The End of Magic, page 8
“Why don’t you show me this playground,” Lizbeth said, indicating the far side of the Red Chapel.
“Yay!” Ginny squealed. Lizbeth noticed the change in the girl and realized that Ginny had decided everything would be all right now that Lizbeth was here. She held tight to Lizbeth’s shirt, leading the three of them past the front of the cabin but giving the entrance a wide berth.
“It’s a real place,” Marji said, taking Lizbeth’s hand. The girl’s fingers were cold and clammy, the palm slicked with sweat. “But Thomas says it looks different back home.”
“It’s called the Red Chapel ’cause it’s made out of red trees,” Ginny piped up, pleased to be able to share what she’d learned.
“Yeah?” Lizbeth asked, encouraging the girls to keep talking.
“Yeah,” Ginny continued. “Thomas says that they cut down big redwood trees to make it—”
“Like the one you can drive through in Northern California,” Marji added, still not her normal self but some instinctive part of her not wanting her little sister to hog the conversation.
“It’s magic.” This came from Ginny, who wore a wide grin, exposing tiny bone-white baby teeth. “See!”
They’d rounded the side of the cabin, and the sight that greeted them took Lizbeth’s breath away. This wasn’t a traditional playground. It was a fairy garden. Earlier in the summer, she and Dev had helped the girls build a smaller version of this same fairy land in the Montrose backyard—but theirs had been nowhere near as elaborate as this one.
The dreamlands had outdone themselves: There were tall glass spires in a rainbow of colors with brightly colored pinwheels in shimmering gold fabric resting atop them; strings of twinkling lights wrapped themselves around human-sized sunflowers whose faces were like soft brown fur wreathed in a halo of mustard-colored petals. A rose quartz fountain cut into the shape of a dolphin sat in the middle of the garden, a purple waterfall of soap bubbles burbling pleasantly from the creature’s nose. A border of blooming hydrangea bushes in shades of baby blue, mauve, and opalescent cream lined the circumference of the garden, walling it in completely—except for a child-sized entrance cut into the shrubbery.
Ginny fit easily, but it took some creative maneuvering—aka crawling—for Lizbeth to get her adult body through the doorway. Marji brought up the rear, only ducking her head slightly to clear the top of the entrance. As soon as they were inside, both girls grabbed for Lizbeth’s hand.
“It’s just like ours,” Ginny said, pulling down the bottom of her T-shirt, the front of which was emblazoned with shiny pink butterflies.
“But it’s all real,” Marji added.
“Real in a different kind of way,” Lizbeth said, letting the girls give her the tour of the garden. “This place is called the dreamlands—”
“We know.”
“Oh,” Lizbeth said.
“Thomas told us,” Marji continued. “He said his brother lives here and that it’s like a magical playland. That you can make it change if you use your mind.”
“I don’t like Thomas, LB,” Ginny said with a seven-year-old’s bluntness.
“He’s not so bad.” Marji spoke quickly, blushing bright pink and avoiding Lizbeth’s eyes.
Someone thinks Thomas is cute, Lizbeth thought—which made total sense. Marjoram was almost twelve and puberty was about to hit the Montrose family like a hurricane.
And Lizbeth knew exactly why Thomas appealed to the preteen: He greatly resembled the poster of Benedict Cumberbatch hidden on the inside of Marji’s closet door—a place she thought was private but obviously was not. At least not with an overcurious kid sister hanging around. Dev had heard all about it—“Sherlock Holmes lives in Marji’s closet!”—from motormouth Ginny and, finding the whole thing just “adorable,” she’d relayed the story to the rest of the coven. Only Lizbeth, who at eighteen was still in the process of leaving her own teenage years behind, realized how humiliated Marji would be to know her mother’s friends had giggled over her crush on the dapper British movie star.
Thomas may have gotten a pass with Marji because of his resemblance to her crush, but Lizbeth had to agree with Ginny. There was definitely something about Thomas that rubbed her the wrong way. He wasn’t bad, per se, just full of himself and hard to read.
