Prompt: Modern day

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Amanda

Tomorrow is Wynona Soro's wedding day, so she knows even before she opens her eyes that she is not in her own body.

The memory of the ritual makes her smile in her bed. Well, not her bed. Benedict's bed. Around this time, he would be in her own bed, waking up in her body in preparation for their wedding.

Wynona sits up and stretches. That is the first cue that something is amiss. Her newly muscular arms are laced with dark hairs. She would have sworn Benedict's body hair was blond. Maybe he uses a spell to make it look that way.

That shouldn't be a surprise. After all, this was the purpose of the ritual: to truly experience life in your partner's shoes before you got married, so there would be no reason of secrets between you. She'd always dreamed of undergoing the ritual with the man she was to marry. She'd once broken up with a man for refusing to do it. She should consider herself lucky that her fiancé's secrets were so harmless.

She kicks off the rest of the sheets and brings her legs around to the floor. Her feet, Benedict's feet, are smaller than she remembers. Maybe I'm just bad at noticing details.

It is impossible not to notice when his body is her body. Every inch of skin is a thousand times more fascinating when it's yours- for the day, at least. The ritual takes effect from sunrise to sunset in the timezone it is cast in. She glances at the pink and orange tinted sunlight streaming in from the window, and guesses its color means she has a solid ten or eleven hours to explore the world as Benedict Chase.

There's no time to waste. Wynona only has one day to live as a different man, and she intends to wring every advantage out of it. She strolls up to Benedict's drawers and yanks one open at the same time she looks up at the vanity mirror.

She screams.

Or starts to. She clamps a hand over her mouth in time to mute the worst of the sound- who knows who could be in earshot?- but the sensation of terror remains.

The reflection in the mirror is not her fiancé's face.

She is not in his body. She is in someone else's body entirely. Not just any someone's body either.

Her first fiancé's body. The one she had dumped for refusing to do the ritual before marrying her.

This is a nightmare. It has to be.

Her nerves had gotten the best of her, and she is dreaming that the ritual had gone horribly wrong. That has to be it. She couldn't possibly have switched into this body- and if she had, what of Benedict? Is he in Wynona's body as he is supposed to be, or is he in someone else's body entirely?

A ringing startles her out of her staredown with her reflection. Her head whips around frantically before she catches sight of the buzzing cell phone on the chair under a pile of messy t-shirts.

She edged the phone out of the pile with anxious fingers, eager to avoid any more contact than necessary with this body's clothes. If the reflection hadn't given away the identity of the body she was in, the phone alone might tip her off. Levi Lang is possibly the only person in the city under sixty that still used a flip phone. She flips it open.

Call Incoming: Big Sis.

Ignore.

If there is one thing she should definitely not do while in Levi's body, it is have any contact whatsoever with anyone that knew him. The last thing Wynona needs is for word to get out about the ritual not working.

If word gets out, Benedict might decide to put off the wedding. And the idea of their new life together and the freedom it will bring is the only thing that has gotten Wynona through a year's worth of ten hour workdays.

Of course, this is assuming all of this is real and not a dream, and she still holds on tight to the hope that it is

But as she stares at the flashing little screen, a thought occurs to her. There is one way to discover what was going on in her body, and that is to call her own cell phone and see who picks up inside her body.

Halfway through typing her number, the phone suggests her contact information. So Levi still has her in his contacts. She'd deleted his from hers after the breakup.

"Hello?" Wynona's voice asks, but it isn't quite right. It's rougher and higher coming out of someone else's mouth.

"Hello," Wynona says. "Who is it?"

"What do you mean who is it?" The voice that is Wynona's but not Wynona's asks. "You're speaking in my voice. Wynona? I'm in your body, so you must be in mine?"

"Got it in one," she says. "Something has gone horribly wrong. Look, is there someplace we can meet up to talk about this?"

Benedict wouldn't be very pleased if he knew Wynona was suggesting a meetup with her ex. But he would be even less pleased if he knew Wynona is in said exe's body.

"We could meet for lunch at the café on Brosbuck. You still know where that is, right?"

She rolls her eyes. "Yes. But we're not waiting til lunch. We have to meet now. I'll see you there in twenty minutes."

"You're demanding. No, we're meeting at lunch. Eleven thirty or not at all."

Wynona curls her hands into fists. The jagged fingernails bite into her skin. If she pressed any harder, they would draw blood.

"Fine." With that, she ends the call.

