Page 7 of Truly Madly Magically

Zander manages to wrestle the shadow back out the door while keeping me inside. He’s acting like we haven’t fought side by side all damn year, stopping floods, facing down the Joywood, saving our friends and ourselves and everyone—well, almost everyone—we love.

Once again he’s making it clear that I’m the very odd one out in a friend group full of not just witches, but special witches. Chosen witches.

And me, the half-witch disappointment he set free ten years ago.

“Ellowyn,” he growls, his voice rough and magic igniting his dark gaze. “Stay put.”

I don’t listen. Not thinking beyond my temper, I follow him right outside, even though I can’t do anything in this stupid magic bubble Zander stuck me in. Outside it’s dark—much darker than it should be on such a clear night. The stars and the moon were out when I flew over, and it hasn’t been that long.

I don’t have a lot of time to worry about that, because the shadow is waiting right there.

It rushes at me once more, but again Zander’s magic meets it before I can do a damn thing. Sparks fly where magic battles magic, gritty and mean. The shadow surrounds him, like it’s trying to suck him in, but he fights it back. Again and again, and I can’t get his walls of protection off me to lend a hand.

So I do what I can, since he’s neutered what I can do here. I call out to our friends. Our coven, the Riverwood. We all promised—if there’s a call, no matter what or why, we all come.

The way we promised ten years ago when it was Emerson we were trying to keep safe from all the things she couldn’t remember.

It doesn’t take long tonight. The past few months have been too quiet. We know the Joywood are working against us in the lead-up to the ascension rituals that will begin soon and then end at Samhain when witchkind will pick its ruling coven. We’ve been waiting for something.

Maybe not a shadow. Maybe not tonight. But we’ve all been on edge.

Everyone appears on Zander’s porch at once. No one waits to dive in.

It’s too dark and I can’t see everything, but I can feel the bursts of magic. The deep, dark wrongness of something wanting to hurt us all and doing its best to make it so. It’s not the hideous, supposedly mythical adlets Emerson fought off back in March. It’s not the Joywood themselves we all had to fight in June. It’s just a shadow.

Yet something about the dark, slimy way it glistens, darker than the dark itself, reminds me of something—

Before I can put my finger on it, the protective bubble around me drops. The first thing I feel is the cold, when it’s still warm—or it was, earlier.

I know Zander didn’t let me go because he suddenly trusted me to fight. He dropped the walls because he doesn’t have the magic to maintain it and fight.

I don’t like that notion at all, so I wade in.

Because I might want to pound on Zander right now—and really all the time—but I’m not about to let anyone else have the pleasure.

With all seven of us fighting, the tide turns. First that nasty, sickening shadow looms large, but slowly, surely we surround it. I finally figure out what this weird black thing that isn’t fully formed reminds me of.

Back in the spring, when we first fought the Joywood. There was all that black.

The black that was in the rivers when they nearly drowned the town and most of Missouri. The black that Jacob described as being inside Zelda, the cause of the sickness that took her from us. It’s all the same, and I have no doubt the Joywood are behind it.

Litha proved that, not that we needed it proved. We already knew.

Tonight, though, I find myself wondering how much of this black is in them. If they’re made of it too.

This horrible black magic with no end.

It doesn’t matter right now because we’re still fighting. The seven of us fall into place, hemming the shadow in on all sides with the magical ring we make. We chant as we move, making it smaller—

“We call on the moon, the confluence, our connection,” we intone, while the magic we make as the Riverwood coven blazes hot and bright, shooting deep into the center of that oily dark. “Give us your might. Strengthen our fight.”

Something screams—

“Indict the dark that threatens the light,” we all shout in unison.

It’s the shadow itself, or something deep within the shadow, and it seems to recoil. It wraps in and around itself like a collapsing dark star, consuming itself from within.

There’s a sickening tearing sound, like rending flesh—

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