“Because they deserve a second chance.”
In the fresh, white sunlight, Elliot and Ursula were easy to find. They rushed through the crowd in a mixture of celebration and confusion. Ursula reached Kane first, embracing him over the wide hoop of her grand pink dress. Elliot, because he was Elliot, immediately started scheming about how they would outsmart the reverie.
“I saw Helena. She’s here. But she’s not young anymore. She’s just wandering around in her normal clothes.”
“Relax, Elliot. It’s okay. I’ve got this,” Kane said. He closed his eyes and let his mind hover over the depths of the crown, holding himself away from its evil entrapment. Careful as he could, he coaxed out Maxine Osman.
Like a sun rising right before them, her reverie came forth as Kane ushered her from the crown’s prison. The lush garden and the gazebo turned vivid in her watercolors, accepting the shift without resistance. If anything, the two reveries merged in a way that made them impossible to imagine separated.
“We’re righting a wrong,” Kane said. He moved them back as the crowd gathered around Maxine, murmuring about her strange clothes and the watercolor brushes she still held. Then the crowd parted, and there was Helena, in the gazebo. She wore her little yellow sweater and her orthopedic sneakers. She blinked at the bright colors, as though her vision had just been restored to her after a long time in darkness.
“Max?” Helena whispered.
Maxine clutched her brushes. Her aloof confidence from Kane’s brief conversation in the river was gone. She was fully present now, shaking as she looked at the person she had been waiting for.
The painter and the heiress joined together in a kiss that spared nothing on shame, for they were in their own world now, a haven of their own making, guarded against twists by Kane’s own exertion. He pushed as much perfection into the reveries as he could muster. He filled the honeyed air with weightless petals. He filled their fists with the thin necks of champagne flutes. He raised his arm and every arm raised with him, toasting Helena and Maxine as they stood in the gazebo, talking so softly that their words were lost behind swelling, joyous music.
Dean took Kane’s free hand and kissed his temple, where the crown still gripped.
“Why this? Why here?” he asked.
“It’s a resolution,” Kane told him. “After everything we put these two through, they deserve a happily ever after.”
Per usual, Dean’s eyes were on the deep distance. They were back to their sea-foam green.
“But this is a reverie. It can’t last forever.”
“It doesn’t have to. These two have real love, not imagined love. I think they’re going to be just fine after all this goes away.”
Helena and Maxine hugged, and the guests broke into riotous applause. The Others cheered, too, toasting the brides as they waded down the steps and into the crowd’s loving embrace to receive all the blessings the world had to offer.
The applause grew louder, tripling as Kane brought the scene to a close. He found there was little for him to do to unravel this. Resolved, Helena’s and Maxine’s reveries simply dispersed. There was no violence in this collapse. Just relief, and a touch of homesickness as the applause echoed across the stoic walls of the Cobalt Complex re-forming around them. Everything—the garden, the great hall, the mishmash of reveries—was gone now, evaporating against the sun rising over the river. Morning, actual morning, had come to East Amity, and it found a small group of sleep-deprived teenagers standing near a burnt-out mill, clapping and cheering as two old ladies looked around in shy bafflement.
A swarm of iridescent knots danced through Kane’s fingers—the reveries he’d unraveled. He urged Sophia’s back toward her and, reaching her nose, it flickered into her. He did the same with Maxine and Helena, who held hands in their daze. Then Kane took off the crown, wincing as old scars reopened, and handed it to Dean. The ground glittered with the remaining charms. Ursula picked them up carefully, and Dean handed Kane the broken remnants of Poesy’s bracelet, the whistle still as cold as ever. Adeline was the one to find Poesy herself.
“You turned her into a cricket?” she asked, showing Kane the small metal bug. The pearlescent wings twitched, like it might take off.
Elliot cleared his throat. “A cicada, I believe?”
“He’s right,” Kane said before anyone started with the eye rolling. He didn’t dare touch the bug, in case it pulled upon the magic hiding in his skin. Instead, he closed Adeline’s hands over it.
“Keep her safe, okay?”
Adeline had no love for Poesy, but she trusted Kane. She nodded.
Elliot had his phone out. His eyebrows jumped. “It’s the same day as when we left. It’s only just past seven o’clock. We can still make it before first bell.”
Everyone groaned. There was no way they were going to school, not when Maxine and Helena were going to need help getting their lives back together. Not when Sophia would snap out of her daze any second and begin asking a million questions. They needed to be present for all of that. School was simply not a reality they could belong to right now.
Elliot grumbled. Ursula strode up to Dean, pulling him and Kane into a rough huddle.
“So. Dean,” she grinned, looking between them. “You like diner food? ’Cuz we’ve got a little tradition, and I’m thinking you’re a part of it now.”
EPILOGUE
Halloween found Kane seated in Ursula’s kitchen, watching Elliot stare down a set of handwritten instructions splattered in grease.
“Is it asking me to sift four cups of flour? Or is it asking for four cups of sifted flour?”
“What’s it say?” Kane asked.
Elliot put his hands on his hips. Kane thought he looked very dashing in an apron, and he had said so multiple times. He had also suggested Elliot remove his shirt but there was only so much teasing Elliot would endure before he tricked you into thinking you were covered in leaches.
“It says four cups of flour, sifted.”
Kane smiled and shrugged. Elliot’s phone rang on the table, and Kane held it to his ear so he didn’t get it covered in flour.
“Hey, Urs.”
He listened, then glanced at the instructions. “It doesn’t say.” He listened again. “I don’t know, why? Is there a difference between ground and minced ginger?”
This must have been an outrageous thing to ask, because Ursula didn’t even answer before hanging up. Elliot looked even more confused, and Kane hoped he would start complaining again. Watching Elliot’s ceaseless attempts to impress Ursula was Kane’s most recent and favorite hobby.
Elliot rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. “I will sift the flour, just in case.”