“Are you… are you actually suggesting wego backto the world we spent the whole time trying to leave?” Bryce asks.
I shrug. “Why not? We can always come back, right? Every time we need to stock up on Germ-X or tampons, we’ll just do a few good deeds and open the portal again.”
But he’s already kissing me. Kissing me like he’s never kissed me before. Bold. Daring. Brave. Irresistible. He breaks away. “Yes. No more being a slug. I want to be a person, tolive.”
I glance at the portal, which is beginning to fade. “We need to catch the dragon’s attention so it will chase us when we go through.”
Panicked that we’re going to run out of time, I start jumping up and down, waving my arms and yelling, but the beast spares me no mind. It begins to rise higher in the sky, gaze searching for a new target.
“I’ve got this,” Bryce says, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a small pebble.
“You went back for it?” I breathed.
“Of course.”
The portal darkens further. I don’t feel any more power inside me, so creating another portal will be impossible, since there’s no magic on Earth to replenish our supply. If we don’t act quickly, our opportunity will be gone forever.
Bryce draws back his arm, hesitates only a second, then whips his arm forward, the rock slingshotting high into the sky.
It bounces right off the dragon’s snout. With a smoky snort, the beast whirls on us, eyes narrowing. Fire blooms in its nostrils.
“Run,” Bryce says, grasping my hand. He’s told me to run a lot in the past few days, but this time his voice is not full of fear, but full of life, of hope, of love.
With the monster breathing down our necks, we plunge through the portal.
And when I blink, I find that all my dreams have come true.
EPILOGUE 2BECAUSEEVERYFANTASYSTORYNEEDSMULTIPLEENDINGS
COURTNEY
It’s Thanksgrieving here in the magical world, which is the holiday everyone celebrates to give thanks for the fact that they can now express their grievances freely.
We’re all seated around a rough wooden table in the backyard of Mama’s house. Bryce and I have a house next door—a tiny cottage that leaks water and barely has room for the two of us, but we don’t mind. Nearly the whole street has been roped into the girls’ game of Kill the Guy with the Ball, which means that our life is perpetually chaotic.
Everyone is here—our band of misfits, the mouse, Mama, Pop, all their children. With Greg the mouse here to tell it not to eat anyone, the dragon sleeps in a heap a little way away, the children using it as a jungle gym. Greg even helped us create a portal so we could run back to our world and pick up Kelly, who’s thriving in her new career as a med school classroom skeleton—a solution that took care of her employment, housing, and education while avoiding the issue of her being alive. She’s only accidentally moved in front of the entire class twice.
Mama spent all day bossing us around the kitchen, and thefood tastes three times better thanks to the work that went into it. Better yet, there isn’t a turkey in sight. Meanwhile, the girls are sussing everyone out; their ball has been missing for hours, and nobody knows who has it. They’ve given me three pat-downs in the last hour alone, and I still don’t even play the game.
As we near the end of the meal, everyone begins going around the table, joyfully sharing their complaints.
“I hate bath time,” the toddler Poppy proclaims with adorably pouted lips and crossed arms.
Bryce’s hand brushes mine beneath the table. I wind our fingers together, hiding a smile, my bare toes curling against the cool grass.
“It upsets me when people still come to my forge expecting weapons,” says the blacksmith, who is now using his craft to make lawn ornaments.
Then, beside me, Bryce stands up. He clears his throat. “Before I share what I’m unthankful for, I have a few words.”
My mind flashes back to the last Thanksgiving I attended, when Will stood up only to drop to his knee. Bryce wouldn’t do that to me, would he? He knows I don’t want an epilogue with marriage and children.
But Bryce reaches into his jacket pocket and withdraws—
“I’ve had your ball for hours, you absolute losers!” he exclaims with relish.
Love blossoms in my heart for this ridiculous, beautiful, imperfectly perfect man and our ridiculous, beautiful, imperfectly perfect life.
The newest member of the game, the blacksmith, rises, his shadow dropping across us.
