Magic Dreams Read Online Free PDF

during her shift. Roger documented the patrol routes of three neighborhood cats, complete with battles for territory and places where they chose to mark it.
    I kept turning the pages, and when I finally saw it, I almost didn’t realize it. Thursday before last, August failed to come in for the shift change. The log showed him signing in fourteen hours later. His
p
s,
g
s, and
y
s showed longer vertical strokes than usual. I ran my fingers on the other side of the page and felt the outlines of the letters. August had pressed too hard on the paper. He was excited when he signed in, confident, angry, maybe determined. His reason for the failure to show up read “overslept,” which made no sense considering the amount of pressure he put on the page. There was something grim about the way he wrote, as if he’d etched each letter into the paper.
    I tapped the page, thinking. A
nekomata
was a Japanese monster. August was half Japanese, half white by birth, but American culturally. He couldn’t read
kanji
, and his Japanese was terrible. Atlanta had a large Japanese population, with its own school and stores, a place where American customs didn’t apply. August visited his family there, but he never quite got the Us and Them mentality, and being a halfer, he was looked down on. A few months ago he told me that one of his cousins was gay. August had gone to pick up the thirteen-year-old kid at Japanese school to take him to a family gathering and he’d seen the boy sit on his friend’s lap after recess. I had to explain that it was a cultural thing that didn’t indicate anything about his cousin’s sexuality, but it just didn’t compute from his Southern guy point of view. He didn’t completely believe me either and told me that if anyone ever picked on his cousin, he’d break their legs.
    Magic tended to stick to nationality and region. People generated magic, and their superstitions and beliefs channeled it. If enough people believed that a certain creature existed and, worse, took precautions against it, eventually the magic birthed it into being. If you had an area densely settled by Irish, you got banshees. If you had Vietnamese settlers, sooner or later
ma doi
, the hungry spirits, would be haunting the streets. And if you had a Japanese community, you would get
yokai
, demonic creatures.
    The residue on Roger’s skin really bothered me. Either the top layer of his skin had turned to dust, or he’d been liberally powdered with something. No creature I could think of could do that to a body.
    Of the four people in the office, August would be the most likely to come into contact with a Japanese legend. We had to retrace his steps.
    I flipped the pages. The entries were becoming shorter, more erratic. On Saturday some of them looked unfinished, as if the writer had simply stopped in the middle of a sentence. Sunday had no entries. There should’ve been some. On Monday, a single entry written in Michelle’s neat handwriting read,
Can’t stay awake. Help. m.
    Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
    “We need to go to August’s place. We need to figure out why he was out on Thursday.” I looked up.
    Jim was asleep leaning against the car.
    “Jim!”
    No response. I grabbed him and shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” He slid to the ground, still asleep. I slapped his face. He didn’t move.
    I pulled Pooki’s door open, popped the trunk, jerked the extra gallon can of enchanted water out, and dumped it on his face.
    The water poured. Come on, come on …
    Jim coughed and shook himself.
    I dropped the can and grabbed his shoulders. “Wake up!”
    Dark eyes looked at me. “I’m awake.”
    “Don’t fall asleep! Don’t fall asleep, you hear?”
    He growled and pushed off the ground. “I’m okay.”
    No, he wasn’t okay. We were in trouble. We were really, really in trouble. I paced back and forth. My heart was beating so fast it felt about to explode. Something was wrong with my Jim and if I didn’t fix