Page 32 of Truly Madly Magically

Zander stays closer to me than he would normally. I pretend not to notice, but he has a kind of energy around him that I can feel in the dark. He always has. I always know where he is.

I grit my teeth and ignore it until we’re a few feet from the ghosts and he leans in closer. Much closer. I hold my breath.

“So this guy is just going to...haunt me?”

I shrug, and pretend my heart isn’t going a little wild in my chest. “It looks that way.”

“You’re the Summoner,” he growls at me, though his gaze is on Zachariah. “Why don’t you know?”

I don’t think he’s trying to get a dig in that there’s something I should know but don’t. I feel the slight all the same and shove it down deep where I keep all the rest of them, polished and ready to wound.

While I’m trying to come up with a suitably scathing retort, I hear our ghosts talking to one another.

“Wilde House is as pretentious as ever, don’t you think?” Zachariah asks, laughing slightly, a rough sort of sound that I tell myself is in no way familiar. “I can’t imagine why anyone would build something like this.”

“Remind me,” Elizabeth returns in an arch voice that is also familiar, “what was it you built with your own hands when you were alive, Zachariah?”

Zachariah does that sigh-that’s-not-a-sigh thing. Elizabeth pretends not to notice, while making it clear he failed her in any number of ways I don’t have to know their story to understand.

Because I already understand. Too well. And I...don’t want to be like this.

With every last part of me, I don’t want to be doing this same thing with Zander into the afterlife the way these two are.

I don’t get good and scathing with Zander. I swallow it down. I catch Elizabeth’s eye and indicate she should follow me as I walk inside Wilde House. She floats along with me, close enough to the floor that it almost seems like she’s walking. We wind our way through the house’s main floor, but she pauses at the foot of the stairs and frowns at Azrael, the dragon newel post.

Hard.

“Everything okay?” I ask, frowning at the newel post myself.

Elizabeth tilts her head one way, then the other, studying the dragon on the post, whose onyx eyes seem to almost...gleam at us. Then she straightens and shakes it off. Visibly.

“Carry on,” she tells me, nodding toward the stairs.

I could explain Azrael to her, and what little I know about how and why there is a newel post with a name, but she only gazes back at me. I’m too tired to get into it with a ghost, so I start up the steps, letting her follow.

I lead Elizabeth into my room. I’ve been around ghosts, spirits, and signs from the other side my whole life. They don’t...hang out. The energy required is too much, and I’m not sure what happened to make it so she’s just here, almost like she’s whole and human again. If I don’t focus on what I must have done or not done to make this happen, it’s fascinating. I’ve never heard of anyone getting to watch a ghost just exist in the world the way we do.

Ghosts: they’re just like us.

Elizabeth drifts in, then all around, studying the wallpaper and the view out the window. She takes in every little detail of the guest room before she turns to me, puts her hands on her hips, and says, “Well. Conjure me up a bed, then.”

“You’re going to sleep? In a bed?”

“I may not be corporeal, but I still need a bed to sleep in, child,” she says as if I should know this when who could know this? I’ve never given a single stray thought to the sleep preferences of ghosts. “I may have slept on the floor after I was fool enough to marry that man, but I refuse to do that again.”

“You two were married.” I’m surprised she’s acknowledging the marriage at all, but I conjure her up a bed all the same. I make it nice and fancy, because it seems like something she’ll get a kick out of.

“Briefly. Before he got himself killed.” Elizabeth studies the bed in such a way I can’t read her reaction.

“Rumor is you killed him.”

She gets into the newly conjured bed, in full ghostly dress, and pulls the soft, heavy covers up over her spirit. She doesn’t respond to my version of gentle prodding, so I decide to be direct. “Did you kill him, Elizabeth?”

She makes a soft noise beneath the covers that I can’t quite identify, then pulls them down to reveal her face and skewers me with a look. “Be careful, child. My sponsorship can always be rescinded.” She nods at my stomach then, a pleasant smile on her face but something glinting in her violet eyes. “You wear no wedding band. I assume you’ve followed in our scandalous ancestress Mercy’s inauspicious footsteps.”

“That’s not quite the burn these days as it might have been in yours.” It’s still surprisingly effective, no matter how okay I am with being an unwed mother.

I kick off my shoes, magic on my pajamas, and crawl into my own bed. I have sat with ghosts, spoken to them, danced with them, and occasionally suggested they leave the mortal coil alone, but I have never had a sleepover quite like this. It would probably bother me more than it does, but the idea that Zander is also dealing with this profound weirdness when he is a Guardian better used to river things puts a smile on my face.

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