“We have to go,” Ryan said. He kissed Bailey’s forehead.
Wendy kissed her cheek, and held her for a long time. “I am so proud of you and everything you’ve become. I’m sorry I had to leave before you were ready. But I’ve never stopped watching over you. And I never will.”
“I love you, Mom,” Bailey said for the final time. She said the same to her father.
Then Ryan took Wendy’s hand, and the two of them smiled at Bailey until they were gone.
Bailey waited for some time in the emptiness, feeling her way through what she meant to do. Before, it had been lonely. Now, she thought, it was just… peaceful. But, her parents had warned her not to stay very long. That the door was open as long as she was here. So she stopped wasting her eternity, and got to work painting her new world.
In the end, it looked very much like the old one, with only a few corrections. She hoped that because of them, Mab would finally have some peace. When she was finished, she looked for the door, and found it just in the corner of her eye. Anita opened it for her, and waved her through.
“Well done,” the old crone said, smiling. “Well done, indeed.”
Chapter 51
Bailey opened her eyes, and for a moment said nothing. No one was looking at her. They were looking at the walls of the Seventh Cave. Some of them were looking at their hands. One of the wizards, who Bailey thought she remembered was named Boris, was looking at his wand in confusion. She smiled slightly, and waited.
Rita was the one that called attention to her. She cleared her throat loudly in the silent Cave, and all faces whipped toward her, and then settled finally on Bailey.
It was a three way tie between Avery, Aiden, and Chloe. All of them converged on Bailey at the same time, all of them speaking at once.
“What did you do?” Avery asked.
“You did it!” Aiden crowed.
“Where have you been?” Chloe demanded.
“What happened… to my magic?” The Russian wizard asked.
All three of her loved ones let Bailey go. Each of them paused, a distant look in their eyes, before their eyes widened and they became suddenly alarmed.
“Bailey, what have you done?” Chloe whispered.
“It’s still there,” Bailey assured them all. “There’s just… less of it. And it’s not like it was before. Well… actually it is. Just… like it was before before.”
Chloe frowned, and peered at Bailey. She put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t… my gift is gone.”
Bailey pressed her lips together. “It was the only way, Mom. I know it’ll take some getting used to, but trust me—it’s going to be better this way.”
“What did you do to the Faeries,” Aiden asked.
“They just… stopped,” Avery said. “Here one minute, then gone.”
“They went back to where the came from,” Bailey said. “Look, I can explain all of this later. For now… I’m really tired, and really hungry. And I suspect we have a lot of very confused people waiting for us outside.”
Aiden stared at her, and Bailey smiled at him. After a moment, he laughed, and then pulled her to him. He held her close, and kissed her in front of the assembly of crones—who, Bailey reminded herself, were now merely very old women who were going to need a new place to live—and wizards, and witches and her mother.
Bailey didn’t mind. For just that moment, they were the only two people in the world.
Just as Bailey predicted, the world outside the Seven Caves was full of confused people in varying states of anxiety and elation. Some of them had especially uncertain looks on the faces. Bailey did her best to be reassuring without telling them too much about why they felt out of place. She promised they would feel better in a little while, and was confident they would. Being dead, even for a little bit, was a traumatic experience.
The hunters were perhaps the most confused. They weren’t sure what to do, now that their shared foe was suddenly gone. None of them yet realized that they, too, had a measure of the new-old magic. Bailey decided to let them figure it out on their own. For the time being, they followed Wheeler’s lead when he told them to stand down and withdraw, and Bailey appreciated it.
She found Piper emerging from the tour office, and shared a long, warm embrace with her before insisting that she also hold her questions for the moment.
“The rest of my day looks like this,” Bailey said. She held up fingers and ticked off her demands. “Muffin, hot chocolate, a very long, very warm bath, sleep.”
“Do we just… wait for you be ready to tell us what happened?” Piper asked. “Because I don’t think these people are going to just sit around patiently.”
Bailey sighed. “Well… I suppose I could work that in with the muffin and the hot chocolate. But, just to a few people. And they can tell the rest. Reorganizing the cosmic balance between worlds and saving the Earth is, I think, about as much as you can expect from someone in a day.”
“Well,” Piper muttered, “being queen is real hard.”
Bailey shook her head at that. “Not anymore. I’m no longer the queen of the witches.”
“What?” That was from Chloe. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said,” Bailey told her. “In fact… I’m sort of… no longer really a witch at all.”
Rita, Wheeler, and Alkina were the only other people Bailey cared to have with her besides her family when she explained the new order of things over—just as she’d said—a very large chocolate muffin and a steaming mug of hot cocoa. The three of them, along with the coven ladies, Avery, Piper, Aiden, and Leander, all took their seats in the Bakery and waited patiently as Bailey took a few bites of the muffin and a few sips of cocoa.
When she’d at least had that, she gave a contented sigh and promised herself that she would never again take things like this for granted. To the people around her, she knew that it seemed like she was being needlessly cryptic and making them wait, and that she’d only been gone, at the most, an hour.
