Where most people's hearts were composed of blood and tissue, Melissa often feared hers was created of wishes. She was a wish devouring being, and it took sitting in front of Nathan Ecscent for this term to hit her full-force.

When she was seven, she made it a point to pluck every jamboree blossom she came across. She would brush dark, skinny fingers over each delicate petal before pressing her lips against the flower's middle as if she were about to tell the flower a secret and whisper her wish. She asked for the most fantastical things her little mind could think of...for the sun to stay up another hour, for the flowers to grow legs and dance, to hear the lullabies the trees sang at night that only deaf children could hear, for the tendrils of silver mist thick with the scent sweet-rotten corpses to lift its heavy presence from her training camp.

As a grown woman, the only thing she had to wish upon now was the chokehold of her life before Lilly. Every morning, she wished for her tired hands to move, for the biting pain in her right leg not to hinder her from work, and for the sun to rise every morning. She wished for sunny days. To not have a panic attack while cooking dinner. No nightmares. She wished to the Great King to forgive her for shooting that innocent man in the head.

But most regrettably, she wished for Nathan Ecscent.

Her mind clogged and her thoughts shattered when she wished for Nathan Ecscent.

He was everything that broke her heart, and she could not let it go.

Melissa wished for his kindness to turn to hostility, his knowing smile to sharpen into a jeer, for his inviting, tea-making hands to turn to claws that caught baby birds and squeezed. Every bit of warmth he radiated hurt, and it would be so much easier to let him go if he was a monster.

"Where's your son?" Melissa asked him now, trying to keep her face from tightening into a pained expression. They were in his kitchen. The room was a furnished, spotless swath of burgundies and dark browns, the color scheme only disrupted by the vase of sky-blue cornflowers on his kitchen table.

Nathan handed her a mug of chamomile tea and sat across from her. "At Khofie's. The cool place, according to Jake. He said a bunch of kids from Eldnac were going to celebrate the end of the school year. What about your cousin?" His voice welled with amusement. "When my son told me it was Lillian Cart Ci who set several hundred butterflies loose in the school, I wasn't exactly surprised, but man, what a bold move!"

"She should be at home," Melissa replied, nodding her thanks for the tea. Knowing Lilly, she was probably out hunting for that journal despite being grounded. "Ah...I can't stay long. I've already worked late for the past three nights and she needs a little extra love right now. She's angry."

Nathan cocked a long, handsome brow. "At you?"

Melissa sighed. "At the world. Always at the world."

"She has funny ways of showing it. Setting butterflies loose! That's a clever—um, I mean...interesting prank. If it's any consolation, she's been a great math student this year. I know she struggles, but she's persistent."

Nathan was the pre-algebra teacher at Eldnac. Lilly had always struggled in math, and through all the battles of tutoring, studying, and extra math problems Melissa had drafted up to help her, it was...difficult...to get mathematical concepts through Lilly's head.

Melissa smiled. Lilly was persistent. All the nights she had come home griping about math homework but not giving up until she understood the concept showed just how determined she was. "I think she would understand concepts better if she didn't rush through the problems and complain about how the concepts don't matter in everyday life." 

Nathan smiled back and glanced down into his own steaming mug, and Melissa took the opportunity to look at him without his knowledge. In that look, she drank in his entire being with a hammering heart: those rose-pale lips she'd once kissed with feverish hope, those ageless bright eyes decorated with early wrinkles from stress and grief, his square-framed glasses she'd accidentally crushed when she'd gone in for a hug, the dark facial hair flowering the sides of his face and chin...

The silence stretched on. Nathan looked up; Melissa glanced away. He still didn't say anything. Why wasn't he saying anything?

Melissa sucked in a breath. "So...you called me here..." She could feel her pulse in her hands and temples/ 

"Right. Yes, down to why I asked you to come." Nathan plucked a flower from the vase of bright cornflowers sitting as the table's centerpiece as Melissa sipped her tea—and nearly choked on it.

He remembered she liked vanilla in her chamomile.

Nathan crushed the flower's blossom between his hands. Blue petals and pollen showered onto the table, and the flower's stem began to shimmer.

The real magic started.

Magic works outwards in waves like sound and light, made visible by rippling beacons of transparent color. Reds, oranges, pinks, blues, and greens bounced off the walls and table in a thousand splendid prisms. Melissa could feel that familiar flutter of the magical current in her ribcage. If felt like a wild bird was trapped in her rib cage, its wings and beak trying frantically to break out of her chest cavity.

