I feel the pressure underneath my touch, a deep, thrumming pulse, like the throb of a phonograph turned up too loud. The door locks with a hard, unforgiving snap, and then the walls begin to hum and settle in.
Gunn realizes what I’ve done, I see him, I watch it all sink in. He looks around at his tomb, his face contorting with confusion, rage, panic—and then he spies me watching him through the door’s glass window. His scream is silent, his mouth pulled into one long O as he silently bellows, “JOAN!”
But I turn away and leave him.
I run across the show space, to the back stairs, up to my room, out to the fire escape. I will get out of this. I will survive this fire. Ruby, Ben, and I will start a new life from the ashes. I just need to run, fast fast fast as I’ve ever run.
I clamber down the rickety metal of the fire escape, think of Alex whispering promises to me in this very spot, in those early hours of this morning when it felt like anything was possible.
And now he’s gone.
But Alex has given me something that no one can take from me, something I’ll always love him for. Something I will hold on to when the days grow dark and the nights grow long. I’m someone who has made mistakes, far too many of them, I know that. I’m someone who might have as much darkness as she has light.
But I’m capable of love, and being loved—the truest, barest, most magical kind of love, regardless of what I’ve done. I’m capable of starting over, embracing who I am and what I was meant to do.
The past can’t be undone. I know it’s too late, that I’ll never be able to undo what happened that night in our cabin’s clearing. I can’t save her, I can’t save any of us from that awful, gut-wrenching mistake—
But I can let the past go.
I close my eyes, steel myself as I sprint toward my future.
And I can sure as hell save myself.
AFTERMATH
ALEX
I start pacing in the alley across from the Red Den, waiting for the other agents to unload their weapons, to suit up before we break into Gunn’s magic haven. God, Joan better be all right. She better walk away from all of this.
Agent Frain tucks his pistol into his holster and trots toward me. “You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Don’t shoot unless fired upon, you got that?” Frain orders his team of agents. “The point is to take them all alive. Lock these suckers up for the rest of their miserable lives.” He looks at me and nods. “It all comes down to this, Alex,” he says. “Take us in.”
We head down the alley, Frain and me in front, more than a dozen Unit men behind us. We cross M Street, walk briskly across the parking lot, gather at the base of the wooden door that promises the Red Den’s inside.
Frain leans into the door. “I don’t hear anything. You’re sure?”
I nod. “The bar’s just a cover for the magic haven two floors below.” I conjure open the lock, and we filter into the quiet bar-front. “They’ll be downstairs, in a lounge off the main performance space,” I tell the crowd. “We’ll need to stick to the shadows, surprise them. There’ll be a troupe of powerful sorcerers roaming around, but I can reason with them.” Because Joan already should have talked to them, won them over.
A dissenting thought flares in my mind. That’s if she knows you’re still coming for her, if Gunn didn’t get to her first, but I smother it. This will still work. This will all work out. It has to.
“All right, Alex,” Frain says, “lead the way.”
I lead them down the short hallway. The Unit men start whispering as I stick my hand right into the wall, feel the pressure of the force field, that intense, dark magnetic space where you can feel the fabric of the real world giving way to the magic. I walk right through the wall as the agents murmur in surprise behind me.
There’s a reason sorcerers aren’t caught easily, a reason the Unit needs a man like me on their side.
One by one the agents take their time, pass through the wall, and then we take the stairs to the lower level.
“There’s a hallway on the right, first door on the left,” I whisper at the base of the stairs. “They’re in the VIP lounge.”
We shuffle into the main performance space, guns out, footsteps light, past the circular stage where Joan and I made our magic together for so many nights. It feels like another time, another world.
But when we get to the first door along the corridor, Frain halts in front of it. There’s a streak of blood, still wet and red, gashed across the door.
Frain looks into the small glass window of the lounge door and gasps. “Holy Christ.”
“Agent Frain?”
But he doesn’t answer. So I angle around to steal a better look.