“Tell me, what happened after I cast my spell?” Annabelle asked, shaking off the pall that had come over her. “What happened to Francis? Tell me everything.”
So Lily told her, including the cryptic passages at the end of her own diary, written by a part of herself she was cut off from.
“But why was I not able to end the curse?” she asked, brow furrowed in thought. “I have tried often enough from here, and you said myself ‘out there’ tried as well.”
Lily thought about that. “If you’re cut off from the Source here, then a piece of your soul separated from ‘you’ outside would have nothing to draw on. You said yourself you couldn’t cast magic. There’s no way you’d be able to undo the curse from in here.”
“But what about my other self? I don’t see how a part of my soul being stuck here would stop me…her…us.”
Lily smiled sadly. “You never knew it, Annabelle, but you cast a curse you could never break yourself. You have no magic in here, and because a part of you was stuck here, even though the rest of you met all the parameters, she could never break it herself either.”
“Parameters? What do you mean?” Annabelle asked, bewildered.
“To end the curse, you have to forgive the one who wronged you,” Lily said, gently. “Francis said you spoke more words of power after you threw the ring, after part of your soul split off. So you ‘here’ was never aware of the extra clause you ‘there’ added on.”
Annabelle looked at her, even more confused.
“Ga-arhus-a,” Lily said, speaking Enkinim. “Forgiveness. You wrote it in your diary, near the end. You said you’d forgiven him, yet the spell wouldn’t go away.”
Realization dawned on Annabelle’s face. “I couldn’t forgive him, because only part of me ever tried.”
“Exactly,” Lily confirmed.
Annabelle got up abruptly, turning her back on Lily and crossing her arms.
“Annabelle?” Lily asked, tentatively, getting up herself. “You are going to forgive him, aren’t you?”
“You have no idea what it’s been like,” Annabelle said softly, not turning, “being stuck here. That bastard threw me away like a piece of trash, and all I’ve been able to do for the past century is relive that betrayal over and over again.” Her voice broke.
Lily felt helpless. She was the last person in the world qualified to resolve interpersonal conflict, especially since she still resented her mother for concealing her magical heritage. Who was she to talk about forgiveness? But she had to try.
“Look, Annabelle,” she began. “I can’t begin to imagine how much pain you’ve been through. But you haven’t been able to see the pain Francis has suffered—”
“Good!” Annabelle exclaimed, whirling with hands on hips in a defiant stance. “He deserves it.”
Lily sighed, at a loss. She knew forgiveness should well from a generous heart, not be based on merit. But such abstract principles wouldn’t appeal to an angry fragment of soul chained by unresolved hurt. If only she could get this part of Annabelle to feel pity or remorse. “Does he really deserve it?” she finally asked. “I know he broke your heart. But hearts heal. Your curse killed him, Annabelle. It killed him and his whole family. His parents, his wife…even his newborn child.”
Annabelle gasped, tears forming in her eyes again. Lily continued, relentless.
“He has paid for his sins and then some. And he’s sorry. So, so, sorry. He told me himself. He said he acted in a cowardly and reprehensible fashion, and was eternally ashamed of what he did. His greatest regret has been never getting to apologize to you, to make things right.”
Tears streamed down Annabelle’s dirty face, though they did not cut lines through the grime. It was as if the dirt on her skin was evidence of something deeper, something inside, that simple tears could not wash away.
Lily stepped forward and took Annabelle’s cold hands in her own. “He knows you cast the curse, but he has never blamed you for it or held it against you. He has forgiven you, but he’ll never be at peace until you forgive him. His soul has been adrift, unable to pass on, for a hundred years because of all this hurt between you. The only way either of you will ever be free is if you forgive him. Your hatred is a heavy chain, holding you tight to your torment. You have to let go, or you’ll stay here, reliving that hurt, forever.”
She fell silent, surprised at the intensity of her own words. Annabelle stared her straight in the eye, expression longing once again.
