“How is this possible?” I turned to Dahlia. “Can you see and hear Linda?”
“Yes.” She blinked several times. “Wow, the gnome is actually alive. Marigold had said she came to life when non-magicals were around, but it’s hard to imagine until you see it for yourself.”
“She’s real, all right. I have the bruises to prove it.”
Rowan asked, “How does being around the gnome leave bruises?”
“Because she likes to throw things at me to get my attention.”
On that revelation, Linda beaned me with a pebble. “Come outside the barrier, Kleinkind. I can’t hear what you’re saying in there.”
I gave Dahlia and Rowan a see-what-I-mean look.
Dahlia actually smiled. “I used to want to throw stuff at you all the time when you were little.”
I gave her a flat stare. “All the time, huh?”
She giggled. “Sometimes I still do.”
I gave her a sly smile. “One bossy bitch throwing shit at me is plenty.”
Another rock hit me in the ear. “Ouch.” I whipped around and faced down the gnome. “Stop it.”
“I can’t hear you,” she said. “If you want me to stop, then come out from the barrier.”
“Give me a minute. Sheesh.” I held up a finger. The middle one.
Linda let out a string of Germanic expletives, but she stopped throwing crap at me.
I turned to the pixies. “If you leave the protection of this spell, I’m not sure if you’ll be able to get back in without it rippling the edges. If that happens, your signal may get out again. You have to stay in here. Do you understand?”
Fair Konig nodded. “We will not leave this space.”
“Good.” I turned to my makeshift coven. “Let’s go out one at a time, stepping back from the circle. Try not to take too much powder with you as you go.”
“How will we know if the signal is blocked?” Luanne asked.
Good question. It wasn’t like we had bad guys to test the success of the spell out with. Then I remembered that both Keir and Zev had said they’d felt the pull of the pixie dust. “Keir and Zev can tell us. If they don’t sense the signal outside the circle, then huzzah, success.”
One-by-one, my sisters, my brother, my friend, and my soul’s companion moved out of the circle’s perimeter.
As I prepared to leave, Fair Konig flew over to me. “Iris, your aero-craft is very strong, but I can sense your tenuous hold on the magic.”
“You mean the fact that I’m disappearing didn’t clue you in?”
His tiny face was serious. “Yes. I apologize for not seeing it sooner. When your magic revived Annibish, I thought it had been on purpose, but now I can see that you are struggling.”
Observational skills aside, I could tell Fair Konig was trying to go somewhere with this conversation. “It’s okay. Saving Annibish is the one side-effect I can live with. Did you want to tell me something else? This will be our last chance until your children are mature.”
“Air is the one element that balances all elements. It’s invisible, yet it moves mountains, it feeds flames, it can become liquid, and it makes the spirits soar. You cannot cage the wind. You have to learn to move with it. To direct it.” He beat his wings, then drifted for a moment as the currents he created moved him back and up. “Only then can you harness the wind.”
I tried to take in everything he was telling me, but I wasn’t sure how I could apply his wisdom to the wild magic taking over my body. “I will try,” was the best I could manage.
“Find balance, Iris Everlee,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a fight.”
Not according to the grimoire, I thought. It had said I had to fight what wasn’t there. And it also told me that every element takes a high price from me. I wasn’t sure there was a lot of balance to be found in either of those things. “Thank you, Fair Konig, for your counsel.” The words sounded formal, but right as I said them.
The pixie bowed deep, a pleased look on his face. “I am ever at your service.”
I carefully extracted myself from the pentagram. When I got outside the circle, the concentrated buzzing of the hundreds of pixies was gone. It hadn’t faded or died down. It was just….nothing. “Wow.”
Keir and Zev had been waiting for me when I exited. “We can’t feel the tug of the pixie dust anymore,” Keir said. “It worked. You did it.”
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” I said jokingly. “I bring it every time.”
Keir chuckled. “You do indeed.”
Luanne had gone inside the house. Rowan, Marigold, Dahlia, and Rose were over by the bench chatting with Linda and her husband, Morlan. I wasn’t sure what it meant that the gnome could animate in front of them now. “Have I turned my entire family into tru-craft witches?” I asked Keir.
He shook his head. “No, but you infused us all with a bit of magic.” He touched his chest. “I felt it as the spell took shape. You took some of our energy and gave us back some of your power.” His voice was filled with astonishment. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
“So they aren’t going to start disintegrating with wild magic?”
He laughed. “No. Nothing so dramatic. You’ve made us a true coven. They are part of the magic world now, so Linda can appear to them.”
“That’s amazing.”
He grinned. “You’re amazing.”
“Not enough.” I held up my arms. “I’m still dealing with this wild magic crap.”
Zev held out his hand toward my stomach. “May I?” he asked. The first time we’d met, he’d tested my fire by placing his hand on my stomach. Only now, my stomach was a mixture of air glued together with magic.
I’d been reluctant. When he’d searched for my ignis-craft, I’d pulled a Wolverine, and I’d turned my rib bones into weapons and shot his hand full of holes, similar to what I’d done with Jordan.
But now, I trusted Zev not to hurt me. “Go ahead.”
He pressed his palm against the air magic that made up my abdomen and closed his eyes. After a few seconds, he said, “It’s still there. I can feel the ignis spark in your stomach.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that beneath all this chaos, you are still there.”
I was getting all kinds of sage words from the elementals in my life. “Good to know. Does that mean if it takes me completely over, I’ll still be, you know, me?”
“I can’t be certain,” the ifrit said. “But I think I can feel your fire fighting for you.”
