Chapter Twenty-Nine
She walked back to the place where the door was, once the last glimmers of the man who had murdered her were gone. And she
did it as quick as her weary legs could carry her, because she could hear him calling her name. She could feel the sky beneath
her feet shaking and knew it was him, casting spells.
She got to the doorway and found him with his hands flat on the invisible barrier. Magic pouring out of him and into it, to
the point where that surface had turned into a swirl of white-hot colors. Blue bloomed into red bloomed into purple, and all
of it edged in a shimmer of the sort she’d only ever seen when fire hit glass.
She could hardly glimpse him through it.
And what she could glimpse blazed like the sun.
It reminded her of that night in the maze. The way he had looked dueling every person there at once—like a dragon breathing
magical fire. Like Calabaraia ran through his veins. Beautiful beyond anything she could ever have imagined. And made more
so now by all her knowledge of what he had done it for.
What he was doing this for now.
For love, for me, she thought, as she knelt by the edge of the door. As she put her hands against the places where his were. And watched his magic dissolve, the second she did. It turned into a glow all over his skin, shot through his dark eyes—like the aftereffects of something white-hot.
Then it was gone, and it was just Bram again.
Panting, shaking with exhaustion, so full of feeling he couldn’t speak for a moment. He couldn’t do anything. He just let
out a sob of relief and sagged against that invisible glass. Hands over his head, forehead pressed to the place where her
hands were. Unable to feel her, of course.
But she could feel him.
There was no barrier there for her.
She simply slipped through and sank her hands into his hair. “It’s all right, love,” she said. “I’m all right. Everything
we ever read together looked after me. Calabaraia looked after me. Your love looked after me.”
“I thought I’d lost you again.”
“You know you never could now. Call for me, and I will come.”
“Yes, but if you call me, I can’t,” he said, as he sat up. Eyes on the barrier between them. Between him and the place that
had taken him in, as a child. She even remembered now what he had once told her about it. The picture he had painted of a
skinny seven-year-old, more eyes than face, half starved, driven away by a cruel father, made whole again by a world called
chaotic instead of kind. Instead of all the most loving feelings, over anything else.
“Because you’ve spent too long abiding by authority rules instead of remembering that they hold no sway here. All you have
to do to cross a line made arbitrarily by us is not listen to it. Let it go. Everything Cobble ever impressed upon you, every
bit of fear you have of what you are, every effort you made to fit in—leave it behind, live inside your heart. Come to me,
my love, and we will dance again among the stars,” she said.
Then he met her gaze.
He reached forward, breath held.
Hesitating—but only for a moment. She knew he could feel it thrumming through him, the second he touched where her fingertips
were, on the other side. The sound of that music, the call of such wonders.
He smiled as easy as the sun rising.
And slipped through, to take her hand.
To dance forever with her, in a world made of magic.