So unlike Tem.
“So what else did Thomas tell you,” Lizbeth asked, as they stopped at the fountain and the girls sat down on the stone bench that curved alongside it.
“That you can drink it ’cause it’s grape soda,” Ginny said, pointing at the frothing water pouring from the dolphin.
“Whose idea was that? I don’t remember anything about grape soda—or even this fountain—being in the fairy garden in your backyard.”
Marji shrugged, but Ginny was full of information.
“Thomas asked us what we wanted and Marji said, ‘Fairy garden’—”
Marji’s brow furrowed.
“I did not.”
“Did, too,” Ginny crowed.
“I said,” Marji corrected, “that I didn’t think he could make a fairy garden like the one at our house, and then he did.”
“That’s what I said.”
Marji rolled her eyes at Ginny—and it was such a specific gesture, the look of utter disdain for a sibling, that it made Lizbeth miss her older brother. She didn’t know what Weir would think about all this. Or what he would have to say when she was able to go home again. He would be mad, of course, angry she’d gone away and left him in a catacomb in Rome. She’d have a lot of explaining to do: why she’d taken off, how she’d been compelled by magic—and the power of the trapped souls of the dead Dream Keepers she and Daniela had found in the catacombs—to go to that awful monolith of rock in the Ural Mountains and use the power of the Blood Moon to telegraph her dream of magic to an unwitting human world.
It was all unbelievable to her—and she was the witch. She knew about strange and unbelievable things . . . had seen stuff that was both terrifying and awe-inspiring. She was the last blood sister of her kind, a Dream Keeper (when almost no others remained) who until recently had been mute and maimed, damaged beyond all reason by the death of her mother and her forced incarceration in a mental institution by the cruel selfishness of her father.
God, her life sounded like a soap opera . . . and maybe it was.
“—he said Mama was gone . . .” Lizbeth had gotten lost in her thoughts and had missed some of what Ginny was saying.
“Did he say how?”
The little girl shook her head, her usually tan complexion ashen.
“He just said she was gone,” Marji added, picking at her thumbnail.
“So maybe he just meant that, literally, your mom had gone somewhere.”
Marji frowned and then her lower lip curled as she tried not to cry.
“No, he said our grandma and our aunties were dead. That Mama was gone, too.”
A tear plopped onto Marji’s cheek, and Ginny reached out and took her sister’s hand.
“It’s okay, Marji.”
Marji shook her head.
“No, it’s not,” she sobbed. “It’s not okay and it will never be okay again.”
She dropped her chin to her chest and cried in earnest, her shoulders shaking as she took in deep, wheezing breaths. This upset Ginny, who until that point had been relatively calm. She looked up at Lizbeth, her own lip trembling and pronounced: “LB will fix it.”
Lizbeth was surprised. If what the girls said was true, she didn’t think anyone could fix this mess. Ginny’s words were like a balm on her sister’s nerves, and slowly Marji began to calm down. Her face was still pale and her eyes red-rimmed, but she’d stopped hyperventilating.
“You will?” she asked Lizbeth, eyebrows shooting up in a hopeful smile.
Lizbeth didn’t know what to do. She hated lying to the girls, but she couldn’t bear to see them so distraught. The words she settled on were vague enough that she didn’t feel too terrible saying them.
“I will do everything in my power to fix what I can.”
Ginny caught her older sister’s eye. Marji took a deep breath and nodded.
“Okay,” she said, her voice shaky as she held Ginny’s hand. “We believe you.”
And that was all it took.
• • •
It was different being in the dreamlands this time. She wasn’t just visiting them in her sleep (like she’d always done before). She was now physically here—she and the girls—brought by the two odd brothers from another universe who seemed to know just how exactly to manipulate the dreamlands to do their bidding. It was exhilarating. She felt more alive, the colors around her were more vivid, the heat from the sun warmer . . . it was like being in a video-game version of normal reality.
