Chapter 23
23
MY VOICE ECHOES through the bedroom that’s still bigger than usual, but I like the way it sounds. I sit up, taking in the way everyone I love is looking back at me. It’s Rebekah who conjures a mirror in the air so I can see what they all see—me, but with witchy eyes at last. A deep violet like all the Good women, but ringed with a bright, bold blue.
I like it more than I should, as a woman who has made dressing in black throughout my life my personality.
“You’ve got to take it easy.” Jacob sounds very serious. All Healer. “Your magic is making you feel great right now, but your human side still needs rest to heal.”
I nod and, shockingly, do as I’m told. I can be reasonable.
Because I didn’t become a Revelare today . I’ve always been one. The future is right here, in me and in my grasp. The best part is that I have enough practice controlling the way the past spools out before me that the future doesn’t come roaring for me at once the way we all know it can.
Maybe this is what balance feels like.
“Jacob is right. You need rest. Come on, everyone,” Mom says, and then she starts herding everyone out of the room while I sit there, watching the room shrink as everyone files out. With my gemstone eyes , thank you.
Tanith doesn’t try to herd Zander anywhere, because he’s brooding over by the window, his own brewing storm. And she can’t see Elizabeth and Zachariah, sitting beside each other halfway up the far wall, just letting their fingertips touch.
Mom comes over to the bed and brushes a hand over my forehead. “Rest, you brave and glorious thing. I’m glad even you see it now.”
She glances over at Zander, a considering look on her face. She takes a breath. Then looks down at me again, but this time she gives the bump a gentle pat. The baby does a soft flutter, just for her, and my mother smiles. Then she leaves the room to me and this little family of mine.
Zander and me. Our ghosts. The baby girl inside me who’s still moving around like she’s the one making room for all of us.
Elizabeth comes over and sits on the bed with me. There’s an expression on her face that reminds me of the night I was poisoned. The night she cried over the curse that kept her from the motherhood she wanted. But this feels more...bittersweet. A gladness with threads of sorrow woven through it.
Maybe because she’s been leading me here all along, to this understanding of who I am and what I can do.
“You were right,” I tell Elizabeth, and we both smile, because I said it. Out loud. “You know I don’t admit that lightly.”
She has her hands folded in her skirt, and she looks down at them. “I was right, this is true, but you had to believe it yourself. It was easier in my time, I suppose, when Revelares were common enough. It was a natural part of growing up to have one sight stronger than the other. The opposing sight came later. With work, with acceptance, with belief.”
That makes sense. I feel it in a way that seems new and solid, like a foundation I’ve been standing on all this time but never knew was there.
Yet I can’t let go of that children’s book. Over near the window, Zachariah is reading the book himself now, using ghost energy to turn the pages.
“What about the story?” I ask.
Elizabeth lifts a shoulder. “We’re familiar with the story, but it was no more than a fairy tale in my time too. The meaning I would take from the similarities here is that we should always heed the messages that come to us, no matter how it is they arrive. It is the message that matters.”
I’m not so sure I believe that. But I glance over at my Guardian, so like the one in that odd little book. He’s still standing there with his elbow propped against the wall as he stares hard out the window, even though it’s now dark outside.
So the things he’s glaring at must be internal.
In the past—maybe even yesterday—I would have decided I knew the reason he was brooding like this. I would have centered it on myself. He thinks I’m weak, so he’s going to make some grand proclamation about protection , I would have thought. He’s changing his mind about messing around with a targeted half witch , I would have seethed. I would have made sure to work up my temper so whatever he might say couldn’t hurt me.
Because I liked to hurt me first.
Then whatever he said hurt me anyway.
Maybe the brand-new gemstone eyes are helping me see what a waste of time this has always been.
“Good night, child,” Elizabeth says to me.
There’s something about the way she calls me child that once felt dismissive but now feels...important. Maybe it’s because I can see that bittersweetness in her gaze. Threads of joy and sorrow, light and dark.
“I am your child, Elizabeth,” I tell her. “You led me here. You’ve been here, every step. You’re part of this. Part of me.”
