Your brother has a locket that he wears night and day.

He’s worn it for as long as you can remember:

When you fought as children, it was there for you to pull on. (The chain never broke.)

When he brought roses for Abuela when she was in hospital, it dangled loosely beneath his shirt. (It hung there still when he placed more roses on her grave.)

When he picked you up from Robin’s party last Saturday, it was looped around his wrist like a rosary. (You wondered if he’d been whispering secret prayers to what was locked inside.)

He’s never tried to hide it. Never tried to hide what’s inside it.

A single lock of dark, curly hair.

Where did you find it? you asked him once.

But he just smiled and said, It found me. Now I just have to find its owner.

You might’ve thought his response strange, but there are stranger things. The unexplainable, the mysterious, trails your family’s footsteps generations back. It seems almost commonplace for him to have something constant about him, however abnormal to those who don’t know your family for what you are.

There is hardly a word for what you are.

Like your brother, you too have something precious on you at all times.

When asked where it came from, you’ve said all sorts of things. In a dumpster. Outside someone’s house. Half buried beneath the iron-wrought gates surrounding the cemetery. The attic.

You go treasure hunting with your friends at least once a week, so maybe it’s true.

You certainly can’t remember.

But you finger the pommel, grip the hilt until your hand seizes from the tension; whatever it’s made of, it was dull and grey when you first found it, and you’ve rubbed it to a Vatican gold.

It’s like a metaphor, your sister says. You have to work hard to gain something that truly shines.

She would know. Her eyes are bright silver.

Mother is very proud of her.

But you’re not looking for praise just yet, so you lead your party of scavengers with half-a-sword pointed skyward and scour your town, with its cracked statues and water fountains covered in moss, for trinkets and other remnants of a history the broken-backed wish you would forget ever existed.

You keep the dead singing. A choir for the damned. Your sword, the conductor’s baton.

It seems that only the birds in your town share your band’s love for pilfering and poking around, so you name yourselves accordingly, with titles of the avian sort. Robin, Sparrow, Wren, Magpie. Swift, Dove, Pigeon, Shrike. Jay, Raven, Lark, Finch. Crow tags along sometimes, but she’s working three part time jobs these days. You can’t blame her. Unless you’re made of old money, it’s hard to stay afloat in this town.

The last time all of you were together, it was New Year’s Eve. Well technically, it was New Year’s already, but all of you agreed that you wouldn’t call it New Year until 3am.

So there you were, sitting in an abandoned bar on the outskirts of town and drinking holy water Mark blessed for you behind the altar. (He tells you to call him ‘Brother’, but you’ve known him since he smoked $5 cigarettes behind the school canteen so you don’t bother.)

And you’re passing around a stick you found outside – Lark broke it in two and handed you the larger half, claiming one side had been diseased. One by one, you knight each other, and when the clock strikes three, you say, “Gratissimum.”

It has begun.

On the day the circus came, Dove’s nose bled so profusely she was allowed to leave math class early.

This is of no consequence, but all that it means is that Dove saw the ringmaster before anyone else.

He was tall, Dove told you, tall and young. Some could call him handsome, I suppose. Dove has lost most of her love for men; she has five brothers, all older than she is.

She told you all this while rust-red sugar dissolved on her tongue; while her nose had stopped bleeding, her mouth had not. You wondered which taste was more potent on her tongue – the cloying cloud-like saccharine or the iron of all your childhood scrapes.

You wondered if you had kissed her whether you would have found out, or if she would have tasted like she always did, like cold water and mint, like orange juice and sweetened cream.

But you satisfied your palate with caramel popcorn and watched grass grow greener beneath the pads of hoop-jumping felines, their features so much gentler than the exaggerated caricatures the statues wear at your brother’s university.

Even now, you wonder how many lions you would need to make things grow again.

When she was seven, your sister found a book. It is like your sword hilt, not in that it is golden in any way, but that when anyone tries to remember where it had come from, time and space seem to waver and distort. Memories are a resource your family trades in, but they are not always willing transactions.

Sometimes they are taken.

You suppose it’s probably for the best that you don’t know. It doesn’t bother you, the not knowing.

After all, you’ve grown up knowing barely anything that you didn’t learn for yourself.

Your sister was different. She had to know everything, every time the clock chimed, every time a bird fell. And the universe listened. She asked and it told her everything.

So it wasn’t surprising when she found a book no one could read and traced a word in the air that turned her eyes silver. (Your parents know all languages spoken yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but that book is hers and hers alone.)

She tried to teach you how to read it. But you were never one to sit still for academia.

