The last hour of Carousel’s life had been full of surprises and magic, the first a thing she had previously enjoyed a great deal, and the other, magic, something she’d thought was reserved for television, movies, and books. The first surprise was the scratch-off tickets Daniel had given each of them. Underneath the little silver coins of film were three bells that turned out to mean Carousel’s ticket was worth real money, a lot of money. This was the second surprise, and the third was it wasn’t just Carousel’s ticket: it was all of them. This meant the game of Monopoly was over, abruptly. And, yes, it was great how everyone had just won a lot of money, but Carousel thought she’d had a shot at winning Monopoly, only no one else cared about that now.
She went back to the room she shared with Lissy and Dakota because everyone was yelling and jumping around and trying to get Daniel on the phone, and sometimes she just really needed to get away from her family. She loved them, but they were a lot.
The next surprise was the man looking through the bookshelf in her bedroom. He was the whitest man she’d ever seen. She thought about yelling, but something about the man suggested this would not be a good idea.
“You’re Caroline,” the man said. “Daniel’s sister.”
“Carousel,” she said. “Not Caroline. Who are you?”
“I’m Bogomil,” he said. “Truly it’s a pleasure to meet you, Carousel.”
“I don’t see why,” she said. “You shouldn’t be in here, by the way. You look like a vampire. Nobody invited you.”
“I go where I please,” Bogomil said. “I’m here because there’s something you need to know. It concerns you and your brother Daniel. After I tell it to you, I will go. And after I have gone, there’s something you will need to do.”
“I don’t care for bossy people,” Carousel said. She ought to have been afraid of this very strange person, but she felt she knew something about him that kept her from being afraid: that as long as you interested him, you were okay. And he was interesting, too. “But go on. I’m listening.”
When Bogomil finished his explanation, Carousel felt no differently than she had before. She felt no less real. “Poor Daniel,” she said. But she was also annoyed. Why did people keep secrets like this?
“Poor Daniel!” Bogomil said. “You realize, don’t you, that his task is now to unmake you. If he does as Anabin commands, he will undo the magic you are made of. Then you will no longer exist, and no one will even remember that you did.”
“Daniel wouldn’t do that,” Carousel said.
“Then he will die again,” Bogomil said. “And you will be unmade anyway.”
“That won’t happen, either,” Carousel said. She said it as definitively as she could.
Bogomil said, “It will happen unless you do as I tell you. You, being made entirely of magic, require magic in order to go on in this world. You need a great deal of it. What you have now is borrowed from the magic Anabin used to make Daniel a new body. You and Daniel have been drawing on the same battery, so to speak. Daniel has been told he must take magic back from you, but you, if you wish to be real, may instead take it from him.”
“I’m not going to do that!” Carousel said. Then, in spite of herself, “How would I even do that?”
“You are made of magic,” Bogomil said. “You are already using it, without knowing you do so. Not all like you are capable of this, but as Daniel has refused his magic, this abundance has been made available to you, and I see you have made the most of it. Will is a source of magic, but given enough magic, magic may become the source of will. For example, magic maintains you in the shape of what Daniel could imagine, but you, now that you know what you are, might become whatever you desire. A prairie dog. An anteater.”
“An anteater?” Carousel said. Much of what he’d been saying seemed like homework or one of the TikTok tutorials on the occult her sisters liked, but the last bit was interesting. “Why would I want to be an anteater?”
“It is a pleasant discovery that you, independent of Daniel, want anything at all. But all I mean to suggest is magic is easier for one like you than you can imagine,” Bogomil said. “Anyone can use magic as long as they have a sufficient quantity to begin with. And if you wish to take Daniel’s magic, all you have to do is reach out your hand to take it.”
“If I can just reach out and take someone’s magic,” Carousel said, “Why wouldn’t I take yours instead?”
Bogomil said, “I don’t advise trying. But Daniel’s magic is already yours. It would come to you willingly. Magic wants to be used, Carousel; Daniel will not use it. It would be a shame if you, too, refused to use it. Even Daniel ought to be able to see this.”
“But you said I’m not even real,” Carousel said, working her way carefully through the tangle of hidden motives passing for helpfulness. “If I’m not real, maybe I should do the opposite of what you’re saying. Maybe I should give all my magic back to Daniel. From what you said, nobody would care. Nobody would even remember me.”
“I would remember you,” Bogomil said. “And although you and I have spent less than a half hour in each other’s company, I find you far more interesting than Daniel has ever been. I have been alive for a very long time, longer than you can imagine, and although you have been what you are for only a handful of days, you are already more real than many I have met. Why sacrifice yourself for him?”
