Page 42 of Magical Mirage (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #6)

The dragons’ voices folded through me like a tide moving the shore.

Smoke drifted, not choking, just warm enough to make every breath feel intentional.

You already know, child of fire and root.

My mouth went dry. “I’m worried that I don’t truly know. That I’ll make a mistake that will destroy everything.”

Another ripple of sound, possibly amusement, flittered through me.

The sapphire dragon moved closer. Its eyes glowed, bronze and gold and banked ember. The chamber wasn’t lit the way a room is lit. It was brightened the way a hearth is when you close your eyes and still see the warmth.

“I’m worried I’m running out of time,” I said, softer. “The Wards are weakening again. The shadows are learning our voices, our faces. Keegan,” My throat snagged. “Something’s inside him that’s not his. And Gideon…”

Gideon’s name carried like a burr in wool. It clung even when I tried to shake it free.

A smaller sound shivered through the den. I turned, and there between the hulking shapes and the curling steam, something bright flickered.

Eyes blinked up at me from behind a curve of stone. New eyes…so new they were almost too clear, like glass over sunlight. The baby drew herself into view with a deliberate grace I felt in my bones. She wasn’t as small any longer. She had grown so much.

As she moved, her scales shifted to silver along her spine, a shimmer like a breath across a mirror.

My palms buzzed as my birthmark hummed.

She came close, tilting her head the way dogs do when they’re deciding if you’re a biscuit person. She came past my hip.

“Hi,” I whispered, because what else does one say to a creature written out of legend and lullabies? “You’ve grown so much.”

A dry, amused huff from the shadows overhead as one of the elder dragons shifted. Not scolding.

The baby stepped the last bit of distance and pressed her nose to my hand. She didn’t sniff. She studied.

Warmth flared through my palm in a bloom that spread to my wrist and up to my elbow.

My mind cracked open in a way that suggested it had always been a hinged door, and I had been standing with my back to it far too long.

Behind the door, diagrams in the book I’d read brightened while circles and sigils I’d traced absentmindedly were buried deep into my mind. The scrolls my dad unwrapped with reverent paws etched themselves inside me.

Child of fire and root, the elder voices murmured, Four points. Four anchors. Four living threads. Participation must be willing and living. The Hunger Path is rising.

The baby’s head nudged my hand again, more insistent.

Heat spiraled up my arm and settled behind my eyes.

Instead of the den, I saw a chalk-dusted floor with a circle braided from two kinds of line, vine and flame, crossed by a second circle made of water and stone.

At the center where the braids met, there wasn’t a symbol or a rune.

There was an opening where people belonged.

Where Keegan, Gideon, my dad, and I belonged to stop Malore.

“You don’t want me to find a spell,” I said. “You want me to remember the shape.”

She blinked the kind of blink that felt like yes.

My throat tightened with relief that wasn’t simple.

“It’s not a binding. It’s an unbinding. The ancient rites. Malore twisted them into a tether, but they were meant to be a door we pass through together, so the power doesn’t clot around one person.”

A rumble answered from the vaulting dark. Agreeing. Approving. Warning.

“I know who the four are,” I breathed. “I’ve always known.”

Saying it didn’t conjure fireworks. No choir of spectral librarians burst from the walls, applauding my emotional growth. It was quieter than that.

Me. Keegan. My dad. Gideon.

The names made a square in my chest. There were four unlikely participants charged with unlocking old magic and righting new magic.

Seemed easy enough.

I laughed a little, some wild edge of me sparkling with what might have been hysteria on a different day.

“Of course, it’s the most impossible answer.”

Convincing Gideon would be an impossible task.

The baby rumbled and bumped me again, and fondness caught me by the back of the heart.

I slid my palm along the warm line of her jaw.

The contact spilled images through me faster than words could keep up.

Images of Keegan, the way he looks at me, like I am both a problem and a solution, made me smile.

My father’s bulldog eyes loyal and stubborn enough to body-check fate when necessary.

Gideon’s wicked laugh caught in the wrong mouth, years of hurt calcified into something sharp.

“I have to bring them together,” I said, and the den answered with a low chord that vibrated the dust in the mortar.

Not a command. Not even permission. Recognition.

“Grandma doesn’t want to see the truth, does she?” I whispered to the baby. “But we’re out of safety. We never had it, did we? We only had a delay. She wanted to delay us from finding the truth. She knew Gideon was only a puppet.”

The baby made a sound like a stone dropped in a well.

Plunk.

Yes.

“Right,” I said. “Okay.”

Midlife women are not known for sprinting off cliffs without assessing the landing.

But we are also not known for abandoning our families to ancient curses because the logistics are thorny.

I could not let Keegan or my dad down. Gideon’s curse may have left them, but what lay ahead was far worse because it wouldn’t just stop at Keegan. Malore had plans.

