Page 89 of The Spellreader and the Phoenix

Max opened his eyes, realizing that made it way easier to figure out what was going on. He blinked up at the ceiling. He didn’t see the ceiling of his bookshop at this angle very often. He wondered if it was always improved by being seen through flames. That had to get some points for being unusual, right? He wasn’t on fire, he was just… surrounded by flames? Nice flames that weren’t burning him and didn’t seem to be burning any of his books or bookshop?

There was part of him that thought he should be way more stressed about all of this, but somehow, none of it seemed the least bit alarming. In fact, it felt a bit like he was on the mellowest trip ever. (He’d only tried weed once in university, before he’d realized he had too many secrets he might give away when he wasn’t in control of himself. But it had felt like a milder version of whatever it was he was experiencing right now.)

Tom still sounded panicked. “I don’t even understand what happened to Rory, but maybe we can still save him. I’ll call—Hey!”

Max assumed someone had grabbed Tom’s phone, and then Max processed the rest of what Tom had said. He lurched to a sitting position.

“What happened to Rory? Is he alright?” he demanded.

Everyone exchanged glances, and a few things became belatedly apparent to Max. He was not only surrounded by magical fire that wasn’t hurting him, it apparently hadn’t been so kind to his clothes, and he was totally naked. Alex was on the bookshop side, and they were one hundred percent a bear right now. There was a body wearing a ski mask on the floor by the door, hopefully unconscious rather than dead, and the door had a shield on it that didn’t come from Max… because there was another witch in the bookshop, and the buzz of magic that told Max he was in the presence of a witch or shifter wasn’t just coming from Alex, it was coming from… David?

Max swiveled to look at him. “How did you hide that you’re a witch? Why?”

David held up a necklace that had been tucked in his shirt. Max vaguely remembered catching glimpses of the cord around his neck from time to time.

“Blocker,” David said flatly.

Max’s eyebrows rose. Those were regulated, took a lot of magic to make, and were expensive.

He eyed the rest of the group. He pointed at Tom. “Okay, Tom is panicking because his entire world view has just been upended. Why are the rest of you so calm?”

Stella sighed. “My mom’s a witch. Dad’s a normal person. I came out normal.”

“I’m with her,” Sam said with a shrug. “It took three years before she told me the truth, and family gatherings started to make a lot more sense.”

Edward looked surprised, but he said, “Shifter dud. My parents were both shifters, but they got stuck with me.”

Max was pretty sure that actually explained a lot about Edward, but he was going to consider that more seriously later.

The fire around Max was starting to die down. He watched the flames flicker with absentminded interest for a moment and then recalled the conversation at hand.

“Alex is a bear shifter,” Max said, waving at Alex, though that was probably pretty obvious given that they were, in fact, a bear right now. “They found out about a week ago. Rory is a bird shifter. Where is he?”

Max was sure he remembered Rory’s face swimming into view amidst what turned out to be quite a lot of pain from being stabbed in the chest. He looked down at himself, reminded anew that he was naked, but he was also… wound-free? The flames had all but flickered out now. Could he have hallucinated being stabbed by a masked intruder?

He looked over at the intruder again, still lying unconscious in the bookshop. He was pretty sure that wasn’t a hallucination. Or was he still in the midst of the world’s most elaborate dream? Had he fallen and hit his head? Was he concussed?

They all exchanged glances again, and Max felt his temper spiking, finally disturbing a bit of his epic calm.

“It’s not a difficult question,” Max said sternly. “Where is he?”

There was silence for a long moment, and eventually, it was David who swallowed visibly and finally said, “He, uh, he pulled the knife out of your chest and burst into flames.”

Max stared at him. David stared back, and the rest of the group gazed solemnly at him.

“He… burst into flames,” Max repeated blankly, unable to process the words.

There was a weird feeling in his belly. The last thing he’d seen was Rory and his molten gold eyes… right before he’d woken up covered in flames and miraculously healed.

They all nodded, and Max recognized the stricken looks now. Even Tom was quiet, perhaps having reached weirdness overload. Edward pulled off his cloak and offered it to Max, who used it to cover himself. Weirdly, he wasn’t cold at all, despite the fact that he kept the temperature in the bookstore a bit cooler at night. He felt weirdly… cozy.

Nōwē suddenly let out a loud meow, startling all of them. She was very focused on… dust floating through the air? Max blinked, confused, because his cleaning spells usually kept the bookshop dust free. And was the dust… moving? As it began to swirl together in a little pile next to Max, it became entirely obvious that it was not behaving like normal. It was more like a little whirlwind of dust, and Max was entirely certain that dust didn’t normally behave anything like that. Nōwē was watching it intently and continued to meow at it.

Was dust normally so… visible? Sure, Max had visited locations that had dust on visible surfaces, but it usually appeared white. This was dark, kind of gray, and… ashy?

Max’s gorge rose as the thought hit him square in the chest, further shaking his calm. “Oh, my god, are those Rory’s ashes?”

Everyone was staring in equal parts horror and fascination as the dust—ash—continued to swirl together, faster and faster.