She strokes a ghostly hand over my face, much like a mother would. Much like my own mother did before she left tonight. I know I shouldn’t be able to reach out and touch her, because she’s a spirit. She isn’t here as a physical body, but there’s so much she’s done that ought to be impossible, so I think...why not try?
I reach out and curl my fingers around the appearance of her wrist. I don’t feel anything except a kind of cold air pocket, but I know that’s her. I guide it toward me until her hand rests on my bump. “And part of her.”
Her visage kind of...throbs then, or flickers. A sort of ghostly emotion, I think.
Because it’s amazing the lengths a person can go to, to convince themselves that all this love is fleeting. That there’s a scarcity of love in the first place. I’ve been supported from so many angles for so much of my life, but it was always the people who were mean to me or the people who pulled away that I focused on. I rested my self-worth on whether or not they loved me when I knew they didn’t.
I think of the Joywood, these men and women that we’re all supposed to look up to. These witches who are meant to protect us and keep us first in their thoughts, so they can do right by all of witchdom. When instead they focused on the threat of us to their power—instead of what we could offer our community, our world. When instead of helping us, they spent years trying to crush us.
But won’t , I think now. Without the faintest hint of anything bittersweet .
Because I’m done worrying about the love I don’t have. There’s too much love right here. Too much support. With my baby, too much to fight for.
Life hurts. Love hurts.
Maybe hurting is how you know it’s working, like every Healer’s cure I’ve ever taken. The ache is how you heal. The pain is the whole point.
This is how a person is alive , not numbed into nothingness. Not hiding and ignoring and twisting all that hurt into anger. Anger is heavy, and sometimes, it doesn’t serve. Just as Elizabeth once said herself.
I don’t intend to forget that again.
“Thank you, Mama Elizabeth,” I say, feeling a lump in my throat. It’s not that I’d be horrified to cry in front of her, because I’m not that person any longer. It’s more that I think we’re both trying to be strong. Strong Good women.
One strong family line, stretching backward and forward forever, ornery and us to the end.
Elizabeth smiles at me, her ghostly eyes overbright with the same tears I don’t shed.
“And thank you ,” she whispers. She doesn’t elaborate, but I don’t need her to. I’m not worried any longer that other people might see—or not see—things in me I don’t.
She pulls her hand away. Then she smiles at Zachariah and gestures toward the door. He smiles back, and they leave together in what looks like a comfortable, companionable silence.
I think—I know: this is what forgiveness looks like.
I glance over at Zander, still facing the dark over at the window. If I push aside all the insecurities that ruled me for so long, I understand that what’s going on inside of him right now might be about what happened to me tonight, but it’s not about me . It’s about the whole mess of a year, and that long, slow loss of his mother, and no doubt a great many other things.
Some things are the kind of darkness we keep to ourselves, not because we’re hiding or hoarding it, but because it’s only looking at those dark spaces that teaches us how to walk instead in the light.
Tonight I don’t want to laugh this away, avoid it, or run. Tonight I have no fights to pick. I don’t want to do any of the things I usually do, and not only when it comes to Zander.
I want to be the kind of person who comforts other people instead of bludgeoning them with my own awkwardness and insecurity. I want that in a sweeping, general sense that feels more like coming of age than that terrible Litha ceremony ten years ago ever did.
Tonight I want the simplicity of being exactly who I am. What I am. I want to lean in, with joy and optimism, to what I could be. If I start like this. If I start right now.
I get up out of bed and silently move over to Zander. I wrap my arms around him and press my cheek to his stiff back. That’s all. It’s such a strange, beautiful, new sensation. To initiate comfort like this. To let my heart open wide without running away.
“Tell me what’s eating you up,” I whisper.
I’ve never been any good at this, but I have friends who are. A family who is. Maybe not always in the same ways, but with the same goal. To take care of each other.
The way they’ve always taken care of me.
Because they have, I know what to say.
“You’re supposed to rest,” he says gruffly, but some of the tension I can feel in his body eases. From me not launching into a new fight the way I usually do. From me holding on and not letting go.
“Then come to bed.”
He grunts. “Hardly restful, El.”
“It wasn’t a sexual proposition,” I say. Then smile, my mouth against his back. “Yet.” I manage to get the tiniest laugh out of him, but then it turns into a whole-body sigh. “Come on, baby. Let’s sleep.”