“I’m not going to do anything that hurts Daniel,” Carousel said.
“You are thinking of your family, perhaps,” Bogomil said. He sat down on Dakota’s bed. If it had been Carousel’s bed, she would have objected, but it served Dakota right. “You think your family would be devastated if something were to happen to Daniel. But, Carousel, if you take your brother’s magic, he will simply be missing again. No one will remember he ever came back. They’ve already grieved him. This will be no new source of pain.”
Perhaps Carousel wasn’t real, but neither was she as stupid as Bogomil seemed to think. Some of what he was saying was true, she could feel that. Maybe the compliments were even sincere. But the way he was looking at her as he said all this was the same way Lissy and Dakota looked when they sent her off on made-up errands so they could do their stupid spells without having to include her. “You want me to get rid of Daniel for you. Why?”
Bogomil stood up. For the first time, Carousel was afraid of him. He said, “Everything I have told you is true. But I will tell you one more true thing. I don’t like this brother of yours. It’s as simple as that. Make up your mind for yourself. Tell your family you are going out. Use your magic and tell them not to worry. Then use your magic to find your brother. Go talk with him if you like. After talking you must do what you think you ought. But I can tell you, as someone who began as a real person and has become, over time, less and less such a thing, what you are now is not what you may someday become. Real is as real does. But I’m sure your parents have read you The Velveteen Rabbit.”
“They have,” Carousel said. And then realized they had not. It was just another thing she remembered that wasn’t real at all.
Bogomil smiled as if he could see this on her face. And then he was gone. A second later the horrible, knowing, delighted smile was gone, too.
Carousel sat down on the floor. She thought about throwing a tantrum, but what good would that do? Someone would show up and think she was throwing a tantrum about Monopoly and she wouldn’t be able to explain otherwise.
She turned over and over in her mind what she thought she ought to do until she realized that just because Bogomil had suggested it didn’t mean she ought not to do it. She would go find Daniel. And, wanting to find him, she found she knew where he was. He was up in the rocks along the Cliff Road, just below the Cliff Hangar.
Her family was in the kitchen, eating handfuls of popcorn and talking about money. Money! Magic was much more interesting. There the scratch-off tickets were, on the table, and the magic in Carousel recognized that, yes, here was more magic. It smelled like Bogomil.
“I’m going to go run an errand,” Carousel said. This was something that her parents, that Daniel, often said. Everyone at the table looked at her. Dakota burst out laughing.
“Don’t worry about me,” Carousel said. “I’ll come right back.”
And Bogomil was correct about this, too. Magic was easy. Her family accepted what she said, and when Carousel stepped outside, she used magic again and became a unicorn, because what was the point of having magic if you didn’t use it to become a unicorn? Then, because she needed to catch up with her brother as quickly as possible, she gave herself the most beautiful, iridescent, and powerful wings she could imagine.
If only she could be a unicorn all the time. Unicorns were unreal, and everyone loved them anyway. Wanted them to be real. Who wasn’t Team Unicorn? Ms. Fish, probably. And in that moment, Carousel made up her mind that she would go on being Carousel. She would go on being. She had done a pretty good job so far. And if Ms. Fish wasn’t nicer after the Christmas break, maybe they could see how Ms. Fish felt about being an actual fish. Carousel could keep her in a little bowl.
There was an indent in the cliff face just below the balcony of the Cliff Hangar. Not quite a cave but a sheltered ledge that was clearly someone’s excellent hangout space. It was entirely hidden from anyone standing above, and there were colored handprints on the cliff wall like the ones My Two Hands Both Knowe You put on their faces before shows. The outcropping of rocks was covered in frozen snow: Carousel landed, placing her hooves carefully. There were three or four snow-covered lumps sticking up, boulders that would have made good seats for anyone who’d scrambled down to the ledge, but no one was sitting on them. Daniel was here and yet he was not here.
Carousel prodded the nearest lump of rock with her horn, excavating. There was something about its shape that distressed her.
Beneath the covering of snow, like a shape in a cloud, she could see how the rock mimicked the crude shape of a body curled protectively around itself. Here could have been one reaching arm.
Carousel investigated the other lumps. One was, as far as she could tell, just a bit of fallen rock. The other two, like the first, had a shape suggesting they had once been living people. She thought of the library book about Pompeii, bodies caught in the rush of lava.
Here, her magic told her, was Daniel. And two others. But here, too, coming up the Cliff Road was Daniel. Carousel took to the air again, leaving Daniel’s poor corpse for the body made by magic that he occupied now.