They’d stayed in the fairy garden for a long time, Ginny half in Lizbeth’s lap and Marji leaning against Lizbeth’s shoulder. It had gotten toastier as they’d rested beside the fountain, the fog lifting as the sky burst into a cloudless neon blue—and the girls had fallen asleep.
One minute Ginny was quietly prattling on about how fairies only ate honey and flower nectar, and then there was silence. Lizbeth let her own eyes close, the sun’s heat spreading across her scalp and face, down her shoulders and torso, until she was floating in a sea of golden warmth. She sat in the silence for a while, her mind adrift in a hazy fog of exhaustion, until a long shadow cut across her face, blocking the sun. She lazily opened her eyes, expecting to see Tem standing above her. To her surprise, it was not him.
“Shh, we don’t want to wake them.”
Lizbeth’s brown eyes widened at the sight of the two older women, one a giantess with a halo of wispy, strawberry-blond hair and the other small and gray-haired, her no-nonsense attitude apparent in the rigid set of her posture and her granite countenance. The Tall Lady, as Lizbeth had referred to Hessika when she was a child, had cast the shadow. Her companion, Eleanora, knelt down so that she and Lizbeth were at eye level, and Lizbeth noticed that the long brown shift she wore was too big for her small frame. That, and the contrast of the towering giant of a woman beside her, made Eleanora look elfin.
“You’re here . . . ?” Lizbeth said, her voice full of confusion as she shifted in place, trying to stand up.
“Take care,” Eleanora said, smiling down at the sleeping girls. “They need their rest.”
Lizbeth nodded, careful not to disturb the two sleeping beauties as she climbed to her knees. The next moment she was in Eleanora’s arms, clinging to the smaller woman the way Ginny and Marji had clung to her earlier that day.
“I was so scared,” she whispered.
“I know,” Eleanora said, stroking Lizbeth’s long hair. “But you did what needed doing. As hard as it was.”
They must’ve made a sight: two sleeping girls, two giant women—Hessika and Lizbeth were both tall as trees—and Eleanora, the no-nonsense, birdlike creature who bound them all together.
“Sorry,” Lizbeth murmured, and pulled out of Eleanora’s embrace, embarrassed by her outburst. She wasn’t a child anymore, yet she’d gone to Eleanora like one, wanting the older woman to make everything better.
As if she could read Lizbeth’s mind—and maybe she could—Hessika said: “There’s no weakness in needing folks, ma chère. We are born alone, but we mustn’t stay that way.” Her voice was soft and lilting, with strong brushstrokes of the Lower Alabama accent that had made her seem so exotic to Lizbeth as a child.
The leader of the Echo Park coven before Eleanora, Hessika had been long dead by the time Lizbeth was born. But she’d chosen to stay on this plane of existence as a Dream Walker, her ghostly presence a part of Lizbeth’s life since she was small. Like Lizbeth, Hessika had been a Dream Keeper, her dream prophecies kept in journals that Eleanora had hidden away until Lizbeth needed them most—because Hessika, alone, had dreamed of The Flood and knew that their ultimate goal was to destroy the covens. These Dream Journals had led Lizbeth to Italy, where she’d separated from her coven mates Lyse and Daniela and her brother, Weir—compelled to do so by magic. This had set into motion a series of events that, she hoped, would stop The Flood.
“So you found us then, did you?”
Thomas stood near the entrance of the fairy garden, lounging against one of the glass spires. His pose may have been casual, but there was a rigid set to his jaw and his eyes flashed with warning.
“What have you done?” Eleanora said, lips pursed in anger. “Bringing them here—”
She gestured at the sleeping girls.
“They’re safer,” Thomas argued, as he stood up straight. “I had no choice after what happened.”
Eleanora got to her feet, shaking her head as Lizbeth tried to follow.
“Stay, this is between him and me,” Eleanora said to her, the words coming out in a low growl. She strode across the lawn, the hiss of grass crunching under her bare feet.
