Page 20 of Zero Happily Ever Afters

Milo began to dig through future threads, pulling at the black string that belonged to The True Witch. His eyes fluttered, searching, searching, searching, and when the light of possibility sprang forward, I caught glimpses. Fractured, shadowed, and veiled between countless layers of psychic energy between us, yet Milo’s frequency had never beamed so vibrantly. I felt completely synchronized with him. We moved as one entity despite being thousands of miles apart.

I couldn’t look at the futures Milo rooted through. They were grainy and dark, like staring at shadows in the night. But they were also impossibly bright, like the white dots that lined your vision while staring at the sun for too long. Milo made sense of it; he always made sense of the possibilities looped before him. Still, his mind stirred with pain, with sorrow, with a somber guilt that his mission had only just begun, and somehow, he’d already failed.

Clenching my teeth, I fought back the sensation. As a manifestation of myself, I had to steel my emotions, or they’d stretch and spread and reach out to my other half residing in Chicago, awaiting a proper report. We would link again, fuse as one entity, but I needed to do that on my other half’s schedule, not because Milo’s sadness cut deep into my heart and threatened to break me.

I worried what horrible futures he’d glimpsed to feel as if he’d already failed. There must be something awful wrapped in those bright shadows of infinitely dark sunlight. With so much pain in Milo’s heart, I reached out to alleviate it, to take on the burden of such weight the grim futures must’ve painted. When my phantom touch reached Milo, I didn’t see trembling thoughts on the visions he absorbed, the potentials he sorted, the threads he chased on leads of this supposed True Witch. No. The twisting knife came from guilt sparked on the child Milo couldn’t help. On the young boy who sat trapped in his own mind. AndMilo couldn’t fathom walking away, ignoring this kid’s fate as acceptable collateral to the greater good.

There was nothing Milo could do. Not one damn thing for this boy. He knew the Global Guild wouldn’t have left this child in such a state with their resources at hand. They had the strongest psychics in the world in their coven. Three of the greatest telepaths sat in their ranks, other psychics with capabilities that far outmatched anything Milo had dreamed possible, but none that could chase the future like Enchanter Evergreen. That was why he was here. He could track an enemy, a threat, a looming danger with just the faintest glimmer of possibility. But he couldn’t break the psychic damage that held this young boy captive.

He also knew the Global Guild didn’t possess a psychic strong enough to shatter The True Witch’s grip, her unyielding magic, her arcane branch that shattered minds, drowning them in their thoughts.

There was nothing Milo could do. It pained him that there was nothing anyone could do to free this child’s mind. His sorrow ate away at me. I grasped my control was nothing compared to the psychics ranked among the Global Guild. My branch magic paled in comparison. My psychic energy couldn’t compete, not with the help of manifestations or personas or a million years of training. I simply lacked the resolve for precision. Still, as Milo wept silently inside the confines of his inner core, I sought to free him and free this child.

I reached out to touch the mind of the imprisoned survivor. In order to delve into this boy’s mind, I had to loosen the strings that kept me latched to Milo’s being. I expected more pushback from my magic, considering how reluctantly it disobeyed me when searching for Milo in the city when my branch defied the laws of space and time to reach Milo. But my telepathy knewthe suffering Milo endured, and as foolishly as me, my magic believed we could lessen that burden.

The second my psychic projection reached the boy’s spirit, we collided, and I found myself heaved into an ocean storm so powerful that the currents nearly dragged me to the undertow of the subconscious. I gasped and choked and fought against the frigid tidal waves that rocked me from one end of this kid’s mind to the other.

It was horrible, painful, but reminiscent of a mind I’d delved into once before. Tara’s mind held an ocean of sorrow, which left her battling inner demons every single day of her life. When I had dived into her mind, her memories, I learned how to navigate the storms that brewed inside the minds of others. When I watched her fight against her depression each and every day, I learned how to handle the weight of the sea crashing down.