“I think you want to forgive him,” Lily said very softly. “So why don’t you?”
Annabelle took a shuddering breath, then nodded slowly, hesitantly.
Lily smiled, took Annabelle’s other hand and pulled her close, so that their foreheads touched, cold spirit to warm flesh. Closing her eyes, Lily drew upon the Source and together they spoke the words that would complete the curse’s reversal, “ga-arhus-a ken”: it is forgiven.
At those words, the black mist surrounding them exploded into light, and a gale wind arose, buffeting their bodies. As Lily tightened her hold on Annabelle’s hands, she yelled a question, but the whipping wind all but tore her words away. Everything around them seemed to be compressing, collapsing in. But, unlike Annabelle, Lily was not a sliver of soul, cut off and trapped. She was a whole person, and her body was her anchor. With a gut-wrenching yank, she felt herself pulled backward, out of the whirlwind and toward herself, dragging Annabelle’s specter with her. Suddenly, the wind was gone, and darkness returned.
Lily opened her eyes to a strange sight. Floating, she looked down and saw her own body, motionless, cross-legged on the floor, just where she’d left it. In her body’s hands was the ring, its engraved runes blazing with a white fire as the last of the clinging, black mist that had permeated the house was sucked into it. Around her everything was dark, but not from mist. It was the soft, moonlit darkness of night. She could see out the open front doors to where Sebastian had apparently been pacing, but now stood frozen mid-step, mouth open, eyes shocked.
“Wha—?” he started to say.
Lily ignored him, knowing how little time was left. Through the insubstantial grip she had on Annabelle’s hands, she could feel the piece of soul pulling, trying to dissipate, kept in place only by Lily’s magical hold. Annabelle seemed oblivious to this, however, as her eyes fixed on something behind Lily.
Lily smiled to herself and floated to the side, keeping a firm hold on one of Annabelle’s hands, even as she felt the pull increase. She fought to hold on, to give the girl a chance to say goodbye.
“Annabelle?” Francis’s ghostly voice cracked, and big, swelling tears as white as pearls slipped down his cheeks as he took in the sight of his lost love, clothed in a wedding dress she never got to wear for him. He floated there, hesitant and unsure.
Smiling broadly now, Lily tugged on Annabelle’s hand, pulling her toward Francis’s incorporeal embrace and noticing as she did that the girl was now free of black streaks and her dress was as pure white as the moonlight shining outside. Annabelle drifted forward, reaching out with her free hand to trace the lines of Francis’s face, her wide-eyed gaze full of wonder.
They both glowed faintly in the darkness, taking in each other, at a loss for words.
“I’m so sorry,“ Francis whispered, voice trembling with emotion as it broke the silence between them.
“I know,” Annabelle said simply, smiling through her tears. “And…I forgive you.”
A look of joyous peace came over the ghost’s face, probably for the first time since he died, and he smiled. Truly smiled.
Annabelle pulled her hand out of Lily’s grasp, and Lily let her go, knowing it was time. The ghost and the bit of soul wrapped their arms around each other, now released from a hundred years of hurt, and their glowing forms began to fade.
As they did, Francis spoke one last time, looking at Lily over his love’s shoulder. “Thank you. You are both mighty in magic and mighty in heart. I hope those occult books I collected all those years ago
do you some good. I could never make heads or tails of them. Goodbye, Lily Singer.”
“Goodbye,” Lily whispered, feeling a single tear slip down her cheek.
Even as the last of their glow faded into nothingness, Lily felt her ghostlike body lurch. Startled, she looked below her and saw the ring was blazing white with light and vibrating violently. The curse had been unmade, and now all that power had to go somewhere.
She didn’t even have time to brace herself as the ring exploded.
The blast of pure magic slammed her discarnate self back into her body with a painful wrench as her personal ward flickered, taking the brunt of the abuse. In a second, it was over.
