muscle and bone as I stretched, shrunk, and contorted to accommodate this body that wasn’t mine. I kept my gaze forward, not wanting to look at any part of myself that would give away my shock and awe at being able to transform into a double of someone else. We had to sell this illusion better than anything the curse had been doling out to us. This was straight from its playbook and it knew all the tricks.
Pictures began to form behind my eyes. I wasn’t just borrowing Ceti’s body, I was gaining access to her very essence. Memories that weren’t mine crowded my mind until they became my own. Faces of people who had magic, with only the barest traces of resemblance to the twelve who faced the curse today. There was so much love and light and magic. Everyone had it, but it had been my job… with Nirah… to protect it. To keep the island safe.
We raised the gates to let Ophiuchus’s lover—Nirah’s mother—go. We opened the island to outsiders to give her safe passage, and let time into our world.
Nirah’s mother had begun to fear her raging lover who wanted to keep her trapped. The jealous god with a toddler’s temperament.
After she escaped, I wanted to keep the gates open. I wanted the island to be a safe haven for anyone who wished to escape the horrors of the mainland, the witch trials that were currently taking the lives of innocents. And I didn’t want my friends and family to feel like the island held them hostage. Trust, home, freedom, choice were all the foundations of love.
But Nirah feared his father’s wrath, feared he would target me. We argued about keeping the gates raised. He wanted to lower them again, keep our island secret. I tried to stop him from going down to the heart of the island. We argued on the narrow stairs. I fell.
My neck snapped. Darkness.
Rafe’s magic tangled with my own. Small wisps reaching out to me. Reminding me of myself. “Come back,” our magic seemed to say. “You are not her. Know her. Feel her. Don’t lose yourself to her. There is more work to be done.”
I halved myself, letting enough of Ceti in to be what Nirah needed, but kept enough of myself to do what I’d come here for. My magic tied itself tight around me, tethering me to this world while I let another use me. To end this for all of us.
This illusion took everything. If this didn’t work, we had nothing left, no other options. It had to be enough. I believed that down to the depths of my soul.
In a last-minute decision, I ended up keeping my own eyes. Ceti saw herself in me, and in turn, I saw pieces of myself in her. I empathized with the woman who made extreme sacrifices for the well-being of her lover. The one who would’ve gone to any length to save him, who, to this day, had put herself in danger to free them both. Timeless love was something I understood far better than the fear and hate that ruled the curse.
I completed the rock ledge, holding Ceti in my heart as the world around me froze.
A silence pulsed against the smooth granite walls of the cave. Loud enough to drown out the fear and hate and need to obliterate. The fighting stopped. Even the dark ooze in the basin stopped beating against the ice cage.
Nirah turned toward me, madness still swirling in his smokey eyes.
The spiders, warthogs, and wasps all flickered and disappeared. With one deep breath, Nirah drew in the remaining smoke that hovered over the battle scene. Wes and Audrey stayed back. Golden-green light still glowed on their palms, ready to throw their lightning if this all went horribly wrong. Kenna and Galen made themselves fully invisible. I couldn’t see them, or even sense them, but I knew they moved closer to the ledge, taking position.
Brooke and Cole backed up to the exit that would take us all out to the ocean. If the cave started to collapse, Brooke would reinforce it with metal rods. And Finn and Thora stood guard on the opposite side from Wes and Audrey, best positioned to reach everyone in equal time if there were injuries. A collective inhale pierced through the silence as we held our breath and waited for the curse to make the next move.
A steady beat thrummed against the ice over the basin. Not a lashing to get out, but a message. The black tar-like substance holding the town’s collective fears and anger was attempting to send a warning to Nirah. As if it could sense that its rule was coming to an end.
And that’s when it clicked. The island would remain safe for as long as the basin remained covered because the curse fed on its dark energy. The empty, stolen threads that had once been light were the source of its power.
Of course, Audrey recognized that. She was the first to believe, long before any of us had magic, so it seemed fitting that she’d be key in the tipping point. The one who would weaken the curse enough to keep the island afloat while Nirah drowned in the gold-flecked pool.