If she's meeting Levi, she needs to be wearing something other than just boxers. She returns to his drawers, and reluctantly pulls out the first items in each. Everything is a mess. Benedict would have made things easier on her by leaving out an outfit the night before. Still, she manages to throw together a semi coherent outfit and she heads out.

Walking the streets is a different experience as a guy. People on the sidewalk move around her to avoid a collision, and not the other way around. No one sizes up her appearance. She would have enjoyed it if not for the current mess her life is in.

But since she still has hours left before Levi will meet her, she decides she might as well have fun. She pops into the gym and lifts weights, enjoying the exhilaration of using immense strength without being flirted with by desperate guys. She goes for a jog through the park alone. No one looks twice at her. No one tries to mess with her. No one tries to control her.

She shows up at the meeting place five minutes early. She sits and waits. Across the street, water users shoot themselves up to the top of a building. Wynona could never stand to put herself with only water underneath her feet, even if she knew the magicians would lift her safely to whatever story she needed to go to.

She isn't opposed to magic, she just doesn't trust it when it wasn't cast with spells. Magic is just one more thing taking control of her life away from her, like Levi, like her parents, and like everything in her life but Benedict. But maybe she should distrust all magic. After all, she'd trusted the magic of the ritual, and look how well that turned out.

Levi shows up five minutes late. It gives her a jolt to see him in her body, with hair completely eschewed and a skirt that doesn't match the top.

"You couldn't have cleaned up a little?" She asks when he reaches the table.

She had told Benedict some guidelines for how to get ready to go out in public. He would at least have brushed his-Wynona's- hair.

Levi stares at Wynona with zero understanding. "What are you talking about? I shaved."

Wynona suppresses a sigh. She thinks about asking if he had tried shaving her face, but decides against it. There are no visible nicks or cuts on her face, so it would be better not to know.

Levi sits. "So what's going on? I haven't had anything to do with magic until I woke up in your body. This is magic, right?"

"Yes." Wynona hesitates. "It's the magic of the premarriage ritual, I think."

Levi raises one of the eyebrows Wynona kept perfectly drawn. "I thought we were broken up."

"I was supposed to wake up in Benedict's body," she snaps. "Not yours."

"Benedict..." He squints. "Benedict Chase? He kept calling this morning. He left a voicemail."

"He left a voicemail? Give me my phone!"

He frowns and digs through jacket pockets. "Okay, okay." He removes her familiar pink studded phone and tosses it across the table.

Wynona puts the phone to her ear and listens. Benedict's voice streams out, telling her how unfortunate it was that the ritual had failed. He says he still wanted to go through with the wedding as long as she did, and to call him soon.

She sighs in relief as the message ended. "Well, that's one thing right."

"What?" Levi asks.

"He didn't switch with anyone else. He just thinks the ritual failed." Wynona leans back. "The wedding's still on. All is well. So now all you have to do is not screw everything up."

"Wait a minute," Levi asks, "the ritual switched us, but you're still going to marry someone else tomorrow?"

Wynona lays out her hands flat on the table. "He's my fiancé, Levi. What am I supposed to do?"

"Call it off."

"And why would I do that?"

Levi leans forward, a tangled honey curl falling over his face. "The ritual that is meant to place people in their soulmate's body put us in each other's. Don't you think that might mean something? Don't you think that maybe this is a sign?"

"A sign not to trust magic, maybe," Wynona says. "Forget it, Levi. I'm not breaking off my engagement."

His face hardens, a look that startled Wynona because it was both her own face, but an expression Levi wore too often. An expression that says Levi is now steering the ship, and no one will be his co-captain. "If you won't, I will." He snatches the phone out of her hands.

"Don't you dare. Or else..."

He arches his brow. "Or else what?"

"Or else I'll drop out of your classes. And quit your job." Wynona's hands wrap around the table rim and squeeze, as if she could regain control of her life by strangling the table.

He frowns, staring at her with narrowed eyes. "You wouldn't."

"Destroy my engagement and I'll destroy your life. Don't think I wouldn't."

He sizes her up with the phone in his hand. She can see him thinking. At last he shakes his head.

"You were always a bluffer."

Wynona lunges for the phone, but this body is too long and clumsy for her, and she falls onto the ground. Levi calls Benedict with a press of a single button.

"Benedict?" Levi's voice asks. Wynona scrambles to her feet. "The engagement's off. I don't want to marry you anymore. Don't call me again."

