Letters From New York [Blood Magic, Book 2]

Epilogue

The moment Lucia vanished through the door was the moment she disappeared from my life. Her cell phone went out of service the next day, and all her social media accounts shut down soon after. She became like those ghosts she talked to: invisible and unreachable. After a couple of weeks and dozens of increasingly futile, frustrating attempts to get in touch, I finally worked up the nerve to trek over to the psychic shop. I didn't get further than two steps inside the door before Lucia's mom tromped out of her office and told me I was not welcome there. The way her eyes narrowed at the sight of me affected me more than her words. Her hatred of supes had clearly solidified and become more caustic in the days since the attack on her business, which still bore many tell-tale marks of the onslaught. She had yet to replace most of the curtains and mystical trinkets, and workmen had only just begun restoring the building's facade.

I withered under Ms. Flores' spiteful gaze, my fragile courage all but crumbling around me. My face was slick with tears by the time I spun around, shoved the front door of the shop open again and stumbled back out onto the sidewalk. People were staring; I pretended not to notice. Let them ogle the freak: what difference did it make? I got as far as Lucia's apartment before my wracking sobs overtook me. I crumbled onto the front steps and bawled like a toddler.

The days began to drag after that. Out of a lack of anything better to do, I threw myself into my studies ‒ my human ones ‒ because Ephraim had confiscated my sorcery laptop and replaced it with a boring, normal one. "Protecting you from yourself," he'd called it, when I'd had a full-blown meltdown in protest. It was annoying, and it slammed the brakes on our developing relationship, but it didn't stop me the way it might have a few months back. While I hadn't resumed experimenting yet, I knew how to tap into the bond magic now, and that was something no book or laptop could have taught me.

During one of my long, solitary afternoons, I rode the subway into Manhattan. As I walked through the bustling mass of shoppers, office workers and gawking tourists, I felt zero kinship with them. I was a danger to these people, and I would be as long as I attempted to fit in. Maybe Ephraim and Bruce had finally realized this as well, because no one was exhorting me to call Anna or Jenny anymore. And without the nagging, I didn't. What good could come of it? We barely got along now anyway, and who's to say one of them wouldn't end up with a gaping bullet hole in the gut, too? I refused to set myself up for more guilt.

Besides, if what Garstatt had said was true, and I had no reason to believe otherwise, time was slowly running down for me. Most days, I could feel that countdown in every cell of my being, as if my body had become nothing more than a big, relentless doomsday clock. You know where you belong, the bond cajoled, and with whom. Despite these urgings, the dreams didn't return, and my life belonged to me as much as it could, given the circumstances. In light of that, I committed to maintaining the holding pattern, for as long as it was possible.

I strode past by countless jewellery and clothing stores en route to my destination, but felt no compulsion to go into any of them. Fashion, like many things, seemed trivial now; something to distract the masses who'd never seen beyond the surface of this world. When I finally found the stationary shop I was looking for, tucked away on a less travelled side street, I spent a good hour picking out a new leather-bound notebook. The old one, the one I'd used to write notes to Keel and track the bond when it had first resurfaced, was full and, to be honest, it felt as if it belonged to a stage in my life that was well and truly over. My post-compound existence had grown its own markers: before Lucia and Garstatt, and after them. Before I found out all about the bond, and after I did.

While it's true I didn't love Keel anymore, I came to accept his presence as a constant, something that would always hover formlessly on the periphery of my senses. It was both scary and strangely comforting, but the thought of someday seeing him again still filled my stomach with a thousand angry fluttering butterflies. I knew that day, when it eventually came, would be complicated and difficult, and I wasn't ready for that yet.

Once home and seated at my desk, I chose a fine-tipped Sharpie from my pen holder, opened the journal to the first page and wrote: Keel is not evil. He is Nosferatu.

Then I wrote it twice more. If Keel and I were going to go anywhere from here, I'd do well to remember that, and to try to make peace with it.

If I could, maybe not all was lost. Maybe we could even find our way back to a civil and halfway civilized place.

I turned the page and filled it with the rest of what I remembered from my conversation with Garstatt about the bond, stuff that existed in no history book anywhere. Once I'd done that, I flipped another page and made a point-form list of everything I'd done, felt and experienced while using the bond magic to fortify the psychic shop, and later to save Lucia's life.

This was likely the first text anyone had attempted to write on bond magic in a very long time; Etan and Garstatt's had all been incinerated during their fall. It felt like I was doing important work, even if I might be the only person ever to see it. I wondered if someday this journal would be set ablaze, too. I wondered about "someday" a lot.

I knew my destiny, but none of the variables that would lead me there.

When I was finished making my notes, I shut the book, only to open it again a moment later. I flipped to the first blank page, now fifteen or so in, and wrote in all caps: YOU ARE STILL LIGHT.

That was important too.

I was still light, and I planned to stay that way. Deciding to "embrace" my fate, as Garstatt had said, and study the bond and bond magic didn't change that. When that day finally came for Keel and I to come face to face again, I intended to meet it ‒ fangs and all ‒ at the door, as an equal, not as a slave and certainly not as a possession.

I flipped back to the first page of the journal.

Keel is not evil. He is Nosferatu.

I leaned back in my chair, and thought, God, Garstatt, I really hope you're right.