The flower, once slender and long, had transfigured into a piece of shimmering silver paper. The light waves abruptly stopped, and the room's magical charge eddied in the silence that followed.

"What if your son picked that up?" Melissa blinked away the constellations of color lingering in her vision and pressed a hand to her chest.

"What thirteen-year-old boy is going to pick a flower from the vase on his kitchen table? He makes fun of me for having pretty flowers as our centerpiece anyway."

Nathan slid the paper across to Melissa. She could make out a sort of map on the silver stationery, coated in spiderweb-thin lines. Across the top, scrawled in giant flourishing handwriting, the map had a label.

"The War of Elevens?" Melissa read aloud.

"That's what the Bloom is calling it."

Small, flashing blue dots appeared on different parts of the map. It was not any sort of map of this world, Melissa suddenly realized, but a map of the Shifter World. Her eyes lingered the longest on the shape of Arabilst-Ari as she studied it, and the longing was tangible, angry, ferocious. No longer a phantom. She could smell sand, taste rice and dark bean bowls, feel sunny evenings and the scratch of desert scrub against her ankles when she would go out and play hide-and-seek with the older kids from Camp Trenchkast. She saw and felt and longed and wished in those ten seconds of staring at the map, and it was incredible how something as simple as a map could evoke such a mosaic of emotions.

Her hands began to sweat. She looked up at Nathan. Keep your face straight. Hide your rebirthed misery.

"Beasts," he explained. If he saw the glitter of pain in her eyes she couldn't quite hide, he ignored it. "Indicated by the blue dots. They appeared yesterday, burning cities and terrorizing Fae. They're torturing cities and villages all over the world."

"Beasts."

"Monsters, creatures...whatever you want to call them. Can you see the pattern?"

There were eleven blue dots on the map. Where Arabilst-Ari rose to meet Té Shezekia on the eastern side of the world, dashed lines split through a series of hills and rivers in jarring sapphire blues. The same dashed lines appeared on the western side of the world as well, where Anna Mae rose to meet the two halves of Bria Hungary. The lines spiraled and whirled, and at first, Melissa didn't catch the pattern. After a moment of thought, she brushed a finger over one of the dashed lines. It led to a solitary group of buildings outlined in red up north in Balalaika, the Shifter World's capital country. Then she saw it: Every line led toward the Bloom Congregation Center.

"The international government center," Melissa said slowly, cold spreading through her stomach. "These monsters are headed towards the government building."

Nathan nodded. "I think so. I think someone's controlling the beasts. If they're headed towards the capital building of the Shifters, then they must have a leader. Monsters don't just appear out of nowhere and head towards the capital because mother nature decided to release them to the world."

"Do you think it's the Acids?" 

"They've taken refuge in Southern Shezekia in Arabilst-Ari, utilizing their underground cities. I don't think they did this." 

"Well, not to minimize the situation, but...why are you telling me?"

Nathan's brows furrowed. "Well, I just thought...if Arabilst-Ari is under attack, you could go back and reach out to your father. You could also let Lilly know. It is her world, after all."

Melissa took a long sip of her tea before saying, "Absolutely not on both accounts."

"Lilly would want to know."

"Lilly doesn't even know the Shifter World exists."

Nathan lifted his chin. His eyebrows shot up from their furrow so far and so fast, even his glasses moved a little. "You haven't told Lilly she's a Shifter? I knew it. I mentioned something to her about it the other day and she looked at me like I was crazy! That's a part of her life. You can't—"

"As it stands, you haven't told your son about the Shifter World either."

"That's because he's not a Shifter and his mother was from Earthens. Why haven't you told her?"

"Mm." Melissa pressed her hands into the mug and breathed in the sweet fragrance of vanilla. The map faded to ashes in front of her, the feeling of the bird in her chest diminishing with it, and her thoughts were like jolting electric shocks as she tried to explain. "Lilly isn't...she's Emma Elkai's daughter."

"What?"

"Don't look at me like that."

"Emma's dead! Emma killed her daughter when she transferred her powers and then Storm killed her!"

"No she didn't. I was there. I took Lilly in after Storm came and took Emma from the church. You're still giving me the Melissa-is-an-idiot look. As far as anyone knows, she's the daughter of Emma's youngest sister, Alice, and has an anonymous Earthens father. As far as anyone knows, she's not a Shifter." 

Nathan scoffed. "I can't believe this. Do you know how—Melissa, Emma transferred her magic to Lilly. Lilly can—"

"Yes, I'm well aware." Melissa set her mug down a little harder than necessary. "I am very, very aware." 

