Page 86 of Dragon Fires Everywhere
I don’t know how long I stand there, trying to come up with a way to read a dragon like a great historical tome, when I heara voice say my name. A familiar voice, though I haven’t heard that particular wavering melody in years. For a moment I wonderif it’s the river again, but something in me knows better.
I turn my head just enough to see Emerson and Rebekah bracketing a small woman.
Lillian Wilde.
She has her ghostly arms around Emerson and Rebekah, but she is looking at me. Her misty eyes shine, and I...
I am looking at my grandmother.
Who was always there, even when I didn’t know who she was to me. Who called me special when everyone else told me I was regular.
Maybe she was telling me all along.
With halting steps, I move forward. Into the cemetery and toward this woman who was always so kind to me. Who was the antidoteto my mother. Who took every sling and arrow that came at me next door and turned them into warmth, funny stories, anecdotes,and belonging.
The thing about Lillian is that she was always there.
When I reach her, she pulls her arms away from Emerson and Rebekah and reaches out to me. She’s not corporeal, so it justfeels like a cool breeze, like goose bumps down my arms.
“Did you know?” I whisper.
She looks at me and runs a see-through hand over my hair. I don’t feel it like I would a living hand, but I still feel a disturbancein the air around my curls.
“Not in a direct way. I knew there was something there. A connection.” She frowns slightly. “Maybe I didn’t want to know.” Because, of course, that would tell her things about her son, Desmond. My real father—though I don’t want to think about fathers now. She smiles at me. “What I knew—and know—beyond any shadow of a doubt is that you’re special.”
You aren’t special, Georgie.My mother’s impatient voice.You’re a Pendell. Act like one.
Lillian sighs, like a patch of fog. “Once I crossed over, I saw more of my son’s mistakes than I wanted to. But you were blockedto me. It has been so hard to reach any of you, but you especially.”
Blocked. It dawns on me, hard and cruel. “The necklace my mother gave me.”
She nods sadly. “Among other things. The Joywood do not want you all having access to the dead.”
“Then how is this happening?” Emerson asks.
Lillian turns to look at Azrael, who is leaning against the statue of his dragon form like he hasn’t a care in the world.But I can see that he does. It’s in the set of his shoulders, that haunted look in his eyes.
“I may not have the magic todothings, but that does not mean there is not magic to be used,” he says, still in that stiff way I don’t understand or like.“They made the mistake of putting onyx in the statue. It might make it look that much more terrifying, but it gives me accessto energy. Energy enough to reach out to my fellow cemetery residents and help them... appear, shall we say.”
His gesture encompasses all the ghosts around us.
“It never fails to amaze me how little you lot know,” a woman in somewhat Victorian garb says to Ellowyn. When Ellowyn onlygrins at her instead of getting offended, I realize this must be Elizabeth Good. Ellowyn’s ancestress who showed up in ghostform before Samhain. She helped us. Saved us, really.
And that means her husband, Zander’s ancestor Zachariah Rivers, is who stands beside Elizabeth.
Dreams and books and fairy tales. Ghosts and crows and dragons. True covens with fabulae. For a moment, I really stand inthat. All these things we’ve been told don’t exist, don’t matter, aren’t for us.
And at every turn we prove them wrong.
Because wearespecial.
It turns out we have been all along.
Emerson turns to the crowd of magical beings and creatures and asks for their advice.
“Anything you know,” she says. “Anything you can share. We’re grateful for it all.”
There is a lot of commotion, then, on this misty December morning. Lots of theories about how to defeat black magic. Lotsof dark muttering about the Joywood. Zachariah insists we need to find the crows, as if there aren’t crows just about everywhere.Emerson is magicking all the practical suggestions down into a notebook. I’m doing the same, sending queries to the archivesso I’ll have the appropriate books waiting for me.