Sometimes you hear her whispering at night and her voice sounds like starlight.

If she were born on a full moon to the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, one might call your mother a witch. But since she was not, they smile and lend her sugar when she asks for it, invite her to social gatherings and charity events.

When she has guests over, no one questions why the house smells like sage, instead asking her if the holy properties of the herb are as they heard. (In short, they are. She’s never sent you to ask Mark to bless your house, unlike other nervous housewives. Jay’s mother is one of those types. Praying five times a day, you know how it is.)

And no one tells you to take off your necklace of spices on Samhain. You’re strange – they know that. Those you like are allowed to sniff the base of your neck and your collarbone; those two spots are the most fragrant. When you were little, you slept with the string the night before, just because it smelled so nice. (You don’t do that anymore because it stains the sheets, and you do your own laundry.)

One Samhain, lightning struck your yard, singeing the cinnamon tree. No rain followed.

Strange.

When you buried Abuela, there were two caskets instead of one.

Her second husband had disappeared a long time ago, so her funeral was for him too.

You only met him once. (He smelled like dried fruit and malt whiskey. The palms of his hands were like sandpaper, but his veins felt like eels under his skin.)

Both caskets were open at the altar, and while the people lined up behind Abuela’s casket to say their piece to a memory of a living being (and others just wanted the morbid satisfaction of seeing death before them), you went to her husband’s first.

What to say to an empty casket? A memento to a life not lost but missing? In the end, you said nothing, but ran your eyes over the vertices of the casket like it was his body, and not just a hollow reminder.

Your siblings joined you. This was the man that gave your brother his first taste of liquor, the man that gave your sister India ink for her birthday every year. But they didn’t say anything either.

And you held Abuela’s hand, though she was not present to squeeze it back. Hold on tight, mija.

On their wedding night, your parents broke their rings. They hammered over the anvil at your uncle’s forge, dousing the bands in liquid fire and other extremities, until the rings were no longer circular. Instead of meeting in the middle, they separated, one raising higher and the other sweeping downwards.

It’s our way of saying we are not bound to each other eternally, mija, your mother told you when you were young and bouncing on her lap.

We are tied to each other here and now, but see how the ring rises upwards? When we are gone, I do not wish for your father to be bound to me. A ring symbolises eternity, mija. An inescapable fate. She smiles sadly. But we forged our own future together.

So one day, if your father dies before me, I am allowed to love another. If I die before him, I hope he will do the same. It does not do to try to hold on too tightly to another’s soul.

But you squeezed her hand and she laughed. You’re holding on too tight, mija!

You think of Abuela, her final words as you sat by her bed. Hold on tight, mija.

Lillian Gates has a secret.

The thing about secrets is that once more than one person knows, you can’t control where that secret goes. Secrets are unwieldy, slimy creatures. They slip out of your mouth unless you have an iron nail stuck to the end of their tails. Hold the nail snug under your tongue – it’s the best way to keep a secret close, but not let it escape.

All of this to say, you know Lillian Gates’ secret. And she knows you know.

What she doesn’t know is that secrets are as good a currency as memories. Sometimes even better.

Lillian Gates works at the library at a computer with two screens, one for books people are borrowing and the other for books more likely to borrow people.

Lillian Gates is not a witch. Not at all, merely curious, she tells you. But still, she’s scared. Most good secrets inspire fear.

So she gives you extra time to return your books when they’re overdue, and asks you every so often if you’ve told anyone.

Of course you have. But you tell her, no.

Secrets are as good a currency as memories, after all.

Those who know will keep quiet.

Your sister’s been cooking a lot lately.

The recipes come from her book, of course. You can understand some of the words now. Simple words – ingredients. (You suppose the diagrams scribbled into the margins do help.) Words like basil and marble and salt.

Some words even your sister, with her silver eyes and all-knowing, can’t read. Ink blots consumed the words, dry parchment caving to an irrevocable hunger. It spreads, even now. Your sister copies what is left into the notes on her phone.

You ask her what she’s cooking for.

She says she doesn’t know. But she wants to.

You shouldn’t have expected anything different.

So you leave her to her concoctions on the kitchen counter. The strange smell follows you out the front door; it is cloying, but not sweet; neither putrid nor pleasant – you don’t know what you think of it. Or rather, you can’t think it at all. Whenever you try to form an opinion about your sister’s strange recipe, static erases all thoughts.

Another exchange, you decide. It must have been taken when you were young, when your grandmother was not even an embryo.

You do not mind.

Trade has always been your family’s forte.