The Beautiful Ajatara #7
But she hadn’t given it that ending, she thought. It was just that it was the only possible ending. The only one that felt real and true. It came from James and Cordelia, just as much as it came from her. It had been born out of who they were as people, as all good endings were.
There was a loud poof sound, a sort of low explosion. Lucie gasped as James and Cordelia materialized before her, dressed as they had been before they went into the book. They were still in each other’s arms, still kissing madly.
Lucie beamed. Then, as the kiss continued…and continued…she cleared her throat. Loudly.
“You’re welcome for rescuing you!” she said, growing tired of them waiting to notice her, not to mention that they had slipped from a storybook world back into the grubby Fleet Street publishing office.
Unfortunately James was no longer wearing the ridiculous lacy shirt. She would have liked to see that.
She would have liked to see all of it, in fact.
It seemed more than a little unfair that she, the author of The Beautiful Cordelia, was the only one who would never know what it was like to live inside the story.
But perhaps that was simply the plight of the author.
To write the words, but never to experience them as a reader would.
James and Cordelia sprang apart, blushing. They looked around with wonder and relief.
“How lovely!” Lucie exclaimed. “Everything is fixed.”
“Not quite,” Cordelia said. “We need to resolve things for Ajatara.” She sounded almost sympathetic, which would be just like Cordelia.
There was no lost soul she couldn’t find some degree of empathy for.
Even a jilted demon who’d kidnapped her and tried to marry her off to a fictional bigamist. “She became a character in the story, after all. She has to have a happy ending too.”
“We can’t just set her free,” James pointed out. “She is a Greater Demon. It’s not really in our purview to do her a favor.”
“I think I have an idea,” Lucie said. She picked up the pen again. James looked alarmed.
“Is it a terrible idea, Lucie?” James said. “Is it a risky, reckless idea, like coming anywhere near that infernal manuscript again?”
Lucie ignored him. James had immaculate instincts when it came to fighting demons. But when it came to her ending her book, it was time to trust herself.
EPILOGUE
Lucie wrote, then drew a careful line under the word.
The demon Ajatara cried out in horror when she found herself back in her own realm…
“Nooooo!” Ajatara screamed, in rage and despair. How could all her hard work, her planning, come to this? Alone, again, in her palace of ice and misery, with no one to entertain her.
“Mistresssssss, you have returned?”
No one except that idiot Krog.
Except something was happening to Krog. His toadlike features were melting, shifting, becoming…
significantly less toadlike. Ajatara blinked, unable to believe her eyes, but it was true.
Where Krog had been standing—well, more like squatting, as Krog was wont to do—now stood a man.
No, a demon. The most devilishly handsome demon Ajatara had ever seen.
“I am inspired by the tale of the Beautiful Cordelia,” said the dashing demon who had been Krog. “I must tell you of my true feelings and show you my true form. I never thought you would love again after Belial, but now I have hope.”
Ajatara’s eyes widened…as did her heart. She opened her arms to Krog, and they embraced. The fierce flames of their passion melted the icy land, and the two of them lived happily together in her newly green world—
Lucie paused, just a moment, considering whether this was enough. Then decided, better safe than sorry.
Forever.
The book slammed shut. Lucie drew her hand back hastily, noting that the pen she’d been holding had vanished.
She let out a long breath of relief.
“Well, now that that’s tidily sorted,” James said, “perhaps we can all go home and forget this day ever happened?”
“I don’t know about that,” Cordelia said, a mischievous gleam in her eye. “It seems unwise not to draw some valuable lessons from our latest adventure.”
“I did deliver some deep wisdom there at the end, didn’t I?” James said.
“I was more thinking about what we’ve learned about how you look in ruffled blouses,” Cordelia said.
Lucie could tell, from the way their laughter wove together—and the way they couldn’t seem to stop reaching for each other, one innocent touch after another betraying the longing for something more—that the couple was eager to get home as quickly as possible.
Since James was her brother, she preferred not to think about it too much, but merely told them to go on without her, as she had a hansom cab waiting to take her home to the Institute.
Once Lucie was alone in the office, she hesitated before leaving. Then she returned to her manuscript, which still sat on the lectern.
It seemed like a hundred years had passed since the day she had learned she was to be published.
Everyone thought this was Lucie’s wildest dream.
And once, Lucie had believed it herself.
But as she got older, she started to understand something about her story.
She wasn’t writing The Beautiful Cordelia because she longed for it to be bound in leather and sold to strangers, or because she dreamed of being lauded the world over for being a brilliant writer.
Of course these things would be nice. But they were not her essential why.
She wrote The Beautiful Cordelia because she wanted to.
Because the story burned inside her—the characters, the emotions, the dreamscape of fantasy and adventure, the land where heroes could do the impossible, where lovers could be parted and reunite, where all her worst fears and greatest desires could be put down in black and white, transformed into a private world whose fate rested entirely in her hands.
Writing was not a profession—Shadowhunters didn’t have professions, they had a sacred obligation that shaped their souls.
But perhaps one could have more than one sacred obligation?
Lucie thought. Writing was, like breathing, like dreaming, simply an essential element of who she was and how she moved through her life.
One that would continue whether she was ever published or not.
So why had her heart leapt with such wild joy when she thought the book was to be published? Why had she felt that now—now, finally!—life could begin?
And then she knew. Her other essential why.
Jesse.
She had told Jesse they would not be married until her book was published, and this had seemed reasonable at the time.
But she wondered, now, whether that had been an excuse.
Whether a part of her had feared the same thing Cordelia did, that marriage meant the end of the story, that when the adventure of their love came to its conclusion, they would run out of plot.
One look at James and Cordelia was evidence enough that this was absurd: that the story went on, even if it was unseen by anyone save the characters themselves.
After all, though Lucie usually preferred to ignore the looks of romance exchanged between her parents, she had to admit that Will and Tessa grew ever more disgustingly enraptured with each other as the years passed.
Marriage, happiness—it wasn’t the end of a story.
It was simply the end of the story of the beginning.
Lucie had been writing the same story for almost as long as she could remember.
The Beautiful Cordelia was part of her, or at least who she had been.
But it was time to finish this story once and for all, she thought, and turn to a new one.
After all, she had a lifetime of stories to tell.
She simply had to give herself permission to begin.
She opened the book one final time, took up a new pen, and bent over the manuscript, carefully writing out the very last lines.
And Cordelia and James and Lucie and Jesse lived happily ever after.
The End.