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I nod, swallowing hard and look over the edge again.
The vision of my tarot card comes into my head.
The tower.
It was like this, but it wasn’t.
I saw the future, but I also didn’t.
So much of our destiny is in our hands.
“Jump?” I say to Paul.
“Leap of faith!” he yells. “Learn to let go and trust.”
I sigh heavily. Of course there’s a lesson in this for me.
“Oh, to hell with it.”
With Kat’s hand in mine, the both of us jump off the edge of the cathedral.
But instead of falling to our death the way that Lotte did, we descend slowly, as if being lowered on an invisible hand, until both our feet are gently placed on the ground.
“What on earth was that?” I ask Paul, relieved and terribly impressed.
“I can control gravity,” he says with a shrug, shaking out his hands. “I’ve never done it with an object as tall as you but I’m happy to say that it worked.”
I pat him on the arm, then wince as my shoulder explodes in pain.
“We’ve got him,” Josephine yells, coming out of the cathedral with a couple of students, an unconscious, soot-covered Brom in their arms, his nudity covered by one of their coats.
“Oh thank god, Brom,” I say and Kat and I run over to him as he’s lowered to the ground.
“Brom, wake up, Brom,” I say dropping to my knees beside him, tapping his cheeks, checking for a pulse and not finding one. He has some burns on his arms and the side of his handsome face, but otherwise he looks unharmed.
Kat goes to the other side of him, holding onto his hand and squeezing it, tears rolling over her cheeks. “Come on, Brom, please,” she whimpers.
Brom, I say inside his head. I know you did a brave and noble thing back there, I know sacrifice was always on your mind, but this isn’t where your story ends. You story begins here. It begins with a life with us.
I slap him again lightly on the cheek but he doesn’t stir.
Then I do something I swore I would never do.
I put my hands on him and close my eyes and I push all the energy I have left into him. He can’t be dead, he can’t be that far past the veil, he—
Suddenly he gasps, his eyes going wide. They turn to look at me and for a moment I think I’ve made that same horrible mistake again, brought someone back from the dead, broken a cardinal rule.
But then his eyes soften and he smiles at me, chest rising as he gasps.
“I saw inside your mind for a moment,” he manages to say through a cough, his voice hoarse. “I must say, you are even more complicated than I thought. And you think about sex far more often than any man should.”
I laugh at that, pure joy spreading through me.
“Yes, well, it’s hard not to with the two of you around,” I tell him, smiling at Kat who is grinning ear-to-ear.
Paul clears his throat from beside me and I look up at him.
“Yes, Paul?”
He just shakes his head, biting back a knowing smile.
“Professor Crane,” Martha comes over to me. “I can help, too. I’ve learned how to heal. I can fix your shoulder and I can fix Brom’s burns. I can at least try.”
I nod at her, feeling even more proud of my students. If she can at least heal me enough, then I can heal Brom. “I have a healing poultice in my room,” I tell her. “It’s in my bag on the desk. Third door on the left, men’s wing.”
She nods determinedly and then runs off.
“And I helped take down the rest of the wards,” Mark speaks up. “I sent a raven into town to tell them what happened. I’m sure the police will be here soon.”
“They’re already here,” Brom says with a cough.
I follow his gaze to see Famke, Kat’s friend Mary, and several constables on horseback riding toward us across the courtyard.
“How the hell?” I mutter to myself.
“Famke, Mary!” Kat yells, getting to her feet and sprinting toward them.
I get up and reach down and help Brom up to his feet, quickly adjusting the coat around him so that he’s not being indecent in front of the authorities.
They stop a few yards away, in front of Kat
“Oh thank goodness we got here in time,” Famke says on top of Sarah’s chestnut horse. “I had come here twice over the last week, I knew something had gone wrong, I could just feel it. Each time the wards wouldn’t let me in, but they’d done so before. Then Sarah said she was coming here for the full moon, and I knew, I just knew you were in danger, Katrina.”
Mary nods from on top her horse. “Famke came to my house last night and told me what she feared. I told my parents, thinking they would laugh and ignore me, but they said we had to at least tell the police what was going on.”