Shocked by the sudden influx of stimuli from her five senses, she groaned and straightened from her hunched position. Glancing down at her hands, she relaxed her death grip on the now crumbling powder that had once been a ring, and flexed her stiff fingers.
There was a sound of running footsteps, then Sebastian was kneeling beside her, hand on her shoulder.
“Are you alright? Is everything okay? Heck, I was so worried!”
Lily tried to chuckle, but coughed instead, throat as dry as paper. She swallowed a few times and tried again.
“Why? I was only gone fifteen minutes or so. Thirty at most.”
Sebastian looked at her funny; she could see his expression faintly in the blackness. “Look around you, Lil. It’s nighttime. You’ve been sitting here for nine hours, hunched over that ring. You went all cold and stiff, but I was afraid to wake you, in case it made things worse. If something hadn’t happened soon, I was going to call—” he paused, as if what he was about to say pained him “—Aunt B.”
Lily was so shocked she forgot to tell him off for using her nickname. “How is that possible? I wasn’t gone that long.” Then it hit her. “That’s why Annabelle thought only a few months had passed. Time must be different in…wherever we were. Maybe it actually was stasis…wait, your aunt? I don’t believe it. You were really going to call Madam Barrington?”
Sebastian made a face and ignored her incredulity. “Forget it. You’re awake, so it’s a moot point. Now stop spouting nonsense and tell me what happened.”
But Lily ignored his question, suddenly remembering the blast of magic. She looked him up and down, worriedly searching for any sign of harm.
“Are you okay? That was a pretty big explosion.”
Sebastian waved her concern away. “I’m fine, but that shield you gave me isn’t.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out the blacked and cracked pieces of the clay tablet she’d given him.
Lily relaxed, relieved. “I’m so glad you had it on you.”
“Come on, Lil, I’m not that stupid. I’ve learned to expect the worst when hanging around you. You always manage to blow things up.”
Lily glared at him but couldn’t remain angry long. A grin spread involuntarily over her face. The curse was broken, all hurts healed, and the house returned to normal. She noticed that, with Francis gone, warmth had rushed back into the great hall from the summer night outside. Sebastian helped her up and they stood, enjoying the night air as a cacophony of cricket song filled the empty house with music.
Epilogue
Lily sat at her desk, staring at the copy of Annabelle’s diary as it lay beside her eduba. It was once again past two in the morning, though this time because the drive back from the Jackson Mansion was so long, not because she’d stayed up reading.
Once back in Atlanta, she’d had to drop Sebastian off at his house before driving home. She’d barely remembered to insist on some money to cover gas before letting him exit the car. It had been like prying a cell phone away from a teenager: incredibly difficult and apt to leave the subject sulky afterwards. Sebastian would live. He was getting paid for the job, after all. He could charge his employer for the travel expense.
After handing over the requested payment, Sebastian had bade her a tired goodbye and then headed up the cracked walkway to his ground-floor apartment. As Lily had pulled away, she’d seen him bend over a slumped form apparently passed out on his doorstep—probably one of the apartment complex’s many resident drunks. Sebastian’s choice of living arrangements had always puzzled her. But, since it was none of her business, she’d never had the nerve to ask him about it.
When she’d finally gotten home, she’d found Sir Kipling waiting for her inside the door. He’d managed to nearly trip her an impressive six times before she’d even reached the kitchen, all in a furious attempt to fully coat her pant legs with fur—obviously he’d missed her.
Now as she sat at her desk with the diary, freshly showered and wrapped in a fuzzy bathrobe, she found she was quite unable to sleep. She couldn’t shake the image of Francis’s face when Annabelle had forgiven him. He’d experienced such relief, such joy, it made her think uncomfortably of her mother. They’d parted on…less than friendly terms, to say the least. There’d been a lot of yelling, mostly on her part. Did her mother hurt inside, even as Francis had, because of their parting words? Was she just like Annabelle, trapped by her own hurt and resentment? She hadn’t been home in seven years, since she left for college. She didn’t like to admit it, especially to herself, but she missed her family. An empty hole gaped in her heart where they should have been, but couldn’t be. They didn’t even know her. Her stepfamily had no idea who she really was because they were mundane, and her wizard family had no idea who she was because her mother had cut them off for reasons she refused to discuss.