"So that's it? You're just going to lie to her forever? You're never going back to the Shifter World, and you're going to deprive Lilly of her family's heritage?"

"If it means saving her life from the Bloom then yes, absolutely." 

No sooner had the words left Melissa's mouth than the screen door that led into the kitchen banged open and a boy stormed in. He wasn't looking up, nor was he mindful of the two people who had been staring daggers at each other a second before at the dining table. He simply yanked his jacket off and let it drop to the floor.

When he finally looked up and saw them, he stopped short. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally spat out, "Sorry, I didn't...did I interrupt a date?"

Melissa and Nathan shook their heads. Nathan leaned forward in his chair; he crossed his arms on the table to hide the cornflower map's ashes. It was such a subtle, easy gesture, and so familiar on subtle, easy Nathan Ecscent that Melissa's stomach churned with longing. She hated it.

"No," Nathan said, ice in his tone. "We were just...it wasn't a date. You weren't interrupting at all, Jake."

Jake Ecscent. The boy-ghost. A watercolor smudge in a world of crisp, oil-painted shapes. His hair was a messy black mop the color of ocean water at night. His skin was milk-white, and he looked physically ill because there were so many veins protruding from his arms and neck. He was an insomniac, Melissa had heard from people in Belle Village, and here she could see it up close in his eyes. Where many thirteen-year-olds' eyes were full of a curious light, his were faded. He's like a whisper in the corner of a room, Sunday-school teachers gossiped about the boy they could crush with judgemental stares. He's a bruised, hurting thing with a mind like sludge, market men hissed about the boy they smashed with words. The only person to lift a finger for him was Nathan.

While Melissa was drinking in Jake, Jake was drinking in Melissa. The woman who thinks entire oceans, she guessed he would remember from gossiping Sunday-school teachers and market-men who tried to crush her with looks and smash her with words. The woman who needs to keep Kettle Fire on a leash.

Red crept up Jake's neck. "You're Lillian Cart Ci's cousin, right?"

"Yes," Melissa replied slowly. "And you're Jake. It's so lovely to finally meet you. Your father and I are coworkers. I was actually just leaving—"

"Your cousin is terrifying," Jake blurted.

"I get that a lot, actually," Melissa said kindly, picking up her mug to wash it out in the sink. As she was getting up, Jake inhaled sharply. It took Melissa a second to realize tears were streaming down his face. She paused, then glanced back at Nathan.

No longer concerned with concealing the ashes, Nathan slid out from the table. "What's wrong, bud? What happened?"

Jake looked at Melissa. She could feel that bird in her rib cage again, and this time, it wasn't because of the magical current. Jake shuddered as he gasped out phrases. "Lilly...she...she and Hailey got into it at the coffee shop. She dumped worms on Hailey and Hailey read this diary entry in front of everyone. It made Lilly mad...she clenched her fists and made all the lights go out. There was all this silver light...my eyes...her hands—"

"What?" Nathan walked over to Jake and laid a hand on his back. "What happened to your eyes? Are you okay?"

Jake rubbed his face with bony fists. "They burn."

"All those other kids," Nathan breathed, turning to Melissa. "They're in danger."

Melissa couldn't find words. She set the mug in the sink and felt the knives she kept hidden in her sleeves itching to slide out. Nathan told Jake to go to the bathroom and rub his eyes with soap and water; if they burned after that, they'd go to the hospital.

Jake looked too discombobulated to argue. He staggered around the corner of the kitchen. Melissa's insides lurched, each fear threading itself into wishes and hopes. As her entire being often was, her exterior presented stillness as her interior raged in hurricanes.

"Now you have to tell her," Nathan said, leaning back against the sink next to Melissa. He lowered his voice to a hiss. "This is your fault. You shouldn't have lied to her. You should have taught her how to use her magic."

"Thanks for the advice," Melissa bit out through gritted teeth, zipping her leather jacket up to her throat. "I'm not giving the Bloom an opportunity to kill her if they find out about what she can do."

"You lied to everyone—"

"I know that." 

"I hope you understand," Nathan interrupted, venom dripping with every angrily articulated syllable, "radiation, Melissa. Everyone who was in the coffee shop might die. My son might—"

"Nathan!" Melissa raised her voice. She held up a shaking hand. "I know."

"I'm just trying to help you!"

"Don't." Melissa turned to the door. When her hand was on the knob, a wave of dizzying anger exploded through her. She turned back to him and said in the most matter-of-fact voice she could manage, "The last time you tried to help the world, you helped my mother kill herself. Do not help me."

And that's not even the reason I hate you.