Rafe stood to the side, next to an illusion of me. Not a solid one, we didn’t have enough energy left for that, but so long as Nirah didn’t try to give me a hug, we figured it would be passable. We expected his attention to be on Ceti anyway.
Kenna, still invisible, pressed her hand against my back. She formed a link with Galen, allowing Rafe to feed his power to me through the chain we formed, while making it look like Ceti stood on the rock ledge alone.
Nirah continued to step closer, his gait jerky and jagged, as if he walked on broken bones. He stopped in front of my false ledge, his eyes widening. “Ceti.”
That one word was both anguish and anger. The Nirah who had sold his soul to the curse to bring back the woman he loved could hardly speak. His bottom lip trembled while his throat bobbed up and down with the emotion trapped within him. But the part that controlled him, that had turned him into a broken puppet with acid strings, clenched its fist.
I held up a hand. Strong and steady. No fear. I could not give it my fear. “If you come any closer with that thing inside you, I will leave this place and never come back.”
His smokey eyes narrowed. “How are you here? I was only able to drain the metal manipulator and some of the plant grower. Everyone else still has their magic.”
“The twelve called me. Their combined magic calls the dead, as you know.”
That’s why Nirah had wanted our magic. Because Ophiuchus had told him the secret to calling down the dead. Knowledge only a god would have. Brooke and Cole had been able to create some kind of accidental portal through the veil that separated the dead from the living. But once Ceti had cut the power from the flutes, it took all twelve of us, the elemental magics working together, to form the building blocks of life.
My heart ached for Nirah. For Ceti. For what they’d lost. I understood what it felt like to live without my other half. Just four years had been the worst kind of misery. I existed, but I hadn’t been living. It was like being on autopilot. The only thing that kept me from going out of my mind was my belief that I was doing the right thing for Rafe.
But Nirah didn’t even have that. All he had was guilt and blame. Three hundred years’ worth. No wonder the curse had been able to corrupt his mind so thoroughly.
“Nirah,” my voice softened. Smoke curled around him, wrapping him in its devastating embrace. “Let this go. Meet me on this side.”
“It’s too late.” The smoke drifted off him and around him like translucent snakes. “I made my bargain. You’re here with me now.”
He took another step forward and I held my hand up again. “Stop. Not another step. I will not be embraced by the evil rotting your soul. I never wanted this for you.”
He bowed his head. Black tears leaked from his eyes. “It will take you.”
“It will not.” I took a step forward, careful to leave enough room on the false ledge to bring him to me. “Come to me as you. Come to me as the man I love, as the other half of my soul. The twilight to my dawn. There is no new day without us.”
“It wants you more than me.” Nirah lifted his head. The smoke had cleared, leaving behind the most beautiful tawny eyes, and for a moment, I could see the handsome man he’d once been, so full of love for the woman whose face I borrowed. “It is done with me.”
“Come to me one last time.” I held my arms out. “I need you, Nirah. I’ve been so alone, so trapped without you. Please. Come to me.”
The curse didn’t trust me. I could feel suspicion leaking from its inky black core. It believed me to be Ceti, but it sensed the trickery it couldn’t sniff out. Tendrils reached toward Rafe, but stopped short before crossing too far. As if it could sense Kenna and Galen, even when it couldn’t see them. It was enough to keep it away.
Instead, smoke wrapped around Nirah’s ankle like a shackle to hold him in place. Nirah took a step toward me. The curse drew him back. Three hundred years’ worth of pain, longing, regret leaked out of him. Not all of it dark. His love for Ceti was stronger than his prison.
The curse hadn’t learned from any of its mistakes. It had tried to tangle with all twelve of us and failed every time. Because it continually underestimated the magic we created with love.
With one last push, Nirah broke free of the curse’s hold. His love for Ceti was always the thing that would save him, just as the love we all had for each other would save our island.
He stepped over the false ledge, and into my arms. The man who embraced me was a broken shell of sorrow and regret. But he stood alone in my arms, having thrown the curse off completely. I let his arms embrace me. I could give him this in his last moments.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered into his ear. “For all you have endured.”
And with those final words, I released him and dropped the illusion.