Forgiveness wasn’t going to get her anywhere; it wouldn’t make her less empty. She could forgive her mother, but would that really set her free? What she wanted was answers—the truth—and she was going to find it. Maybe once she’d discovered her past and found her father, then she could put it all behind her. If she spoke to her mother now, she’d just get angry again at her refusal to tell the truth. Deep down, a part of her knew she ought to pick up the phone anyway. But something held her back.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge that uncomfortable train of thought.
There was one other thing that kept her awake as well, and she concentrated on that. It was something Annabelle had said. Lily had meant to ask her fellow wizard a myriad of questions about her magic, methods, and family line, but had only remembered in time to ask one thing before they’d both been pulled out of the ring: Who had been her mentor?
Annabelle’s reply, barely audible over the rush of wind, had been, “Ask the fae.”
At least, that’s what Lily thought she’d said. It might have been “ask le fae,” she wasn’t sure.
Lily sat and considered Annabelle’s words for a long while, trying to puzzle out their meaning. Then she opened her eduba and began the process of summoning every reference to the fae she could find. She would start there, then expand her search outward as necessary. Consulting her mentor would probably be fruitless, considering how tight-lipped the old wizard was about anything but Lily’s lessons. Sebastian always seemed to know more than he should, though, so there was a chance he might have heard stories of the fae.
She was no longer a clueless country girl from an Alabama backwater, but being a library archivist with no knowledge of her past wasn’t much better. She was a wizard but still knew next to nothing about her culture, her people, or her family history. How could she decide who to become if she didn’t even know who she was now?
Well, it was time to do some research, starting with the fae.
Interlude
Chasing Rabbits
Sebastian Blackwell liked to think of himself as a pretty decent person. He obeyed the law—mostly—and helped people out when they were in a tight spot. What more could anyone ask? He was no saint, he knew, but even he deserved a bit of respect.
So why was it that, after giving his old school buddy a place to crash, he got this in return?
Standing in the middle of his wrecked house, he surveyed the damage. Admittedly, the house didn’t look much more trashed than usual—he had a unique se
nse of interior decorating. But when you knew where each little thing was in your own personal mess, it was quite distressing to have someone else rearrange it. And rearranged it was, not to mention ransacked. His stash of cash, his father’s watch, some electronics, and every other valuable-looking item that was small enough to carry was gone.
Worse, though, was his sock drawer. You never really knew what it felt like to be violated until someone went rooting through your sock drawer looking for valuables. And, like any sane male, that was exactly where he’d been keeping his. Including the artifact. Curse it all. Cory would pay. He’d thought that little scumbag had been drunk to the point of passing out and therefore virtually harmless—minus the vomit, that is. No one that drunk could have made off with so much stuff. Which meant he’d been faking it, relying on Sebastian’s good-naturedness and planning all along to turn around and rob him blind.
Sebastian’s fingers twitched restlessly as he resisted the urge to punch something. All he’d ever wanted was to make his parents proud: do the right thing, help people, follow their example. But whenever he tried to apply that to the real world, things like this happened. How had they managed it?
He sighed and bent to pick up a pile of magazines. There was no use crying over spilt milk, so he got busy rearranging the mess back to its proper place. The quicker he cleaned up, the quicker he could get to the important part: tracking down a scumbag.
* * *
“Hey, where did you get that watch?” Sebastian asked as he pointed, leaning on the glass counter of Lucky’s Pawn Shop, one of many in metro Atlanta.
The burly shop owner glanced at him from where he bent, rearranging gold rings in a neighboring case. He surveyed the timepiece for a moment as he considered. “Fella brought it in a week back.”
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