Epilogue
The abandoned subway station had been strongly spelled to ward off intruders, but in the coming days, the Greenwood family would crack it open like an egg and scoop out its double-yolk insides.
Fiona Ganon had left nothing of major importance there: Some books she owned or had stolen from various places. Empty bottles of cold brew. The mysterious glass-shard remains of something that looked rather like a snow globe.
They wiped Joan’s blood from the scene, incinerated the rest.
But they never found the backpack she’d taken with her when she left Joan with a bomb around her neck.
A ghost with hawk-shaped eyes watched it sink, weighed down with heavy rocks, to the bottom of the Hudson.
Billy had seen this coming, at least a flash of it, the remnants of her own magic giving her that much.
These days she relied on her memory to know the future, but sometimes the universe still threw her a vision.
Fiona’s research had gone deeper than they would ever know. Water would pour in and destroy the papers, the journal, the scribbles, the passage about the end of an empire, stars crashing to earth, in a book of myths tracing back the lineage of witches.
Dead gods? Two years had been written and circled a few times.
Billy had waited centuries, clinging to this half life and her mother’s secrets, and still it wasn’t enough time.
Two more years until the anniversary of the Bind came again, and Billy learned if her vision would come to pass.
Two years until the sweet, sorrowful end of Billy’s afterlife.
The end of Joan, really.
Billy waited for the last bubble to emerge before she turned away. She couldn’t do much to protect Joan from what was coming, but she could give her a bit more time to live obliviously. That was the greatest mercy she could offer.
She didn’t know if it would doom them all. That was up to other fates.
Two years.
New York was opening ancient eyes.
They merely had to give her time.