Chapter 13
13
ZANDER IS STILL holding my hand. Or, I guess, I’m holding his. Clutching it tight.
“We Goods do love a curse,” I mutter, frustrated with these things, these family legacies, that do little more than hurt . When they’re meant to. When they’re not.
Zander looks at me then, and I’m not sure what I see on his face. It’s a little too naked. And serious. Maybe I can fight off a Joywood poison, twice, but that doesn’t mean I can also manage to handle whatever this is between us any better than I ever have.
I look down at the picture in my hand instead. Our daughter . A Good. A Rivers. A mix of us, and all of our ancestors and histories, and the great big mess Zander and I have made of loving each other and hating each other for most of our lives.
But there are bigger issues than this endless tangle we’ve made.
I tell myself it’s not a relief to focus on said bigger things, but I don’t dare try to say that out loud. “They want me to die,” I say instead. Because that’s clear now, like it or not. I’m the one with the target on my back, and I have been since Beltane.
So it isn’t solely about the baby. Or Zander.
He plays with my fingers the way he did when we held hands often, and I pretend I don’t want to melt into it the way I always did then. “I think they’d be happiest if we all did, but they need to make sure they win over the public. That was the whole Litha deal, right? They need the people who support us to think we lost, fair and square. Or they can’t do whatever it is they want.”
I shake my head. “Immortality, Frost says.”
Zander makes a noise of agreement, and I keep staring at the picture of the baby growing inside of me. The one I’ve got to survive ascension to meet. That means we have to understand more than we do right now. We have to fight harder than ever.
I guess I’ve proved twice already that I’m a lot tougher than they assume I am. “They think I’m the weak link. That’s why they’re targeting me.”
“ Think being the operative word. It isn’t true if you were strong enough to fight their poison off. Twice.”
I open my mouth to say something. Probably something stupid, like he should prepare for disappointment. But Zander steamrollers on, and even though I can tell he’s pissed—it’s flashing in his eyes, vibrating inside of him—he’s quiet when he speaks. Calm.
Like somehow, while I wasn’t looking, he went and got mature .
“You’re stronger than my mother, Ellowyn.” He’s quiet, sure, but his voice is rough. “If you want to play the poor little half witch card, don’t do it around me anymore.”
I want to be incensed at that, but how can I be when it’s about Zelda? And he isn’t even wrong. I fought off that terrible poison two separate times, because I’m half a witch.
Not despite the human blood in me. Because of it.
Maybe this is what Elizabeth meant when she called me special.
I turn in the bed to look at Zander. “Even if there are risks, I have to do the ritual Jacob talked about. I have to do whatever I can to help all those other Summoners.”
He lets out a short sound that would be a laugh if it didn’t sound so unamused. “Like hell.”
“I trust Jacob, and so do you. He wouldn’t bring it up if it wasn’t important. Imperative , even.”
Another short laugh. “He also doesn’t make shit up, which means you can’t do it. If Jacob says it’s dangerous? It’s fucking dangerous.”
“What he said was that there are risks.”
“I love when you argue semantics with me like I’m stupid.” He pulls his hand from mine. Agitated, I know. Thinking about the baby, not the big picture.
I don’t want to use Zelda like a hammer, but we’d be having a very different conversation if she was alive. “If your mother was still here—”
“No.” He pushes to his feet.
I sit all the way up, even though he turns and glares at me like I should lie back down. I’m going to be adult and calm , though, because this is important. I sit with my hands in my lap. I use his quiet voice. I look him in the eye.
I am a grown-ass woman, not a teenager. “You would have done anything to save her. You would have sacrificed anyone or anything.”
“No, Ellowyn.”
“You never had to—”
He turns to face me, slapping his hand to his chest. His heart. “You don’t think I had to choose? Over and over and over?”
He’s not angry at me, not fighting with me . Even I can see that, and I’ve never been particularly nuanced when it comes to Zander’s temper. I usually let it light my own, but right now everything’s...softer. Harder. We are both holding pictures of our daughter, who Zelda won’t get to hold the way she should. “Zander.”
“You never wanted to hear it, but I chose.” He says it so quietly I barely hear the words.
Not that they make any sense. “What are you talking about?”
None of this feels like the us I know so well. Too much ache, not enough fire. Too much sadness mixed in with the typical anger. Too much vulnerability, maybe.
