract light?”

“I don’t know, a whole lot of science?”

“Yes, but not just that. There’s nothing in malachite’s scientific makeup that means transformation, or growth, or healing. The difference is how we understand them. So if I’m trying to release energy, and I want it to cause transformation or growth, I can channel my understanding of it through the stone.” He takes the malachite out of my hand. He holds it in both of his and closes his eyes.

After a moment, a sparkle of green light gently swirls around his hands. A rush of warmth ripples over me, carrying a bright, fresh scent, like the air after the rain has scrubbed it clean. Aiden holds up his cupped palms and shows me the malachite. A tiny green shoot has unfolded from its surface, as if it had grown right out of the rock.

“Knowing how the stones are understood culturally is helpful. Guessing at their meanings is much harder.”

He plucks the little shoot and offers it to me. I hold it carefully, my breath taken away.

“Oh my fucking god,” is all I can say.

“The stones also help contain the energy, which is why the glasses explode, but the whole room doesn’t. Part of why, anyway. I’m also doing my best to focus it, but I need the help. Like I said, I’m not very good at this. I don’t exactly know the best way to order the rocks, so I’ve been trying a bunch of different configurations, testing each one.”

He opens his phone and goes to the camera roll. I stare in a daze at shot after shot of different versions of the little circle.

“These are all ones I’ve already tried.”

“None of them have worked?” There are so many. So many. In some the pattern is circular; in others, a triangle, in one, a square. I’m terrible at math, but I know enough to guess that… “Aiden, it’s going to take forever. There’s got to be thousands of different ways we could group them, and that’s not even accounting for changes in the shape of the design.”

“I know, it’s not working.” Aiden leans his palms on the counter. “I’m actually really glad you’re helping me, because for a while now I’ve felt like I’m running into a brick wall. It’s like trying to guess someone’s phone number by just starting at 000-000-0000 and then going to 000-000-0001, et cetera. No arrangement of these rocks I’ve done yet has had the intended effect on the glasses. All they’re doing is containing my energy to the glasses, and I’m not even sure how good of a job they’re doing at that. I was hoping you might have some new idea about all this, once I explained.”

If I stop to wonder at each new discovery I make about Aiden and his abilities, I’d be flat on my ass for the rest of my life. I tell myself I will process this later, and gently set the shoot down on the workbench.

“Can you show me again?” I ask, and Aiden glances over at me, one eyebrow raised. “Not just because I want to see something explode. Last time I was so excited and it happened so fast. I didn’t get to watch closely.”

“Fine, but if you Snapchat this to anyone, I’ll explode you next.”

“Honestly, I just want to see.”

Aiden takes a new pair of reading glasses and sets them on the table. Then he scoops up the rocks and lays them out carefully.

“I’ve been putting understanding, clarity, sight, perception, and knowledge the closest to the glasses,” he explains, as his hands dart out around the table. “Those, to me, seem the most important for this situation. The ones with less relevance go further out. Those are basically just there to help hold the energy within the bounds of the table. So that, you know, the windows don’t blow up. And then the plants, I’ve been putting on the outside. A final barrier, sort of.”

He does so, then steps back. I come to stand at his side. Once again, he closes his eyes, raises his arms, and lets them bend comfortably. His palms face the ground. I see his fingers twitch at first, but soon he grows still, and something happens.

The glasses jump a little on the table. The tiniest, quickest movement. Then, without warning, they zip straight up into the air like a rocket launching. We both gasp as they impact with the ceiling and shatter. Bits of broken plastic rain down on us from above. Aiden snatches my arm and yanks me out of the way just before a spinning piece of the frames would have hit me.

We stand there crouching together until the last pieces of destroyed glasses tumble out of the air and come to a spinning stop on the ground. Aiden’s fingers are around my upper arm.

“Yeah,” he says, straightening up. “So, you can see, it’s not working.”

I turn to look at him, the fading traces of that bright white blue in his eyes. There are pieces of broken plastic in his hair.

“I. Am. Never going to get over how cool this is!” I rush to the countertop and grab a new pair of glasses, place them in the center of Aiden’s design. “Let’s try…. This.” I swap a red rock with a blue one and dart back to Aiden. He’s biting back an exasperated smile, but he raises his hands again, closes his eyes.

This time, the glasses literally melt. Before our eyes, they turn into a shiny, slick puddle of plastic in the middle of the coffee table. And then the puddle drifts into the air, reforming into a ball. It reminds me of videos I’ve seen of astronauts pouring out cups of water in zero gravity. It lazily drifts towards us, glimmering in the air.

“Oh, shit!” I reach out a finger towards it.

“No, Jamie, don’t touch the-”

I poke it and the ball pops. My hand is suddenly covered in black liquid plastic.

“Oh, shit!”

“Yeah.” Aiden tries and fails to suppress a laugh. “You dope.”

I almost expected it to burn me, but it’s cool to the touch, and getting cooler quickly. I stare at Aiden, open-mouthed, holding up my coated hand.

