We stood there in relaxed silence as the last light faded from the sky and the first stars appeared. Somewhere in the forest, an owl called, and somewhere farther away, I heard the distant bark of a coyote. Ordinary sounds, normal sounds. The soundtrack of a world that went on turning whether or not I could feel the magic beneath its skin.
I couldn’t feel the portal network or the ancient fire that slept beneath the mountains. But as I stood here with Ben, with my family inside the warm house behind us, with a future spreading out ahead that I was finally letting myself imagine — I thought that maybe this was its own kind of magic.
The quiet kind. The human kind.
The kind that lasted.
Chapter Twenty-One
Snow was falling on Silver Hollow. I stood at the kitchen window and watched the flakes drift down through the gray air, soft and slow and utterly silent. It was the first real snow we’d had in three years — Northern California wasn’t exactly known for its snowy winters — and most of the residents were responding like it was their birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. Someone had already built a lopsided snowman in the park across from City Hall, complete with a carrot nose and top hat and what I thought was one of Eliza’s campaign buttons stuck to its chest.
The world outside looked like a Christmas card, all white roofs and frosted trees and chimney smoke rising into the pewter sky. I could see the forest at the edge of town, its evergreens dusted with white, and knew the portal site must lie sleeping there beneath its own blanket of snow.
I couldn’t feel the ley line anymore, couldn’t sense the ancient power that ran through those woods like blood through veins. But as I stood there on the morning of the winter solstice and watched the snow fall on a town that had nearly been destroyed more than a month ago, I found that the absence didn’t ache the way it once had.
Some losses, I was learning, got easier to carry with time. Maybe they weren’t exactly lighter, but at least they were more familiar. The weight became part of you, and eventually you stopped noticing it quite so much.
“Coffee’s ready.” Ben appeared in the doorway, two mugs in his hands, his hair still rumpled from sleep. He’d been doing that lately — sleeping in, taking his time with mornings — and I suspected it had something to do with the way his own abilities were fading along with mine. The scars on his chest and arms, the silver circuitry that had once blazed with light when we touched, had grown fainter over the past few weeks. By now, they were barely visible, just a pale tracery that could have been old stretch marks or the remnants of a long-healed sunburn.
“Thanks.” I took the mug he offered and let its warmth seep into my palms. “It’s really coming down out there.”
“I noticed.” He came over so he could stand beside me at the window, close enough that our shoulders touched. No spark of light flickered between us, no pulse of shared energy. We were just two people standing together and watching the snow fall. “Eric called earlier,” Ben went on. “He said the sensors at the portal site are picking up some unusual readings.”
“Unusual how?”
“He wasn’t sure. Just…activity. More than there’s been since everything settled down.” Ben sipped his coffee, his expression thoughtful. “He wanted to know if we’d like to check it out.”
I considered the question, turning it over in my mind the way I might examine a stone I’d picked up on the beach. Not so long ago, unusual readings from the portal site would have sent me rushing into the forest with my heart pounding and my abilities straining toward the ley line to find the source of the wrongness. Now, the idea of hiking through snow to look at a clearing I couldn’t sense anymore felt less urgent, more like curiosity than compulsion. Everything was back to normal, after all, with even the explosion in the woods at the Aetheris site chalked up to catastrophic system failure. Investigations continued, of course, but I knew the authorities would never be able to fully explain what had happened there.
How could they?
But it was the solstice, the longest night of the year, the turning point when darkness began its slow retreat and light started its return. My grandmother’s journals were full of references to the solstice — the way the veil thinned on the longest night, the way the portal seemed to breathe a little easier as the year turned toward spring.
“Maybe later,” I said. “After the sun goes down.”
Ben nodded, as if he’d expected that answer. “I was thinking the same thing.”
We stood there quietly as we watched the snow accumulate on the windowsill and the branches of the oak tree in the backyard. Somewhere in the house, I could hear my mother moving around in the kitchen, starting preparations for tonight’s dinner. She and my grandmother had picked up pretty much where they’d left off, and if I shut my eyes, I could almost imagine this was a winter morning from a year ago, before DAPI had intervened and they’d disappeared into the woods, trying to discover what had gone wrong.
But there was one important difference now. Ben stood beside me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, despite everything we’d suffered to get to this point.
My father was here as well, finally out of his wheelchair and walking with a cane, his physical therapy progressing faster than anyone had expected. He’d taken over the office on the ground floor, and had converted it into a sort of command center where he monitored the various alerts and sensors he’d set up around town. Old habits, apparently, died hard. But at least now he was doing his watching from inside the house, with family around him, instead of from the shadows. He slept on the pull-out bed there, although I guessed, based on the way I’d caught him and my mother talking quietly, had seen them join hands when no one was looking, that they were probably just waiting for Ben and me to be out of the house before they took the next steps in reclaiming their relationship.
“I have something I want to show you in the forest,” Ben said in an undertone. “Before the solstice dinner, if that’s okay.”
I sent him a curious glance. His expression was carefully neutral, but I’d spent enough time learning to read him without our old bioelectric connection that I could see the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers had tightened slightly around his coffee mug.
“What kind of something?”
“The kind that requires hiking through snow and probably getting our boots wet.” A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Trust me?”
What could I do except smile in return? “Always.”
We left the house around three o’clock, bundled up in puffy coats and scarves and gloves, our breath fogging in the cold air the second we walked outside. The snow had tapered off to occasional flurries, and the clouds had thinned enough to let pale winter sunlight filter through, turning the world into something out of a fairy tale. Everything was white and silver, the edges of the tree softened by layers of white, the usual sounds of the forest muffled beneath the fresh powder.
Ben led the way along the familiar path toward the portal site, his boots leaving deep prints in the snow for me to follow. I watched his back as we walked and noticed the way he moved with more confidence than he had in the early days of our relationship, when he’d been a cryptozoologist chasing rumors of a magical white horse and I’d been a suspicious shop owner with a secret I wasn’t ready to share.
So much had changed since then. So much had been lost, and found, and lost again.