A rage builds up in Wynona that only Levi's controlling nature can bring out. This was why she'd left him. On the surface, it had been his refusal to undergo the ritual. But really, it had been that he was too controlling to trust her in his life for one day.

Levi ends the call and stared at her with a smile, his control reestablished. "There. Now that's taken care of and we can talk about us. Wyn, there had to be a reason we were switched like this. It's meant to be."

'Meant to be' my ass.

With the breaking of her engagement ringing in her ears and her rage boiling her blood, Wynona does something she never does. She steps up to Levi and slaps him squarely across the face.

And it feels good. Levi's big hand packs so much force than her own thin palm ever could. The sound of it reverberates across the café.

Levi stumbles back a step, eyes dazed. He touches a hand to his face. "You- you hit me."

"You broke my engagement."

And because it had been so satisfying the first time, Wynona hits him again. Levi reaches out a hand to stop her, but he underestimates their new difference in strength. Her hand makes contact with his face with a pleasing smack.

"Fuck you bitch," Levi spits at her. "I'm glad I broke off your stupid engagement."

She hits him again.

"Hey!" A bystander calls out. "Stop hitting that girl!"

They don't know what's going on. They see a big strong guy hitting a tiny girl.

"Sir," a waiter exclaims, "if you keep that up I'm afraid I'll have to call the police."

That is when the beauty of it occurs to Wynona.

Yes, go call the police. Arrest me and put me in jail. Taint my record. In the morning, I'll be back in my body and Levi will be locked away.

She hits him again, relishing in the control it gives her for once in her restricted life.

When they arrest her, she is smiling for the first time since she opened her eyes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hannah

I heard the news first from a zero-center, portly and prim and sporting a bright green peacoat that I'd seen on a mannequin in Gorsuch's two days before. Objectively, the news should not have come from a tourist; later, I'd learn that it was the bus driver's fault that she knew, and it was Evelyn Breit's fault that the bus driver knew, loose-lipped and easily excitable as she was, but retroactively understanding why the news had come the way it had did not lessen the panic and dread that I felt upon its delivery. For this, both I and the tithing party were sorry in turns.

It's funny, then, in an ironic kind of way, that when I first saw that woman breeze through my doorway, I suspected that she might have the news after all. I didn't recognize her, but that didn't seem to matter in the moment. A shining ski pass was dangling from her neck, and so I squinted to make out the label as my stomach lurched—"Gold Access," the ski pass read, "All-Season, North and South Lifts Included"—and when I failed to find the crest of the tithing party, I allowed myself to relax momentarily, the tension in my chest easing and the idle clanking noises of my tea-weigher taking the place of my more raucous thoughts. I'd been foolish to worry, I decided; if the party hadn't sent word to me by now, there was probably no word to send. Besides, I had never seen this woman before in my life. I nearly laughed as I appraised her again—she'd bought a coat from Gorsuch's. She wore a gold-access ski pass. She was a tourist, and I was neurotic, and the night was dark and lovely and blessedly bereft of surprises.

I leaned against the counter with both forearms as my customer picked her way through a pre-packaged tea display. Though relief had settled like a mantle over my shoulders, my pulse still fluttered in my throat, and so I fixed my gaze on the windows behind her, allowing the sight of a familiar line of storefronts to steady myself. The twilit street was as well-trodden with mucky ice and old snow as it had been for months, footprints upon footprints packing the previous week's snowfall into the asphalt, but only tourists's boots were freshly marking the streets at this hour; tonight, most residents had secluded themselves inside of little-known dive bars or trusted friends' homes, leaving the shopping quarter empty but for the vacationers and the shopkeepers. With fewer people out tonight, the tangled fairy lights along doors and windows seemed softer and more tentative, the faint 70's and 80's "mood" music more mournful than celebratory, and this might have dampened my spirits had I not experienced the same sort of soft, mournful evening three years before. Then, the early quiet had been disconcerting and strange; now, it was comforting, for the streets were still and my shop was idle and I could see no reason to fear. The residents are inside, I thought, because it's a good night and because tomorrow will be an excellent day. I allowed myself the barest trace of a smile.

Then the tourist wearing the green coat grabbed a bag of Darjeeling, turned toward the counter, met my gaze and beamed. Her rosy face dimpled jovially, as if the person she'd spotted behind the counter of Abram & Sons was a friend rather than a total stranger; she began to amble across the hardwood floor, and as she moved, she spoke: "Odd night, isn't it?"