"Mel, please just—"

"I dare you to call me that again," she breathed, jerking open the door. A chilly night breeze ripped across her face. "Because if you do, I'll vow to myself never to so much as look at you after your face has a nice chat with one of my knives."

"You're a hypocrite, you know that? You're upset with me because of something I did to your mother, but if I remember right, you didn't even reach out to Finn's mother after you shot him."

Melissa slammed the door behind her without looking back at him, because oh, if she looked at the face of her history and Nathan's eyes brimming with tears behind those handsome glasses, she'd see her mother choking on her own vomit, the poison hissing from her eye sockets. She'd see the hammer, the woods, the light in her lover's eyes lit up by the glow of the church, and she'd never sleep again. So she did not spare one single glance back at Nathan's house. She marched down the street, anger rising fast, violent, and explosive inside her.

Later that night, she would find out the men in the shadows of the street with their hands on holsters clipped to their belts were assassins waiting for the call to shoot her in the head.

***

Lilly took a detour in an alley between a dilapidated hair salon and a Japanese candy factory to vomit up the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she ate before she'd left for Khofie's.

She had the desperate desire to run until the world ended or until she fell flat off the face of the earth. She wanted to sprint off all this anger, this violent aggression...but instead, she bent double against the brick wall of the candy factory, avoiding a shaft of neon green light falling from the window of the hair salon across from her, and tried to catch her breath.

Think, Lilly.

Lilly sat down and pulled her knees to her chest, her hands still numb, bloody, and gross. She rocked back and forth. It was her fault...she shouldn't have pushed Hailey's nerves so far across the line. She could have been kinder, gentler, more compromising.

It hurt.

Here she was, in an alley in the middle of the complicated network of shops and consumer-magnets that made up downtown Belle Village, and her dad was out there in the world high on his happy pills, trying to forget watching Emma Ci die. Lilly hardly even knew the guy, and it still stung. She wanted him to be here, for her, to teach her the father-daughter language of fingers walking into fingers, of little heads resting on broad shoulders, of consoling words. She wanted to hear the words, "Lillian Cart Ci, you are my daughter."

But was that selfish?

Lilly put her head between her knees and screamed. She didn't care if it was selfish. She was angry and hurt and a dirty mess of bloody silver glitter, so she continued to rock back and forth until her thoughts escaped her head and floated up to the blue-purple sky in shattered pieces.

"Impressive, what you did back there."

Lilly looked up. The voice was delicate, like a wine glass or a filigree crown, and had come from the opposite side from the alley. The short, curvy shape of a woman materialized in the soft glow of the neon lights falling into the alley. Lilly tensed her knees together and sniffled. "You...you saw that?"

"'Course I did, dear. Aren't you a cutie? Vicious thing, based on what I saw in the coffee shop, but you have the most adorable sad-looking face." The woman came closer, and now Lilly could see her features: Scarlet lips, a diamond choker around her dark throat, a leather jacket similar to the one Melissa often wore, and jeans the color of the shadows pooling in the corners of the alley. "Mind if I sit?"

Lilly tightened her hands, which were laced around her knees, and shrugged. "Do you have a name?"

"No. But I do have an offer for you." She sat down next to Lilly. She really was pretty, with a long face and a powerful jawline. Her dark hair was pulled back into a high ponytail. Lilly could smell her perfume...something cheap and mixed with the sour tang of alcohol. "You can do scary things. I know what those things are."

Lilly breathed out a hysterical laugh. "Can you explain—"

"Shut up and let me finish. I'll let Melissa explain everything...God knows she needs to take responsibility for something in her lifetime because she obviously hasn't done a great job with you. You have two options." The woman paused, possibly for drama but probably because the alcohol Lilly smelled was a lot stronger inside her than on her, and Lilly took the brief moment to straighten her legs. Her tears had mostly dried on her face, but her cheeks were warm with discomfort. How did this woman know Melissa? Why had she followed Lilly here?

Lilly considered leaping up and sprinting back home, but before she could make a decision the woman continued. Her voice turned from wine-glass-dainty to witch-wicked: "I'm going to give you two options. I hate you. I've known your family a long time, and I hate them, too. I'm ready for the government to put you down like a dog or a freak or a beast, whichever you prefer to imagine yourself as, so that's why I told the recruit general over Earthens to put your name down to train for war, and you're going to go because if you don't, I'll kill your cousin. I'll take a hammer to her face. If I have the unfortunate luck of not being there, I've got a whole team of assassins hiding outside your house, waiting for the word." 

