Cat's Claw by Amber Benson

wasn’t dead after all, well, the rest of Madame Papillon’s visit had just seemed to fly by. Of course, it wasn’t until she and her wily Minx were long gone that I realized exactly how out of it I had been.
    I had agreed to let her give me a magic lesson.
    And not just any kind of magic lesson, mind you. I wasn’t just gonna spell something. Nope, I was going to let the aura specialist teach me how to summon and navigate wormholes, something that I had never ever been able to do in my entire life.
    All I had to do was summon her and the lesson was mine—free of charge.
    My older sister, Thalia—who was now safely ensconced in a tiny cell in the nether regions of Purgatory as she served out the one hundred years of solitude she’d gotten as punishment for her part in my father’s kidnapping—had once told me that I was magically inept, that I wasn’t even fit to be the servant of someone who could wield magic. I was only twelve at the time—and going through a sensitive, pudgy period where nothing about my body and/or mind felt right, so her accusations of magical ineptitude really felt like they were just par for the course. But still, I couldn’t totally blame Thalia for my feelings of magical inadequacy.
    Puberty is when magic really starts asserting itself in young women—must be something to do with all the hormones kicking through their systems—but for me, puberty came and went without magic ever manifesting itself at all. I was horribly embarrassed by my lack of magical talent and even more embarrassed by how ecstatic my father was about my magical duncehood.
    While he seemed aware of, but not overly excited about, Thalia’s prowess as a magic handler, with me, it was all about discouraging the ability. Something I still didn’t 100 percent understand, especially now that he was sending Madame Papillon over to my place for private lessons—and probably paying her more for her time than I made all year.
    The one thing that my dad and I did agree on when it came to magic was that it was best to keep the supernatural aspects of one’s life under wraps. Especially when it came to letting humanity know anything about you and your abilities. I had taken that idea to heart, trying as best I could to kill all the supernaturalness inside myself. This was part of what had led me to take that forgetting charm, so that no one would ever take me for anything other than a human being while I was living out in the human world.
    My dad’s approach wasn’t nearly as extreme; he had just put the kibosh on magic handling in the confines of his house.
    Apparently, neither of my sisters had taken that rule very seriously, as both of them were pretty adept when it came to magic. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even open a can without a can opener, let alone jump through space and time by summoning a wormhole.
    Well, I decided, I was gonna remedy that one sooner rather than later. Then maybe I could figure out how to get my hands on that wannabe corpse, the Devil’s protégé.
    I thought back to what Madame Papillon had said about Daniel still being alive and I got both nervous and angry at the same time. How could he just leave me hanging like that, thinking he was dead and off to some other aspect of the Afterlife? I mean, I knew in my heart that I could never do something like that to someone I cared about . . . which then led me to a thought that made me feel even worse than I was already feeling.
    Maybe he didn’t let me in on this whole still-being-alive thing because he didn’t give one rat’s ass about my feelings. I was just some girl he had coalesced with once and that was it.
    Okay, so I wasn’t the queen of self-confidence, but no matter how much my brain kept telling me that I was being a total nut bag and overreacting, the insidious worm of doubt kept creeping closer and closer to my heart.
    What if Daniel had faked his own death because he thought I was gonna go all stalker-y on him, or something? I