Page 4 of Soul of Shadow #1

The morning after the party, Charlie sat in the library and watched magicians catch bullets in their mouths.

Charlie had always loved magic.

She loved everything about it. The weight of the cards.

The swish of the cups as she switched the ball, unseen by the audience.

She loved the complexity of it, the web of lies and misdirection.

The wonder in the other person’s eyes when the cards did something impossible, or the handkerchief appeared somewhere it couldn’t be.

The subtle dexterity, the sleight of hand.

She loved it so much that she had once imagined making a career out of it.

The morning after they found the tree, Charlie made herself a bowl of cereal and carried it upstairs to her favorite room in the house: the library.

It was a small space, the walls entirely covered in old novels, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.

Charlie wasn’t much of a reader—she preferred scrolling YouTube videos on close-up magic—but she often sat in there just for the ambiance.

For the plush carpet on the floor and the worn red armchair perched beside the bay windows.

Charlie’s mother put her children into circus classes when they were just toddlers.

They dabbled in a little bit of everything—flexing their muscles, loosening their joints, learning to fly high and be fearless.

They tried trapeze and floor acrobatics, silks and hoop, close-up magic for the audience.

It was the prerogative of circus athletes to have a wide range of skills. But they each had their favorite.

For Mason, it was the trapeze. For Sophie and Charlie, it was anything they could do as the Incredible Twosome: identical twins with identically impressive skills.

On stage, there was no difference between Charlie and her sister.

There was no quiet one, no loud one, no adventurous and shy, no extrovert and introvert.

None of the things that usually differentiated twins.

Together, in the circus, they moved as one.

And they were good. Exceptional, really.

All three of them—in grade school, they were invited to join the junior traveling troupe that put on shows all around Michigan.

It took up most of their free time, and the kids at school didn’t get it.

They thought the Hudson kids were strange for doing circus instead of soccer or basketball or even gymnastics.

In their minds, circus was clowns and monkeys and bearded women—not brave, athletic children.

Within their grade, there was one girl who didn’t find Charlie and Sophie strange. Who loved to watch them perform, even egging them on to do stunts during recess. Her name was Louise, but she preferred to be called Lou. She quickly became the twins’ best friend.

Mason was the first to drop out of the troupe.

When he turned eleven, he decided that the circus was no longer “cool.” That he would rather do a mainstream sport, like baseball or football.

Though he had no experience in any of the sports, every team was excited to have him.

Growing up in the circus had left him remarkably strong.

As it turned out, his skills best transferred to baseball, where his swing was the hardest. He joined the local league, and that was the end of his circus career.

Charlie and Sophie kept going. By age ten, they had already cemented their place within the troupe.

They were the wonder twins, those fearless girls who would backflip in sync, dive from great heights, and bend each other into impossible shapes, all for the sake of the audience’s delight.

They even developed a two-person magic routine, assisting each other in card tricks or letting one saw the other in half. They were unstoppable.

Or, at least, Charlie had thought they were.

She didn’t remember her twin’s death. She remembered the illness.

Remembered her sister’s fever, of little concern at first but never seeming to break.

Remembered her mother waking her very suddenly in the night and saying they needed to go now , her and Mason both— Get your coats and get in the car .

She remembered the pale-white light of the emergency room, the doctor’s voices, frantic when they arrived but later hushed, secretive.

She had been told that she was in the room when it happened.

When the machine’s pulsing line went flat.

But she couldn’t remember. And what’s more, she didn’t want to.

Bacterial meningitis. Those were the words she heard that night, words that would be repeated for weeks afterward. Words that still sometimes woke her in the middle of the night, echoing in her ears as if someone had just whispered them moments before.

When her sister died, so did Charlie’s love of the circus.

She only cried for one day after her sister’s death.

One day of excruciating pain, of feeling as if her insides were being ripped out and thrown across the room, stomped on, squeezed, forced back in—only to repeat the process all over again.

One day of heaving sobs, of feeling as if she could never get enough oxygen.

Her grief made the day feel endless. It dragged on and on, a never-ending cycle of burning eyes and knives in her stomach.

When she woke up the next morning, she thought, No more. She couldn’t live like this. She would not crumble beneath the pain. She would become, as she dubbed it, a master of distraction.

The distraction could be anything. It could be a movie night with Lou, taking herself out for a run through Silver Shores, learning to cook, reading about the Civil War in her history textbook—anything.

Anything that absorbed her attention. Anything that made her forget, however briefly, the absence of her twin sister.

She tried returning to the circus, too. But when she finally made it back into the gymnasium, nothing felt right.

Her routines were all meant for two people.

She was supposed to be a base or a flyer or a partner, one half of a whole.

She felt weakened, incapable of hoisting herself up the trapeze or even holding a handstand.

All she could do—the only thing for which she had any energy—was magic.

It was magic that saved her. Magic that pulled her through her grief, through the heavy, gray cloud that hung over her home, the schoolyard, everywhere she went.

At night, when she couldn’t sleep, she stayed up reading forums on sleight of hand or watching step-by-step videos of magicians teaching their most difficult tricks.

She bought a brand-new set of cards. Practiced with them until her hands bled.

For Charlie, magic was no longer about mystery and wonder.

It was a tool to be perfected. A sword to be sharpened.

Something that absorbed her attention, that yanked her from the misery of her own body.

Her method wasn’t bulletproof. Grief still found ways to wiggle to the surface, most often in the long moments when she found herself zoning out, replaying old memories on a torturous loop until she could redirect her thoughts.

She cried, too, but only sporadically and never in relation to her sister’s death.

She watched a documentary about migrating penguins, and she cried.

She saw a squirrel run up a tree, leaving its baby behind, and she cried.

She read a book where a couple defies all odds and ends up living happily ever after, and she cried.

The tears always felt as if they came from nowhere, slamming into her like a truck careening into the wall of a tunnel.

They hit hard and fast, overwhelming her with sadness, then leaving her wrung out, empty.

Their occurrence was so erratic that it was easy for Charlie to disconnect them from her grief.

To think of them as random eruptions of sadness.

I’m just an emotional person , she told herself, and eventually, she started to believe it.

She felt strongest, most focused when she was practicing magic.

She dropped out of circus classes. Stopped performing magic for big audiences.

Trained in the safety of her bedroom, brought her tricks to her family or to Lou only when she could not improve them any further.

She no longer cared whether they reacted with awe.

She cared only for the lie, for that moment of perfect deception, when everything the viewer thought to be true was turned on its head.

The world had deceived her, had taken away the one person who should have been by her side her entire life—and she would deceive it right back.

And on that particular morning, she was watching the bullet catch over and over, taking notes on every minute detail of the act.

The bullet catch was a trick that had only ever been performed by a handful of magicians, due to the high probability that they would die in the process.

In the act, a gun was fired directly at the magician, who then caught the bullet in their mouth.

It was first performed by a magician who called himself Chung Ling Soo—a Scottish American man falsely representing himself as Chinese.

He lost his life in the process, shot to death on stage.

The trick was so famously dangerous that not even Harry Houdini dared to attempt it.

One magician who successfully performed the bullet catch—and the only woman to ever have done so—was Dorothy Dietrich.

Charlie had become somewhat fixated on Dietrich in the past few years.

She researched every website she could find on the female magician, watched documentaries on YouTube, checked out books from the local library.

It was never enough. There were no videos of Dietrich performing the bullet catch, only photographs.