I have the strangest thought that this is what we’ve been running from all along. Because we’re great at getting naked in one way, but this is something else.
I’m not sure I want it.
Zander sits back down, and gently takes my hand in his again. “Will you listen?”
If he made that a demand , I would say no. If he was all furious and contained like a few seconds ago, I would back off.
But there is a desperation, a need in that question.
I have been strong when it comes to Zander. An entire decade of one night a year and no more.
It’s not like any of that was easy.
This is different. He said it a few days ago. This changes everything.
“Okay,” I manage. He’s hurting, not just angry. So maybe... Maybe I can handle the truth.
“Actually listen to me,” he insists. “Don’t argue. Don’t tell me you don’t want to hear it, the way you always have. Just sit there and let me say it all. Finally. Can you promise me that?”
I try to say yes, but it won’t come out.
He laughs, just a little exhale of breath. “I appreciate the attempt at a lie, anyway.”
“I can promise to try,” I offer him. It hurts how much I want to offer him. Even if he’s right and I’ve been avoiding this conversation for a very long time. Though I don’t have any idea how it connects to Zelda.
“That’s something, I guess.” He takes a deep breath, and it’s ragged with more of that hurt. I want to think that this is what we do to each other , the way I usually do, like that’s some justification, but we have a daughter on the way.
The world’s a little bigger tonight than what the two of us inflict on each other.
Zander looks down at our hands, still intertwined. “Do you remember back in high school when I had to do that stupid apprenticeship with Festus Proctor?”
I nod, though I can’t imagine why he wants to talk about the Joywood’s creepy Guardian now. “You had to go follow him around the locks and dams all over the rivers, right? Guardian it up. Except you didn’t mind it.”
I remember being irritated about that and picking a fight once or twice or maybe ten thousand times, that he could get along with someone who had such open contempt for me.
“No, I didn’t. Back then, I didn’t mind Festus at all. He made me feel important.” Zander shakes his head. “Mom and Dad were always so relaxed about everything. Too relaxed. It didn’t matter what I did. Good grades or bad, sports or lounging around, working or choosing not to work—everything was fine. They loved me no matter what. As long as I wasn’t cruel or disrespectful, it didn’t matter.”
I roll my eyes. “The horror.”
There’s almost a smile on his face then. “It wasn’t a horror. Obviously. But Festus acted like what I did—or didn’t do—was important. Or could be. I liked that.”
I can’t begin to imagine where this is going, but there’s a cold knot of dread in my gut. “Zander...”
“Until he started in on you. He thought I could do better. He thought I deserved better. He wondered why I wasn’t with someone befitting my important station.”
I try to pull my hand away from him. “If this is why you broke up with me—”
“Simmer down, I’m not that easy. I love...d you.” The way he stumbles over the word love , with a tacked-on past tense, has my heart lodging in my throat.
But he keeps telling his story. One I have refused to let him tell all these years.
Because he made his choice. Why should he get to tell stories about it?
I don’t really want to hear it now either. My heart is beating much too fast, like whatever he’s about to say is going to wound me, somehow. Or like it already has.
Still, I told him I would try. So I try—meaning, I literally bite my own tongue.
“I didn’t like it when he talked about you,” Zander says, in a very low, deliberate sort of way that makes my heart get acrobatic for...other reasons. “So he changed tactics. The thing is, I didn’t see what he was doing at the time. He just...started talking a lot about staying in St. Cyprian.”
“While you and I were making plans to get out of here.” So many plans that it makes my throat clog to think of them now.
“A Rivers who doesn’t stick around isn’t upholding his legacy. His important legacy as a Guardian. My parents would never tell me, of course, because they’re too soft—Festus’s words, not mine, but I could see it. How they’d never ask anything of me, because they never did.”
That’s important enough to get past the tightness in my throat and all those lost plans we made. “Because they love you, Zander.”
I don’t stumble over the tense. He holds my gaze a little too long, like he needed to hear me say it. Like he needed to make sure it was true.
“I see that now. I even knew it then. I didn’t take Festus’s word for it. I brought it up to my parents. I asked—straight-out—what did they want me to do. Stay? Because I could. I would. If they wanted me to.”
“They’d never tell you what to do.”