To Bailey, though, she’d just spent… well, it was impossible to say how long, but suffice it to say that rewriting the laws of reality, even just a few of them, was not something she could have done in a few hours.
So, she let them wait.
When she was ready, she set her half-eaten muffin aside, and leaned on the table, her hands clasping the warm mug.
“First,” she said, “magic isn’t gone. It’s just different. There’s only one current now—shared by everyone.”
“What do you mean everyone?” Wheeler asked.
Bailey leveled her gaze at him, and reminded herself calmly that it was a different world from here on out. “I mean what I said,” Bailey told him. “I meant everyone. You were worried about people with magic trying to take over the world. That was only ever possible because magic was concentrated into a few people. Relatively speaking. But that was only the case because we needed people capable of fending off invaders from Faerie. Now we don’t—so, I returned magic to everyone. It’s only a little bit. I don’t really know what it will be capable of yet, but we’ll figure it out. Or… you all will, anyway.”
“Which brings me to the second thing,” she went on. “I separated our world from Faerie. Permanently. Or at least, until someone like Itaja makes the same mistake. But I made it harder for that to happen, so… fingers crossed.”
She sipped her cocoa, and followed the warmth down through her chest with her eyes closed. When she opened them, she smiled. “And, last of all, there was a… cost to that transaction. And I paid it. I’m now officially the only person in the world without a shred of magic.”
“Well now hang on a minute,” Wheeler said. “How do we know you didn’t go changing whatever else you wanted, if you could do all that.”
Aiden answered for her. “Because her parents—Ryan and Wendy—are still gone. Aren’t they?”
Bailey looked up at Aiden with eyes that stung just a little bit. She nodded.
“And she might have given yo
ur attitude a tune-up,” Frances muttered.
That got a few chuckles, and turned Wheeler’s cheeks a shade of pink.
“From now on there will be no need for hunters,” Bailey said. “I considered just giving the residents of Coven Grove my magic. But… the same problem would have just happened again, down the road. This way, everyone has the same advantage, and no one can do much damage with it.”
“And the Caves?” Rita asked. “They’ve gone quiet. And my cabin is gone.”
“It was the only way,” Bailey said, apologetic. “The Caves only existed because of the connection between our world’s magic and the magic of Faerie.”
“You could have changed anything you wanted,” Piper said softly. “Anything at all. Is that right?”
Bailey shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“Then… why not bring back your parents, Bails?” Piper asked.
Bailey sighed, and looked toward Chloe and Leander. Her mother and father. Her… new-old family. “Because,” she said, “I’d just have to lose them again later on. And where they are now, they’re… together. And happy. It would be selfish. The same is true of a lot of things I might have changed. But making those kinds of changes to our world is what caused all this to begin with. We can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over and expect to get a different result. The irony of a perfect world is that… it doesn’t work. And from what I can tell, it’s been tried.”
“So what do we do now?” Avery asked. “What happens next?”
Bailey smiled, and sipped her cocoa again. “I already told you that.”
“Did you?” He asked, looking around, as if he’d been the one who hadn’t heard.
“Yeah,” Bailey said. “Next, I take a hot bath and go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”
Epilogue
Winter broke soon enough, and gave way to a warm spring. Bailey went back to the library, at first, but it didn’t seem quite right for her anymore. After a few weeks, Chloe agreed to let her work at Grovey Goodies, and started teaching her to bake. Bailey was, it turned out, a natural. Perhaps it ran in the family.
And it was fortunate, too. The town became very busy very quickly. Of the several thousand people who had come to town as witches, wizards, and other practitioners, a great many stuck around. They built houses, and began to open businesses, and before very long, Coven Grove had nearly doubled in size.
Aria was among the first to begin exploring the new magic in depth, and as soon as she made some progress she shared it with others, and within a few months she petitioned the city government to open a formal school. It would be the first of many.
Bailey was a bit wistful about that but not so much so that she felt quite badly enough to let it bring her down. She knew perhaps more about this new magic than anyone alive, and from time to time she talked theory with Avery and very carefully slipped him a tip or two in the guise of conjecture and wild guesses. He and Peter shared a passion for exploration, and she didn’t want to take the joy of it away from them.
The new magic was gentle, and subtle. No one would be levitating things—not without a great deal of cooperation, at least—or altering the weather. But flowers bloomed a little brighter, and animals were a bit more talkative—some of them, at any rate—and in time healing magic would become a favorite application. In Bailey’s opinion, that was the best use it could be put to.
In the Summer, in June, Aiden finally proposed. He’d asked Bailey before, and she’d agreed—but he’d wanted it to be a surprise, and so he waited for her to forget that the conversation had taken place. She never did forget, but it was still a surprise. She said yes, of course—again.
Soon after, Peter proposed to Avery. Avery was more surprised about his engagement than Bailey had been about hers.
By August, Piper was pregnant with her third child. Something about the mortal fear of losing one another and the near miss of the apocalypse inspired them to make their family just a little bigger.
