Page 23 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

Experiment. People think they’re going to accidentally open a portal to hell, but I hate to break it to you, it takes a lot of training to do something like that. The worst that might happen is you could poison a few people. The hellmouth worry is overblown. Just play.

—Evie Oxby, to Martha Stewart at her Skylands home

Beatrice’s whole body jolted, as if Minna had reached out and slapped her.

The girl continued, “You take out the suitcase every year on her death day and let yourself look at it for exactly fifteen minutes. You literally set a timer. The suitcase holds only one thing—I can’t quite figure out what it is.

It’s round and clear, like a snow globe with no snow.

Like, red rocks instead? I don’t get it but that’s what I see.

Then you zip up the suitcase and you try not to think about her again until the next year rolls around, but you always fail. ”

“What the fucking fuck .”

“Ooof.” Minna leaned forward, looking a tinge green. “That one hurt a little.”

“How did you do that? Who told you that?”

“I asked someone.”

“Did I put that on Instagram or something?” As far as Beatrice knew, she’d never put the globe on social media, but maybe she’d just forgotten?

Minna shook her head. “What’s the thing with the red rocks? Is it really a snow globe?”

A million years ago, when Beatrice was a junior in high school, Dad and Naya had taken her to Bryce Canyon.

One morning, Dad slept in while she and Naya went to Inspiration Point before the sun came up.

It was late in the season, and it started snowing as they waited.

When the sky streaked purple with the sunrise, the red pillars glowed through the floating snow.

Beatrice had laughed at how hard Naya cried at the beauty of what she called a miracle.

Later, in a gift shop, Naya bought a snow globe, tiny limestone columns rising inside it.

Instead of fake snow inside, it held reddish sand.

After Naya died, it was the one thing Beatrice had asked her father for.

She exhaled roughly. “Snow globe, with sand. But—how do you know about it? You’ve got to tell me because you’re freaking me out .”

“A guide told me.”

“A guide .” Beatrice couldn’t keep the heat, the panic out of her voice. “I don’t understand. This doesn’t make sense.”

Minna scooted closer. “You have to stop trying to make it make sense. It’s not going to. Not really.”

A blast of cold air struck Beatrice’s face. “Minna. Tell me how you knew. ”

“Okay, okay! I chanted an incantation that gets me into contact with someone who can connect me with dead people.”

“Someone?”

“I told you. A guide. I’ve worked with them before. And no, I didn’t connect with your mother figure herself.”

“Naya. Her name was Naya.” Even saying her name still hurt.

“I didn’t connect with her, and my guide didn’t, either, but—okay, this is kind of hard to explain.

It’s kind of like that game you play in grade school.

Telephone, you know, but I don’t hear things, I see them instead.

Naya must have given someone the image of the suitcase, and then the image of the snow globe, in order to prove to you that it was her, and then that someone sent the image to my guide, who sent it to me. ”

“So you see images in your head.” No, Beatrice couldn’t believe this. She didn’t want to believe it.

Or did she? Could it be possible Naya was reaching out?

If she was—if that could be true—what would that mean ?

“Yeah, I’m a clairvoyant medium. In training, I mean. And I only see images when I ask for help in seeing them—it’s not like I’m getting images from the dead all the time. Which is good, especially during the school year, because that would seriously mess with my homework.”

“Oh, my god.” A warmth crept through Beatrice’s bones as if she’d been covered with a heated blanket—could Naya really be thinking of her?

If so, it would mean Naya still existed somewhere.

The taste of salt rose at the back of Beatrice’s throat.

Life after death, come on. No one in the history of the world had ever proved it, and certainly, if it were a true thing, someone would have managed to. Which meant it was all crap. But—how to explain the red rock snow globe?

The warmth she felt shifted to a chill as the wind blew colder against her face. “It could just be coincidence.”

Minna rolled her eyes. “The front pocket of the suitcase is broken, and there’s a red ribbon tied to the handle.”

Wrong. “Red bandanna. Not a ribbon.”

Holding up her hands, Minna said, “Fine. You got me. You’re right—all of this is just a big fat hoax. Jeesh. In the meantime, I want you to try it.”

“Try what ?”

“The incantation.”

“No.”

“Because you’re scared?”

“Absolutely not.” But fear laced through her veins like a poison.

“I’ll be right here with you.”

“Fabulous. Protection in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl.”

“Almost sixteen. And you’ve sucked at all the other incantations anyway. You really think you’re going to get this one right? What’s the harm in trying?”

She did have a point. “Fine.”

Minna took out a notebook and pen from her backpack and handed them to Beatrice. “Mom used to make me write them out when I was learning. Maybe it’ll help.” She opened the grimoire again, to a page on which the writing had grown faint.

“Is that… a coffee stain?” A brown half ring marred the page.

Smiling, Minna touched it. “You know when your favorite page in the cookbook gets all effed up because you use it so much? Same thing. Okay. I’ll read it to you, and you write it out phonetically, so you get it right.”

