Her smile was serene. “It feels better to be the hero than the villain.”
I gave John a shove. “You’re still on my poop list.”
He frowned at me and rolled his eyes.
Mary Bell patted John’s arm as she turned. “I think he has learned his lesson. I also think he’ll sleep with one eye open for a very long time.”
With that, she moved off to a black sedan Darius had clearly supplied, John slouching in her wake.
“Okay, bye…” I waved. They didn’t notice. “Is saying goodbye after a battle strangely forbidden or something?”
After I closed the door, Emery took me by the hand and led me to our room, leaving the exhausted dual-mages on the couch. “I wanted to ask you something,” he said softly, closing the door and wrapping his arms around me.
“Anything.” I closed my eyes against his hard chest, breathing in his smell, comfort and cotton.
“Will you visit my brother’s grave with me? I want to pay my respects…and introduce you.”
I smiled up at him sadly. “It would be my honor.”
Epilogue
My shoes crunched against the brittle ground. A white, crooked line stretched across the sky to my right, a scar on the blustery, gray day. My danger sensors blared, warning me that something hunkered in the distance, watching us.
“Don’t worry about it,” Emery said, looking around before glancing back down at the map in his hands. “It’s harmless. We’ll hear it coming before we smell it, and that’ll be long before it’s a real danger.”
If he said so.
We’d just come out of the Realm, a magical place with an orange sky and gold dust floating around in the air. I was pretty sure I’d gawked at everything through wide-open eyes. Parts were achingly beautiful, rich with wild magic and twisted woods. Other parts had clearly been manufactured, apparently by elves, and wow, could they do better. They were horrible at mimicking nature. And still other parts were dark and treacherous, making Emery jittery as he tried to watch everything at once.
I’d felt the safest in those areas, though I had had no idea why. Probably insanity.
Three months had passed since we’d blown the Mages’ Guild wide open. And I meant wide open, literally. The spells I had pulled from the ground had felt destructive, but I didn’t understand the magnitude of the damage until I saw it again after the battle. Sides of buildings had blown apart. Sidewalks had crumbled. Debris thrown. The spell hadn’t crawled across the ground like I’d felt—it had chewed it up, showing the earth below.
Just two days afterward, in each place I’d planted a spell, a tree had budded, reaching up through the destruction. Emery’s buried spell had been similarly destructive, but instead of growing into a tree, it blossomed into a thorny sort of bush with black flowers. He wasn’t pleased.
As my friends had threatened, I was placed in charge of the rebuild, though it helped that I had a budget from the Guild’s huge coffers to see it done.
The first thing I did was level the place. Everything was taken out, including all the concrete. I had it hauled away to the dump, smoothed the earth over, and planted many more trees and flowers. It would become a sanctuary for all magical people, hosted and overseen by the mages. I wanted to develop a better rapport with other magical people. I wanted to create a community in Seattle that, hopefully, might carry over to other places.
Darius and Vlad called me naive. They called it an experiment. But with Emery at my side, defending my reasoning and my right to follow my vision, they let me go the untraditional route.
Next I’d need to fill the new Mages’ Guild. I was still developing a system for that, putting together checks and balances. Applicants would, for now, go through a screening process run by people I trusted. And some I mostly trusted, like Mary Bell. Lastly, they would get to me, and I would do magic with them, using the magic the goblin had probably regretfully handed over. Like Cahal could, I could use those to suss out a person’s inner qualities.
But that was getting ahead of myself. I wasn’t there yet.
I was here, in No Man’s Land with Emery, looking for the place his brother had been ambushed and left for dead.
“What would they be doing way out here?” I asked, covering my eyes with my hand to block out the sun. An outcropping of jagged rocks rose up about a hundred feet to our left. A strange creature crouched there, looking at us. I didn’t know what he was, other than he’d followed us into the Brink from the Realm. The land stretched out before us, flat and barren, with a few cactuses standing in clusters amid a couple of scraggly bushes. Far to the right appeared to be a town of some sort, with small structures braced against the pale sky. “It looks like desert, almost.”
“It is. My brother came through here on camel. I think.” He shook his head, walking diagonally right. “As far as I know—and it isn’t much, because the Guild tended to destroy evidence of the crimes they committed—he was headed this way to meet a magical prodigy. That’s what he’d told me, anyway. Before he left.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. He still had down periods, times when he just needed time to himself to reflect, but he’d climbed out of the depths of his despair. Now that things had calmed down for us, and he wasn’t so anxious about the future, he laughed all the time. He joked and smiled. It was as though a weight had been lifted off him.
“What’s…” He stopped next to a cactus and a circle of stones, looking down in confusion.
I joined him, immediately feeling the vibe of a sorrowful power stone, missing…something.
A stone about the size of my fist sat in the middle of the circle. While it had likely appeared as mundane and innocuous as Emery’s Plain Jane, it now showed the effects of years spent in the desert sun. The effect was interesting, with unique color changes highlighting the little crags and flats.
“He…” Emery took a step back, his eyes glued to the rock. He glanced up and looked around before returning his attention to it. “He used to carry a stone about that size. Carried it everywhere. Like you do…” An incredulous expression drifted across his face as his beautiful eyes hit mine. “I didn’t know much about power stones at the time, just that they existed and I could sap power from them, but he…” His voice cracked and he put a fist to his mouth. “He had a favorite. This… Was it this one? But how…”
The creature hiding among the rocks, a bent thing with horns on its head and out of the sides of its mouth, watched us.
“How long has that creature been following you around?” I asked, not pointing, lest it decide that I was inviting it to fight. I’d had a similar experience with a minotaur on the way through the Realm.
Emery straightened up and turned, his eyes going distant. They focused quickly, and a look of knowing came into his eyes. He glanced back down at the rock and shook his head. “Couldn’t be…”
But his ragged sigh said he knew better.
“Years,” he said softly.
That creature, whatever it was, clearly knew enough about Emery—and his brother—to know he’d want this power stone. A misunderstood guardian angel of sorts, he’d built a shrine for it.
“The stone is sad,” I said quietly, looking at it. “It misses something. Or someone.”
Emery nodded.
“You should take it with you. Your brother wouldn’t want it left here. Not if it was his favorite. I’d hate for Red Beryl to be left on its own. Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, however…”
He turned to me in a rush, putting his hand on the side of my face and tilting my head up. His lips met mine and lingered. Eventually he backed off just a bit so he could look down into my eyes. Then he sank to one knee in front of me.
“Penelope Bristol, will you marry me?” He took the ring box out of his pocket. “You can put the ring on your other hand and hide the engagement for as long as you want, but will you marry me?”
I smiled, elated. I sank down with him, throwing my arms around his neck. “Yes! And it’ll go on the correct hand. My mother can just deal.”
“That should make me happier, but…” He laughed, taking the ring out with shaking hands and slipping it onto my finger. This time, I let him slide it all the way down. It fit perfectly and vibrated against my skin pleasantly. “I love you. You are a gift that I don’t deserve, but will gladly accept and cherish for the rest of my life.”