Bailey would have been inclined to poke fun for a bit longer, but when the winter returned, it brought morning sickness with it. Piper assured her that it was worth it—if she’d just give it a couple of years.
Rita Hope passed away at the end of the winter, almost precisely a year after Anita had. She made sure to let everyone know when it was going to happen. They gathered at her bedside—Chloe, Frances, Aria, Piper, and Bailey—and waited with her until it was time. She used her last breath to tell them all that she expected them not to make a mess of things while she was gone. Her funeral was held within a few days, but Bailey cried for weeks, and so did the rest of the coven ladies.
And for a time, after that, very little changed.
That August, two years after the world was saved, and changed, and made better for it in almost every way even if it was slightly less magical, Chloe Minds waited nervously by the door to the hospital. She checked her watch, conscious of the time and how little of it they likely had.
It was late, almost eleven pm. Where was he?
If she hadn’t had the same thought every thirty seconds for the past fifteen minutes, Chloe would have wondered if she’d summon Aiden with the thought. She saw his car pull into the parking lot, and his door fly open, and him bolt over the asphalt toward her.
He he looked panicked. “Are you sure?”
“Aria’s positive,” Chloe said. “You’re here just in time, I think. Come on, up you go.”
She all but chased her son-in-law into the hospital and to the elevator. When it wasn’t coming fast enough, he took the stairs instead, two at a time, and Chloe managed, somehow, to keep pace with him.
They were stopped by the nurses just outside the door to Bailey’s room, who almost had to hold him down to wash his hands and put on a light smock. When he was properly prepared, he stopped at the door a final time and looked at Chloe, wordless questions in his eyes.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Chloe asked.
“Not in the slightest,” Aiden admitted.
Chloe smiled, and patted him on the shoulder. “Good. No one ever is, I think; but the danger is more in thinking you are and finding out you’re not, than in knowing you're not and discovering that you are.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come in?” He asked.
Chloe shook her head. “No, no. I gave birth to Bailey in a Cave, surrounded by six other women. This is not a party that gets merrier as you put more people in it. This is for the two of you. Now go, you don’t want to miss it.”
Aiden nodded, and then took a long, deep breath before he went in.
Chloe paced the hallways for another hour. So much for Aria’s assurances that the baby would come soon. Lately, Aria had taken to all manner of divinations in an attempt to figure out what worked these days and what didn’t. So far she was batting 0 for ten.
Eventually, though, the door did open, and the nurse, beaming with excitement, waved Chloe in, and Chloe in turn waved Aria and Frances out of the waiting room.
“One at a time for now,” the nurse said as they approached.
“Fine,” Frances grunted. “Let grandma go first. Babies all look the same anyway.”
Aria gave Frances a patronizing smile, and winked at Chloe. “Leander just called. He’ll be here in a minute. Take the moment while you can.”
Chloe nodded, and braced herself as she entered the room.
The doctor was just leaving, muttering congratulations to Chloe as he passed her. She passed the privacy curtain cautiously to find her daughter in the hospital bed, looking every bit as ragged and triumphant as Chloe remembered looking, twenty two years before. Aiden didn’t look that much better.
But they were both, obviously, madly, desperately in love.
“Hi,” Chloe whispered.
Bailey smiled up at Chloe, her eyes full of tears. “Mom. Come see. She’s… just perfect.”
“Of course she is,” Chloe breathed, and came close.
The little bundle had a perfect nose, pe
rfect chin, perfect little cheeks still covered in teeny little bumps, just as Chloe had expected. What’s more, she had nearly a full head of bright red-orange hair, just like Bailey and Leander.
“That red hair,” Chloe chuckled quietly. “You are never gonna shake that.”
“I hope not,” Bailey said. “Do you want to hold her?”
“What a ridiculous question,” Chloe said, and scooped her granddaughter from Bailey’s raised arms. She had to blink through the tears to see the baby’s face clearly and up close. “Hello, little one. I’m your… your grandma. Maybe we’ll figure out something else you can call me, though. I’m a little young yet for all that.”
Bailey snorted, and shook her head.
“Hush you,” Chloe said. “It’s between me and my granddaughter.”
“Uh huh,” Bailey chuckled.
“Oh,” Chloe said, “I should have asked to begin with. Have you named her yet? I know the old ways don’t really count for much any more but, you know… tradition.”
“Of course I named her, Mom,” Bailey said patiently. “Care to guess, though?”
Chloe smiled lightly, and looked down at her granddaughter, and she didn’t have to guess. She knew right away, and couldn’t have picked a better name herself.
“Wendy,” she said, quietly, and smiled wider. “Her name is Wendy.”
*****
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the book and would love a review. Reviews help authors gain more exposure and keep us writing your favorite stories.
You can find all of my books by visiting my Author Page.
Join my ARC Team.
To find out more about how the ARC team works, email me at [email protected]
Sign up for Constance Barker’s New Releases Newsletter where you can find out when my next book is coming out and for special discounted pricing.
I never share or sell your email.
Witching for a Miracle (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 7) Page 21