Chapter Twenty-Five
Okay.
Auntie Zee was the cat.
Was that really any more odd than any of the other magic she’d seen?
Yes. It is. A lot odder. “Auntie Zee?” Calisa said, squatting in front of the cat. “Is it really you? Um, meow once for yes, twice for no?”
The cat began to lick her paw.
“That’s her,” Thomas said. “She takes that form to recover her strength—it’s what enables her to heal and recharge—but she must have been too worn out to change back.
She warned me once that could happen, if she overextended herself.
One of the reasons I needed to find the remedy.
” He knelt beside her and lifted the medicine to her face.
“I found it, Zee. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring it to you earlier. But I found it.”
She lowered her paw and licked the medicine from the dropper.
Calisa leaned against Jack and whispered, “Did you know?”
“Not a clue,” Jack said, also in a whisper. His eyes were round, and his jaw dropped as they both gawked at his dad and the cat. “Though, in retrospect, I can’t remember ever seeing Portia and Auntie Zee in the same room together, but I thought that was just the cat being a cat.”
She could understand that.
“In my defense,” Jack said, “it is a far better disguise than Clark Kent as Superman.”
Also, agreed.
She stared at the cat, wondering if Portia was about to shape-shift into Auntie Zee like some bad CGI effect.
She felt another laugh tickle at her lips.
It was too absurd, too unbelievable. Just too much.
Other realms, a pet dragon, a moving statue, a sea witch, and now this?
“Where do her clothes go when she transforms?”
Jack’s eyes widened, and then he spun around quickly to stare at the bookshelves. The library ladder scooted closer, as if hoping he’d climb it. He pretended to study the book spines.
Calisa was about to ask another question when the cat’s fur rippled.
It looked as if water were moving beneath her skin.
The air around her shimmered, and suddenly it didn’t seem so funny anymore.
This was happening. It wasn’t a joke or a trick; it was magic.
And it was right here in front of her. She felt her heart thump faster, and she gulped oxygen as if there weren’t enough left.
She clung to Jack’s arm as her knees wobbled again.
Rising, Thomas moved to beside the statue and took Evela’s motionless stone hand. He watched silently.
And the cat unfolded.
It reminded Calisa of origami in reverse—white fur unfurled, flat as a cloak, and the cat’s face lengthened and paled and then stretched again. The cat’s body blurred, a column of fuzzy white, and then the white faded away.
A moment later, Auntie Zee was slumped across the window seat, crumpled within a paisley housedress with white buttons. Her white hair was awry, like untamed fur, and her eyes were closed, near buried within the folds of her wrinkles.
Kneeling, Thomas touched her hand. “Zee.”
She was breathing, shallowly, but Calisa could see her chest rise and fall. Unable to stop staring, Calisa elbowed Jack. “You can turn around.”
Jack turned. “Auntie Zee!”
Her eyelids flashed open. “Much too loud.”
“Sorry,” Jack whispered.
“How do you feel?” Thomas asked gently.
“Thomas. You’re home.” She reached up toward his face and then stopped an inch from his cheek.
“Unless this is a dream.” She pinched the wiggly skin on her upper arm.
“Not a dream.” She tried to push herself up to a more seated position, and her arms wobbled, her elbows caved, and she flopped backward.
Gently, Thomas helped her sit. He plumped pillows behind her.
The library ladder shifted back and forth as if it wanted to help. “Calm yourself,” she told it. It subsided, slightly vibrating. “Explain,” Auntie Zee ordered Thomas when she was comfortable, with several pillows propping her up. “I lost you. Yet you’re here.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Thomas said. “It was an accident. Shortly after I arrived in the other realm, I suffered a fall—there are cliffs, and it was raining. I was knocked unconscious, in the cold rain. It took days for the villagers to nurse me back to health. By then, the portal had closed—”
“Yes, yes, but you found the remedy, and you made it back,” Auntie Zee interrupted. “How?”
He glanced at Calisa.
Auntie Zee leveled a gnarled finger at her. “Explain, girl.”
And so Calisa did, starting at the moment she realized this was not an ordinary inn.
Halfway through the retelling, she felt Jack take her hand.
She left nothing out, except for the details of the kiss.
She glossed over that with just a mention—enough of a hint that Auntie Zee rolled her eyes.