“It’s not a rhyme, like the others?”

“It’s not a rhyme, and it’s not in English. Well, it may be Old English or something, but it doesn’t sound like anything I know.”

The syllables were odd and didn’t fit in Beatrice’s mouth. Piece by piece, she said them slowly, writing them down and putting them together, one after another, until Minna finally said, “Good. You’ve got all the bits. Now say it all at once.”

“And then what?”

“Then you listen. Or you see. Or whatever.” Minna’s voice was cheerful. “Anything could happen.”

Beatrice took a deep breath and sat up straighter. “This isn’t going to do anything.”

“Noted.”

She began to mutter the words.

As each syllable slipped through her mouth, the phrases got easier to say. By the time she’d spoken the three gibberish lines, the pen in her hand heated up, as if it had been plugged into a wall socket.

“What the—?”

But before she could finish asking, everything dropped away. She could see Minna’s outline, but it was blurred, as if Beatrice had put on someone else’s prescription glasses.

In her mind rose the image of an old fountain pen, the nib of it nosing into the keyhole of a rusted padlock.

A vibration roared in her ears, and she only wanted one thing: to scrape the pen’s tip against the paper in the notebook.

As the ink trailed out—dark blue against the ruled pages—it was the only thing that stayed clear.

It felt like scratching an old mosquito bite, the kind that’s mostly healed but wakes you in the middle of the night with its phantom itch as fresh and new as the day you got it.

Impossible to resist. She didn’t want to resist. The only thing that mattered was drawing the lines.

Nothing in Beatrice’s consciousness told her how to move the pen—it was an urge that she followed without questioning, like drinking a glass of water when she was thirsty. It was right. It was good.

Snap.

With an audible pop, the buzz in her head stopped its whine.

The plastic barrel of the pen, which had felt like hot metal just two seconds before, was cool again. Just a plastic Paper Mate. The air was heavier and colder, and thunder rumbled close by.

Minna swam back into focus—her mouth was slightly open, her eyes wide. “Whoa. What did that feel like?”

Feel like?

Beatrice hadn’t felt. She’d just been . Sometimes, when she was working on a particularly thorny tax problem for a client, she’d look up to find an hour had passed instead of a minute. It had been like that—the knowledge of herself had vanished, and she’d—somehow—become the blue line on the page.

“What did you write?” Minna was clearly working hard to control herself, but her fingers twitched as if she wanted to grab the notebook right out of Beatrice’s hands.

Beatrice read from the page: “ Norman, the key is in the g/f pizza box in the freezer. ”

“Huh?”

She read the next line. “ K–M and J send love and out of season peppermint bark. Don’t worry. We’re watching O. Froggy carries our kisses. ”

“What does that mean?”

Beatrice blinked at her. “You think I know?”

“And what’s that one?”

“Patrick, you’ll be forgiven but not yet. Andy says be patient.”

“This is so great. And the last one?”

Beatrice read it out, “ K is here with me. We are together. At the same time, I’ve never left your side, nor has he.

He knows his blue hanky will always catch your tears.

He still loves salt and vinegar chips dipped in Nutella, and he says you never have to let him go.

I’m sorry I said you did. L. ” Good grief. This was ridiculous.

“Nothing for you, specifically, though?”

“I mean, I have no idea. But they’re not my initials…”

Minna’s voice got smaller. “And nothing for me?”

Oh, no. “Come on, we can’t read anything into this.

It’s like playing with the Ouija board, you know?

” When she was a kid, she’d talked Naya into playing with one after she’d found it at a garage sale.

The planchette had rocketed around the board, but the words it spelled had never made sense.

Naya had said her father could never know, which was weird, because surely Naya had been the one pushing it.

Minna’s eyes were huge. “The Ouija board always tells the truth.”

Just because Minna presented herself like a small adult didn’t mean she wasn’t just a kid. “It’s a board game made by Hasbro, and this—whatever this is—is a game, too.”

“Bullshit.” Now Minna did yank at the notebook.

Beatrice let her have it. She passed the pen back, too, before picking up the grimoire and slipping it into her bag. The sooner she returned it to Cordelia, the better.

“You know it’s real. You can feel it. I saw your face—you felt the power.”

“Power? I just scribbled junk on a page because…” Because why? “Because I wanted to buy into it. To make you happy.”

“You’re so full of crap!” Minna blinked rapidly, her nose scrunching up, looking like she was on the verge of tears. “You’ve probably known you could do this since you were little, and you’ve been shoving it back inside you, too scared to let any of it out.”

“I swear to you, I don’t believe in magic, and I never have.”

“Don’t call it magic, then. Gran sometimes calls it divine intention, and you can’t deny that you want things. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t put energy and intention into something you were desperate to have. What do you want to do with your intention?”

I want to live.

So that just made her exactly like any other human on the planet. Not special. Definitely not magical. “Fine. So what do you want to do with your intention?”

Tears rose to Minna’s eyes. “I want to talk to my dad.”