Rafe’s magic grabbed me, Kenna, and Galen before we could go tumbling down into the water below. I hung suspended in the air over the crystal blue, gold-flecked water. The smoke, untethered from its host, dove for Nirah, but Kenna and Galen were waiting. They filled with fire and sucked the smoke into themselves, burning it to ash before it could reach Nirah again.
He hit the water with a splash, nothing more than a man who had been tortured for centuries by a curse he’d been manipulated into casting. Despite all he’d done, the selfishness of his act, my heart wept for him and Ceti. They deserved peace the same as anyone.
Violet and Donovan grabbed Nirah and pulled him to the bottom of the pool, holding him there while the remaining water from the River of Life filled his lungs.
It took less than a handful of minutes for the nightmare to end. Rafe brought us to the ledge, and I buried my face against his chest, unable to watch the light leave Nirah’s tawny eyes.
It felt as though the world should’ve shaken, the stars realigned, but death was rarely glamorous or earth-changing. Not even for the son of a god. It was simply an end of one phase and the beginning of another. Any ceremony was for those left behind.
And Nirah had no one in that respect.
Violet and Donovan climbed the gate. Donovan carried Nirah’s lifeless body over his shoulder and laid him on the stone ledge. We’d come back later and give him a proper burial next to Ceti at the bottom of the cave where he’d spent too many years as a prisoner.
He looked so frail. It hadn’t been him causing so much destruction on the island, not really, but it was him who we associated with the curse. Without it, he was just a man who had lost everything and reached out for relief with both hands.
Try as I might, I couldn’t hate him for it.
Wes rubbed Audrey’s shoulder as the twelve of us gathered around his body. “We’ll come back once we find something to wrap him in. Everyone deserves dignity in death.”
A murmur of agreement ran through us. We couldn’t help but look at him as one of us and weigh the choices we’d make if we were alone and broken by grief. What promises we might believe if they were whispered in our ears during our darkest hours.
My stomach lurched into my throat as the cave started to rumble, but it wasn’t another earthquake. The cave wasn’t going to come down around us. Those days were over.
The rumble came from the ice breaking over the basin. Not from the sticky black substance finally freeing itself, but from light. Bold, bright golden light that glowed from the center of the well and washed the cave in warm, pulsing rays of sunshine.
The black was still there. We couldn’t have light without dark, but with the death of the man who’d been host to the curse, a balance had been restored. Behind us, a splash of water hit the pool. The first trickle from the River of Life.
Which only meant one thing. The Gates of Dawn and Twilight had been restored to their former positions, and water flowed through the island once more.
“Holy shit.” Cole waved us over to the opposite side of the basin. “Look at the water. It’s blue.” Emotion choked his voice. “It’s fucking blue.”
We’d seen nothing but black waters touched by silver moonlight for weeks. The twelve of us looked at each other, tentative smiles, as if we didn’t dare believe this was actually over. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in years. Not wanting to spend another second in the dark, we all jumped off the ledge into the crisp, cool water.
Violet and Donovan pulled us up through the cave. When we broke the surface on the other side, sunlight greeted us. So bright that tears stung my eyes. The light I never thought I’d see again hurt to look at in that way only the most beautiful things could.
Rafe and I lifted everyone into the fishing boat, where we all stood, letting the moment sink in. Each couple embraced, letting their magic flow. Just like the island, it was ours to keep, to enjoy, to build a better future with than the past we’d finally closed the door on.
A plane flew overhead.
I peered up at the black rock and caught the shimmering outline of a man and woman embracing before fading away. His gait was no longer broken, but whole and free. The man he had been before the curse, restored, as he was always meant to be. A swirl of golden light hummed a distant melody carried on the wind. Nirah and Ceti were finally at rest.
A line of ferries holding the rest of the residents puttered around the sprawl of the island. Which appeared so much larger than I remembered it. I glanced up to the cliffs, where Ceti and Nirah had embraced before moving on to the next adventure in their eternity. Ceti had said nothing the curse had taken was lost for good, but I hadn’t expected us to get back the land the original descendants had lost before they gave up their magic, too.
The hotel and businesses were still gone, but those were manmade. We could rebuild.
Rafe kissed my temple. “Ready to go home?”
I’d been ready since I was thirteen years old and saw a boy in the woods who I knew even then would become the very definition of the word.
