Page 107 of Truly Madly Magically

How the hell am I supposed to be calm when I’m floating about some magical space void, untethered?

How did this happen? I ask.

Elizabeth sighs audibly, there inside me. Look to your protections, child.

I look at my hands. The bracelets and the ring are all intact. I reach for my head to find the crown still sits there. Georgie’s little book is in my pocket. I can feel Zelda’s necklace around my neck, but when I lift my hand to touch it, to wrap my fingers around the metal the way I sometimes do to reassure myself everything is okay, it burns.

I look down, and it’s covered in an oozy kind of black. Deep and dark and wrong.

In the distance, in the dark, I hear what sounds like a scream. The kind a weasel might make.

Black magic, I think. Worse, blood magic. It’s burning there against my skin.

My first instinct is to pull it off, but something in me tells me that’s all wrong. Like intuition, but louder. And far more certain.

I try instead to wipe away the oily black. It burns when I pull at the gooey substance, but it also moves. So I ignore the burn and claw the black off the necklace. It keeps growing back, but I don’t give up. It seems like the only thing I can do.

It hurts, it all hurts, but it’s centered here like they can’t get to me any other way, and that gives me some relief.

I manage to clear a spot off the metal.

Ellowyn. Baby. I can’t find you, comes Zander’s voice at once, and it nearly makes me weep. I hear him, and that means there is hope.

I want to give that back to him. You can, I tell him, there in that channel that’s only ours. You can find us, Zander. All of us.

I don’t just say it, I believe it. I trust it.

I trust him.

Something makes the back of my neck prickle, and it reminds me of that night that feels forever ago. Stepping out of Zander’s apartment on stilts and that black shadow swooping at me. Zander saving me in the nick of time.

I don’t see a threat here in this void, but I throw up the protective bubble anyway. Just like he did then.

I’m just in time, because the entire black world around me explodes in flame. I nearly lose the shield around me, it’s so shocking.

I am surrounded by fire. The flames are huge, raging. Angry and hot.

They are everywhere.

They are licking at me, at the protective barrier, and I can feel them too well.

I feel Elizabeth lend her strength to mine. That means we can hold off this fire for a while—

But it won’t last forever.

Sooner or later we’ll burn our power out, and then what?

Maybe, I think in a dark sort of way that reminds me of the Ellowyn I used to be—and in that moment, also tells me how much I’ve changed since I accepted the Revelare in me—that’s the whole point of this. Whatever this is.

Don’t panic—but this time it isn’t Elizabeth telling me that, it’s me telling me that.

Because I’m not that girl I used to be, with a human-sized chip on my shoulder, convinced I was a target and the butt of every joke. I’m not the teenager who decided I might as well dress the part of the town’s black cloud, and act like it too, since truth might be a curse, but it can also be a weapon.

She’s part of me, that girl I was, but I am so much more than she could imagine I’d become.

I swallow and try to think, though the roar and hiss of the flames makes that difficult. I know that I was able to hear Zander when I cleared off the necklace, so I look down at it again. I hold my breath as I wipe away the black ooze, waiting for the pain to hit me, but it doesn’t burn.

Instead, it turns into a crackly kind of ash and falls away.

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