It’s hard for me to realize that Zack and Zelda loved Zander so much that they couldn’t see what he’d needed. That even two of the best people I knew weren’t perfect, not even back then when I considered them my other parents. My intact second family.
I don’t know how to feel about the notion that even they could get something wrong. Because if they can be wrong...what hope do I have?
Zander is still talking. Still telling me things I don’t necessarily want to hear—but the difference is, now I know I need to hear them anyway. “They told me it was up to me to do what I thought was right, but I could see how much it would mean to my dad if I did stay. Then they asked where this was coming from, when they knew you and I had plans to leave. I started to explain what Festus had been telling me, but before I could even get into his thoughts on my legacy, Mom just...crumpled. It was the first time she ever collapsed.”
He takes a minute. I can tell he sees it all in his head, as vivid as if it just happened. Because it was traumatic. Because it changed everything for his family. Because he knows how it ends now.
“Mom was sick for a few days, and I didn’t think about much but that. The next week, I had my regular apprenticeship meeting, and I felt dirty. Slimy.” He shakes his head. “Everything Festus said felt wrong, when a week before I’d been positive he was right about everything. I couldn’t talk to my parents about it, because Mom was still sick. I figured I’d talk to you. That we’d figure it out, because we were good at that. Once.”
I want to laugh, but it’s true. We were. Once.
“I was about to leave to pick you up. Mom was sitting up, reading, feeling better. Back then she used to get better in between attacks.”
That hangs there between us. I can see there’s a part of Zander that can’t fully accept there’s no poison in me, no matter what Jacob says.
“Dad was at the ferry, so it was just Mom and me. I told her I was going to see you, and she smiled. I was walking out the door, thinking about how I’d tell you everything, and then she started choking. She couldn’t breathe. I tried to get in there and do something with all this magic I’m supposed to have, but nothing worked.”
I squeeze his hand. Harder and harder until he looks at me again and slowly blinks himself back to now.
He’s not done though. “That was the pattern. She’d get better, but then, if I even had a stray thought about getting away or talking to you about what was happening, she would have another episode. A Healer could help, but they could never stop it for good.” That gray gaze of his is heavy on mine. Steady, but weighted. “I thought I was cursed.”
All I can do is whisper his name.
“I was afraid to do anything wrong,” he tells me, sounding more resolute, somehow. “I knew I couldn’t go anywhere. What if something happened? What if I said the wrong thing, or did the wrong thing, and she was left here hurting? You have no idea how much I wanted to explain all this to you then, Ellowyn, but I didn’t know how. Not without hurting her more.”
I feel as if I’m spinning, but not because I feel sick. That would be the easy way out this.
I knew Zelda got sick, but I guess I thought it was a cold here, a flu there. The normal way people got sick sometimes, if not usually witches. I don’t think any of us realized...
But admitting that feels like it might be the death of me. “You could have asked me to stay.” I mean that to come out like every other accusation I’ve ever hurled at him, but it doesn’t. It’s quiet. Raw.
More telling than I want to admit.
I would have said yes.
“You didn’t want to stay here, and I didn’t want to ask you to do something I knew you didn’t want to do.” He looks at me then, over our daughter’s picture. Over our daughter herself, tucked up inside me. Over our hands threaded together. Over a past neither one of us can go back and change. “It wasn’t bullshit, Ellowyn. I fucked it up, doing it at prom. I fucked up, period, but I wasn’t lying . I wanted—needed—you to have what you wanted, even though I couldn’t go with you.”
I open my mouth to argue, even though there’s no argument to make, but he just keeps on .
“I know everything changed that Litha,” he says in the same rough, raw way. “You stayed here and you made it work, like maybe we could have. I couldn’t see that beforehand. The only thing I could see was me, being the anchor that drowned you.”
“We could have—”
“There are always going to be a million and one could haves , but I did the only thing I could. The only thing I could live with. I broke things off. I let you go. I let you hate me. I was determined to be as noble about it as I could. Until that night.”
Because that night, our Beltane prom night, I refused to cry in front of him. That night, I refused to do anything he expected. In fact, the only thing I could think to do was prove I didn’t need him at all.
By having someone else instead. One of his jock friends, so it would really twist the knife.
It didn’t matter that I went home and threw up after. That I felt dirty and wrong and like I was the villain, because in that moment, in my head, I won.
