Page 6 of Truly Madly Magically

I’ve spent the past months he’s just counted out in denial, but when I can’t hold on to that, I’ve practiced what I would say. How I would behave. It hasn’t gone to plan—shocker—but there is one thing I have always known I’d tell him. “You don’t have to be involved.”

His hand drops from the cabinet door. He skewers me with a look that is somehow both outrageously hurt and volcanic. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen from him, and that’s saying something. “Fuck you, Ellowyn.”

I don’t want to analyze why that simple statement, said almost quietly, sends a wave of panic through me rather than the typical tsunami of fury. “We know how bad we are at getting along. You think we should raise a kid together?”

I’d love to say this is why I’ve put off telling him. That I didn’t want an argument.

But I love an argument.

The real reason is that it hurts. It all hurts. Like I’m eighteen and he’s breaking up with me at Beltane prom all over again. Not before or after, like a normal person who is also a stupid boy. Actually at the prom.

Not because he thought I’d been flirting with Tony Alward in potions class (I wasn’t) or I thought he’d been staring a little too hard at Michelle Holland’s miniskirt while she pretended not to understand spellcasting (he definitely was). No, Zander was being noble. He wanted to set me free.

So I used that freedom to destroy us both in the way I knew he would hate the most.

Even ten years later, I keep waiting to look back and think, Remember how huge that felt? What babies we were.

It was never baby stuff, though, even when we were.

I’m still waiting for that freedom.

“I have a right to be in my kid’s life,” he says in that deadly quiet way that makes my stomach twist into a million knots, because quiet Zander is a dangerous thing. It’s the real him. The Guardian he always has been under all the smiles and jokes and masks.

I wish I didn’t know that.

“We’re already in each other’s lives with the coven and Emerson’s ascension bullshit,” he continues, like I’m so stupid I can’t possibly understand the things happening to both of us, all our friends, and—no big deal—the entire world thanks to the Joywood. “Our child is going to be there since you are. I’m just supposed to pretend he or she isn’t mine?”

I am so not ready to think about what’s growing inside of me as a child. One that will be real. And here. And have to come out of me. Zander’s right. We can’t cut each other out. Even without the extenuating coven and ascension issues, we’ve never been any good at that.

“You know what?” I say to him—because a great defense is always an asshole offense. “I’m not going to get into this with you. I told you. That’s all I came to do.” I turn toward the door, horrified that tears are stinging the backs of my eyes. It’s the hormones, I assure myself. Even witches aren’t immune when growing life inside their own bodies. “When you decide to be civil, we can—”

“Civil? You’ve got some fucking nerve.”

I do. Oh, I do. Just to show him, I fling out some magic that has every cabinet fly open. With another wave of a hand, I slam every liquor bottle in the house—and there are a lot—on the counter next to him. “Drink yourself to death. See if I care.”

Then I whirl away and open the door. A few sparks fly as he hurls out his brooding, angry magic to stop mine, slamming the door shut again. I throw mine back and the door wobbles, caught between both of us trying to impose our will on the other. Trying to win.

Welcome to us.

I dig in, exulting in the fight the way I always do with him, because I don’t have to worry if he can handle what unpredictable thing I might or might not do—I know he can take it.

The door blows open on a huge gust of magic, and I stumble back. My butt hits the floor, not hard, but not like I hit a feather pillow either.

I certainly didn’t expect to win a power battle with him. I might be angry, I might wish I had stronger powers, but at the end of the day, I am only half witch. Even when I can muster something powerful, the control is shaky at best.

Zander is a full witch from a hereditarily powerful witch family. He should win, but it still pisses me off, and I start to tell him so—

But a shadow from outside rushes toward me, and I get it then, but it’s too late—

This shadow is the source of the blast of magic that knocked me down. Zander must sense it a second or two before me, because a rush of his magic encases me before I can even throw my hands up in defense.

Ruth dive-bombs from wherever she was hiding. Storm screeches out a battle cry.

Suddenly we’re in a real fight.

I scramble back to my feet. I can move, but I feel Zander’s magic wrapping me in a kind of armor, which makes it impossible to use my own magic unless I can somehow break through his spell.

Something, it pains me to admit, I’ve never been any good at.

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