For a moment, she said nothing. Then, very quietly: “Okay. I won’t ask again.”

She stepped around him and started to walk back to the dunes, her shoulders too straight, her hands tucked under each arm, her light all but extinguished.

He understood what it must have cost her to accept his poor explanation, to be pretty much told outright that she was once again on the outside, to see once and for all that she was not one of them and would never be, and it occurred to him, watching her walk away, that none of this was worth it if it meant doing that to her.

She had never been loved. No one had ever chosen her.

But Jamie could choose her now.

He could give her this, even if it meant he never saw her again.

“Wait.”

Mika stopped, but she didn’t turn around.

“We lied to you,” he said.

And then he told her everything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Mika strode up the dunes. Somewhere inside her, there was a dark and hollow dread, and an impossibly deep sea of anguish, but they were buried so deep that she hoped they’d never find their way out.

She marched past the heather and sea holly, the glow of a thousand firefly-like lights lighting her way. By the time she entered the garden gates, the stars were ablaze in the wintry sky and the peculiar, persistent sunflowers were glowing so brightly, they looked like they were on fire.

There was a swan on the koi pond. This wasn’t terribly unusual because wild ducks and swans had been drawn to the pond before (and had always, in the polite way of wild things with a good understanding of magic, left the koi alone), but the still, silent, ghost-white shape did nothing to keep Mika’s dread away. Behind her, the sea whooshed, a lullaby that steadied her as she approached the patch of sunflowers.

She held her hands up, palms out, like she was holding an invisible ball in front of her. What she was actually holding was the magic around the sunflowers, and she threaded it around the stems and petals and roots of the flowers until she had control of them. Slowly, the entire patch of sunflowers lifted out of the ground, along with two feet of rich, dark soil, and Mika gently brought the patch to rest on the grass nearby. The sunflowers dimmed as the gold dust left them and curled around her wrists and waist instead.

Mika cast a new levitation spell, this time on the object at the bottom of the long, dark hole she’d unearthed. Something pale rose into the air.

So it was true.