When she got to the part about how they searched the realms for Auntie Zee, the eye roll became a full-out scowl.
“You shouldn’t have risked yourselves like that,” Auntie Zee said.
“We needed you back,” Calisa said. “The inn needed you back.”
“Bah, the inn is doomed anyway.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Calisa didn’t know why she was feeling so angry, but she was.
Furiously, incandescently angry all of a sudden.
It felt as if the frustration and disappointment and feelings that she’d been shoving down since the start of the summer were bubbling up into her throat and popping in her brain.
“You know nothing about it, child.”
“You could have explained that sometimes you get stuck as a cat,” Calisa said.
“You could have told me how it worked. And what to do.” She’d been lied to again and again, her questions unanswered, so little explained, when she could have been trusted to make her own decisions about her summer, her life, her future.
She could have been told she had this portal magic, trained to use it, warned that it could cause her to faint… or become a cat?
The glare hardened. “It’s not your problem or your responsibility. I would have recovered enough to transform back eventually.”
Calisa crossed her arms and glared back just as hard.
“And what would have happened to the B&B in the meantime? What about the guests that are still here? They’d just have to fend for themselves?
Do you think they’d ever want to stay here again after that?
” If she’d just trusted Calisa…or Jack! He hadn’t known that Auntie Zee was here all along, or that she was trapped in feline form, or that his father had gone to search for a cure for the overuse of portal magic.
All of that would have been useful information for him to have.
“It’s my bed-and-breakfast.”
“You still need help,” Calisa said. “If not from me, then from someone. Thomas. Or Jack. Or whoever. But you don’t need to do it by yourself.” She couldn’t do it by herself.
“I always have.”
“So? Things change.” It was a cliché, but the truth of those two words hit her like a fist to the stomach.
She thought of Ethan. She’d wanted that to be forever, but now that it was gone…
He was the past, and that was okay. That had been her epiphany in the closet doorway while she’d kissed Jack.
Everything changes, and it’s okay. And a huge reason why it was okay: she hadn’t had to go through it alone.
She’d had Jack. And Steve. And her moms and Crystal and Maddy back home.
Even Melidor and Mulligan and Kendra had helped in their own ways.
“There’s nothing wrong with asking for help.
Or not even asking—you don’t have to ask.
There’s nothing wrong with accepting help. ”
“You don’t know what it’s like—”
Calisa cut her off. “To feel helpless? Powerless? Sure, I do. Anyone who’s been disappointed by someone knows that. You don’t have to be a thousand years old to discover that people can suck.”
“I am not a thousand, and it is my own self that’s disappointing me. My own body.”
“How’s that different?” Calisa countered.
“Because it means that I’m dying.”
Thomas and Jack both gasped.
Narrowing her eyes, Calisa crossed her arms. She wasn’t buying it. Yes, she could believe Auntie Zee occasionally turned into a cat, but dying? She was too stubborn for that.
Auntie Zee waved her hand at Jack and his dad. “Not right this second. But I’m far closer to death than any of you. My strength—it’s not what it used to be. I recover slower than I used to, if I do at all, and I have to accept that. I am old, Calisa. Old. I won’t be around forever.”
Calisa wondered if Auntie Zee had always been this dramatic. Sure, she was older, but she wasn’t dead yet. How could she abandon all of this, everything she’d worked for and built? Just because she didn’t want to accept help? “You’re here now, and you can’t give up.”
“It’s not giving up to accept the inevitable. It’s practical. I am slowing. Someday I will be gone. Someday this inn will close. Perhaps it’s reached that point. I remind you that it’s my inn, my decision.”
It was her decision, but it was so hard to watch her make what was so obviously the wrong one.
All she had to do was accept help! How was that so terrible?
Three people were right here, ready to help.
Plus the statue. And the ladder. Even Steve, in his own way.
Probably not the mirror, but everyone else.
On the other hand, she did have the right to retire.
People did that. Calisa felt a tickle of doubt.
What if Auntie Zee had reached that point?
She knew her own limitations. Every business owner probably did reach the point where they were ready to quit.
But she shouldn’t leave carnage in her wake.
If she were to retire, she should do it in a way that didn’t destroy the inn.
Sell it to someone who could keep it magical.
Ensure that Jack and his dad weren’t instantly homeless.
Create something that lasted. Retire happily, not in defeat.
“Do you want it to close?” Jack asked.