Page 203 of Sigils & Spells

Another barrage of questions. Ruby’s was the only one I understood. “What happened?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but instead, the room warped around me, and I was way too tall. I was a Goddamn horse again. I whinnied in absolute frustration, and was human once more. I fell hard on my ass. My three friends stared at me.

“You havegotto be KIDDING ME!”

EPILOGUE

Three weeks,several phone calls with Ruby’s terrifying uncle and a long, odd discussion with Magnolia, who looked like a pleasant house wife once more and we finally knew why I was still a horse.

“So Maeve broke the enslavement.” Ruby rubbed her head with the back of her pencil, looking at the papers in front of us. “But whatever magic got messed up when you didn’t finish the apple didn’t get undone by the release. Basically the magic is in your bones now.”

She threw her hands up. “You’re a shifter now, Julian.”

“Forever?”

She nodded. “Don’t worry, you won’t go crazy anymore, and you should be able to control it soon enough, but yeah. Just like Alice. Welcome to the magic life.”

Alice and I high fived.

It turned out that, since Ruby’s magic was so much stronger in Elfhame, it was also wilder. The magic didn’t listen as well. So when she poured so much magic into such a strong protection spell, the magic went haywire and, while it protected Alice as it was meant to, it also flooded her body with magic and she turned into a sugar glider. Why a sugar glider? Ruby’s uncle wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe Ruby or Alice had been thinking about sugar gliders earlier that day.

“The only predictable thing about Elfhame,” Ruby’s uncle had said with his thick Texas drawl over the phone. “Is that it is unpredictable.”

Which meant that through entirely different means, in some odd twist of fate, Alice and I were both shifters now. The same kind of shifters called Ceridwen, or a witch who has spent years imbuing themselves with a certain spell to turn themselves into shifters. Neither Alice nor I were witches, but the magic had stuck in us the same way it would have for a spell caster.

“Ok but you were able to turn yourself and Minho and Alice into birds.” I protested.

“Yeah but it wasn’t the same. That’s barely more than an illusion and I can’t maintain it for more than an hour. I can turn into any number of things in short bursts, but Ceridwens become a part of the animal that they pick. You guys just didn’t get to pick.”

“Magic is fun,” said Alice. “It’s confusing.”

“You’re telling me.” Ruby signed and shut the thick dusty volume we’d been looking at. “You guys should get ready to go. Minho will be here in a few for you.”

We stood and helped Ruby tidy her study a little. Alice and I as new and confused shifters, were going to one of Minho’s W.A. meetings, where they’d hopefully be able to help us learn to control our new found abilities.

Ruby wished us luck, and left us in her driveway to wait for my werewolf roommate. She went back into her big farm house. I looked at Alice and found myself grinning.

“So. Ceridwens, huh?”

She grinned back. “Everything’s going to be different now. I’m going to go back to school and study biology, but… now I’m magic.”

Her smile could have split her face open. “I’m magic!”

I squeezed her hand. “Yeah, you are.”

“So, Horse boy,” Alice bumped me with her hip, and, holding a pretend microphone to her mouth like a reporter, said, “You just defeated a psycho Fae lady, what are you going to do next?”

She smiled like she was trying not to laugh and offered her fake microphone to me, the golden sun slanted into her eyes, turning them mahogany.

“Well, Pickle Girl, I’ll tell you what I’m not gonna do.” I kissed her on the side of the head as Minho’s truck started to crunch down the driveway. “I’m never going in a Fairy circle ever again.”

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