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“Whatever.” Tammy grumbles. “If the unicorn could’ve just teleported there, why did we have to do this whole boat deal?”
Pax lifts her head off my shoulder to look at her sister. “She was too weak in the mortal world.”
“This is still the mortal world.” Tammy waves her hand around. “Just a… umm… magically walled-off part of it.”
“You know what I mean.” Paxton sighs. “She was too weak to teleport herself all the way home. We had to get her close enough.”
“Oh.” Tammy leans back in her seat, rubbing her stomach.
“And, umm… I had to let go of her, too.” Paxton fidgets.
“Let go?” asks Kingsley.
Tammy narrows her eyes. “What did you do?”
Paxton’s face is full of guilt. “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t really want to see her go away. I’d been secretly wanting her to stay with us and I think that somehow made it harder for her to go home. When she almost died, I realized I had to let her go. As soon as I really stopped secretly hoping she could stay with us, it made her strong enough to go.”
I hug her. “You did the right thing, Pax. Our world is too devoid of magic, too mean and cruel for a being like her.”
“It’s too mean and cruel for a being like her, too.” Tammy nods toward Paxton. “Maybe we should leave her on Thelmora, too.”
Paxton giggles. “You don’t hear me saying no!”
“Well, I’m saying no,” I say.
We sit there for a few minutes, enjoying the calm.
“I wonder what else lives there.” Paxton twists to look out the front window.
Tammy shrugs one shoulder. “Magical foxes, wise owls, silver stags… good dragons. Maybe ents or treants. All sorts of things.”
“Neat.” Paxton stares out the window. She totally wants us to go look for them, but miraculously isn’t asking us to.
“Well, now we can at least have a nice—hopefully quiet—cruise home,” says Tammy.
“Ugh.” Paxton huffs.
“Kiddo, the unicorn will be much happier at home.”
“Yeah. I know.” Paxton gazes at the ceiling. “That’s not why I’m groaning. I’m going to have so much work to do for school to catch up.”
Thelmora emits a brief glow before disappearing entirely in less than a second.
Now, it looks as if we’re out in the middle of the open ocean with no land for many hundreds of miles in any direction.
“Whoa.” Anthony whistles.
“I need some air.” Tammy gets up and walks out of the bridge onto the deck.
The rest of us follow her, except Angus and his crew—who are taking a well deserved break.
We gather in a group by the side railing, gazing out over the water at the spot the hidden magical continent was. Technically still is, but we can’t see it. I wonder if any of that rough seas and rocks stuff happened for real or if it had all been a hallucination that resulted from the protective magic trying to keep us away from the place.
The water all over the deck as well as the littering of random objects thrown around tends to suggest we really did experience that. I glance down at my hand and try to conjure a lightning ball. Alas, I only get the little tangerine-sized ones I’m used to. No more cannon-blast giant orbs of electrical doom. Oh well. I can live without that.
“Well… I guess everything’s back to normal,” I say.
Tammy chuckles—and so does Anthony and even Paxton.
Normal. Yeah, right.
As if anything about my family will ever be normal.
Just the way I like it.
The End
