An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 39

She dragged herself closer, close enough to reach out and touch—

The room went black.

***

So this was how it felt, to tear herself in two.

When Boone had done it that day at the newspaper office, she hadn’t even noticed them walking away from their bodies to have a conversation of the spirit. When she splintered herself now, her body collapsed and surrounded in one world and slumbering peacefully in another, her spirit floated between them like a swirling air current. She was aware of the conversation— stall them —and the need to escape— wake up —but it felt like she was soaring through layers of the atmosphere, fighting against the gravity of the spell that had kept her yoked until now.

Even while as insubstantial as a thought, she could feel the weight of that magic against her soul. She could soar as high as she wanted, but, inevitably, it would pull her back down, her memories erased, her timeline reset, her school year beginning anew. Her power was their power.

Again

And again

And again

Until.

***

“When was the last time you saw sunlight?”

***

“You just want to get your hands all over me.”

***

“I want you. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t.”

***

Memory by memory, Ellory dragged her spirit toward the light. Every time she tired, she felt a jolt of sizzling energy—the magic of the Lost Eight, carrying her, strengthening her—and she climbed further out of the fog.

***

“What if you don’t remember? What if you never do?”

***

“Are you going to hurt me, Morgan? Let me make it easy for you.”

***

“We can end this.”

***

And then she paused. She had time for one goodbye.

***

Tai and Cody sat across from her at Little House, sharing a catfish po’boy and potato wedges. Ellory knew at once that this wasn’t real—or rather, that this was another memory she had plunged into—and yet she took the time to enjoy it. Afternoon sun slanted through the blinds, and Tai was wearing one of the corset tops that made her breasts look amazing. Cody, in their soccer uniform, fed Tai a potato wedge, and Ellory instinctively made the same grossed-out face that she’d made then, even though there was nothing disgusting about two people so deeply in love.

Especially not when it might be the last time she ever saw it.

“Are you sure about this?” Tai said after she’d swallowed her potato wedge. “Who’s to say Graves is even being honest with you about how much he knows about magic? He didn’t tell you about it in the first place, right?”

Cody pried the blinds apart with two fingers, and Ellory realized that it wasn’t the sun that cast lines of light and shadow across the table. There was nothing outside the restaurant but a network of roots, each glowing blue. Lightning shot through them, erupting like fireworks outside the window.

A network of borrowed power, calling for her attention. She was so close to freedom, to the light, to ending all this. The spell was nearly complete.

Ellory ignored it for a little while longer, reaching across the table to take her friend’s hand in hers. They were still asleep, in the waking world, but she would save them soon. And if she didn’t, well, at least she got to see them one more time.

“I’m not sure about anything,” she said. “But I have to try. I have to protect us.”

“Who’s going to protect you?” Cody asked, carefully separating a shrimp from the sandwich. “And don’t say Graves. I don’t trust him either.”

“Then trust me , because I do.” Ellory took Cody’s hand, too, the one that wasn’t covered in shrimp grease, and she smiled soothingly at both of them so they wouldn’t notice her memorizing their faces. “Hudson will help.”

“Okay,” Tai said without hesitation. “I trust you, Lor. Of course I do.”

“And we’re here,” said Cody. “If you need us for anything. You might have to work with Graves, but you don’t have to do it all alone. Got it?”

Light flashed in the corner of her eye again. Her reckoning waited only for her to reach out and take it.

“Got it.” Ellory drew her hands back, fighting tears. “I have to go.”

“We’re not finished eating,” said Tai, eyebrows drawn together in confusion.

Ellory squared her shoulders and headed for the door. “It’s time for me to remember.”

***

Ellory awoke in a bed both familiar and unfamiliar. She recognized the soft feel of these thousand-thread-count sheets, but it had been so long—too long—since she had seen the world from this perspective. Books stacked precariously on every flat surface, covering the floor except for a narrow trail cleared between the door and the bed. Reel to Real by bell hooks annotated on the side table, an ornate bookmark just pages from the center of the novel. A constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, the only compromise on the subject of a night-light in the room.

The door opened.

She sat up as Hudson strolled in wearing a pair of frayed black jeans and nothing else. Thin black hair spanned the skin between his pectorals down to his dark brown nipples. A trio of tattoos lined his inner bicep: the alchemical symbols for salt, sulfur, and mercury. His toned chest and soft stomach glistened with water. A small mint-green towel hung from around his neck.

“This,” he said with a smirk, “is the liminal space you’ve created, is it?”

Ellory settled against the bed frame, admiring the view. “You’re welcome.”

Hudson left the door open as he dripped his way across the room. She leaned into his touch like a flower in the sun, her eyes sliding closed as he pressed their foreheads together. He smelled like bergamot and shea butter, momentarily distracting her with a memory of the first time they had showered together and she had complained, for three days after, about his expensive, though fragrant, Yves Saint Laurent soap.

“We don’t have much time,” he said, trailing kisses down the line of her nose. “I can keep talking for only so long before they get suspicious.”

“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, it hadn’t worked 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 plan she had come up with.

With the full context of three years of memories, she could see his desperate fingerprints all over her school year. The RemƎmber tattoo, copied from her own notes in her own hand and bespelled to appear whenever she came close to the truth. The hudson will hɘlp note 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 had time .

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.

And they deserved something real.

“I love you,” Hudson said fiercely, his face pressed against the side of her neck as he slid inside her. His hips slammed against hers in a familiar rhythm, and she could feel him deep, deep where he belonged. She wrapped a leg around his waist, taking him even deeper, and choked out his name. “I love you, I love you—”

Ellory dragged his head back up to hers, kissing him again and again. “I love you. I won’t forget. I’ll never forget you again—”

He said her name like an oath, and her orgasm spilled over her.

For a moment, everything went dark.

Then light erupted between them as two worlds collided and tore them apart.