Lucy’s purple eyes study me. I can feel her in my head, reading me, trying to gauge how truthful I’m being.
“You saved Natalie,” I say. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“The Guardian relationship goes both ways, sister.”
I nod, feeling safer than I have in a long time. In that simple statement, there’s a profound truth that the coven doesn’t understand: magic is meant to be respected and protected. If we do that, it will protect us in return.
I study the cute kitten, who looks so much like Ethel when she’s like this. “Is this your true form? Or is it the griffin?”
She just stares at me.
“I—I know you don’t really have a true form,” I say. “Chimeras are everything at once, right? But I wondered…”
“That is true. But we all have forms that are easier to manifest than others. I find this one the most pleasing. The griffin is…for when I’m having fun.”
I smile.
She turns around and hops off the boulder, trotting away with her little tail in the air.
As the chimeras turn their attention away from Sophia, I feel them searching my thoughts, gently and one at a time, like they’re all trying to figure me out as much as I’m trying to figure them out.
My heart beats fast as my purpose materializes before me like someone’s lifted a curtain. I’m not meant to be a witch, or a Tracker, or even a Guardian in C.S.A.M.M.’s sense of the word. I’m meant to be a bridge between witches and magic.
The realization settles into my bones with a rightness that suddenly makes sense. For so long, I’ve been trying to find my place in the world, not quite fitting in anywhere. Now I understand why. I’m meant to carve my own path, and to find my own coven with the people closest to me.
I look at Natalie, her face smudged with dirt and blood but still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She smiles at me, exhausted but triumphant.
“Ready to go home?” she asks, extending her hand.
Home. Not a place, but wherever we are together. I take her hand and nod.
From the Journal of Hazel Okada
As I walked away from everyone, emotions coursed through me so fiercely that the soil shifted and swirled around my feet. I didn’t know what I was feeling. My white-hot anger had given way to something else, but I couldn’t decipher it. I just knew I couldn’t look at Oaklyn for another second. Each step I took felt like ripping off a piece of myself and leaving it behind.
After everything I did and all that shit with Oaklyn, Katie was too gracious to forgive me like that. I abandoned her, and the shame of it burned hotter than the magic coursing through my veins.
I found a log near where Fiona and Hayley sat and collapsed onto it. None of us spoke. Both looked exhausted, and Fiona’s broken arm rested across her lap. I couldn’t look at it. Sophia’s awful screams echoed as they tried to separate her from the stolen magic, mingling with all those noisy crows and the witches’ shouts.
Doing my best to block it all out, I stared at my hands. These ordinary-looking hands that can now do magic.
I extended my fingers toward a stick, trying to recapture the surge of power I’d felt when facing Oaklyn. In my rage, I hadn’t paused to think about how to use it—I just did it.
My hand trembled as I concentrated, imagining the stick rising.
Nothing happened.
I took a deep breath and tried again, focusing harder. The stick wobbled, then lifted an inch before plopping back down. A small victory that made my heart skip.
But as exhilarating as it was, reality seeped in at the edges.
Whatever I had with Oaklyn is irrevocably over. And my friendship with Katie might be intact, but it will always have a scar.
As for the rest of my life? How am I supposed to walk into the office on Monday and talk about databases when I just helped take down a witch trying to steal ancient magic? How will I explain to my parents why I seem different?
My degree, my career, my whole carefully planned life will now have to exist alongside this new reality. Can a witch still be a software developer?
I’ll need to get used to wearing a mask of normalcy while carrying an enormous secret. Forever. Like a chimera, I’ll have to adopt different forms to suit the occasion.
