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So, even though it was futile, I placed my palms on the magic circle. “We’re out of time! I’ll cast the spell. Ram, you keep changing the symbols as quickly as you can think of them until something works or we figure out if bubble dimensions have afterlives.” We might be ghosts stuck in nothingness forever, which seemed worse than just straight-up death.
Ram grabbed my wrist. “Wait.”
I shot him a look, but he didn’t let go. “I have an idea, but… I’ll need to mix my magic with yours. Do you trust me?”
The ceiling groaned and blasted outward. Above us was nothing… literally nothing. Not the darkness of space—that still held matter, photons, and gravitational waves. Darkness was heavy, full of horror and promise and the chance of light. Darkness held a color—well, a shade technically—but still. It was something you could see.
This held no color I could see. My gaze slid across it as though nothing was there because nothing was. It held all the promise and horror as the eyes of a corpse.
It was pure nothingness.
And the next time the floor heaved, we’d be flung into it. I could hold us down with magic, but not while trying to open a portal out of here.
“I don’t have much choice but to trust you,” I said to Ram. “Do it.” I didn’t wait for him to answer. I spoke the spell in the strange language and let my magic fly.
Despite the danger and the panic in my chest, my magic sang, vibrating like plucked strings through my body. As it hit the busted parts of the circle, Ram’s magic twined around it like a lasso.
I fought the urge to jerk away. His touch was both familiar and out-of-place, like visiting a McDonald’s in China. Why was I going to this crap when there were better and more interesting options across the street? Why was this even here when I should have left it far behind?
Ram’s magic tightened around me, and I tensed before I lashed out at him. Next to me, he muttered a spell in ancient Babylonian. I knew the words, but the spell itself was strange.
He yanked on my magic, dragging it past the broken sections of the spell circle that I couldn’t pass on my own. I expected it to hurt like jagged glass, but it only felt bumpy like riding a bike over gravel. Maybe because Ram’s magic cushioned mine.
I understood his plan then. He was using his greater power to brute-force my portal spell to continue along the makeshift relic despite the missing sections. He was breaking all the rules of magic, but then… that was what Ram and Juniper had always been good at.
I repeated the portal spell and poured all the magic I had into it like tipping a bag of chips upside down to get every last crumb. Ram’s magic wrapped around mine and pulled me further than I could go alone.
With our magic interlaced, I felt more powerful than I ever had. My heart raced, and my skin tingled with power. I shouted the portal spell again and again.
The men were screaming, and Beverly was grunting. I tried to open my eyes, not realizing I had closed them, but I couldn’t. All my body and all my magic were fixed on the spell. My heart beat so fast and so hard, I thought it might explode like the ceiling of the bubble dimension.
Through it, Ram held my magic with his own, a steady, calm presence. He dragged my magic around the circle to complete the spell. I felt it click like a seatbelt, but it also felt wrong, like fire at my back rushing closer and closer.
Wrong, wrong, flashed through my mind. My stomach churned.
Something exploded, and the ground vanished from under me, leaving me floating in nothingness. I could no longer feel Ram’s magic against my own, or the magical circle, or my spell. With the end of the universe, my magic had retreated into the cover of my body like a turtle into a shell.
I couldn’t see anything because there was no light left in this world. My lungs could find no air; it had probably disappeared with the rest of the dimension. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel panic, and I didn’t try to gasp for oxygen. Maybe because I knew there was nothing left I could do. Instead, I wished I could tell Jag, Elliot, Moe, and Beverly that I was sorry for letting them down. Not that it would do them any good.
I should have known better than to listen to Ram.
I heard a whoosh, which was strange because there was no air to carry sound waves.
“Alyssa?” said a familiar voice.
Juniper? I tried to answer, but I had no breath. I couldn’t see her, or anything else, for that matter. This must be my life flashing through my mind before my final death.
“Shit,” Juniper said, and chanted something in Gaelic. Something cool brushed against me, and I breathed in air that smelled of mildew. “Listen. Free Jinx crashed. We’re trapped—” Her voice cut off, and my back slammed into the hard ground.
I gasped in sweet, sweet air. I was alive! How was I alive?
Sitting up, I looked around. I was in a dark room lit by a sliver of orangey streetlights leaking through window curtains. It cast its sickly light across a lumpy queen bed and stained carpet.
Oh fuck, not another 1970s cum dumpster of a bubble dimension?
Ram groaned on the floor next to me. Jag rubbed the back of his head as he stood while Moe rolled over onto his back. “Ow,” he said. Elliot cradled Beverly against his chest as though he had broken her fall.
My heart soared. They were alive! They were safe. I could have laughed and cried and cuddled their faces all at once.
