Page 37 of Dragon Fires Everywhere (Witchlore #4)

indecipherable images—I’ll be able to figure this out. Figure him out.

I don’t know how long I stand there, trying to come up with a way to read a dragon like a great historical tome, when I hear

a voice say my name. A familiar voice, though I haven’t heard that particular wavering melody in years. For a moment I wonder

if it’s the river again, but something in me knows better.

I turn my head just enough to see Emerson and Rebekah bracketing a small woman.

Lillian Wilde.

She has her ghostly arms around Emerson and Rebekah, but she is looking at me. Her misty eyes shine, and I...

I am looking at my grandmother.

Who was always there, even when I didn’t know who she was to me. Who called me special when everyone else told me I was regular.

Maybe she was telling me all along.

With halting steps, I move forward. Into the cemetery and toward this woman who was always so kind to me. Who was the antidote

to my mother. Who took every sling and arrow that came at me next door and turned them into warmth, funny stories, anecdotes,

and belonging.

The thing about Lillian is that she was always there.

When I reach her, she pulls her arms away from Emerson and Rebekah and reaches out to me. She’s not corporeal, so it just

feels like a cool breeze, like goose bumps down my arms.

“Did you know?” I whisper.

She looks at me and runs a see-through hand over my hair. I don’t feel it like I would a living hand, but I still feel a disturbance

in the air around my curls.

“Not in a direct way. I knew there was something there. A connection.” She frowns slightly.

“Maybe I didn’t want to know.” Because, of course, that would tell her things about her son, Desmond.

My real father—though I don’t want to think about fathers now.

She smiles at me. “What I knew—and know—beyond any shadow of a doubt is that you’re special. ”

You aren’t special, Georgie. My mother’s impatient voice. You’re a Pendell. Act like one.

Lillian sighs, like a patch of fog. “Once I crossed over, I saw more of my son’s mistakes than I wanted to. But you were blocked

to me. It has been so hard to reach any of you, but you especially.”

Blocked. It dawns on me, hard and cruel. “The necklace my mother gave me.”

She nods sadly. “Among other things. The Joywood do not want you all having access to the dead.”

“Then how is this happening?” Emerson asks.

Lillian turns to look at Azrael, who is leaning against the statue of his dragon form like he hasn’t a care in the world.

But I can see that he does. It’s in the set of his shoulders, that haunted look in his eyes.

“I may not have the magic to do things, but that does not mean there is not magic to be used,” he says, still in that stiff way I don’t understand or like.

“They made the mistake of putting onyx in the statue. It might make it look that much more terrifying, but it gives me access

to energy. Energy enough to reach out to my fellow cemetery residents and help them... appear, shall we say.”

His gesture encompasses all the ghosts around us.

“It never fails to amaze me how little you lot know,” a woman in somewhat Victorian garb says to Ellowyn. When Ellowyn only

grins at her instead of getting offended, I realize this must be Elizabeth Good. Ellowyn’s ancestress who showed up in ghost

form before Samhain. She helped us. Saved us, really.

And that means her husband, Zander’s ancestor Zachariah Rivers, is who stands beside Elizabeth.

Dreams and books and fairy tales. Ghosts and crows and dragons. True covens with fabulae. For a moment, I really stand in

that. All these things we’ve been told don’t exist, don’t matter, aren’t for us.

And at every turn we prove them wrong.

Because we are special.

It turns out we have been all along.

Emerson turns to the crowd of magical beings and creatures and asks for their advice.

“Anything you know,” she says. “Anything you can share. We’re grateful for it all.”

There is a lot of commotion, then, on this misty December morning. Lots of theories about how to defeat black magic. Lots

of dark muttering about the Joywood. Zachariah insists we need to find the crows, as if there aren’t crows just about everywhere.

Emerson is magicking all the practical suggestions down into a notebook. I’m doing the same, sending queries to the archives

so I’ll have the appropriate books waiting for me.

No stone will go unturned—we’ll all see to that—but it’s clear no matter how many ghosts or familiars offer suggestions that

no one really knows how to beat black magic.

Which makes sense. I don’t think even Frost knew when he could remember everything, and he’s been around forever.

Still.

“I’ll research all your suggestions in the archives and see if we can’t find an answer there,” I tell the crowd of magical

things.

“And you’ll have all our help, should that be what you need,” Lillian says. She’s clearly the de facto leader of the ghosts.

Echoes of Emerson, and that makes me smile.

It gives me hope.

We begin to say our goodbyes because we still have real lives on this side to see to. But it’s hard. For all of us, I think, not just me. I really don’t want to let this moment with Lillian go.

But some of the ghosts begin to disappear. One by one.

And soon enough my coven begins to head off to those real lives too.

“I have to get to the store,” Emerson says to me regretfully, but she doesn’t leave. She’s waiting to see if I’ll ask her

to stay.

Because she never opens that store late, but for me, she would. That’s best friend love.

But I’m looking at Azrael. “It’s all right, Em. Go. I’m headed straight to the archives after this.”

Emerson glances at Azrael, then me. She nods once, and then she’s off.

And it’s just Azrael and me again. He stands with yards between us and makes no move to close the distance. It gives me a

shiver.

“You should get to the archives,” he says. “You have much work to do.”

For a moment, I can only stare at him. I see him, bloody and falling, over and over again. I see myself, pale and lifeless.

Death, death, and more death.

The red thread that connects us, time after time.

I get why he didn’t want me to see it, but I don’t understand why it suddenly matters . “Why wouldn’t you just tell me?” I ask him.

And I don’t know why it hurts. It’s not like I asked him.

But at the same time, he’s the one with all the knowledge. He remembers .

He studies me, and something has gone cool in his gaze. “You should not have done that ritual,” he says flatly.

I shrug. “I had to do it. The archives and the book told me to. Maybe if you’d told me yourself, I wouldn’t have had to.”

He looks wounded by that, but it’s only the truth.

“Did you note how often it was your painful death?” he asks a bit dryly—but there’s a hint of something in his tone. Something with fangs. “And how close that was to happening just yesterday?”

“I was the one getting pulled into the water, so. Yes. Noted.”

“And I was the one who pulled you out.” He moves forward then, and he grabs me by the shoulders like he wants to shake me, but he

doesn’t. “You must let me save you this time. You must trust me. You must listen to me this time. Promise me that, Georgina.”

I wish I could. “I do trust you, Azrael,” I say gently. I put my hand on his chest, hoping he understands. “But I have to

trust myself most of all.”

He steps away so that my hand falls too. Everything about him goes cold as he crosses his arms over his chest. “Very well.”

I move toward him. “Azrael—”

But before I can say anything, he just disappears.

And the dragon statue shakes a little, so I know he’s gone in there. Purposefully and by choice gone into the prison the Joywood

made for him.

Leaving me out here, all alone.