“And Boone?”
“Holding the spell and clearing your way out. I told you he just needed a push.”
“Or a flashlight to the head.”
“Whatever works.” Hudson grinned. “We have until the flashlight goes out a final time.”
Ellory’s answering sigh was shaky, both from his proximity and from the reality of what she had to do. There had been no guarantee that this would work. In fact, ithadn’tworked for three years, three long years in which Hudson was forced to play the role of dutiful son and aspiring initiate while trying desperately to get her to remember the planshehad come up with.
With the full context of three years of memories, she could see his desperate fingerprints all over her school year. TheRem?mbertattoo, copied from her own notes in her own hand and bespelled to appear whenever she came close to the truth. Thehudson will h?lpnote buried in her favorite bookstore, right on the shelf where her research would inevitably take her. His easy belief in her theories contrasted with just enough sharp resistance that she took his attitude as a challenge to overcome. He had left a trail of breadcrumbs formed of the memories they’d made together in her freshman year, and she had finally followed it to the right gingerbread house.
Now all that was left was to trap the witch in the oven and escape with her riches.
Her hand cupped the back of his neck. A tear slid down her cheek.
The only problem was that Hudson was one of the witches. He always had been, and he always would be. Unless she trapped him, too.
“It’s okay,” he said, brushing his thumb across her damp cheek. “I deserve this. After everything, I—”
“Stop it,” she snapped. “You’re nothing like them.”
“I was. If I hadn’t met you…”
The Hudson Graves she had met in her first year at Warren had been arrogant and cruel, trapped in a sycophantic prison of his own making. His brother, she would learn, had been meant to carry on the family’s lineage in the Old Masters, but that night when Hudson was nine years old had proven that he was far more powerful than Cairo could ever be. Nathaniel Graves turned his attention to Hudson, and Cairo turned to drink, his addled mind addled further by the memory spells that tore any mention of the Old Masters from his brain. Hudson was watched and molded for a future that didn’t belong to him. Cairo dropped out of college and disappeared into the heartland.
It was like I’d spent my whole life asleep, Hudson told her once beneath the cover of night, his fingers buried in her hair,and then you came along with your sharp mind and your wild magic, and I remembered what it was like to live.
Hudson hid how potent her wild magic was from the Old Masters for as long as he could—but in that she foiled him at every turn. One flash of power unspooled into an investigation that put the School for the Unseen Arts on Ellory’s radar…and put her on their radar as well.
Either I bring you to the lodge to be siphoned, Hudson confessed,or they’ll kill you and say it was for the good of the world. You don’t know them like I do, Morgan. They’re dangerous families with dangerous power, and they don’t care what they have to do to maintain it.
The world runs on dangerous power and the people who abuse it, Ellory replied.That doesn’t mean we should let them win.
Together, they schemed late into the night. The next morning, he brought her to the clearing in Riverside Campus, and she had been a living battery ever since. Until now. Until the Old Masters had finally trusted Hudson enough to let him enter her dreamworld to strengthen the siphon—and he had weakened it instead.
Every time we reset your school year, you always end up here. You always remember. I need you to remember.
Incantations aren’t as you see them in the movies… You have to set an intention, surrender a memory, and from that loss, you have to build.
In the fabricated world, Hudson stalled for time, confronting her with everything the Old Masters needed to hear. In this liminal space formed by Boone’s magic, seconds stretched into minutes that gave them time to be together before the spell they were constructing took hold. Another tear slid down Ellory’s face, and then another, and then another. It wasn’t fair.
It just wasn’t fair.
She and Hudson had been born in two different worlds, yet they had both been set aside as lambs for slaughter. She was doomed to scramble and struggle for even half the recognition that others received as a rite of passage. He was doomed to live a life decided for him before he’d been born, isolated in an ivory tower that claimed to work for his benefit.
The Old Masters needed to be stopped. There would be no justice as long as this secret society continued to exist.
But why did the people underfoot always have to be the ones to sacrifice? The ones to lose?
“It’s okay,” Hudson said again. “I’ve had the honor of watching you fall in love with me again and again. Now give me the chance to fall in love with you a second time.” He cupped her face in his hands with a sad smile. “Loving you is the best thing I have ever done. As easy as taking a breath. You’re not a weakness, Ellory. You’re my strength. The best part of me, the best person I know. I don’t need magic or memories. I just need your word that you won’t give up on me.”
“I won’t,” Ellory promised. “I couldn’t.”
He kissed her, and it tasted like goodbye. Ellory slid down the bed, dragging Hudson on top of her, over her, burying herself in his warmth and scent and skin. His head tilted. Her mouth opened. His teeth grazed her lower lip, and she groaned, wishing they hadtime.
Her magic was finally hers again, and for a moment, with his hands sliding up her shirt and hers undoing his belt, she considered turning her back on the real world. She could build them a new one, one in which they didn’t have to struggle, one in which they could walk hand in hand down flowered paths, drink cheap supermarket prosecco on picnic blankets, and argue over modern art on museum days. Everything her imagined Liam had offered her sounded tempting if it was Hudson’s hand in hers. She could make them immortal, pass the centuries together with the kind of love they wrote sonnets and songs about, watching the world change, changing the world. They would never hurt again. They could finally rest.
But it wouldn’t be real.