Thomas met her halfway, moving with a feline grace that belied his anxiety. He was trying to intimidate Eleanora, but she was having none of it. She marched right up to him and jammed her finger into his chest.
“How could you do it? You sold them out and now they’re all gone.”
Thomas held his ground, but his shoulders slumped.
“I didn’t do it. I know it looks bad for me, but you have to believe I would never harm a hair on the head of a Montrose woman.”
Eleanora was like a pit bull with its teeth locked on its prey.
“How dare you plead innocent,” she said, her voice tight with rage. “You bound all of them to the house and then you burned it to the ground. You would have done the same to Hessika and me, but unlike the others, we didn’t belong to the house. We exist in the dreamlands like your brother.”
“Speak of the Devil,” Thomas said, turning around and indicating that Tem should join them. “Come in, brother. No one here will bite you.”
Tem ducked his head so he could fit through the entrance cut into the hydrangeas.
“I don’t expect to be bitten, brother.”
He moved toward Thomas and Eleanora, but then he bypassed them and made a beeline for Lizbeth, kneeling down beside her.
“Everything okay here, half-caste?” He took her hand in his and brought it to his lips. The back of her hand tingled where he kissed it.
—Thomas may be a self-righteous prick, but he can be trusted. I promise.
He spoke only to her, using their telepathic bond.
“I’m fine. Everything is okay,” she replied, giving him a quick smile. She didn’t know if Thomas could be trusted or not, but she believed in Tem. She was just going to have to trust him when it came to his brother’s intentions.
“I was just telling the ladies that I didn’t hurt their friends.”
Tem raised an eyebrow, turning his attention to Eleanora.
“He helped to destroy the Montrose line—” Eleanora began, but Thomas interrupted her.
“I saved the girls. If I had meant to wipe them all out, why would I have done that?”
Eleanora shook her head.
“I can’t begin to imagine what’s going on in that horrid mind of yours.”
Thomas snorted.
“A powerful witch wants in my mind. Not the kind of place for your sort, dearie,” he spat back. “Don’t think you can handle what’s in there.”
“So much anger, ma chère,” Hessika said, stepping between them, her height dwarfing them both as she looked at Thomas. “We must put it all aside in these dark times. Fight among ourselves, and we will surely lose this war.”
“But he murdered them,” Eleanora said as her gaze lingered on the sleeping girls, sadness filling her eyes.
“We don’t know who perpetrated this atrocity,” Hessika replied, a light breeze rippling the hem of her diaphanous cream-colored robe. “Appearances can be deceiving.”
Hessika’s pronouncement seemed to relax Thomas, his shoulders sagging and the tension lines dissolving from his face.
“I appreciate your judicious words,” Thomas said. “I understand I was not myself before and that my behavior was, well, unforgivable. For that I am truly sorry. I was under the spell of the darkness . . . The Flood, as you call it in your universe. It was not my choice to attack Devandra Montrose or her children that day.”
Tem stood beside his brother, placing a hand on his arm.
“Where we come from, we are you,” Tem said, directing his words to Hessika. “Unlike in your universe, magic was never forgotten in ours; it’s flourished and grown, helping us to create a more egalitarian society. We, the magicians, are its stewards and we do its bidding. Some of your kind, like Lizbeth and yourself, Hessika”—he lifted his chin toward the Tall Lady—“are half-castes. Somewhere in your family line is a link to our universe. It’s why you are Dream Keepers, why you can visit the dreamlands of your own volition. How you can control what you see here. In this place where time is fluid. Where the past, present, and future meet, and if you’re lucky, you can get a taste of your destiny.”
Hessika nodded.
“I’ve always wondered . . .”
“Why you were so special?” Thomas asked.
“How we came to be,” Hessika said. “Why we could do so much more than just dream.”
“It’s because you are us,” Tem said. “There’s so much more you can learn, so much more available to you. You have no idea the power you wield—”