He turns around, keeping me in his arms, and pulls me with him as he heads for the bed.
A million versions of an old me exist—the one who would let him, the one who would pick a fight instead, the one who would needle answers out of him.
But now there are also a million versions of different future mes that stretch out before me.
Lessons, if I’m willing to take them.
I am. I hold on to his other hand to stop his forward movement toward the bed. “Talk to me, Zander.”
He looks at me then. His mouth curves. I think he’s trying to smile, but it doesn’t quite get there. “You can’t understand, and that’s okay. I don’t need you to. Let’s just go to bed.”
I don’t let go. I don’t move. “Explain it to me.”
He sighs like he’s frustrated, and that sound usually infuriates me. It usually spikes me straight into something boiling hot, shouting or sex, whatever works.
It’s not that I don’t feel the urge to swan dive straight into the familiar. I do.
That’s why it matters that I don’t let go of his hands. That I don’t give up.
He must sense this in some way because his shoulders slump. “I’m a Guardian,” he says gruffly.
“Wow. I guess you think you’ve really dropped a bombshell on me.” Because I might be changing, evolving, maturing— but I’m still me .
Zander scowls. “You don’t understand. Just like I can’t fully grasp everything that comes with being a Summoner, or a Revelare, or hell, a mother carrying a baby. There are some things that are too hard to explain.”
I know that feeling. The comfortable, safe feeling that you’re alone in your misery. I have certainly hoarded my misery like it was something precious, but my mother never let me hoard it forever. She’d always say the same thing when it was time to, if not let it go, find a way to live with it.
I say those words to Zander now. “Maybe I can’t understand, but I can listen.”
He starts to shake his head, but I place my palm over his heart. “Zander.”
I meet his gaze, and I don’t hide. I don’t pull the punch. If I thought facing the Joywood was terrifying, this ranks right up there. “I need you to explain it to me, okay?”
He studies me, and I guess he gets it. How hard that was for me to say. How hard it is to stand here like this, telling him I need something and waiting to see if he’ll give it to me.
But he does. “My family is literally here, on the rivers, to watch over the confluence. We failed. We should have been able to protect my mother. We failed. I should have protected you from too many things to count. I failed at that, every time. There is no guardianing happening. There’s no actual protection. There’s nothing but one failure after another.”
I hear what he doesn’t say then as clearly as if he had. I know that he’s still holding on to the idea that he’s cursed. That what he sees as failures are proof of that.
“You helped Emerson beat back that flood and save the rivers. You just didn’t do it alone,” I remind him. “You can’t protect people from illness or from a deliberate poison that killed other people too. All the Healers in St. Cyprian couldn’t manage it. Your mom died, and that will always be unfair. There’s no arguing otherwise, but that’s not your failure. I am here right now in part because of all the people who stepped in to hold me up while the Joywood got their kicks in. You’re one of those people.”
He looks down at me, brow furrowed. “Don’t be positive, Ellowyn. It’s fucking creepy.”
That gets a laugh out of me. “What, you don’t think I should turn into sunshine and unicorns? Rainbows and shit?”
He reaches out, brushes a thumb under one of my new gemstone eyes. Violet ringed in sapphire. Something wholly different. Something all me.
Revelare. That word is a whisper inside me. Of what could be. Out of what has been.
“This makes you an even bigger target,” Zander says in that gruff, serious way. “They’re not going to give up on hurting you.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got a kick-ass coven and a hot Guardian at my disposal.”
This time when his mouth curves, it really is almost like a smile. “At your disposal, huh?”
I shrug, grinning. “I said it, so it must be true.”
He doesn’t smile, not really. He stares down at me, at my bright new eyes that I can almost see reflected in his. In all those storm clouds I’ve loved for so long.
His face looks naked, open. A lump forms in my throat, because if I’m not mistaken, the way he’s looking at me right now has more to do with pride than any lingering worry or sadness.
Just call it what it is , Ruth interjects. He’s proud of you. Obviously.
It’s a sign of my emotional maturity that I ignore her, without a single threat involving stew.
It’s a knee-jerk reaction to want to crack a joke, or fling out an insult, or maybe just press my body and mouth to his and forget everything else.