This ocean wasn’t the same as Tara’s, though. The ebb and flow were dreadfully similar, so I stopped resisting and allowed the current to drag me where it sought. But this horrible sea held a bitter taste of magic. Each drop of water burned with venomous hatred. I couldn’t grasp how someone could despise a child they didn’t even know. It wasn’t that. No. It was disgust. Pity for those beneath her heel. Her shadow glowed in the dark corners of the ocean, too far to see but vibrant all the same. This came from Milo and me working in tandem to unravel her identity and location. Well, he worked toward that while I attempted to grasp how this godlike level of magic remained fully intact despite her being halfway across the world.

I gasped, taking a startling breath. Had I seen that because our magics collided with each other? Had it been from Milo using his clairvoyance to search and seek out the elusive witch? Or had she sensed my interference? Milo’s attempt to see behind the curtain? There was an omnipotence to The True Witch’smagic. It burned or froze and offered a gentle hug all at once. The kindness was a lie, though, meant to deceive and take poor, unfortunate souls to the depths of their deaths.

I shook my head, raging against the ocean that spun me round and round, closer and closer to the seafloor where it’d pin me and drown me and destroy me as it’d done to countless others in this town.

A shiver of icy water traveled up my spine, sending a surge of every death this ocean had caused. The magic of The True Witch held a life of its own, much like my telepathy. Not sentient but primordial. When I dove into these waters, this fabricated illusion of drowning, the ocean magic sought to share some of its prized deaths, displaying atrocities soaked into each droplet.

This ocean wasn’t like Tara’s. It wasn’t a construct of depression. It wasn’t a coping mechanism for the horrors she’d endured in a family of monsters who painted themselves as idols.

“This is nothing more than a magical illusion,” I called out, taking a deep breath of the bitter water meant to poison my lungs and harden my insides to stone. “You can’t harm me. You can’t harm anyone anymore.”

I exhaled, releasing smoke and fire with each breath. As a projection, I didn’t need the air, didn’t need the cigarette either, yet I craved both. More than anything, I craved an end to this ocean of horrors. The fire I manifested burned away the water. Exhaling like a dragon, I cast enough fire to burn down every forest in the world.

“In the mind, a psychic reigns supreme.” My flames manifested into a fiery giant of how I perceived myself as I strangled water between my hands. “Leave. Leave. Leave.”

A gasp caught my attention. Above me, a glowing blue cube held the mind of Benjamin Oxland as he watched me wreak havoc on the ocean that threatened to drown him. He kept afixed gaze on the fiery beast of a man I summoned to eradicate the water.

“Fire beats water?” He tilted his head, completely perplexed, and something about the shock made me smile.

I didn’t understand why I picked fire. Perhaps it’d been the recent development of Melanie and Yaritza’s branch magics. Maybe I missed the smell of smoke and craved the fire of nicotine in my lungs. Maybe I simply liked the irony of stomping out the water with flames.

“A true fuck you to the so-called True Witch,” I whispered, but Benjamin heard.

His jaw had fallen slack, awed by the wonder unraveling in his mind.

“You’re safe now,” I said, resisting the smile and frowning at him.

The reverence he held collided against me, making me happy, making me proud of my actions, making me smile because he believed heroes should smile.

“I’m not a…” I turned away. I didn’t have time to explain it to the kid. Chances were he wouldn’t recall this anyway. The way his inner core had been slapped around by the ocean, my bet was he’d be struggling to recall his most concrete memories after such an ordeal, let alone the interaction he had with an annoyed telepath who really only did this to help ease the pain that ate away at his boyfriend.

Speaking of boyfriends… I disconnected from Benjamin’s mind and went to return to Milo.

Electric blue ignited around the boy’s body, sparking countless threads of potential futures that had returned now that the ocean meant to drown him had fizzled away. Milo’s face lit up, smile wide and overjoyed, eyes darting about to study the possibilities, and thoughts absorbing what could’ve possibly happened to set this in motion.

“Dorian?” He tilted his head, truly believing this had been my doing, believing no one else could’ve possibly played a role or had the ability. “How did you manage that?”

I wanted to tell him, to reach out and tell him everything that I’d learned about my magic, about my manifestations, about my personas, and everything else. But my other half had a plan. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t fully comprehend what the sensation was or how to explain it. Even though we were split, with our consciousness divided and dwelling in separate parts of the country, I had this synchronized sensation for my other half. He—no, we—had a plan.

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