Page 30 of Truly Madly Magically

But they don’t look at each other or acknowledge each other, even though they’re both here. I know they can see each other because I’ve brought them here and they’re linked. I can feel it.

Still they ignore each other.

It feels deeply, uncomfortably familiar to me.

“You want us to be sponsors for an ascension,” Zachariah says, and I don’t miss, even in his ghostly form, how much his eyes look like Zander’s eyes. Rivers genetics imprinted on their bones, I guess.

Elizabeth has my mother’s violet eyes, but her hair is brown. She’s shorter, rounder. It’s hard to see any of myself in her. I assume all my dad’s human stuff took over to make me, because of course it did.

“Yes, Zachariah,” Elizabeth replies. Her voice is acidic. “That is word for word what they have shown us.”

It’s the first glimpse I get of me in her, and I am charmed.

Zachariah gives the impression of sighing heavily without actually doing it, another genetic trait that has apparently been handed down through the ages. “I will support you, blood of my blood. Our light in the dark.”

The I is pointed, and Elizabeth shoots him a narrow glare before she replies too. “I will always stand up for what is right. I will support you, blood of my blood. Our imperative hope.”

Imperative. Zelda used that word too.

“We will ask for you to stand before us in six days’ time, ancestors,” I say to them, getting back to the script. “You will come before the gathering and offer your sponsorship, if you so wish to honor us.”

They both incline their heads. A ghostly promise.

So easy. So simple.

I begin the chant to release the spirits back to whence they came.

We’ll see them again in six days’ time.

They’ll sponsor us.

We’ll start the actual, mysterious ascension process that no one can stop once it starts. Not even a certain evil ruling coven. So say Frost’s books.

I might be a little giddy. Take that, Joywood.

I’m pulling away from the Summoning confident, happy, even excited. I’m ready to let our ancestors go, pull in my magic, break the circle.

Then something...fractures. It’s not painful like that time on Ostara back in March. It’s something else. Like holding a little too tightly to spun glass so it shatters. There’s nothing dark about it—but there’s that shattering all the same.

Yet my coven keeps chanting like they don’t feel it.

The Summoning ends. The circle is broken, the familiars called in. My friends are talking excitedly all around me, but I only hear the murmurs of it, like I’ve got cotton in my ears. I shake my head and try to find my grip in the here and now.

That’s when Zander comes into my vision. “Ellowyn?” he says, and he’s frowning. Not at me, for a change. He’s focused on something behind me.

I look over my shoulder and see that he’s looking directly at the ghostly image of Zachariah Rivers. Like he can see him. When it’s over and Zachariah shouldn’t be here any longer, and neither should the starchy-looking woman who stands off to the right of him, as if she refuses to stand directly beside him, which is relatable but—

“Why are they still here?” Zander asks.

“Who?” Rebekah asks, stepping right through the mist that makes up Elizabeth Good. Clearly she doesn’t see the two ghosts we’re left with.

They should have disappeared when I released them.

But they didn’t.

Meaning that the Summoning did not go according to plan after all.

Shit.

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