They had me standing inside a circle of bones lit by fire so that the bones burned as we cast the spell. The flames soon grew out of control. They flickered dangerously close to my clothes.
I reached for my Magic to cool the fire. But when I reached for it, the darkness I plunged into was so much darker than normal.
I could still feel the heat pricking at the edges of my consciousness. Dark water enveloped me, but there was something else there, too. Something all-encompassing; foreign, yet intimately familiar.
What have you done?
Even now as I recall its voice, I cannot remember the sound of it. I only remember how it made me feel. Like a minuscule drop in the ocean, a mere ant in its grandness. Ancient and immovable, like rushing water or shifting earth, wind through creaking bark, the hiss of air through a gap in stones.
It felt as old as the Earth itself, like I was speaking to its bones, but edged with something wrong, something dark. Something humans should never have disturbed.
Give me more, I said.I need it.
I was familiar with the Magic, had felt it before when I cast, but this was something different. A more … direct line, as if I were accessing a god, or some powerful deity of the sea, beseeching myself at its feet.
Only now did I sense the threads of power running through the Earth, could practically see the lines running from people, see the way their power was transposed through objects. Magic was everywhere, always was waiting to be called to, to be let in.
Why?
In that one word, an entirety of emotion, thoughts—measured in years, decades, millennia. It didn’t care about me. Didn’t care about my response or my thoughts. Whatever I said would be forgotten seconds after our interaction. But for now, for this one moment, a spark of curiosity. What do you want from me, and why do you want it?
That one question—Why?—caused me to think all kinds of things—some petty, some not, some fundamental to me as a person.
But at the heart of it, the staunch desire to make my own way in the world.
I wanted to be my own person, to stand on my own two feet, not have to be tied to the great Maximilian Middlemore. Dependent on him no matter how much I fought it, always and forever sinking into his inescapable shadow. My achievements forever assumed to be the product of his genius. Forever relegated to the role of girlfriend, not peer. Not colleague. Just the latest idiot to fall in love with someone who could never care quite as much as you did. I didn’t want to be connected for all my life to someone who had hurt me. Didn’t want to feel his presence with every nerve in my body, didn’t want to feel his heartbeat across the room, to always know how he was feeling.
I didn’t want to be a dimidium anymore. Didn’t want to be one half of a Magical soul. I wanted to be one full, unified soul that was all my own.
I didn’t have to say all this to the Magic, of course.
It was in everything I did, in every breath I took, entwined in the veins in my wrists, wrapped around my lungs. It knew; it just wanted to make sure I knew, that I was sure.
And I was.
I held my breath as I awaited its reply, felt it breathe around me, as old as the Earth itself. Its reply rattled my bones.
So be it.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Max,” I said now, my heart racing as I lay beneath the steadily darkening sky. “I think I know why I can cast without my objects.”
As I explained to him what happened that final year before I left, more memories that had been tamped down—by the Magic?—rose to the surface.
“So all that stuff you were doing with Jamie and his friends … you were unbound?”
I swallowed. As the realization dawned on him, his eyes lost all their blue. They took on a hue as gray as the sky.
“Looks like it. And that’s why I could sense Dani when you couldn’t, in her Magic. When we pushed the Magic, she was there instead to take it, like a black pit or something. Just a void.”
“But why aren’t you like Dani then? Levitating and out of control, and skin all scarred up?”
I chewed my lip. “Well, from what I remember, Jamie and the others hadn’t had much success before with the spell. It was still an experiment, something they were curious about but not sure could work. Jamie and the others, that must’ve been the foundations of Phi Kat, they must have been the founding members, before it was officially a frat on campus.” I shook my head, still dazed. “I think that must be why Basile and the brothers are so enamored with me, why they try so hard to get me to talk to them. I’m the first successful case of unbinding they know about, and I think, because I was the first one, the Magic wasn’t that powerful yet. I only opened the door, and it waited, festering and growing in power, until they were able to do it again.”
Max looked down, and I could feel the hurt swirling in his aura. He could barely look at me. “I knew something was up, I just didn’t know what.”
“I think everything just boiled over at once, with Aaron, and you, and it was—yeah.”
