A Midwinter Fantasy by L. J. McDonald, Leanna Renee Hieber, Helen Scott Taylor

her young self and her current self, and she truly saw him, completely, for the first time. With clarion focus she knew that he would never be second-best. He was, simply,
best
. For her, he always had been.
    Her huddled heart exploded with joy. Her body shifted, expanded; her every muscle, so tightly clenched in quivering fists, finally let go. The transformation was whole and glorious, a revelation that could never be undone, a knowledge so sure that it put all other pain in distant shadow. Her loveof Alexi had no power here. She was broken free from the unwitting spell he’d never intended to cast. The gentle heart before her, fiercely passionate for nothing but her, had overcome all. It was the greatest power yet seen in all manner of strange in her life of spectral mayhem.
    She turned to Jane in wonder, and the friends shared a beautiful, moved silence. Rebecca saw the new light in her eyes reflected in Jane’s.
    “Now,” her friend pressed. “The last question. Do you forgive yourself for the past?”
    Rebecca faltered, the word “forgive” an impossible obstacle. She felt the chill of shadow pierce her again, finding that hollow, tender place and ripping the fresh stitches. She groaned, a terrible swinging pendulum in the pit of her heart, bloodied and razor sharp. Oh, to feel such joy, only to regress again and feel it ripped away . . . The scene on Westminster faded, and she was again in grey shadow.
    Jane was talking again, giving words of reassurance to again turn the tide. Rebecca couldn’t hear her. The shadows encircled them both, and they seemed too powerful. These shadows didn’t think she deserved a second chance; they wanted her a wasting form, unable to pass on, doomed for eternal regrets. Why had she made so many mistakes? Why had she wasted all the time she’d been given with Michael? What was left for her when so much time had passed and the Grand Work was done? She began to weep.
    Her shoulders felt a gentle pressure. Jane held her. But Rebecca still could not hear her. She saw the hideous form of the defeated Whisper-world lord, Darkness, a form of bones and rot, a force comprised of everything one wished humanity could just leave behind. Rebecca saw him in her mind’s eye, in that serpents’ nest within her; reassembling.Digit by digit, vertebrae by vertebrae. Eyes of hellfire and a tongue of damnation.
    But she recalled that she had life yet to live. She had the power to retaliate, just like when her feet were on the bridge’s edge. She did not want Darkness, so recently torn apart, to so easily be put back together. Not by the mere regrets of her weak, mortal heart. She did not want Darkness to win her as a bride. She would not
let
Darkness win her.
    “I reject thee . . .” she murmured to shadow.
    She wanted the bright hearth of Michael’s heart. She would be lured, fooled and seduced by misery no longer. Jane was right: the heavens had made no mistakes. Darkness only wanted her to think so.
    “And now I see,” Rebecca murmured. “Forgiveness.”
    And suddenly everything was light.

Chapter Nine
    Percy maintained her position in the Athens foyer and watched how the shadow shapes responded to her light through the portal before her, how she curbed them. This was her power, her gift, and it had saved them all once before. While it hurt, dearly, to let it burn, it was worth the discomfort to know that she could turn tides, that so long as she focused, she could strike back and declaw misery’s talons.
    “Oh, Percy, look how it worsens,” Constance murmured, bobbing in the air beside her. “The headmistress chose correctly, at least I think, but it’s not over.”
    The whole vast room had grown dark over the course of the journey. There were terrible murmurs and whispers through the portal hung like a curtain in the middle of the foyer, seeping out into their mortal reality, and the blood chilled in Percy’s veins. She rushed forward to its very edge, staring in, straining to