Page 33 of Truly Madly Magically

It also has me considering all those similarities I don’t want to notice between them and us. I shouldn’t let myself wonder. I shouldn’t consider anything but how fantastic it’s going to be to get some sleep. I can feel exhaustion tugging at me.

I definitely shouldn’t ask.

But it’s only Elizabeth and me here.

I can’t come up with a good enough reason not to ask.

“You must have liked him at some point to have married him, right?” I don’t know what I’m looking for. I pluck at the quilt on my bed, and when she doesn’t answer right away, I dare to look across the room to where she lies so stiffly in hers.

“I loved him,” she says at last, with a kind of devastating finality that echoes in me. In ways I do not like. “Through many a ridiculous fool’s errand—his specialty. I told him not to go on that trip. I had a premonition it would not go well, but he and his precious legacy wouldn’t listen.”

I want to ask her questions so I can outline all the ways Zander and I aren’t like Elizabeth and Zachariah, but premonitions are not the purview of Summoners.

“You weren’t a Summoner?” I ask Elizabeth.

“What’s this?” My ancestress sniffs, clearly offended. “I summoned, of course. My tie with the spirit world was very strong when I was living. That’s why we came so readily to you tonight. Don’t let Zachariah tell you it was because of his Guardian navigating abilities, because that is ridiculous.”

“If you had premonitions, you can’t have been a Summoner. You must have been some kind of Diviner instead?”

Elizabeth sits up in her dramatic bed and frowns at me. “I do not understand you.”

That makes two of us. I sit up too. “What was your witch designation?” I ask her, aware as I do that my pulse is getting a little crazy. I can feel it in my wrists, my ankles. My baby.

She frowns at me as if I’m quite dim. “Revelare.”

“What?” I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that word in my life.

“A Revelare. Just like you.”

I laugh, but mostly in confusion. “I am barely a Summoner and I’m definitely not...whatever that word is. Whatever it means.”

She shakes her head at me, her frown deepening. “Goods are always Revelares.”

“Not this one. Not my mother either. Or Granny Good, I’m sorry to tell you.”

She floats up through the covers—yes, through them, making me wonder how she was beneath them to begin with—then crosses the room to me. She’s kind of hovering above my bed, and I thought ghosts couldn’t really creep me out, but turns out a sleepover ghost body looming above my bed does the trick.

She’s studying me closely, and I can feel her magic. When I shouldn’t. It shouldn’t work here, outside the circle and away from the ritual. Nothing is as it should be tonight.

“You have something special,” she says after a moment.

Being half human has often led to me being called special, but usually with a nasty sniff or an eye roll. Elizabeth sounds proud.

I find I have no place to put that.

“Very special,” she says, nodding her head. “I knew there was a reason we stayed.”

“What’s the reason?” I need to talk to Emerson about this. And Rebekah. Has Georgie heard of a Revelare? Surely Frost has.

Elizabeth shakes her head, and she smiles at me. And it’s genuinely warm. “Ah, my child. There are so many.”

Then she puts her spirit hand on my forehead, and I shouldn’t feel it. Not so fully formed, almost like a real hand, but I do.

“Sleep, my children,” she whispers. To me and to the baby inside. Like a spell she shouldn’t be able to cast in ghostly form.

But that’s the last thing I remember before I wake up the next morning.

10

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