Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“Not much. Getting the last ingredient, dirt from her grave, will be easy, and using your blood to open the wizard stone won’t be difficult,” he says.
“‘Wizard stone’ is nearly always a reference to Merlin and to caves. I’ve done some research and the only local place that fits is the wizard’s cave at Alderley Edge. ”
“What?” I jerk up, staring down at him, suddenly feeling lurching sickness rising up inside me. I hear her voice inside my head: Don’t leave me, Orla. “No, I can’t go back there. That’s where Elizabeth died.”
“Wait.” Bastian winces as he leans up on his elbows, frowning at me in the darkness. “This was the cave you were in?”
“Yes!” Inside my head, I see a repeat of the moment all over again: her body, lying half in and half out of the cave, her head caught against a deadly slate, her bloody hair and my bloody fingers.
“Maybe that’s why you had a magical discharge, why you shapeshifted,” Bastian is saying, pulling me out of my recollections.
“If there’s a resurrection spell connected to shapeshifter blood cast into that particular stone, then having shapeshifter blood there but not the rest of the spell would have disrupted whatever she was trying to do.
You could have been the right ingredient in the right place but with the wrong spell—”
“So you’re saying it’s my fault?” My voice is sharp, because I already know it was, I just don’t want to hear him say it.
“No, Lando, no, I’m not.” Bastian cups my face, his eyes earnest. “I’m just saying—magical spaces like that are ancient.
There were spells cast into that rock that we have no record of and they’re connected to some of the oldest and most volatile magic in the country.
If part of our spell is woven into the stone there and it depends on a shifter’s presence it could, theoretically, react badly. It’s absolutely not your fault.”
I don’t believe him. All the technical stuff about the spell might be correct but not this. My only child is dead because of you, Elizabeth’s mother’s voice echoes in my mind. It will never stop being true.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I whisper. “I don’t know if I can go back there.”
“You don’t have to.” Bastian strokes my cheeks soothingly. “But if we do this and we do it right, then everyone will know that none of this, her death, any of it, was your fault.”
It’s what I want, I realize. Not just to have Elizabeth back but to no longer be responsible for her death. The only way to get rid of that guilt is to undo it. I want to give Elizabeth back her life, to turn back time entirely. This is the closest way to get there.
“You’re not worried about resurrecting my girlfriend?” I trace a pattern on Bastian’s naked shoulder. It feels like we should definitely talk about it. If Elizabeth comes back she will have questions, but at least she will be alive to ask them.
“Listen, we all have to do what we have to do.” Bastian’s eyes are lit with intensity. He pulls my bare wrist, ghosting a kiss over my scars. I shiver. “I won’t be mad if you still have feelings, but that’s not important. I remember what it’s like to be … haunted.”
“Are you talking about Shasta?” I ask.
“Yeah.” Bastian sighs and pulls me down so my head is resting on his chest. I brush his charms out of the way so the feathers aren’t tickling my nose.
I remember what Bastian said at my parents’ house, about it being okay for me to wish that the moment of Elizabeth’s death was quicker.
I imagine Bastian and Shasta in the car on a dark road; I imagine the abruptness of Shasta’s life, snatched away.
“After Shasta died, and everything with Mum and Dad just fell apart, I was … well, I went a bit wild. I think it’s because I was so angry that the world was moving on without him. But it has to move on.” Bastian’s voice is distant. “We all have to do what we have to do to move on.”
What seemed impossible to me three days ago now seems just very, very difficult. There’s hope here, in Bastian’s touch and Bastian’s words.
“How do you move on?” I whisper. “How did you do it?”
“You just … keep going. It seems weird but, like, I had to get used to the world changing and not hating it for doing that. Reading helped, studying, having a purpose, moving up here and meeting you, it all made a difference, and then I realized I was moving on and it was okay. I wasn’t watching the world change without him anymore; I was part of it changing.
At first I was a bit angry with myself, like I was betraying him…
” Bastian’s voice breaks and we wait, holding one another in the darkness and silence until he finds the words again.
“Then I realized … that’s exactly what Shasta would have wanted.
That it wasn’t about me moving on from him, like forgetting him, but moving on to something.
He’d want me to keep going, keep … living. ”
“He’d be so proud of you,” I say firmly. “I didn’t know him, but I’m sure he’d be proud.”
“Thanks.” Bastian presses his face into my curls, breathing deeply.
“I don’t know exactly how it happened but one day I realized I was looking forward instead of looking back, and I realized I wanted to keep looking forward.
A new future.” He swallows and I feel his Adam’s apple move as he squeezes me close. “With new people.”
“Yeah.” I flush coyly, despite everything we’ve done tonight. “I think … that’s what I want, too.”
I want to do what Bastian’s done, to transform myself and create a new future. If he can do it, maybe I can, too?
“That’s why we need to do the ritual. Then you won’t have it hanging over you.
No one will blame you anymore. You’ll be free, and you deserve to be free, Lando.
Because you’re so amazing. You make me feel…
” Bastian’s voice becomes thick with emotion.
He’s holding me too tight; I’m worried that I’m hurting the wounds on his stomach where I’m pressed against him, but he doesn’t seem to care.
“You know me. You see me, like no one else does.”
I think about what the shifter wrote about the woman they loved. I feel seen.
“You, too.” I kiss him on the lips and think to myself that it doesn’t matter if I bring back Elizabeth.
I want to be with Bastian. When I bring back Elizabeth I’ll have undone the worst thing I’ve ever done, robbing an innocent person of the rest of her life.
She’ll get to live, and that’s all that matters.
She doesn’t have to live with me. Our futures can be whatever we want them to be; the important thing is that we’ll have them.
All of our choices, all of our lives, spread out before us.
Bastian found his way through his grief and I can find my way through, too.
“We’ll do the rest of the spell on Samhain. ”
“Okay,” Bastian says sleepily. I settle back down against him with a sigh. Everything will be okay, I realize, as long as I’m with him.