Epilogue #2
Nick laid his hand over hers on her stomach and when she looked at the next line, she knew why. The remainder of the page had been largely illegible before, except for a couple of words near the bottom. Now, thanks to Dr. Morgan, they could read it.
She took a deep breath and went on. “‘Then will a girl-child wake the old magic once more. When the need is dire.’” She looked at Nick. “Lily?”
He shook his head. “I think it’s you. The first time you put your hand in that handprint was when you were eight.”
The color drained from Grace’s face.
“It’s nothing we didn’t consider. You were a girl-child,” Nick said. “Something did happen the day you touched that carving for the first time. And not just to you.”
She gazed at her hands. “I woke it up. Whatever it is. And it woke…something in us.” Old magic.
She’d started all this. That knowledge was a heavy weight on her soul. No matter what happened next, for good or ill, it would all be traced down to that choice she’d made as a heartbroken child.
Nick tilted her chin up and kissed her. “Fireflies,” he said. It was the word he used to untangle her neurons when she was overthinking everything. “Go on.”
She looked at the next line but couldn’t breathe. It took her a moment to find her voice. “‘And those who are burdened will be kindled.’”
The kitchen was quiet. Grace could hear birdsong outside and muffled voices from the sunroom. She remembered the dreams—remembered Granny Lily telling her to be kindled.
“I keep thinking back to when I saw Granny Lily in the cave,” Nick said. “When I was trying to find you. She kept echoing your name back at me…”
Grace nodded, unable to speak.
“She said other things to me that day, and I didn’t realize the significance until I saw this,” he went on. “She said burden and be kindled and then she pointed to the cave wall—to the carvings.”
Grace traced the word kindled with her finger.
“I think we would all agree, including Daniel and Mel, it is a burden,” Nick said.
“But kindled? Doesn’t that mean—”
“Given the poetic imagery, Diana thinks she used it to mean awakened.”
“Awakened.” But knowing Granny Lily, there were layers of meaning there. And how had she dreamed those exact words?
“Keep going,” he said in a soft voice.
Grace went back to the page. “‘Then her people will learn again to hear her voice. And She will sing.’”
“Sounds like the happy ending to your Pops’ firefly story. ‘She will sing,’” Nick said.
“It is.” Grace thought of Pops and wished he could be here to see the end of the story. She smiled and looked at the last line.
“‘For a single firefly cannot subdue the darkness. But thousands can kindle magic.’” Grace repeated slowly and bit her lip. “She’s not talking about fireflies, is she?”
It wasn’t really a question. She already knew the answer.
“She’s talking about us,” Nick said.
Grace closed her eyes. The cave was on her mountain. Granny Lily was her ancestor. She had somehow convinced herself that this gift, these gifts, were limited to their family, or at least to their mountain, and had tried to rationalize all evidence to the contrary.
She had assumed Nick, with his uncanny intuition, was just an aberration. And Old Annie… Old Annie had lived on the mountain her entire life, living in the middle of a magical blast zone, for lack of a better term.
But then there was Mel and her mom, and now Nino. She had to accept the idea that there were others out there with gifts. And she had to admit those gifts, all of them, had been awakened when she touched the cave wall.
“How many others are there?” she whispered, half to herself.
“Thousands?” Nick suggested, referring to the poem.
Grace opened her eyes. “Probably a metaphor. It could just be dozens.”
“Let’s hope so, if any more of them are like Nino.”
“Or Old Annie.”
Nick’s arm tightened around her shoulders. “The thing is, we have to think past the fact that there are others like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have to remember that they’re going through the same things we are.
Think about your struggles with your gift.
What Daniel just went through. Mel apparently had a really hard time as a child…
” Nick had obviously been mulling this over for a while.
“Aside from not knowing there are others out there like you, there’s the side effects, the risk of being branded as mentally ill.
The others out there will have been through a lot already.
They’ve probably spent their lives hiding what they are, and I expect it’s only gotten worse for them recently. ”
“We have to find them,” Grace said. “We have to help them.”
“I know, but we’ve barely got our arms around this thing.”
“No, we have to. It’s the rest of the story, remember?
” Grace pictured Pops’ face as he told it, glowing in the light of all the fireflies she had in her jar.
She put her hand on Nick’s. “When you catch a star in a jar, there’s one less voice for the Mother to hear, one less chance that she will sing for us again.
And your part is to let the fireflies go and join in the great song. ”
Nick smiled at her. “So you want to rescue fireflies?”
“You could say that.”
“And how are we going to pull that off?” Nick asked.
“You forget. We only have to save the world—”
“—one firefly at a time. I remember.” Nick nodded.
“The more I recall of his stories, the more I think Pops knew something,” she said. “He did call it the Firefly Foundation, after all. And it was about saving the Earth, but maybe it was also about who will save the Earth.”
“And we have to find these fireflies. Assuming they even want to be found,” Nick said.
“Daniel told me that he thinks we figure it out,” she said. “All of it.”
“Did he?” Nick said. “What did this involve? Visions and dreams?”
“Visions and dreams,” Grace said. “Some good ones, finally.”