I nodded, sidestepping toward the cash register, ensuring that my face remained professionally pleasant. "Quiet," I said, and I smiled good-naturedly.

The skeleton clock on my wall indicated that it was already past eighty-thirty. The woman glanced at it briefly, then placed the bag on the counter, one hand rifling through the pockets of her green peacoat. "And what is it they're saying," she continued absently, "about what's going on tomorrow? Somebody's donating something? Everyone's calling it"—she paused to unzip her purse—"a tithe, or a gift of some sort—do you have any idea what I'm talking about?" She retrieved her wallet and glanced up at me, her cheeks still dimpled, as my stomach twisted and my eyes skated away from hers "No one is explaining anything. Who's the money going to? Is it for Pearl Harbor Day?"

I scanned the Darjeeling with steady hands, bagged it, gestured toward the chip reader with an attempt at casualness. "I'm sorry," I replied, "I spend a lot of time here in the shop—"

"—and my bus driver, what was it he was saying?" She inserted her card into the reader as she bit her lip. "Just now, ten minutes ago, he was talking to someone on the phone—said something fell through for the donation, now there's only three—"

I heard nothing else that this tourist said, because my entire body was stiffening and my face was slackening and a harsh ringing was drowning out the conversation here and the tea measurer in the backroom and the steady volume of my own familiar thoughts. First I assumed that I'd misheard, and I interrupted her inaudible chatter to eke out the word, "Three?" And the woman blinked at me, hazel eyes wide, and asked me if I felt all right, and I said it again—"Three?"—and she said yes, there was only three for the tithe, how much money was that, good gracious young man did I need to sit down, and as I shook my head, I felt as if the walls of Abram & Sons were collapsing over my head and a chorus in my mind was singing, "it's happening again, it's happening again, it's already been decided."

It was in that moment that I knew, with burning, unearthly certainty, that when I woke the following morning, Margaret May would be long gone. The truth blazed into existence suddenly, detracting my attention from all other thoughts and focusing it into one painful point, and this was how I knew that it was not a fear but a premonition; this was how I understood with complete certainty that my closest cousin and only remaining family would disappear in the night, that she would be chosen to become nothing and everything and that I would become horribly, achingly lonely because of it.

I shoved the bag of tea across the counter with one hand, searched my pants pockets with the other, told the woman to have a nice day without looking her in the eye. At some point, the tourist must have grabbed her tea and skeptically exited the shop, but I didn't register either of those things because I was unlocking my phone with sweaty fingers and rifling through my contacts and calling Rita Okoye's personal number. The phone rang twice before I realized, in a state of breathless panic, that a figure wearing a white ski jacket had just approached the front doors of my shop and that a ski pass hung around her neck—"Gold Access, All-Season, North, South, and Southwest Lifts Included." A stylized dragon's head roared in the corner.

I lowered the phone and let a coarse, strangled breath escape my throat. Rita shoved her way through the glass doors of Abram & Sons, barely opening her mouth before I shook my head and whispered, "In there," motioning toward the open backroom of the shop.

"I've got two more people to talk to," said Rita, her voice unusually gravelly and her tone emotionless. The laugh lines around her eyes had flattened into nothing, and her hair had begun to work its way out of a high ponytail without her realizing. Unhappy and disorganized—if the tithe had transformed Rita in such a way, I could barely imagine what the rest of the tithing party looked like in the wake of the excursion.

"I can't think in here," I replied, turning toward the backroom and allowing my face to fall as I sidled through the doorway. Rows of packaged teas and coffees gave way to drawers and counters piled with herbs, spices, and looseleaf teas, all washed in the golden light of my late father's glass lanterns; though the vaulted ceilings and open space allowed some of the scent to disperse, the heady aroma of hundreds of magical stimulants was concentrated enough near the doorway to instantly suffuse my lungs and clear my head. With slow, hungry breaths, I drew in the potency of the room; with focused thought, I organized the facts. There are three people instead of five. The dragon is going to choose the remaining two itself. Margaret May will be one of them.

While I stood in the arched entryway to the backroom, breathing heavily and willing my panic to dissolve, I felt Rita's hand on my upper arm, warm through the fabric of my shirt yet wavering slightly. Through the work of the backroom's invisible miasma, her deep brown skin had begun to radiate a faint glow ("fifty percent something," she'd told me once, though, like many of us, we'd never know what her particular brand of something was), and her tightly-coiled hair was softly stirring within the ponytail holder. For the first time since her arrival at Abram & Sons, her eyes seemed to soften as she stared at me evenly. "What do you know?" she said.

