She patted my arm and went to join the others in the living room, leaving me standing in the kitchen with my mother’s gravy ladle in one hand and a future I hadn’t let myself imagine suddenly spreading out before me.
Ben came up beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him through my sweater. “What was that about?”
“Hope wants to sell me her practice. And her house.”
“The Victorian on Ash Street?” His eyebrows rose. “The one with the wraparound porch and the stained glass windows?”
“That’s the one.”
He was quiet for a moment, processing. “What do you think?”
“I think I don’t know how to think about the future anymore.” I set down the gravy ladle and turned to face him, leaning against the counter in a way that probably drove my grandmother crazy. “For months, all I could see was the next crisis, whether that was lost griffins or contaminated phoenixes or the Dragon. And now that’s over, and there’s just…time. A whole life I’m supposed to figure out how to live.”
“Is that so bad?”
“I don’t know.” I looked out the window at the yard and the forest beyond, at the mountains in the distance where the portal site lay hidden among ancient trees. “I can’t feel them anymore, Ben. The ley lines, the connection to everything. It was part of who I was, and now it’s just…gone.”
“You’re still you.” He said the words simply, without drama, the way he said most things that mattered. “The abilities were part of what you did, but they weren’t who you are.”
“Weren’t they?” I heard the edge in my own voice and made myself soften it. “I was a guardian, Ben. That was my purpose, my inheritance. And now I’m just — ”
“Just what?” He turned me to face him, his hands gentle on my shoulders. “Just the woman who walked into the Dragon’s fire to save everyone she loved? Just the person who convinced an ancient being that humanity was worth preserving? Just the veterinarian who’s going to take care of every sick dog and injured hawk in Silver Hollow for the next fifty years?”
I laughed despite myself. “That’s a lot of pressure.”
“You can handle it.” He kissed my forehead, the gesture so familiar now that I leaned into it automatically. “And you won’t be doing it alone.”
The doorbell rang before I could respond, which was probably just as well because I wasn’t sure what I would have said. I heard my grandmother’s footsteps in the hallway and heard the door open, followed by a voice I hadn’t expected.
“Sorry I’m late. The flight from Portland was delayed, and then I had to argue with the rental car company for an hour about the difference between ‘compact’ and ‘subcompact.’”
Eric Hargrove stood in the doorway with a bottle of wine in one hand and a nervous expression on his face. He’d traded his usual lab coat and wire-rimmed glasses for a decent blazer and contact lenses, and he looked almost like a normal person instead of a former government scientist who’d spent the last few months monitoring dimensional anomalies from a basement full of equipment.
“Eric.” Rebecca’s voice came to us from the living room, warm in a way I’d never heard her sound before. “You made it.”
She went across the room to meet him, and I watched in fascination as the sharp-edged FBI agent I’d known for months transformed into something softer, someone who reached up to straighten his collar and then rose on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Well,” Ben murmured beside me. “That’s new.”
It was, and it wasn’t. We’d already had hints that they were together, although Rebecca Morse wasn’t the kind of person to simply announce to everyone that she had a new boyfriend. If we weren’t smart enough to figure it out, well, that was our problem.
I supposed surviving an apocalypse together either brought people closer or pushed them apart. For Eric and Rebecca, apparently, it had been the former.
The familiar chaos of Thanksgiving descended after that, with everyone pitching in to help with something, or at least stay out of the way so we weren’t tripping over them as we worked. I helped my mother baste the turkey and kept an eye on the special spiced cranberry sauce that my mother had introduced to the menu when I was only around five or six, in the good days before my father left. And I watched him and Ben have what looked like a serious conversation near the fireplace, their voices too low for me to hear but their expressions suggesting something important was being said.
And through it all, I kept noticing how different the world looked through ordinary eyes.
The light falling through the windows was just light, not the complex interplay of electromagnetic frequencies I’d once been able to perceive. The house was just a house, not a nexus of dimensional energy with roots that stretched down into the ley line beneath. Even the forest outside, visible through every west-facing window, was just trees and earth and sky — beautiful, yes, but no longer alive with the hum of ancient power.
Part of me mourned that loss. But as I stood there in the kitchen with my mother, watching her roll out pie crust with the same practiced motions she’d used my entire life, I found myself thinking that there might be a different kind of magic in the ordinary. Not the fire and lightning of dimensional energy, but something quieter and steadier, the magic of family gathered around a table, the magic of a future that stretched out ahead with room for choices I hadn’t yet imagined.
Hope’s offer surfaced in my mind again. That gorgeous Victorian house with its wraparound porch, and the veterinary clinic with its steady stream of dogs and cats and horses and the occasional hawk with a broken wing. A life built on healing instead of fighting, on nurturing instead of defending.
It was a life I’d once imagined for myself, back before DAPI’s interference, back in a time when I’d thought my heritage wouldn’t interfere. Once my abilities had grown and changed, I’d thought I’d move forward as that altered Sidney, a woman who wasn’t what she’d once been, someone with powers I once couldn’t have even begun to imagine. Now I was just Sidney again, and that wasn’t what I’d thought I wanted. But maybe what I’d wanted had been shaped by circumstances that no longer applied.
We sat down to dinner at four o’clock, just as the light outside began to shift from gold to amber. The turkey occupied pride of place at the center of the table, surrounded by enough side dishes to ensure leftovers for a week. My grandmother said grace, and then the meal began in earnest.
Conversation flowed as easily as the wine, moving from topic to topic with the organic rhythm of people who had been through enough together that small talk felt unnecessary. Eric told us about the readings from the portal site, which had stabilized completely over the past two weeks. Rebecca shared her own news, that she’d officially retired and was starting her own security company in Grants Pass. And my father described his physical therapy with a dry humor that almost dared us not to find the absurdity in his situation.