Page 1 of Truly Madly Magically

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WHEN I OPEN my eyes, I know immediately that I’m not dreaming.

The woman sitting at the end of my bed is here. She’s spirit rather than flesh and blood, but it’s her. Not fully herself, but so much her it hurts.

Zelda Rivers is the aunt of my best friend, the mother of my ex-boyfriend, and she was one of the few adults who never made me feel bad about the fact I’m only a half witch. Zelda was confirmation that my mom was right that not all the witches out there were going to look down their noses at the mixed-blood half human and sniff. Dramatically. The way so many did here in St. Cyprian, Missouri, the charming little river town that’s also the hidden-in-plain-sight witch capital of the world.

But I know exactly why Zelda is here tonight, a couple of months after she died in June.

“Ellowyn, you have to tell him.”

I think about pulling the covers over my head and pretending she’s a dream. But she sets me straight. Three loud bangs shake the whole room and what feels like my entire apartment, my tea shop below, and most of Main Street.

Zelda was always excellent with the nonverbal communication.

“Ellowyn Sabrina Good, you have to tell him.”

My hated middle name, courtesy of my human father who thought it was “cute,” does the trick.

I look at Zelda, or the fuzzy vision of who she was when she had a body. She was with us on Litha back in June, her spirit having not made the crossing yet as she’d only died that very morning of the summer solstice, but I haven’t seen her since. Ghosts need time to figure out how to be dead, after all.

Time’s up tonight, apparently. She sits there, her eyes the same gray and gold—and worse, she reminds me of the him she’s talking about.

“Now,” she tells me, in that firm mom voice of hers. It makes me remember the time she caught me and Zander a little too naked in the storage room at Nix, the bar that the Rivers family have run as long as anyone can remember. It’s almost a fond memory now, when I let so few of my high school memories of him be fond.

“Tell him,” Zelda orders me, though her voice is waning along with her image.

I’m a Summoner, and the past is my thing. And I’ve learned in my many run-ins with the spirits of the past that newly deceased spirits are still learning. How to project, to connect. It takes a significant amount of energy—and I don’t know how spirits gather their energy in the great beyond, but Zelda’s is currently running out.

Her form is getting paler. I can see my window behind her. Through her.

“You can’t wait, Ellowyn. It’s imperative you don’t wait.” Then she slips away once again.

Leaving me wide-awake, feeling guilty and wishing it didn’t hurt.

Some would say the connection I have with the past is a gift, and I try to think of it that way. I really do. But sometimes, being alive in a sea of the dead and gone, lost and forgotten, feels as isolating as being the only half witch in your generation.

Imperative, she said, that I tell Zander what’s going on—but that’s an odd way to put it. He’ll figure it out eventually. Do I really need to tell him?

Yes. Zelda’s voice, or my conscience, is firm then.

I sigh. Because I know she’s right, no matter how little I like it. Hence the guilt. I have to tell him. Hiding it is getting harder by the day. An extended glamour takes a certain amount of energy, and that’s just to glow things up. Hiding things is even harder to sustain for any length of time.

I haven’t told Zander. I haven’t told anyone, not even my very best friends—who also happen to be my coven, the Riverwood. I think Jacob North might have his suspicions, but that’s the problem with being friends with one of the most powerful Healers in the world. You can’t claim hangovers and food poisoning all the time—I’m half human, so I can claim that I might suffer from such all-too-human ailments sometimes—without a Healer wanting to help.

He’s never acted like he knew. He’s never said anything to me about my little secret that would have stopped being a secret to him the moment he touched me. A brush of a hand, a jostle, anything.

Hell, he probably knew before I did.

I moan and groan and kick my bed a few times, and then I roll over and poke the screen of my phone. Harder than necessary. The time reads 2:45 a.m., flashing a bright light in my dark room, like one more imperative I could do without.

He’ll be up. It doesn’t matter that he’s been working the ferry nearly all day, every day, because his dad is still only barely functioning after losing Zelda. Zander still works his shift at the bar and doesn’t stumble home until around three in the morning.

Things I wish I didn’t know, but I do, like his every move is etched into my bones.

If I get up, I can beat him there. Then again, I could also send a note. Or Ruth, my owl familiar, to do the dirty work. People always want to kill the messenger.

How kind of you to volunteer me, Ruth says in my head, where only I can hear her, filled with owlish sarcasm.

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