"Whose idea was that? I don't remember anything about grape soda-or even this fountain-being in the fairy garden in your backyard."
Marji shrugged, but Ginny was full of information.
"Thomas asked us what we wanted and Marji said, 'Fairy garden'-"
Marji's brow furrowed.
"I did not."
"Did, too," Ginny crowed.
"I said," Marji corrected, "that I didn't think he could make a fairy garden like the one at our house, and then he did."
"That's what I said."
Marji rolled her eyes at Ginny-and it was such a specific gesture, the look of utter disdain for a sibling, that it made Lizbeth miss her older brother. She didn't know what Weir would think about all this. Or what he would have to say when she was able to go home again. He would be mad, of course, angry she'd gone away and left him in a catacomb in Rome. She'd have a lot of explaining to do: why she'd taken off, how she'd been compelled by magic-and the power of the trapped souls of the dead Dream Keepers she and Daniela had found in the catacombs-to go to that awful monolith of rock in the Ural Mountains and use the power of the Blood Moon to telegraph her dream of magic to an unwitting human world.
It was all unbelievable to her-and she was the witch. She knew about strange and unbelievable things . . . had seen stuff that was both terrifying and awe-inspiring. She was the last blood sister of her kind, a Dream Keeper (when almost no others remained) who until recently had been mute and maimed, damaged beyond all reason by the death of her mother and her forced incarceration in a mental institution by the cruel selfishness of her father.
God, her life sounded like a soap opera . . . and maybe it was.
"-he said Mama was gone . . ." Lizbeth had gotten lost in her thoughts and had missed some of what Ginny was saying.
"Did he say how?"
The little girl shook her head, her usually tan complexion ashen.
"He just said she was gone," Marji added, picking at her thumbnail.
"So maybe he just meant that, literally, your mom had gone somewhere."
Marji frowned and then her lower lip curled as she tried not to cry.
"No, he said our grandma and our aunties were dead. That Mama was gone, too."
A tear plopped onto Marji's cheek, and Ginny reached out and took her sister's hand.
"It's okay, Marji."
Marji shook her head.
"No, it's not," she sobbed. "It's not okay and it will never be okay again."
She dropped her chin to her chest and cried in earnest, her shoulders shaking as she took in deep, wheezing breaths. This upset Ginny, who until that point had been relatively calm. She looked up at Lizbeth, her own lip trembling and pronounced: "LB will fix it."
Lizbeth was surprised. If what the girls said was true, she didn't think anyone could fix this mess. Ginny's words were like a balm on her sister's nerves, and slowly Marji began to calm down. Her face was still pale and her eyes red-rimmed, but she'd stopped hyperventilating.
"You will?" she asked Lizbeth, eyebrows shooting up in a hopeful smile.
Lizbeth didn't know what to do. She hated lying to the girls, but she couldn't bear to see them so distraught. The words she settled on were vague enough that she didn't feel too terrible saying them.
"I will do everything in my power to fix what I can."
Ginny caught her older sister's eye. Marji took a deep breath and nodded.
"Okay," she said, her voice shaky as she held Ginny's hand. "We believe you."
And that was all it took.
• • •
It was different being in the dreamlands this time. She wasn't just visiting them in her sleep (like she'd always done before). She was now physically here-she and the girls-brought by the two odd brothers from another universe who seemed to know just how exactly to manipulate the dreamlands to do their bidding. It was exhilarating. She felt more alive, the colors around her were more vivid, the heat from the sun warmer . . . it was like being in a video-game version of normal reality.
They'd stayed in the fairy garden for a long time, Ginny half in Lizbeth's lap and Marji leaning against Lizbeth's shoulder. It had gotten toastier as they'd rested beside the fountain, the fog lifting as the sky burst into a cloudless neon blue-and the girls had fallen asleep.
One minute Ginny was quietly prattling on about how fairies only ate honey and flower nectar, and then there was silence. Lizbeth let her own eyes close, the sun's heat spreading across her scalp and face, down her shoulders and torso, until she was floating in a sea of golden warmth. She sat in the silence for a while, her mind adrift in a hazy fog of exhaustion, until a long shadow cut across her face, blocking the sun. She lazily opened her eyes, expecting to see Tem standing above her. To her surprise, it was not him.