Just as I’d cared about her.
And I had to keep going without her.
I let out a long breath.
“I miss you, Murph,” I whispered quietly. “I know you can’t hear me. But I miss you. I wanted to be with you. I wanted to spend our insane lives together. I hope you’re doing things that make you happy.”
Tears came. I didn’t sob. Just bowed my head and let them fall.
Murphy was gone. But life was still going.
And it was time for me to pick up whatever pieces I could, rebuild the rest, and be alive.
Something eased. Something that had been slowly loosening for a long time. There was a feeling of warmth in my chest and stomach. I felt…something strange. A presence. A warmth. I wasn’t sure how to quantify it.
I didn’t feel alone. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel like I was walking through a world of formalities and constructs. I’d been telling myself consciously that I was getting better in an effort to help make it happen.
But now I could feel it.
In the gathering dark, my heart and my brain sat down in the same room and started talking to each other again. There was work to do, and I needed all of me to be on the same page to get it done.
I’d been hurt. But even hurt, I wasn’t weak.
I’d suffered loss. But in losing, I hadn’t become less.
Pain had subsumed me in fire. But the fire had not destroyed me.
I remained.
Changed, perhaps.
But I remained.
In the face of evil, of the heartless calculations of power, in disaster and destruction and death and chaos, I had screwed up, but I had survived.
Now it was time to learn.
Time to be made stronger by what I had faced.
Time to live.
I sat with that for a long while andfeltit. Felt it glowing in my chest like a small, bright star. And I liked how it felt.
And being around that kid had been what allowed me to find it.
That was when I felt a subtle thrill of supernatural energy, somewhere in the air above me.
“My lord!” Toot-Toot said in a stage whisper. There was a buzz of his wings in the air, and the little fae was suddenly hovering several feet over my head, his hand on his sword’s grip.
“Yeah, Toot, I feel it, too,” I growled. I stood up, looked up at the darkened sky, and felt something I hadn’t for a while—grumpy, proper wizardly annoyance. I shook out my shield bracelet from my sweater’s sleeve and flexed my fists, bringing my focus to my energy rings. “Okay, you!” I shouted up at the sky. “I’m officially tired of this! It’s about time you showed yourself, or else leave me the hell alone! It’s potpie night and I’m hungry!”
For a moment there was silence, except for the buzz of Toot’s wings.
Then there was a flapping, leathery sound, and from the night sky dropped a large form with membranous wings almost twenty feet across. It came gliding down with an aerial grace that was too elegant and precise to be entirely natural and landed on the far side of the roof with a mild thump of something heavy and hard being set gently on stone. The figure dropped into a crouch, wings withdrawing, folding up around it like some kind of dark tent.
From where the being crouched, there was a stir in the air and then pale blue light began to spread through the stones around it, running along faint, ancient knotwork channels carved in the stones. The light spread out from the strange being in a sphere that swept up the merlons behind it and in a circle around where it crouched, slowly illuminating it with increasing clarity.
Steel torches were set in iron sconces on the outside of the merlons every ten feet or so, and they abruptly burst into life, flames burning upon no fuel, wardlights like the ones I’d once used to warn me of magical intruders back in the day. Except apparently Merlin had set the enchantments on these, and more than a dozen centuries later they were still good to go. No idea how that had been done.