“What do I do?”

“Hang on, I think we might have some paper towels or something-”

“Wait, look!”

I tip my hand down. The plastic slides off in one smooth motion and clatters on the floor. I bend down and scoop it up: a perfect, hollow model of my hand in thin plastic. I show it to Aiden, who takes it and bursts out laughing. He sets it down on the shelf over the workbench.

“There we go. Our first bit of decor for the Ghost Office.”

“Should we then also call that our first magical experimentation success?” I ask, and Aiden grins, shaking his head.

“Sure,” he says. “What the fuck. Sure.”

~~~~

I unlock the door to the flower shop quietly. It’s late, and we are well past closed.

“What are we doing here?” Aiden murmurs, glancing out at the dark street.

“Shh.” I close the door after him, but don’t flip on the lights. “Kent?”

I’m met with a resounding silence.

“Kent is at the vet clinic,” Aiden says.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Ellen wanted to go. She wanted to see Angie, I think, and also pet some dogs.”

“Oh. Well, let’s leave the lights off anyway. He might drive home past the store and spot us in here and technically I am banned for a year from being here after hours.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long, complicated story involving an April Fools Day thing that didn’t go quite as planned. Really more Destinee’s fault than mine.”

“And yet you are banned from being in the store after hours, and Destinee is not.”

“Okay, well, if she had filled up the water guns properly, it never would have happened.”

“Remind me to ask Kent about this later so I can hear the real story.”

“Shush.” I step into the store and drop my backpack on the counter. The heat lamps over some of the plants provide enough light to see by.

“Again, what are we doing here?” Aiden asks, putting his bag with mine.

“Getting a pot and some topsoil.”

“For what?”

I reach into the pocket of my flannel and extract the little shoot grown from the malachite. I place it down on the counter gently. Aiden stares at it, then leans his elbow on the counter.

“It was just an example, Jamie, I didn’t-”

“Come on, of course we’ve got to plant it. We’ve got everything we need right here.” I head over to the wall with the smallest pots and select one. We have an open topsoil bag behind the counter, so I go behind it. The mini-fridge catches my attention; Kent usually stores some drinks in there.

Aiden laughs when I pop up from behind the counter with one Coke and one beer.

“This is the world’s most exclusive bar,” he says, as I pop the soda open and slide it to him.

“Do you mind?” I ask, pointing to the beer. Aiden shakes his head.

“Nah. I was never a beer guy, anyway.”

I crack it open and take a sip, then bend to grab some topsoil. I begin feeding it into the pot, going slower than strictly necessary.

“Aiden, can I ask you something?”

“Are you about to ask me to explode something else? Because we destroyed like twenty pairs of glasses today alone.”

“Not that.”

Maybe he can tell that I’m nervous, because his joking face grows a little more serious.

“What’s up?” he asks, more softly.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Jamie. You’re making me nervous.”

“Okay, okay.” I hesitate, set down my beer. “Was the drinking problem related to all this? Your magic?”

Aiden pauses, then lets out a breath, glancing down at his decidedly non-alcoholic drink.

“You know, I decided a long time ago that it wasn’t helpful to put the responsibility for my problem on anything but myself. I don’t want to say it made me into an alcoholic, because I did that all on my own. But to say that the two things are unrelated would be - dishonest.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure why.

“It’s fine.” He shakes his head, takes a sip of his drink. “I just wish I remembered more of the last eight years of my life. Some days it feels like it was all a bad dream, other days it feels like I lived it for a century. It’s such a long time to be miserable, but I never tried to pull myself out of it. Sometimes I’d come to the surface and have these weird moments of clarity, like holy shit, is this going to be my entire life? But it never lasted. I was pretty much resigned to living that way forever.”

“But-” I hesitate. “I hope this isn’t a bad thing to say, but - you can do magic. Isn’t there a way to just - turn the addiction off? With your power?”

Aiden finally looks up at me.

“I made a promise to myself when I was seven that I would never try to do magic to myself. Never. For any reason.”

“When you were seven,” I repeat. “That’s… how old you were when your mom moved away, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He says it with a kind of finality, like the subject is closed. I pick up the little shoot and carefully place it in the pot, then start feeding in soil around it. When it’s placed, I grab the moisture meter from behind the counter and stick it into the pot.

“Are we going back to the Ghost Office tomorrow?” Aiden asks.

“Hell yeah. I want to see more of what you can do.”

“What is that?” Aiden asks, glancing at the moisture meter.

“I don’t know what kind of moisture this malachite plant will want, so we’ll need to pay attention to what it likes,” I explain. “Shit. It’s too dark to read the meter. Can you hand me my phone so I can-?”

Aiden places his forefinger over the plant. A gentle golden glow shimmers into being around his fingertip. I look up at him, amazed. The light flickers in his soft blue eyes.

“Told you,” he says, with a smile. “Light is easy.”