Magic for Liars

In a world where magic is real but hidden from most people, Ivy Gamble is a private investigator in Oakland who was born without magical abilities, unlike her twin sister, Tabitha. The sisters have been estranged for years, their rift rooted in Tabitha's departure for Headley, a prestigious magic boarding school, and deepened by the death of their mother from stomach cancer during high school. Ivy nearly failed out of school while caring for their dying mother, while Tabitha stayed away. Ivy has spent 14 years handling adultery and insurance fraud cases from a basement office.

Ivy's life changes when Marion Torres, the headmaster of Osthorne Academy for Young Mages, where Tabitha teaches, appears inside her locked office. Torres explains that five months earlier, a health and wellness teacher named Sylvia Capley was found dead in the school library's Theoretical Magic section, her body cleanly bisected from head to navel. The National Mage Investigative Service (NMIS, commonly called "the 'miz") ruled the death an accident: a theoretical spell gone wrong. Torres disagrees and hires Ivy to investigate what she believes was murder.

Ivy arrives at Osthorne and finds a campus that is simultaneously mundane and magical: linoleum floors and graffitied lockers alongside self-shelving books and students casting spells between classes. She tours the crime scene, where bloodstains mark the carpet in a butterfly shape and the books in the Theoretical Magic section whisper constantly. Torres sets Ivy up in Sylvia's former apartment. Reviewing the case file, Ivy notices that Sylvia's medical records have been torn from the coroner's report.

Ivy begins building rapport with students and staff. She meets Dylan DeCambray, a brooding senior obsessed with a family Prophecy foretelling a "Chosen One" in his generation, the most powerful mage of the era. Dylan is certain the Chosen One is him, not his half-sister Alexandria, the queen bee of the school's social hierarchy, who leads a circle of friends including Courtney, an artsy senior. Ivy feels strange waves of compulsion and irrational fear around Alexandria that she cannot explain. Alexandria seeks Ivy out and reveals that Sylvia was secretly dating Tabitha, making Ivy's sister a prime suspect.

Ivy meets Tabitha for drinks. Their conversation is stilted, but after hours of drinking they begin to reconnect, holding hands outside the bar. Tabitha reveals an old wound: As a child, she gave Ivy a fake enchanted mirror, claiming it could send "magical voicemails." Ivy spent months talking into it before realizing the deception, and Tabitha's laughter when confronted became a defining injury in their relationship. When Ivy asks for Tabitha's alibi the night of the murder, Tabitha is hurt and uses magic to send Ivy home.

Meanwhile, Ivy lets everyone at Osthorne assume she is a mage, a deception she justifies as professional strategy but that also lets her inhabit a fantasy of who she might have been. She begins a flirtation with Rahul Chaudhary, the physical magic teacher. Mrs. Webb, the elderly school secretary and a former professional healer of considerable renown, magically heals an infected knife wound Ivy received during a mugging, disassembling and reassembling her shoulder in seconds. Webb reveals she was the one who recommended Ivy for the case.

Ivy discovers a cache of folded paper stars stuffed under a bank of lockers: secret love notes between two students, part of a senior-year tradition. She also finds a leather-bound journal hidden under her bed, filled with obsessive equations and desperate entries about mastering a single impossible spell. She initially assumes it belongs to Sylvia. Pinning the letters to the wall in chronological order, Ivy traces a secret relationship, a pregnancy ("It was positive"), and a plan to seek help from Sylvia. She identifies the couple as Courtney and Dylan. Brea Teymourni, one of Alexandria's friends, comes forward with testimony that she overheard Alexandria threatening Sylvia the day before the murder: "If you don't do it, I'll tell everyone what I saw."

Ivy and Rahul go on a date and connect deeply. Returning to her apartment, they find Tabitha sobbing on the couch. Rahul leaves. Ivy confronts Tabitha about their mother, screaming 17 years of suppressed rage about Tabitha not coming home, not using magic to save her. Tabitha explains she was just a student at the time: Healing advanced cancer would require taking an entire body apart for days and reassembling it alive, a feat no healer has ever accomplished. Their father had asked, and she had to say no. They talk for hours and reach a fragile reconciliation. That night, Ivy receives anonymous texts: photos of her and Tabitha, and the question "Are you safe?"

Ivy interviews Mrs. Webb about pregnancy care at the school. Webb explains that beyond nine weeks, an abortion becomes "surgical," requiring magical disassembly of the body in a sterile clinic with sedation. When Ivy questions Courtney, the girl claims she took abortion "potions" but accidentally says "pills." Ivy checks Courtney's described symptoms against a medical website and realizes Courtney has memorized a cover story. Whatever actually happened to her was different.

Tabitha steers Ivy toward suspecting Alexandria, pointing out that the last time a teacher denied Alexandria something, Alexandria destroyed his car. Ivy later discovers that Tabitha drugged her water and used theoretical dynamism, a form of magical emotional manipulation, to direct Ivy's suspicion. On a second date, Rahul explains that theoretical dynamism is considered impossible; only the most powerful mage in history could achieve it. When Ivy accidentally names her real, nonmagical high school, Rahul realizes she has been lying. Hurt by her dishonesty, he asks her to leave.

Devastated, Ivy confronts Alexandria, accusing her of killing Sylvia and possessing theoretical dynamism. Dylan, hiding nearby with an invisibility charm, erupts in rage at the suggestion that Alexandria is the Chosen One and charges toward her. Alexandria's uncontrolled power causes his body to explode into a floating cloud of flesh and organs. Guided by Ivy's calm instructions, Alexandria reassembles Dylan organ by organ until he is alive and whole on a lab table. The effort strips away her magical cosmetic enhancements, revealing the ordinary girl beneath. Mrs. Webb confirms that Alexandria, not Dylan, is the Chosen One.

Courtney breaks down and reveals that Tabitha, not Alexandria, performed her abortion. Alexandria had blackmailed Tabitha, threatening to expose her relationship with Sylvia, into taking Courtney apart on a classroom lab table without sedation or sterile conditions. Courtney also reveals she sent the anonymous texts to warn Ivy about Tabitha.

Ivy finds Tabitha in the Theoretical Magic section, sitting between the bloodstains. Tabitha confesses everything. Sylvia had advanced, metastatic cancer and was given a month to live. When Mrs. Webb said healing Sylvia was impossible, Tabitha used the abortion on Courtney as a test case to prove she could disassemble and reassemble a human body. She then spent three days without sleep taking Sylvia apart and removing cancer cell by cell. She succeeded, but during the final reassembly she fell asleep from exhaustion. When she woke, Sylvia had fallen apart, bisected, and could not be put back together. The journal was Tabitha's: years of obsessive work driven by guilt over their mother's death. Tabitha also confesses to tearing out the medical records, drugging Ivy, and manipulating her toward suspecting Alexandria.

Ivy tells Tabitha she will not expose her. She will tell Torres the NMIS was right: Sylvia's death was a spell gone wrong. But she demands Tabitha leave Osthorne permanently for performing an unsedated, dangerous procedure on a student. Tabitha reaches to hug Ivy; Ivy steps away. Their reconciliation is over.

As Ivy leaves the library, she touches the spines of the books. They are silent. She cries at the loss of their whispering. Back at the apartment, she confronts the wreckage of her time at Osthorne and reflects on her lifelong pattern of leaving before people can get close. She realizes the problem was never that people do not stick; it was that she does not. The next evening, she returns with wine and takeout and sits on Rahul's porch, hoping he will hear the truth. The novel ends with Ivy choosing, for once, to stay.