Notes of Magic (The Bohemians #1) Author: Jessica Bucher
Publication Date: February 24, 2018
Goodreads
Enchanted city. Old magic. New threat.
Taq, a young fiddler, comes to Prague with dreams of joining the Bohemians—a band of immortal, magic-wielding street performers. With a mission to right past wrongs, things don’t go as planned when he meets the beautiful performer, Katia. Now, he must decide if revealing his secret is worth losing her heart.
Katia has spent one hundred years chained to the city, broken-hearted and silent,
waiting for her chance to be free. But with an impending threat on Bohemia itself and a mysterious newcomer, peace is starting look farther than ever. Now she must decide if she should trust Taq or put her faith in the one who broke her heart—the tyrannical Magistrate of Bohemia.
Curses can be broken, but at what cost?
ExcerptThis is a deleted “prologue” and a sneak peek at what is in store for book two.
Budapest, 1934
Eight-year-old Yuri Stovanovich had never seen someone play music on the street before. He watched the old man play, with his face wrinkled from the pinnacle of his bald head to the gap-tooth smile under his thick glasses. Yuri did not wonder why someone would play alone on a street when people shuffled by uncaring, and he did not care that his mother would worry about his absence from the store where they had been shopping. His mind could not get past the sound that filled the streets.
For the first time in young Yuri's life, he had heard the sweet, melodic sound of music, pure and organic straight from the fingers of the musician who created it. He had heard records played and listened to the messy sound of bands in the pubs and inns his mother and he had ventured through. But Yuri had never heard anything like this.
The song was light and young. It reminded him of a beautiful girl or sunshine on iron-clad
balconies. The center of his chest felt as if the music were pulling his heart out through the buttons of his uniform. Yuri floated away on the notes that came from the keys and pipes in the hands of a poor old man.
So gently, without a soul knowing, Yuri reached out to touch the instrument. Not with his hand, but with that invisible reach that belonged only to him. It was his mind's reach, and it was stronger than any man's. He reserved this inconspicuous gift to moving things about the house for his mother or dangling flowers over her head while she cried, hoping it might cheer her up.
Suddenly, a gentle hand grasped his shoulder through the thickness of his tweed jacket. The soft features of his mother's face interrupted his view of the accordion player.
"Yuri, what do you think you are doing? You cannot run off like that, my love. Do you understand?"
Sweat beaded on her forehead and upper lip. Her cheeks were pink but the skin around her eyes was almost gray with pale. She wrangled in the terror she felt and hid it from Yuri, but he could see it through the weakness of her voice and the state of her complexion.
Yuri felt guilt for worrying his mother, but worrying his mother was not difficult to do. She gasped if he stepped too far away from her in the marketplace. She woke with a start every night if a single piece of his body was not touching hers in their small bed. She often stared at him too long while his thoughts preoccupied him. His mother's love was a blessing he knew not how to be grateful for. He wondered if there would come a day when he would love someone to the point of burden.
It was difficult to blame his mother for her abundance of concern, because Yuri understood that he was not like other children. In fact, he was so incredibly unique and extraordinary that his existence alone was a threat to society. At least, that is what he came to believe. His mother warned him, since the day he could understand words, that if anyone were to know of his gift, his little magic trick, they would kill him.
Suddenly, a crew of black-suited, baton-wielding street guards clucking their weapons against their hands, cornered the old man and his accordion. Yuri watched in terror as the music stopped and in silence, the old man packed up his instrument, shuffling off the street corner. They continued their jabbing as the old musician left Yuri with one last gummy smile and a queer wink.
Yuri wanted to ask why the musicians were not allowed on the street anymore, when it filled the air with such beauty. Before the question could form itself on his lips, his body felt drained of blood. Cold flashed through his skin, like jumping into a pond of frigid water. His skin, he knew, was paler than his mother's. Paler than the surface of the moon on a clear night in Budapest. And as quickly as it came, Yuri was a lump of barely living flesh on the cobblestone. Darkness would keep him, like a long nap, until the blood returned to his body where it belonged.
There was one more infamously special thing about little Yuri.
He had a hole in his heart the size of a flea's brain. But that little hole, completely irreparable and life-threatening, kept his mother's nerves on edge more than anything.
Poor Mrs. Stovanovich had no way of knowing that her sickly son would someday grow to be the immortal patriarch of outcasts. A pinhole was nothing against the Magistrate of Bohemia.
Jessica Bucher is a Young Adult author living in Texas with her husband and children. Her first book, The Hereafter, was published in 2016. When she’s not writing, editing, or chasing her kids, she can be found scrolling through Facebook or planning her next travel adventure.About the Author
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