Celeste
Odalys had set up in the den, which struck me as pointedly symbolic.
She'd drawn the curtains against the afternoon, and the room had gone dim and close, smelling of beeswax and old paper. A single white candle burned in the middle of the low table. Around it, laid out with the squared, careful precision of a surgeon's instruments, were a stack of brittle yellowed pages, a small leather-bound book with a cracked spine, and a hand-drawn chart that looked like a tree whose branches had been scorched halfway up.
I stopped in the doorway. It was the same room. The same armchairs, the same worn rug, the same faint pale stain on the floorboards, like a patch of frost that wouldn't melt, where a few days ago silver light had poured from my hands. My palms tingled at the memory.
"Sit,"