“I need to understand the cost,” I told the elders. The baby leaned into my knees, and I braced, laughing breathlessly as she nearly toppled me. “Hey, easy. I’m a little brittle compared to you.”

Warmth and amusement skittered in the air. Then the low, braided voice of ages.

The door was barred by vow and grief. To open it, the vows must be spoken true and the grief must be named. The four who are bound must stand in the pattern unhidden. Each must give what they kept back when they first chose power, love, or flight.

“Vague,” I muttered. “But always the way.”

I knew my part even before the baby’s breath warmed my cheek and the answer slid across my tongue like a confession.

“I kept back trust,” I said, and it hurt to be that honest with a creature who could smell lies. “I kept a piece of me ringed in doubt so no one could hurt me there again. If I stand in the circle, I can’t keep it. Not if I want the door to open.”

The air shivered.

True.

“Keegan kept back…” I closed my eyes. He had chosen to carry everything alone so none of it would spill onto Stonewick. “Control,” I said softly. “He kept back the part of him that asks for help before the fire eats the cabin.”

Another shiver.

True.

“My father kept back mercy and grace for himself,” I whispered, sudden tears slick and hot. “He forgave the world, then forgot to forgive the tired man in his mirror. It’s why he feels safer as a bulldog.”

Heat at my sternum, firm as a hand.

True.

“And Gideon…” The name scraped again.

I almost stopped. But the baby nudged me, breath humming, as if to say it only hurts because you’re holding it wrong.

I took a breath.

“He kept back his first grief,” I said. “He let it harden. He traded the soft thing that could cry for the sharp thing that could cut.”

But we need to know what that was.

The den thrummed.

True.

The cost is not blood but softness. The rite unmade was a rite remade.

“So we have to show up as our true selves without our bravest faces. The ones underneath.”

The elders didn’t answer. They didn’t have to, but the baby did. She pushed her forehead into my waist with a sound like a kettle just before the whistle, all warm insistence, all now.

I sank to the ground and sat cross-legged on the stone because my knees were nearly knocking.

“Will he come?” I asked her, which was ridiculous, and I did it anyway. “If I ask him?”

A flicker behind her eyes. A tiny flare at her throat like a swallowed star. Yes, she seemed to say, with the uncomplicated certainty of the newly born.

If you ask them for the truth, not for heroics, and if you listen…

The elders moved, scales rasping like wind through pines. The den’s heat rose and settled. My breath steadied. My hands stopped trembling. I stroked the baby’s jawline and found a patch of softer scales there, the same way a mother finds the silkiest spot behind a child’s ear without looking.

“What should I call you?” I asked because names mattered. I didn’t want to pick one she’d hate for three hundred years.

But somehow I knew this moment was important. We were connected somehow. She knew it before I did.

“Lumen,” I said, breath catching. It wasn’t quite the right word, but it was the right shape.

“Or…” I tried again, tasting the syllables. “Lumi.”

Her eyes lit, and the elders’ breaths came in slow, approving drafts. The name echoed once through the stone like a bell rung with care.

“Okay, Lumi,” I whispered. “I’m going to go do the impossible. Can you,” I swallowed, “Can you lend me a little faith? I’m short on my own.”

She leaned into me so firmly I groaned, which is not dignified in a dragon den, and something bright sank into my skin. It wasn’t power born from strength. It was power like memory.

“It’s time for me to begin,” I said, looking at Lumi and the rest of the dragons. “But I might sneak back in for more advice.”

I stood and pressed my palm to Lumi’s forehead. “Thank you.”

Walking through the den, I looked over my shoulder at the gathering dragons as if they were seeing me off for the last mission.

The den’s heavy door groaned when I pushed.

The Academy’s hum gathered me like a hand at my back.

In the corridor, I pressed my fingers to my birthmark, and it pulsed twice and settled.

I started walking and didn’t look back, but I didn’t have to. Lumi’s certainty walked with me, warm against my heart.

I would have to tell Keegan what was expected. I would have to look into my father’s tired, brave eyes and ask him to forgive himself, out loud, in front of the oldest magic. I would have to find Gideon and ask him to bring me the softest, ugliest thing he owned. The thing that built him.

I was going to drag three stubborn and powerful men into a circle and ask them to put their hearts on the floor.

“Well,” I told the Academy, “good thing I’m bossy.”

The Academy answered with a whispering clatter as somewhere a stack of books settled.

Ahead, the path forked. We had left toward the library where Nova would be chewing on a chart, right toward the hall where Keegan’s stride would sound like a promise, straight on to the old chapel where the circle could be laid if it came to that.

I took a breath that tasted of smoke and scale from a den that wasn’t supposed to exist.

And then I went to find my people.