Dance of Magic - The Books of Beginning [1]

1. Unfulfilling Normalcy

She was bleeding, she was dying, but that wasn't the scary part. No, the most horrifying thing by far was not the gunshot wound, but the conversation happening before her, the one she was powerless to stop. Rafe was offering his life and soul for hers, promising to become the Dire Magnus if only she was saved. She tried to push him away, to tell him to run, to stop, but she couldn't. He was changing from the boy she loved to her worst enemy and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Kate woke with a start, a scream in her mouth about to be let  loose. She clutched her blankets closer as she sat up in bed, swallowing the scream. It was just a nightmare, that was all.

Except, the thing was, it wasn't just a nightmare. That had actually happened, all of it. There was no twisting it to make it more horrible then it seemed. This was Kate's worst memory, pure and simple, being replayed in her dreams.

Thus happened more often then she'd like to admit. In fact, there was rarely a night that the nightmares did not come for her, causing her to wake up in tears, or ready to scream. There were several horrible nightmares, including many that were fictional renderings of her siblings' pain, but this nightmare was the most common and effective one, perhaps because it was all true.

Kate shivered. It was early November and there was a constant chill in the air. It had been three or four months since the war had ended and the books had been destroyed. And since then, many things had changed, not just the weather.

For starters, Kate and her siblings had to adjust to the nightmares. Out of all of them, Michael had it best. His dark dreams had been vehement for weeks, causing Kate to have to sit with him until he was able to fall back asleep, but had finally begun fading, meaning most nights the middle Wibberly got a good rest. Emma had more frequent nightmares that were still plaguing her, particularly horrible dreams about Gabriel. Usually when she got these dreams she screamed out for Kate, who knew how to wake her sister up and calm her down. As for Kate, she had the worst nightmares and unlike with her siblings, hers showed no sign of subsiding. So all she could do was cope the best she could.

Then there were their parents. Kate knew, she really did, that they were trying their very best. But that didn't mean they didn't frustrate Kate so.

Richard and Clare clearly did care about their children and wanted them to heal. But they didn't seem to understand that Michael and Emma were not healing, not in the way their parents wanted them to. Where Richard and Clare wanted a normal life in this normal neighborhood and for the whole family to forget about magic for the rest of their ordinary lives, the children missed the magical world they had become part of.

Her parents couldn't see it, but Kate could. She could see how Emma couldn't settle into an ordinary lifestyle and rhythm, she could see her sister's desire to explore, to become stronger, to be a warrior like her dead mentor, Gabriel. And she could see how Michael was missing the magical world so much. He clearly had so much more he wanted to learn about its many aspects, and he was missing all the dear friends he had made, from King Robbie to Wilamena. Writing long letters was simply not enough for him.

Kate really did understand why her parents wanted to leave magic behind forever. But that was the exact opposite of what Michael and Emma wanted. They had found their calling in magic, it, and the friends it had brought them, had made the children the wonderful people they were now. They were stronger and wiser then so many, or they would be, once their broken hearts mended properly. But they couldn't do that if they had to keep pretending everything was ordinary to fulfill their mother and father's dreams of an everyday life.

Another thing about this new normal that drove Kate slightly insane was that sometimes her parents just had no clue what they were doing. They didn't know Michael and Emma and how to best fulfill their needs, and they didn't seem to want to ask their kids for help. Instead they insisted on figuring things out on their own, which wasn't going anywhere and wasn't good for Michael and Emma.