When Zander flew off the handle the next day, the way I’d hoped he would, I knew I was right. That I’d won.
I was so sure that was the only thing that mattered. For all these years.
Yet now I look back on it and all I see is loss. All we ever did was lose. He couldn’t tell the truth, and it was the only thing I could do, and all we really wanted was each other. How did that get lost along the way?
For a moment, all I want to do is cry. Right here in front of him, the way I never have.
But I won’t.
I don’t.
“It doesn’t end there,” he says, looking at our joined hands like he can sense the possibility of my tears. Or maybe he can feel the same thing I do inside me—that even though everything he’s saying makes me ache, I’m getting better by the moment.
“Every time I tried to tell anyone about the things Festus said. Any time I talked to Jacob about the rivers rising and all the imbalances we could see everywhere. If I dared make a case at a town meeting about the confluence being messed up. If I did anything, Mom got worse. Then this coven shit killed her.”
Suddenly I get it. All that guilt over the summer that I chalked up to him being a man , a Guardian, makes sense.
He thinks he did it to her. He thinks he killed her.
“Do you think her death is your fault?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
“She would have been disappointed in me if I didn’t stand up for what was right, if I let you guys go alone, so I couldn’t,” he says gruffly. “So they won. And I get to live with the knowledge that I could have stopped it by shutting my mouth, for once. By sitting down. By standing up for her, no matter what she thought of me for doing it.”
This past summer makes more sense than it ever did. The self-destruction, the drinking.
“It wasn’t a curse,” I tell him gently, and I know even before I form the words that they’re true, but I like the validation all the same. “A curse doesn’t leave you any choices. Look at me. At Elizabeth and Zachariah.”
He looks like he doesn’t know where to put that. “You think it’s all a coincidence?”
“I don’t think it’s that either.” It’s worse than a curse, is what I really think. Because he had to choose. They put that on him.
He shakes his head like it doesn’t matter. “I don’t need to rehash the past anymore. I don’t need you to forgive me, because I did the only thing I knew how to do. Maybe it was wrong, maybe it sucked, but it was all I could do. I can’t change the past ten years. Just like I can’t bring Mom back.” Once again, it’s all thunderstorm gray and my heart too wild against my ribs. “I’m telling you all this so you get why you can’t risk this. You can’t risk getting hurt. You can’t risk our baby. You can’t risk you , Ellowyn. The risk isn’t worth the loss.”
There are things I could say, but I don’t. That it isn’t up to him. That this is the thing I can’t refuse.
“I don’t want anything to happen,” I manage, very carefully, “to anyone I love.”
“That’s the problem,” Zander returns, his gaze as serious as his voice. As the grip his hand has on mine. “You keep thinking I don’t know you, but I do. You’ve got a self-destructive streak a mile wide, and I know it’s only begging to be turned into a martyr complex. I can’t have that. Ellowyn. I won’t.”
Every good movement needs a martyr, though. Everyone knows that.
I don’t say that in his head. I know I don’t, because we don’t do that anymore. Still he squeezes my hand.
“You matter too much to martyr yourself, Ellowyn.” His gray eyes search mine. He looks vulnerable and surly. He still looks like mine , but he also looks vulnerable in a way I know I never let myself. “To me, baby. You matter too much to me .”
Before I can decide what to do with that—or lodge my historic objection to being called baby , even though I only wish I hated it when he calls me that—or if I should faint or jump him or surrender to tears after all, or something —
There comes a great tolling.
Far off and close all at once. Inside my body and all over my skin. The whole house shakes. The air seems to follow suit.
Calling it the tolling of a bell feels like an insult.
“Christ,” Zander mutters, and the human invocation feels harsher than if he’d called out to Hecate like witches usually do. “What now?”
The sound rolls out again, worse this time.
Then a booming voice surrounds us, so loud I have to cover my ears, though that does nothing at all.
“Citizens of St. Cyprian. Witches of the world.” The voice is everything and nothing. It emanates from the sky outside. From my own pores. From the sheets I’m lying in. From Zander’s hand in mine and the arm he must have thrown around me when the tolling started. “The ascension ritual has begun, and the ancient trials must take place. Appear before me, or risk my eternal wrath.”
And this time when everything seems to collapse in on itself, Zander is with me.