Chapter 20 #2
“Just what?” He turned me to face him, his hands gentle on my shoulders.
“Just the woman who walked into the Dragon’s fire to save everyone she loved?
Just the person who convinced an ancient being that humanity was worth preserving?
Just the veterinarian who’s going to take care of every sick dog and injured hawk in Silver Hollow for the next fifty years? ”
I laughed despite myself. “That’s a lot of pressure.”
“You can handle it.” He kissed my forehead, the gesture so familiar now that I leaned into it automatically. “And you won’t be doing it alone.”
The doorbell rang before I could respond, which was probably just as well because I wasn’t sure what I would have said. I heard my grandmother’s footsteps in the hallway and heard the door open, followed by a voice I hadn’t expected.
“Sorry I’m late. The flight from Portland was delayed, and then I had to argue with the rental car company for an hour about the difference between ‘compact’ and ‘subcompact.’”
Eric Hargrove stood in the doorway with a bottle of wine in one hand and a nervous expression on his face.
He’d traded his usual lab coat and wire-rimmed glasses for a decent blazer and contact lenses, and he looked almost like a normal person instead of a former government scientist who’d spent the last few months monitoring dimensional anomalies from a basement full of equipment.
“Eric.” Rebecca’s voice came to us from the living room, warm in a way I’d never heard her sound before. “You made it.”
She went across the room to meet him, and I watched in fascination as the sharp-edged FBI agent I’d known for months transformed into something softer, someone who reached up to straighten his collar and then rose on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Well,” Ben murmured beside me. “That’s new.”
It was, and it wasn’t. We’d already had hints that they were together, although Rebecca Morse wasn’t the kind of person to simply announce to everyone that she had a new boyfriend. If we weren’t smart enough to figure it out, well, that was our problem.
I supposed surviving an apocalypse together either brought people closer or pushed them apart. For Eric and Rebecca, apparently, it had been the former.
The familiar chaos of Thanksgiving descended after that, with everyone pitching in to help with something, or at least stay out of the way so we weren’t tripping over them as we worked.
I helped my mother baste the turkey and kept an eye on the special spiced cranberry sauce that my mother had introduced to the menu when I was only around five or six, in the good days before my father left.
And I watched him and Ben have what looked like a serious conversation near the fireplace, their voices too low for me to hear but their expressions suggesting something important was being said.
And through it all, I kept noticing how different the world looked through ordinary eyes.
The light falling through the windows was just light, not the complex interplay of electromagnetic frequencies I’d once been able to perceive.
The house was just a house, not a nexus of dimensional energy with roots that stretched down into the ley line beneath.
Even the forest outside, visible through every west-facing window, was just trees and earth and sky — beautiful, yes, but no longer alive with the hum of ancient power.
Part of me mourned that loss. But as I stood there in the kitchen with my mother, watching her roll out pie crust with the same practiced motions she’d used my entire life, I found myself thinking that there might be a different kind of magic in the ordinary.
Not the fire and lightning of dimensional energy, but something quieter and steadier, the magic of family gathered around a table, the magic of a future that stretched out ahead with room for choices I hadn’t yet imagined.
Hope’s offer surfaced in my mind again. That gorgeous Victorian house with its wraparound porch, and the veterinary clinic with its steady stream of dogs and cats and horses and the occasional hawk with a broken wing. A life built on healing instead of fighting, on nurturing instead of defending.
It was a life I’d once imagined for myself, back before DAPI’s interference, back in a time when I’d thought my heritage wouldn’t interfere.
Once my abilities had grown and changed, I’d thought I’d move forward as that altered Sidney, a woman who wasn’t what she’d once been, someone with powers I once couldn’t have even begun to imagine.
Now I was just Sidney again, and that wasn’t what I’d thought I wanted.
But maybe what I’d wanted had been shaped by circumstances that no longer applied.
We sat down to dinner at four o’clock, just as the light outside began to shift from gold to amber. The turkey occupied pride of place at the center of the table, surrounded by enough side dishes to ensure leftovers for a week. My grandmother said grace, and then the meal began in earnest.
Conversation flowed as easily as the wine, moving from topic to topic with the organic rhythm of people who had been through enough together that small talk felt unnecessary.
Eric told us about the readings from the portal site, which had stabilized completely over the past two weeks.
Rebecca shared her own news, that she’d officially retired and was starting her own security company in Grants Pass.
And my father described his physical therapy with a dry humor that almost dared us not to find the absurdity in his situation.
I listened more than I talked, letting the voices wash over me like warm water.
This was something I’d forgotten how to do in recent months — just sit and absorb the presence of people I loved without analyzing every word for subtext, without scanning the room for threats or calculating the probability of everything going wrong.
The absence of my abilities made it easier, strangely enough.