Slowly, Lilly rose to her feet and pressed a quivering hand to her mouth. What was she talking about? Lilly could think a thousand things to tell this beautifully horrible woman, but none of them seemed smart to say after said beautifully-horrible-woman just told you your cousin was about to die if you didn't join a war.

The woman stood up. Her face, all sharp angles, was contorted in the patterns of light and shadow filling up the alley, making her look like a vulture from a nightmare. She grabbed Lilly's arm and continued, "Remember the morning after your thirteenth birthday? I did that."

"Who are you?" Lilly's teeth chattered; her stomach had gone as sour as the woman smelled. She sucked in deep breaths but they didn't satisfy her lungs. Blood thundered in her ears, in her skull.

"A very angry psychic," the woman growled. She let go of Lilly's arm. "Now you can run."

Lilly didn't waste a second; she took off down the alley, into the neon-lit streets of downtown Belle Village, squeezing in breaths through crushed lungs. She didn't stop until she got to the bottom of her driveway, where she skidded to a stop and doubled over, ready to throw up again. She bent over in the side of her yard and, because there was nothing left in her stomach, she dry-heaved until the wave of nausea passed. Then she trekked through the lawn up to her house.

The windows were abysmal, the moon reflecting itself in a blinding white highlight against the glass. Melissa wasn't home yet, which spared Lilly having to come up with an excuse as to why she disobeyed the rules of her grounding. 

She yanked the front door open so hard that the squeal of its hinges tore through the silent house. She'd barely stepped into her kitchen and turned her head when she saw the movement beneath the kitchen table.

This movement was a...slither.

Then came the wet scratch of a slimy underbelly beneath the table.

Lilly paused.

Something large scampered out from the table and darted beneath a chair. Lilly eased into the house and grabbed the first thing that could be considered remotely dangerous—a pepper shaker from the stove—and advanced towards the table.

Slowly. Very slowly.

She breathed out.

A snake...it had to be a snake. That was all it was. She raised the pepper shaker and tried to stop her hands from shaking.

The thing sprang from underneath the table. 

It wasn't a snake.

The creature screamed as it arched through the air, a big silhouette in the darkness. Black, viscous liquid dripped from its body and smeared the floor in oily, glossy pools of ink. The creature latched around Lilly's leg and thrashed, causing her to stagger back against the sink. Up close, she could see more of what it was...a fat, large slug with bony wings and cloudy eyes that looked like they were swimming with maggots.

Its jaws gaped, showing razor teeth that were black with disease.

Its grip on her leg numbed all the feeling on that side of her body. Lilly shrieked. She dropped the pepper shaker and stomped on it with her free foot. Glass crunched beneath her sneaker. On her other leg, the monster clutched tight, gazing up at her with those terrible maggot-eyes.

She staggered and fell on her side. Pain shot through her left shoulder. Grunting, she kicked the creature in its squishy black head with her free foot. The beast screeched, let go, and Lilly grabbed a handful of glass and pepper before scrambling on her hands and knees to get out of the way.

"Okay," Lilly spat, gasping. "Okay, come at me. I dare you."

The creature reared back, now a head taller than Lilly, who was still on her hands and knees. Its stout, bony little wings stretched behind its body. How could a slug as large as a small dog be supported by those paper-thin wings?

Lilly's throat involuntarily released a breathy whimper. She'd gone weak in the knees. Her hands were bleeding from her fistful of glass, but she didn't feel the sting because her hands were so numb from whatever had happened at Khofie's. Lilly rocked back on her bottom and gritted her teeth.

An uncomfortable silence settled between them. The slug stared at Lilly. Lilly stared at the slug. The world was held poised at this moment of electric tension—

And the silence shattered: From the opposite side of the house, the front door slammed shut. Melissa's scream rang through the house: "Lilly!"

The slug exploded into action. Lilly screamed and lifted her glass-filled fist. That huge mouth was an inch away from her face, and she could smell its sour breath as her hand collided with the monster's face.

Glass met slug-skin and the world exploded.

Lilly's vision went black, and her thoughts were clogged by adrenaline. She could still smell its sour breath.

When her eyesight returned, all she could see was a storm of ash swirling to the ground. When the gray-black ashes met the floor, a slip of parchment paper appeared. Cradling her hand to her stomach, Lilly got to her knees and snatched the piece of paper up.

Welcome to Elliott Way.

Lilly was so shocked she didn't even see Melissa standing in the doorway.

"We need to talk," her cousin whispered, making Lilly jump and look up. Melissa's eyes filled with tears. "I've been keeping part of your life from you."