I breathe through that reaction, holding his gaze the whole way.
Who do I want to be now? Now that I’ve finally realized who I am. The old me who couldn’t handle all this emotion that somehow feels, at the same time, like my lungs are being squeezed from the inside and that I’m light and bright enough to float away?
Or a brave new Revelare—not afraid of the past or the future because I know how to wield both?
“A while back, you told me everything changed,” I say quietly. Because it has.
Then again, it hasn’t. Maybe it took access to the past and future to finally fully see it, realize it, accept it.
Zander’s gaze tracks over my face, a kind of measuring I didn’t realize he’s been doing for a while now. “I guess I sort of lied when I said everything .”
It’s not that he’s hesitant, because that’s not who he is, but he’s feeling it out. Feeling me out, more like, and probably waiting for me to blow up at him the way I usually do. So he can calm me down the way we like.
I play up the explosion, and he plays up the cool response. The unflappable Zander who he performs for the world is a lot of who he is, out there. Here, between us, it’s also part of a mask.
One he’s been wearing for a long time while he waited for me to catch up.
He’s still not sure I have, but I am. “Tell me what hasn’t changed,” I encourage him.
“You sure you want to hear it?”
I nod. Even though something shimmers through me. Nervous energy. Fear. A million things, and yet I know I want this. I know it.
Maybe it’s always scary—no matter how much you believe in yourself—to be vulnerable enough for this.
Maybe that’s the whole point.
He smooths his hands over my hair, like this hurts. Or like he expects me to hurt him . “I’ve always loved you, El. That never changed. You know that.”
I probably should have, and maybe sometimes I did know it. But mostly...
I shake my head. “I did everything in my power to make sure you wouldn’t. That you couldn’t . I can’t imagine you were feeling loving toward me the morning after our Beltane prom.”
The old Zander would have punched a wall at me bringing that up. This one laughs, if not exactly happily. “I don’t really want to go down that memory lane again, thanks. But yes, even then. Always, Ellowyn. Isn’t that why it hurt?”
“I felt awful,” I confess. I haven’t before. “During. After.” I sigh. “Still.”
“Good,” he throws back emphatically.
I never thought I’d laugh about that mess, but something escapes me then that’s close enough to count. “You weren’t a monk.”
“Hell no, I wasn’t. But why do you think every woman after you was a human? A relationship with a human couldn’t go anywhere. I would never tell them what I was.” He shrugs like that was inevitable, not a choice. “It always felt like if I actually got involved with another witch, that would mean...”
“Mean what?”
“That there was no chance,” he says, his voice a scrape of sound in this room that now feels too small. “Ever. For us.”
He was out there preserving our last chance, and I was doing everything to destroy it. Sounds like us, but I’ve changed. He’s changed. So much around us has changed.
There’s one thing no version of me has ever done.
I curl the fingers sitting over his heart into his shirt, pulling him closer. Because I know my voice isn’t going to come out strong, no matter how strongly I feel this. The emotion is clogging my throat so much that I’m not sure I’ll be able to speak at all.
But I have to. Because I mean it with every last cell of my body. It’s the stark and simple truth and always has been. “I love you too, Zander.”
His mouth curves, his hand cupping my face. His eyes gleam, thunder and certainty, and I feel the rumble deep inside. “I know.”
This time when he kisses me it’s soft, slow.
Perfect.
A new promise amidst all sorts of old broken ones. We’ll lay it down between us tonight and build a future on all we’ve learned.
I wrap my arms around his neck and deepen the kiss.
Because this is the secret to why the sex was always amazing—no matter how angry we were with each other. Love.
It’s been love all along.
Zander pulls his mouth from mine and even tries to put some distance between us. “Baby, you’ve got to get some sleep. Those were the Healer’s orders.”
“No, Jacob said rest ,” I correct him. “I happen to find sex very restorative. Don’t worry, I’ll try to be gentle.”
He laughs as I pull his mouth to mine. As he lifts me up, then puts me down again, but comes with me this time.
Until we’re wrapped up with each other, deep inside and out, lit up with the ways we love each other and always have.
Because we’re exactly where we belong.