Without the constant input of dimensional awareness, my mind had space for simpler things — the way my mother laughed at something my father said, or how Ben’s hand found mine beneath the table without either of us having to look.
The way my grandmother watched all of us with an expression that might have been contentment if she’d been anyone else.
“A toast,” Rebecca said at last as she raised her glass of wine. The table fell quiet, all eyes turning to her. “To the people who saved the world. And to the ones who are still figuring out how to live in it.”
We raised our glasses. The wine was good — something Eric had brought from a vineyard in the Willamette Valley, apparently — and I let the taste of it sit on my tongue for a moment before swallowing.
“I want to say something,” I heard myself say, and twelve faces turned toward me with varying degrees of surprise. Public speeches had never been my strong suit. But the words were there, pressing against the back of my throat, and I’d learned recently that some things needed to be said out loud.
“Two weeks ago,” I continued, “I woke up in this house and reached for the ley line, and there was nothing there. Just silence. And I thought — ” I paused so I could steady my voice.
“I thought that meant I’d lost everything that mattered.
That I was broken in some fundamental way that couldn’t be fixed. ”
Ben’s hand tightened around mine beneath the table.
“But looking at all of you right now, I’m starting to think maybe I was wrong.
” I let my gaze move around the table, taking in each face in turn.
“My mother and grandmother, who came back from a place I couldn’t reach.
My father, who spent seventeen years protecting us from the shadows and then took a bullet to save my mom.
Ben, who fell in love with me when I was suspicious and scared and terrible at letting people in.
Rebecca and Eric, who risked everything to help us when they didn’t have to. ”
I took a breath.
“I thought being a guardian was all about the abilities, the sensing and the channeling and the connection to something larger than myself. And I grieved when I lost that. I still grieve.” I let myself acknowledge the truth of it, the ache that hadn’t fully faded and might never fully fade.
“But I think maybe being a guardian is actually about showing up for the people you love and about choosing to protect what matters, even when it costs you something. About building a life that’s worth defending. ”
The table was silent, but it was a good silence. The kind that held rather than pressed.
“So here’s my toast,” I said, raising my glass.
“To normal. To ordinary. To turkey and mediocre wine” — this drew a mock-offended noise from Eric, something I’d intended to lighten the mood — “and family gathered around a table in a house that’s survived everything the universe could throw at it.
To the life we’re going to build together, whatever that looks like. ”
“To the life we’re going to build,” my mother echoed, and the others joined in, glasses raised, voices blending into a harmony that filled the old home’s rooms with something very close to hope.
Across the table, my grandmother caught my eye and nodded once, a small gesture of approval that meant more than any speech she could have given.
The light outside deepened toward dusk, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I let myself believe that everything might actually be okay.
Later, after the dishes were washed and the leftovers stored and the house had settled into the drowsy contentment of a holiday well spent, I stood on the back porch and watched the stars come out.
Ben found me there, as I’d known he would. He brought two cups of coffee and settled into the chair beside mine, close enough that our arms touched.
“Big day,” he said.
“Mmm.” I wrapped my hands around the warm mug and let the steam rise into my face. “I think I gave a speech.”
“You definitely gave a speech. A good one, too.”
“I surprised myself.”
“You’re always surprising yourself.” He sipped his coffee, his gaze on the darkening forest at the edge of the property. “Hope cornered me before she left. She told me about the offer.”
“And?” I knew what I wanted…but I needed Ben to want it, too.
“And I told her it was your decision.” He turned to look at me, his expression open in the fading light. “But for what it’s worth, I like the idea. The house, the practice, the life. It feels like something we could build together.”
“‘We,’” I repeated. The word sat strangely on my tongue, weighted with a whole host of intention I wasn’t sure I was ready to examine.
“If you want,” he added quickly. “I’m not assuming anything. I just — ”
I cut him off before he could spiral into qualifications. “I want,” I said. “I want the ‘we.’ I want the house and the practice and the life we could build. I want all of it.”
He was quiet for a moment, and then he smiled — not the careful smile of someone managing expectations, but the real one, the one that transformed his whole face.
“Okay, then,” he said.
“Okay, then.”
We stood there in relaxed silence as the last light faded from the sky and the first stars appeared.
Somewhere in the forest, an owl called, and somewhere farther away, I heard the distant bark of a coyote.
Ordinary sounds, normal sounds. The soundtrack of a world that went on turning whether or not I could feel the magic beneath its skin.
I couldn’t feel the portal network or the ancient fire that slept beneath the mountains. But as I stood here with Ben, with my family inside the warm house behind us, with a future spreading out ahead that I was finally letting myself imagine — I thought that maybe this was its own kind of magic.
The quiet kind. The human kind.
The kind that lasted.