Magic Nation Thing Read Free Page A

happening to him or her.
    A special reason why that part of the weird ancestors’ story made Abby particularly uneasy was that it made her wonder about something that had happened to her a lot when she was very young. But she wasn’t going to let her mind go in that direction. With one side of her mouth twisted into a disbelieving smile, Abby was reaching out to put the locket back in the envelope when something strange began to happen.
    The locket suddenly began to feel very warm—as warm as if it had been lying in the sun. What came next, weird as it was, wasn’t an entirely new sensation. Abby remembered having that strange woozy feeling quite often when she was a little kid. The feeling that her eyes had begun to see in extra dimensions. There would be brightly colored shapes and pieces that spun around inside her head and then began to arrange themselves into patterns. One pattern and then another, until they finally came together in a real-life scene, like something in a movie. And now it was happening again. Still there, but in the shadowy distance, was Dorcas’s messy desk, and behind it a dusty file cabinet, but on a closer plane a whirl of parts and pieces was quickly spinning into view.
    When Abby was really young she’d kind of enjoyed the strange sensation, as if it were her own private TV show. A show that she thought of as taking place in her Magic Nation, because that was what Mrs. Watson, the day care lady, said when Abby asked about it. “It’s just your Magic Nation, dear,” Mrs. Watson told her more than once. “Nothing to worry about.”
    So for quite a while Abby went on thinking of the experience as a visit to her Magic Nation, like Mrs. Watson said. “It’s just your Magic Nation,” Abby would tell herself firmly. “Nothing to worry about.” And she went on not worrying about it even after she realized that what Mrs. Watson might have said was “It’s just your imagination.”
    By the time she was nine or ten, however, Abby had started to react to the woozy feeling, and what followed it, in a different way. By then she’d begun to spend a lot of time at the Bordens’ with her friend Paige, and now and then with other kids she knew from the Margaret Elston Barnett Academy, a well-known and expensive school for girls. A school that the O’Malleys never could have afforded if not for a scholarship fund that one of her father’s grateful clients had set up for Abby when she was still a baby.
    Most of Abby’s Barnett Academy friends lived lives that were more or less like the Bordens’. Maybe a little bit less, as in having slightly smaller mansions, maybe only two or three cars instead of four, and nothing to compare to the Bordens’ enormous cabin in Squaw Valley. But most of their lives were pretty much the same, with parents who had regular jobs instead of ones that required doing surveillance in Oakland one day, looking through police files in San Francisco the next, and then flying off to Portland, Oregon, to track down a suspect the day after that. Activities that Dorcas might or might not get paid for, depending on how rich—and honest—a particular client happened to be.
    As time went by and Abby became very much at home at Barnett Academy, as well as at the Bordens’, she became more and more resistant to Dorcas’s Great-aunt Fianna stories. And for a long time, when one of the strange visions started to happen, she would whisper, “Stop it, right this minute,” put down whatever she was holding, and quickly do something to deaden her mind, like watching TV.
    Now it was happening again, and as always, Abby resisted it. But even as she tried to stop it, she wasn’t able to keep herself from noticing that one of the vivid scenes flashing before her eyes had formed itself into a familiar face. The smiling face of a little pigtailed girl with a missing front tooth, looking just the way she had in the newspaper picture with the article about the kidnapped kid named Miranda