God, I knew that feeling! A sister, a parent, a lover, an animal. It didn’t matter where you put your unconditional love, once given, the stealing away of it was an assault to every sense. Smells were the worst—they could ambush you, put you smack back in the middle of the hottest part of the grief. The scent of a peaches-and-cream candle. The brand of deodorant she’d used. Her pillow back home. The smell of the bookstore in the evening, when I’d believed Barrons was dead. When you love too hard, you can lose the will to live without them. Everywhere you look is a great big sucking absence of what you once had and will never have again. And life gets weirdly flat and too sharp and painful at the same time, and nothing feels right and everything cuts.
There was a sudden rattling in the distance, and I inhaled sharply.
“It’s coming,” she whispered.
“Promise me a favor now,” I whispered.
“Anything,” she vowed.
“If you have a chance to escape, if you suddenly find yourself free, run like hell and leave me behind.”
“Anything but that, Mac.”
“I promised you, damn it,” I hissed. “Now you promise me, and mean it. If you have the chance to escape, turn your back on me and run as fast as you can.”
“I don’t run anymore.”
“Promise me. Say it.”
She remained silent. The only sound was the whine and clatter of our would-be tormentor approaching.
“Quid pro quo or I won’t keep my promise,” I threatened. “I won’t save Shazam if I get out.”
“Coerced promises aren’t fair, Mac. You know that.”
“Please,” I said softly. “It won’t mean anything if what I do goes wrong and we both die. One of us has to make it.”
She said nothing for a moment, then said stiffly, “I promise to do what I think is best.”
I laughed softly. That was Dani. Not Jada at all. And it was enough because I knew Dani: survival at any cost.
I heard the screech of metal and knew we didn’t have much time. I closed my eyes, leapt and dove into my black lake.
“What are you doing, Mac?” she said sharply, no longer bothering to be quiet. I knew why. There was an ominous portent to the sound of the approaching Sweeper. It was no longer ambling. It was moving with briskness and focus. Our “operations” were about to begin. Whether we were awake or not.
“What I should have done the moment you jumped through that Silver,” I said. “Believing in the good magic, too.”
She was quiet; as if trying to think of what to say. Finally she said, simply, “I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“I thought you didn’t like me,” I reminded. Chittering, coming closer. Rustling. I swam hard, focusing on the shaft of golden light slicing through the murky water.
“I don’t sometimes,” she said irritably. “But we’re…”
“Sisters?” I said as I drifted lightly to my feet in the black cavern. She’d come after me. She’d looked out that window, decided I was in trouble, and shoved aside whatever it was she’d gotten out of bed to do—go save Shazam?—and come after me instead.
“Peas. Pod. Whatever you’re doing, think hard about it.”
Peas in the Mega-pod, she’d once called us. My heart expanded, so full of love for her it hurt. “I have.”
“And know I’ve got your back.”
“Back at you, kid,” I said lightly. But I’d had to say it loud, to make myself heard over the jarring approach of the Sweeper.
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Don’t we all know that,” I said dryly. I dashed into the cavern, the shining, resplendent black rock chamber that housed the enormous power that had kept me immobilized by fear for far too long.
No more.
I had no idea which of my three suppositions was right, and no longer cared. The only thing that mattered to me was that Dani lived. That she went on to love. To save “Shazam” if he actually existed, to grow up and take lovers, regain her wonder and freedom of emotion and wholeness of heart.
And if the price was me, the price was me.
I guess that’s what love is. You care more that they live than you care about whether you do. Dani’s light would never be extinguished. Not on my watch.
Panic was pressing at the outer edges of my mind and I knew the Sweeper was almost on us. I could smell the noxious odor of the wraiths hemming us in.
I hurried to the Book and turned the pages rapidly, scanning, looking for anything I could use.
“Mac,” I heard from a distance. “Don’t do it for me. Don’t lose your soul for me. You know I have responsibility dysmorphia syndrome. You’ll make it worse.”
I laughed in the cavern as I thumbed through page after page. Who said I would lose my soul? Good magic, I reminded myself.
There! A bit of a double-edged sword, but it would work.
Triumphantly, I shouted the words of the ancient spell I’d just found. The syllables echoed sharply off the stone of the cavern, amplifying, growing, shimmering in the air around me. I could feel the power flooding me, ready, able, and more than willing. It filled me with euphoria, and I knew something that felt so good couldn’t possibly be bad.
As I finished the final syllable, the Book abruptly collapsed into a pile of shimmering gold dust.
I stared at it wondering what had just happened. Looking for the same winking red gemstones I’d seen in the cavern.
Had I absorbed it? Was I one with it? I’d been reading it in the First Language. Had I succeeded in doing what Cruce had done?
I didn’t feel any different.
I knew that, beyond me, in the warehouse, the Sweeper and its minions were gone. The spell had done what I’d intended it to do. Well, essentially.
And most importantly, Dani was free and safe.
Even now she was rising from her gurney, restraints falling away as she stood up. I could see her movements in my mind’s eye.
Music began to play in my cavern and I frowned. It was a Sonny and Cher song that I’d always hated. They say we’re young and we don’t know…
My blood turned to ice in my veins and I could feel it, oh God, I could feel it!
Inside me, expanding, cramming every nook and cranny of my being!
Blighting everything, blacking out the tiniest most essential parts of me, draping my soul in homicidal rage and bottomless hunger and madness and horror, shoving me back and down, cramming me into a tiny box with no holes for air, packing me in there as tightly as a sardine.