Page 65 of Strange Lights

For a while, I cry a lot, letting the tears fall under my mask as I sit silently so no one will notice. At night, I can’t always hide it from my sisters. Sometimes Zara comforts me, tucks into my bed next to me. Sometimes she looks at me with a hard disgust in her eyes as she watches from the doorway before she returns to her room for the night. Eventually, she becomes indifferent to my pain. She can sleep right through my tears. Meredith notices at first and tries to comfort me in a baffled sort of way. I’m surprised more than anything that her empathy isn’t entirely unformed in this environment. Eventually, though, she, too, only shrugs off my sadness, looks past it.

After a while, I’m numb. With numbness comes relief. But the pain leaves behind a hole that yawns open into a chasm.

I want to feel something. Anything. Just to prove I still can feel something. I begin to crack open the door in my head, let shimmering threads of magic leak in. Only for a few moments, to feel the warmth flood my veins. But then that isn’t enough, and I open it a little wider, enough to feel a crackle of power in my fingertips. Enough to let a few illusions ripple across my vision, let myself live a few daydreams out. I ignore the part of me that knows this is dangerous and allow myself to succumb to the seductive pull of it. Stretching my tethers to the limit but careful not to lose myself to it entirely. It’s easy enough to pretend I’m the one in control.

It isn’t enough, not even close. I can’t manage to forget reality, no matter how hard I try. It’s the barest hint of a warm breeze in a blizzard, gone before I’m sure it’s even real. My sisters act as unbidding tethers, anchors, holding me down when I don’t bother to reach out for them first.

I’m not a teenager, but I might as well be with the amount of freedom I have. With no official tasks, I sequester myself in one of the labs and come up with my own. Inspiration is a long time coming. Static fills my brain as I stare at the sterile white laboratory walls and listen to the tick of time stuttering away in uneven intervals. I want to feel something. I want to feel anything.

So I plan to create something to break through the hard shell of numbness encasing me. I remember Luca, his magic constantly there, channeled through the water around him. His ability to access it without tethers without losing himself. I want to build myself the equivalent of that, a way to fling the door wide open and keep it propped. It’s the same type of magic; I’m convinced of that. I want to feel everything again. The old book full of dangerous methods. The way I knew I could make that collar work; that’s what I’ll do. I don’t consider the dangers of building a gate, even with less nefarious intentions. Or rather, I do, but it doesn’t matter to me. I convince myself I’m different from Adele, even as I finally walk the path she’s tempted me to follow for years. I’m a horse trailing a dangling carrot right to the slaughterhouse.

The first few prototypes fail, shattering from the power I try to channel through them. It’s about finding the right vessel, the right material. Luca uses water for his magic. But that won’t work for me. What I’m looking for needs to be something I can keep close always. I think of my mask. Why not something I wear? An armor of sorts. The natural choice is metal. After all, it’s conductive, and I’m looking for something I can channel pure magical energy through. I choose silver, as the werewolf lore I’ve dug up suggests this might be a good choice.

Sequestered in my lab with a bar of silver clutched in my fist, I fling open that door in my mind. I feel the pull of magic immediately. I deliberately, consciously think about leaving them all behind. Tether after tether, I let them drop, threads slipping through my fingers. It’s the most reckless thing I’ve ever done.

Alone, I want to be alone.

Before, magic has always been a trickle, washing over me, soothing and warm. This is something different, a vast ocean of energy. Stardust, spare parts of planets, detritus from dead galaxies, everything leftover and assumed long gone. It’s all here. Waiting for someone like me. Power swirls around and through me. I swear I glimpse my physical self in the lab, my hair rising like the air is full of static.

A void yawns open inside my mind, threatening to rip me away from myself. I could dive in, bathe in it for eternity in peace and silence. And I’m so tempted. I have no tether, no reason to return. I’m floating in space and stars and everything the universe is made up of. Indecipherable whispers, so many voices calling to me that it’s impossible to distinguish one from another. I’m not sure what they are. Spirits maybe. Lost souls, gods, perhaps?

It isn’t time for that, yet.

Familiar, they feel familiar, but I can’t place how, where I’ve heard them before, the knowledge too hard to hold on to, dreamlike.

The silver warms in my palm, glows. It becomes fluid, moves of its own accord, and I remember why I’m here. Let me feel something, I plead with the universe.

And when she answers, all I feel is pain⁠—a swelling bubble of it consuming every nerve ending. Screaming fills my ears, ripping the air from my lungs. As quickly as it hit me, it’s gone, leaving behind a bright clarity I haven’t felt in months. Followed by a deep bubbling rage boiling upward and outward. I wasn’t numb; it was all there after all, crushed down and hidden. A wave of everything I’ve suppressed, every bit of me that my mother has ground under her heel. All of it fights back now. Luca, my sisters, the life I haven’t gotten to live. I feel everything. The wall of energy and magic crests, folds down over me, and I react without thinking.

I flinch and throw my arm into the air as if I could hold back the darkness coming to reclaim me. To my shock, it works. Gasping, I look where the ball of silver has spread over my palm, thinned into hundreds of threadlike fibers, weaving between my fingers like an armored glove. A Gauntlet. The darkness rages around me but doesn’t overtake me.

As I watch, threads of magic swirl off, wrapping me in tendrils of shimmering shadow. It creeps into the crevices of the Gauntlet, filling them with the black of the yawning void that lives inside me. It’s as beautiful as it is terrifying. I can’t yank my hand away, and I realize then that I’ve made a mistake. This is what everyone warns about, losing myself to the magic, jumping in without a tether. This is the ending I can’t bring myself to condemn Adele to, the fate my lifeline forestalls. And now my arrogance is going to get me killed.

The magic pulls at me, and a gentle tug shivers down the Gauntlet, like a hand in mine, drawing me closer. I think of Luca tugging me close moments before he left me behind. How it felt to succumb to the warmth and want. That phantom hand tautens its hold, and I want to give in, to follow.

Bit by bit, I let my soul drift, until there’s only a thread left. There’s a hollow space in my chest where my soul should be. I’ve split myself open and let go. I unfurl my free hand, ready to release that last connection tying me down. I close my eyes. I’ll go somewhere else, wait there for Luca. I’m so tired, and I’m ready to surrender⁠—

28

The Gauntlet

“Reggie?” a voice calls.

I clench my fist down hard on that last thread, right before it slips away from me. One last spider silk filament tethers my soul to my body as my heart skips a beat and my eyes fly open.

“Zara?”

She’s standing there, impossibly. Holding Meredith by one hand, clinging to the frame of an open door with the other.

Meredith’s eyes are wide, gazing past me to the still-raging magical storm above us. She smiles in pure awe, not a trace of fear, as only a child can manage. She takes a step forward, reaches toward the magic, and I snatch for her in panic.

Her fingers are toddler sticky; her tiny palm in mine feels like home.

“What are you doing here?” Zara asks me. There’s no awe in her voice, only fear in her eyes. “I love you. Don’t go, Reggie, don’t go.”

“I just wanted to⁠—” I can’t tell her.

“We shouldn’t be here. Let’s go,” Zara says, tugging on Meredith’s other arm.