I closed my eyes, shook my head. "I don't know for sure," I mumbled.

"No, if you're in this room, you know for sure. What'd you intuit, Joseph?"

As I opened my eyes, I felt my stomach twinge, even as the focus that the room provided me intensified. The truth burned inside every bone in my body—I did know for sure, which was why the words themselves emerged with painful difficulty: "Margaret May."

"Margaret—" Rita's hand stiffened on my arm, the warmth receding. "Margaret May. Oh." She was blinking rapidly, her gaze moving from my stricken face to the ever-shifting tea scales my father had built on the counter beside her. "Joseph, I'm so sorry. I didn't think—did someone tell you about the dropout, was that what triggered—"

"This tourist," I said, my tone miraculously even, "she came in to buy front-room stuff and she kept asking things like 'what's the tithe, what's going on with December 7th,' and then she said there were only three tithes now. There are only three tithes now," I added slowly, glancing at Rita's rigid jaw, "aren't there?"

Rita's face was grave. "I...yes." Her attention was entirely fixed on the tea-weigher as she continued: "Zero-centers shouldn't have heard it first, that's inexcusable, but we did get back about an hour ago and we did...well, Jeanine said to keep it quiet, but I thought you might know something." She paused. "He didn't want Alfie or Agnes."

"It didn't," I said numbly.

"It didn't want Alfie or Agnes, and of course it didn't want Hassan." Her eyes were distant as she spoke, her shoulders rigid. "And that was bad enough, but when we tried to leave the four sure bets, Sonny heard about Agnes and—did you know Agnes is Sonny's godmother?"

"No, I didn't." None of the words found purchase in my brain. They swirled around my head, painting pictures that took shape just as rapidly as they faded, but all I could concentrate on was the truth of the matter, the tragedy lurking behind Rita's familiar voice, the thought that my happily-married cousin was sitting across town with a newborn in her lap and an unjust confidence in the tithing system that would be shattered within hours. Now that the panic had passed, an all-consuming sadness had begun to take its place—I thought of that pleasant, heart-shaped face contorted with pain, the hands that had held mine after my parents' deaths smoldering into nothing at all, the voice that had consoled me after Lucy's tithe shrieking until it had burned itself out, and my mouth twisted inadvertently. Should I call her? Should she know about this at all? Why haven't I visited her in days, why did I let business get this busy, she's going to be sleeping at 3:00 AM and wake up at 3:01 AM, glassy-eyed and foggy-headed, and she's going to put on her shoes without knowing what she's doing and wander to the southwest ski lift and descend into that cavern and then—

"None of us knew this, but they were trying to go together—it wasn't a mental health thing for either of them, obviously the dragon would've rejected that right off the bat—they were thinking it'd be this noble thing they could do for the town, they're apparently super close, and when we sent Agnes and Alfie and Pablo back down the mountain, Sonny heard her leaving and started banging on the dragon's door, going, 'I want out, I want out.'"

I lowered my head, hiding my fracturing face from Rita's gaze. Margaret May would be dead in the morning. "Three people," I said softly.

"Three people." Rita swallowed and added, "And Margaret May."

The sound of her name only made it more difficult to maintain my composure. "I'm sorry," I said, voice shaking slightly, "I don't know who the other tithe will be. I know that'd be helpful, I know people will want to know, I just—"

"Joseph, it's all right." As I sucked in a deep, ragged breath, Rita's warm hand on my shoulder managed to restore some presence of mind, and I wiped away the quickly-forming tears and listened as she spoke: "Is there anything we can do? Can we change this?"

"This one isn't actionable, I don't think." I stared into the rafters, blinking rapidly as I continued. "She can't leave town—she's eighty percent, she wouldn't make it five minutes."

"You're sure she couldn't just leave the border from three to four, sit tight at a rest stop with Jean and the kid, drink some tea or something—"

"Tea won't work for someone as weak as her right now. It's December 6th, Rita, she needs that kickback just like everyone else. If it were December 8th, maybe, but she's..." Holed up in bed, frail without the magic, desperate for the sacrifice with no idea that it'll be her own.

Rita opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. In the silence that followed, she appeared twenty years older than she actually was, more like her mother than my childhood friend; when she finally spoke, all she said was, "I'm sorry, Joseph," the strain in her voice indicating that she truly meant it.

I covered my face with a hand. "I'm sorry, too."

