Page 96 of Truly Madly Magically

“Wow. I guess you think you’ve really dropped a bombshell on me.” Because I might be changing, evolving, maturing—but I’m still me.

Zander scowls. “You don’t understand. Just like I can’t fully grasp everything that comes with being a Summoner, or a Revelare, or hell, a mother carrying a baby. There are some things that are too hard to explain.”

I know that feeling. The comfortable, safe feeling that you’re alone in your misery. I have certainly hoarded my misery like it was something precious, but my mother never let me hoard it forever. She’d always say the same thing when it was time to, if not let it go, find a way to live with it.

I say those words to Zander now. “Maybe I can’t understand, but I can listen.”

He starts to shake his head, but I place my palm over his heart. “Zander.”

I meet his gaze, and I don’t hide. I don’t pull the punch. If I thought facing the Joywood was terrifying, this ranks right up there. “I need you to explain it to me, okay?”

He studies me, and I guess he gets it. How hard that was for me to say. How hard it is to stand here like this, telling him I need something and waiting to see if he’ll give it to me.

But he does. “My family is literally here, on the rivers, to watch over the confluence. We failed. We should have been able to protect my mother. We failed. I should have protected you from too many things to count. I failed at that, every time. There is no guardianing happening. There’s no actual protection. There’s nothing but one failure after another.”

I hear what he doesn’t say then as clearly as if he had. I know that he’s still holding on to the idea that he’s cursed. That what he sees as failures are proof of that.

“You helped Emerson beat back that flood and save the rivers. You just didn’t do it alone,” I remind him. “You can’t protect people from illness or from a deliberate poison that killed other people too. All the Healers in St. Cyprian couldn’t manage it. Your mom died, and that will always be unfair. There’s no arguing otherwise, but that’s not your failure. I am here right now in part because of all the people who stepped in to hold me up while the Joywood got their kicks in. You’re one of those people.”

He looks down at me, brow furrowed. “Don’t be positive, Ellowyn. It’s fucking creepy.”

That gets a laugh out of me. “What, you don’t think I should turn into sunshine and unicorns? Rainbows and shit?”

He reaches out, brushes a thumb under one of my new gemstone eyes. Violet ringed in sapphire. Something wholly different. Something all me.

Revelare. That word is a whisper inside me. Of what could be. Out of what has been.

“This makes you an even bigger target,” Zander says in that gruff, serious way. “They’re not going to give up on hurting you.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got a kick-ass coven and a hot Guardian at my disposal.”

This time when his mouth curves, it really is almost like a smile. “At your disposal, huh?”

I shrug, grinning. “I said it, so it must be true.”

He doesn’t smile, not really. He stares down at me, at my bright new eyes that I can almost see reflected in his. In all those storm clouds I’ve loved for so long.

His face looks naked, open. A lump forms in my throat, because if I’m not mistaken, the way he’s looking at me right now has more to do with pride than any lingering worry or sadness.

Just call it what it is, Ruth interjects. He’s proud of you. Obviously.

It’s a sign of my emotional maturity that I ignore her, without a single threat involving stew.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction to want to crack a joke, or fling out an insult, or maybe just press my body and mouth to his and forget everything else.

I breathe through that reaction, holding his gaze the whole way.

Who do I want to be now? Now that I’ve finally realized who I am. The old me who couldn’t handle all this emotion that somehow feels, at the same time, like my lungs are being squeezed from the inside and that I’m light and bright enough to float away?

Or a brave new Revelare—not afraid of the past or the future because I know how to wield both?

“A while back, you told me everything changed,” I say quietly. Because it has.

Then again, it hasn’t. Maybe it took access to the past and future to finally fully see it, realize it, accept it.

Zander’s gaze tracks over my face, a kind of measuring I didn’t realize he’s been doing for a while now. “I guess I sort of lied when I said everything.”

It’s not that he’s hesitant, because that’s not who he is, but he’s feeling it out. Feeling me out, more like, and probably waiting for me to blow up at him the way I usually do. So he can calm me down the way we like.

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