It struck me as odd in that moment that I had three active elements. After each one, Linda, Zev, and Fair Konig had come into my life. Earth, fire, and air. All elementals. Linda had introduced herself as my earth guardian to Thomas. Even Keir had called her that when he’d first entered my garden a few months back. Did that mean….?
“Zev, are you my fire guardian?”
His expression transformed into an emotion I hadn’t seen on him before. Surprise. He frowned as he thought about my question. Then finally, he nodded. “I think I might be, Sahira. That makes the most sense.”
“Of what?”
“Of why I feel protective over you and why I haven’t required any favors to come to your aid. It is a question I’ve been pondering for several weeks.”
Keir gazed at me curiously. “You think Fair Konig is your air guardian.”
“I do. It can’t be a coincidence that when an element is sparked that an elemental arrives as sort of a guide.”
“What did the pixie king tell you after I left the circle?” he asked.
“He said that air brings balance to every other element and that I couldn’t cage it but that it could be directed.”
“Like choreography?” Zev inquired.
“More like a conductor,” I replied. “Air is the orchestra.”
Unlike with the wild earth magic, I wasn’t in pain. The aero-craft destroyed by taking away, not adding. I worried that I would turn into nothing if I couldn’t find a way to make peace with the chaos. Suddenly, the weight of the past couple of weeks, including the harrowing last few days, settled on me.
“I’m exhausted,” I told Keir. “I think I need to lay down for a bit.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m tired, is all. I think the adrenaline of constant danger has worn off. The pixies should be safe for now. There’s nothing going on that a few hours of sleep won’t cure.”
“I’ll stay in the garden and keep watch. Just in case anything arrives that might have caught the signal before we suppressed it.”
I said my goodbyes to my siblings and thanked them for their help. They’d come through for me like they always had. Once again, I was reminded that blood didn’t make family. The Everlees were proof positive.
When they left, I kissed Keir with all the enthusiasm I could muster, which, I admit, wasn’t much.
“What does my future look like?” I asked him.
“The possibilities are endless,” he told me. He gave my bottom a playful squeeze. “Get some rest. We’ll talk more when you get up.”
“Hold you to it.”
I kissed him again, then went into the house, down the hall, and fell into bed without even taking off my shoes. Within seconds, I was blissfully out.
A ding-dong noise startled me awake. I groaned as I rolled onto my side. It was the doorbell. It sounded again. I waited to see if Keir or Luanne would answer. But nope. At least, I thought, a bad guy wouldn’t ring. They’d simply break down the door. I got up and staggered to the bathroom.
The bell went off again. “Just a minute!” I shouted. I peered at my reflection in the mirror. I looked like hammered shit. I wrapped an oversized robe around me. It covered most of the magical chaos.
I hustled to the door as it rang again. Cripes. Whoever it was, he or she was persistent.
I peeked out the living room window. Yolanda Carver and her daughter Maddie stood at the door. Why were they here?
I opened the door. “Uhm, hi. Can I help you?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Ms. Everlee. Did we wake you up?”
It was just starting to get dark, which meant I hadn’t been asleep for more than an hour.
“I’ve had a long day,” I explained. “Made it an early night.”
Maddie looked confused. “Michael texted and asked me to come over.”
Yolanda, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, was smiling as she stood behind her daughter. “I think he thought it was time for us all to meet properly. I know I’ve been itching to get to know you.”
“That’s nice.” Why would Michael invite them over here? One, he wasn’t home, and two, he knew there was a bunch of shit going down right now. I can’t believe he’d be irresponsible enough to ask them to come to the house. Maybe he’d planned this earlier in the week and had forgotten about it. That seemed the most plausible explanation. “I’m afraid our plans have changed. Michael isn’t home tonight. I’ll call you next week, and we can make a plan.”
“Absolutely,” Yolanda said. She winced and added, “Can I use your bathroom? We live outside of town, and it’s a long drive home for this old bladder.”
“Mom,” Maddie complained. “That’s so embarrassing.”
I’d been in the situation myself before, so I wasn’t taken aback. “Nope. Not embarrassing at all. Believe me, I completely understand,” I said. “Come on in. I hope you don’t mind using a teenage boy’s bathroom.” While I sympathized, I wasn’t going to share my own bathroom with a stranger. “It’s right up the hall.”
“At this point, I’d take a bedpan,” Yolanda said.
I laughed. She was funny. Maddie hung back in the living room while I walked her mom through the kitchen to the hall. I played out scenarios where Michael got serious with Maddie. Eventually, after college and a decent job, they’d get married, then Yolanda would be my in-law. I could do worse. I mean, my son could end up with someone like Carla for a monster-in-law.
“It’s the first door on the left,” I said.
Yolanda wiggled the handle. “It’s locked.”
I frowned. “It shouldn’t be.” She moved as I approached the door. I turned the knob, and it opened right up for me. “That’s weird. It’s unlocked now.”
Before I could turn back to the young cheerleader’s mom, she pushed me inside Michael’s bathroom and incanted the words, “Outside this house, no sound, no light. Keep all outside from joining this fight.”
I felt a surge of energy.
“What the hell?” I narrowed my gaze on her, readying myself for a fight. “Why did you shove me?”
My bathrobe had fallen open when she shoved me, exposing the wild magic at play.
“Well, well,” she said. “It looks like I’ve shown up just in time to drink you up, and your tru-craft is doing all the work for me.” The woman’s churlish snarl turned into a devilish grin. “You won’t escape me this time, Iris. No one is coming to your rescue.”
Her black hair changed to blonde, and she grew two inches. Her face and eyes transformed as well. I recognized the bitch immediately.
“Bogmall.” I pursed my lips as I called to my fire. “I was wondering when you would show up.”