"You know I'd tithe myself if I could."

"I...I know."

"You know we'd all tithe if we could."

And this seemed less of a truth than the ultimate one that burned inside my chest, because everyone living in Silver Ridge could tithe if they desired it enough. No resident was precluded; any one of us could choose to die, for love of the town or love of our neighbors or fear of the consequences if we did not, and only an unsound mind or an outright rejection from the creature in the mountain caverns could disqualify us from the act. Only lack of willingness prevented people like Rita and I from donating our energy for the town's good, for all of our good; only lack of willingness would allow Margaret May to die in the middle of the night.

Only willingness could save her.

And with that realization, another truth began to burn in my chest, more fiercely and brightly than the first one, and the world around me seemed to grind to a halt.

*

The lift monitor failed to recognize me when I first approached him. Upon glancing at me as I shambled across the sidewalk, my face lowered and my gloves fisted inside my pockets, he straightened and called out a cursory, "Lift's closed, restricted access." Then I raised my head to look at him, wincing as I exposed my cheeks to the brisk December air, and he leaned forward as he peered through the darkness at me. "Ah! Joe Cheng? You looking for the tithing party?"

I shook my head. "Here for a visit," I said, my voice small and insubstantial in the winter wind.

"Probably a bad night for that, eh, Joe? You heard what happened—tithes are already up there, they're scouting for replacements, they don't want people in there who aren't sure tithes and you're...well, you're not official."

"It's been a bad night for me," I said, and I glanced at the distant mountainside meaningfully. "I could use the company."

In the end, he allowed me to take the lift, and I shivered throughout the entire journey in my thin windbreaker and old ski pants. I managed to remain preternaturally calm until the chair arrived and the door rose into view—gnarled, wooden, infamous—and at that point my anxieties returned, fear of pain and dark imaginings borne from years of childhood terror, and it required all of my resolve to push through the door regardless.

The instant I passed into the entry hall, its rocky walls barren and its crude wooden floor dented in places, that familiar toneless voice rushed into my head, and I steeled my nerves:

You're back.

As the voice consumed every crevice of my body, I stood in place, curled and uncurled my fingers, closed my eyes and cleared my mind of nothing but my own even breaths. It wouldn't accept my sacrifice if I wasn't brave; it would repel me from these caverns if it believed me unworthy.

But it had already made up its mind, and the new truth of my unworthiness—my inability to change the future, my insignificance in the face of Margaret May's death—lodged itself inside my chest like a grenade.

Joseph, I won't take you, said the voice, and my stomach wrenched.

"It's Margaret May," I said softly, and my hands began to tremble. "You're taking Margaret May. I can't—"

The dragon needs Margaret May. The voice sounded insistent, though something in its cadence reminded of the tithe from whom its words flowed, the sixteen-year-old girl it had chosen to serve as its mouthpiece. Joseph, this is non-negotiable, I can't—Joseph, why would you do this, I don't understand—

And I felt myself kneeling on the dusty, well-worn floor, my gloved hands still shaking as my joints screamed, and I said, "You know why."

The voice remained silent as I began to fall apart.

My voice was quiet, weak. "She has so much," I managed to say staring into a dark stain in the corner of the entry hall. "She's married, she had a kid, she's got hundreds of friends and the whole town loves her and I've got...I've got the shop, and that's it. I've got Rita, I guess. And her. But the family is gone, Mom and Dad are gone, and you..."

The voice said nothing.

"Lucy," I whispered. "You have to take me."

But the double doors at the end of the hallway remained closed—the dragon doors, the doors behind which Everett and Marshall and Susan slept—and the only response to my request was the soft, barely-tangible voice of my twin sister.

Joseph, she said, and for an instant I imagined that the dragon had never claimed her, that we'd traveled up this mountain together and we'd return to the shop together and we'd continue to live in this beautiful, terrible town with the knowledge that we at least had one another to rely upon, that that would be enough for the both of us. Then the moment was gone, but Lucy was still speaking:

Joseph, you have to keep living for me.

And though this preternatural truth was the most difficult for me to accept, of all of those that had come before it, I accepted it all the same.

"All right," I whispered, and I bowed my head. In my head, Margaret May was dying again, though she looked something like Lucy had, something like my parents had in the moments after the accident. But I stowed away the image, and I stood, and I turned toward the door.

You mean the world to me.

I smiled, barely. "Please just be good to her."

You know I'll try.

And I felt this truth in my chest, too. She really would try.