“Not it,” Grandma and I called in almost perfect unison.

“Not it,” Mom cried a fraction of a second later, followed by an annoyed swear. I heard her moving across the hardwood toward the front door as I continued to my room. Grandma cackled like a cartoon villain, and I could just picture her snuggling deeper into the couch.

Just as my hand closed around my doorknob, a cacophony of sounds erupted from downstairs—a boom and a crash, the sound of something shattering, a scream of rage and fear.

“What the…” I murmured, allowing my voice to trail off. I turned on my heel, loose hair whipping around me in a flame-colored blur, and ran back down the hall toward the top of the stairs. I leaned over the banister, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on.

From my vantage point, I had a view of most of the living room, but only a fraction of the mudroom. I could hear the sounds of struggle coming from beyond the dividing wall, but couldn’t see what was happening. The smell of ozone was in the air—the pungent chlorine-like smell of Magic. Capital M. This wasn’t some simple spell for cooling coffee or finding a lost key. This was big.

“Mom!” I could hear my mother shouting from the mudroom. “Go!”

Several things happened at once.

The shouting downstairs intensified, growing louder as more voices added to the chaos. It was as if thunder roared through the very house, shaking the foundations. In the same moment, my grandma had leapt over the back of the couch, vaulting like some kind of Olympic athlete and landed with the grace of a cat on the other side. By contrast, I clung to the railing in a desperate attempt to keep my footing.

“Mom?” I called out, panic rising in my voice. Was she in danger? Was she hurt? What exactly was going on?

Whatever it was, I had to make sure she was okay and help her if I could. I started for the staircase, but just as I placed my foot on the top step, my grandma dashed toward the staircase. I reeled back as Grandma took the steps two and three at a time.

I could still hear the banging and crashing of whatever was happening in the mudroom, but even when I strained my neck, I couldn’t see what was happening.

“Grandma?” I gasped as she reached the second landing. “What’s—”

Below, Mom screamed. My words caught in my throat. A flash of motion below caught my eye. I watched as my mother flew bodily out of the mudroom and into the living room. She landed hard against the back of the sofa which moved across the floor with a sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Mom let out a grunt, still conscious—still alive.

I opened my mouth to call for her, but Grandma slapped a hand over my mouth and dragged me toward the back of the house, her grip like a metal vice.

“Keep low and keep quiet,” she hissed into my ear.

My blood froze in my veins. I’d never heard her so serious, so…angry. I did as I was told, too afraid to argue. Grandma closed her eyes briefly and made a motion like tossing a blanket onto a bed to make it. I felt an invisible weight settle around my shoulders as the world around me became a little duller, as though some of the color had been leached out. A reluctance spell. It wouldn’t make us invisible or anything, but it would make whoever was in our house less likely to notice us—less inclined to look in our direction.

I could hear them moving downstairs as grandma and I crept toward her bedroom. Four voices. Two masculine, one feminine, and one belonging to my mother. They were arguing over the sounds of blows—fists hitting flesh like a slab of meeting hitting a marble counter.

Please be all right, please be all right, please be all right, I chanted over and over in my mind like a litany.

After what felt like an eternity, we made it to my grandma’s bedroom. I stepped through the open doorway and pressed myself against the wall, trying to make myself small as Grandma twisted the knob of her door with agonizing slowness. All the while, I could hear shouting downstairs. The stench of Magic was overwhelming, crackling through the air as my mother punctuated it with screams of something between rage and fear. Wood splintered, and an acrid, smoky aroma tinged the chemical scent of Magic.

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Grandma pressed her door into the frame, releasing the knob slowly, silently. The moment she did, the smells and sounds from downstairs dampened, as if they existed only on the television playing in the living room. Moving quickly again, she engaged the lock and grabbed my hand again, pulling me toward her closet.

“Grandma, what’s going on?” I asked, unashamed of the quiver in my voice. I was damn scared and I didn’t care if she knew it. “Is mom okay?”

She didn’t answer me. Instead, she scrambled to the back of her closet and pushed against the wall. I opened my mouth to ask what she was doing, when the wall moved. A square section of drywall depressed then slid aside revealing a crawl space.

“Is that a hidden room?” I gasped, blinking.

“Amber, listen to me very closely,” Grandma said, taking me by the shoulders. Her grip was like ice, mirroring the hard look in her normally soft, kind eyes.

“Those people down there are Witch Hunters—”

“—Witch Hunters? But—”

“Just listen! Please. Your mom is keeping them busy, but we don’t have much time. They’re here because we have something they want. I…I have something they want.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t have time to explain, honey. For now, just repeat after me: magicae in omnibus nobis.”

“Magicae in omnibus nobis?”

Grandma’s shoulders visibly relaxed, her expression melting into the soft and compassionate face I knew. Slowly, she began speaking, the words flowing into one another like water flowing downhill. The words seemed to vibrate through the air, becoming corporeal, bringing with them the smell of Magic unlike any I had known before.

As she spoke, the words flowed around us, not quite visible, but there all the same.

“What is—” I began to ask, but the words came at me with a sudden rush. I threw my hands up but it was useless. Whatever scream I might have given died on my lips as the words pushed into my skin. I didn’t have time to expect it to hurt. Each word and syllable pressed into me with physical sensation, melting beneath my skin and into my blood, into my bones. They seeped honey-like into everything that was me, filling cracks and empty places I never knew existed until I felt full. Whole.

Wave after wave crashed into me—through me—until I was filled with and surrounded by a nameless sensation. I felt something tighten in my chest. My breath hitched painfully as the air was pushed from my lungs. I gasped, trying to catch breath that wouldn’t come. My chest felt as if it were collapsing. Ribs tightening to drive the breath from my body. It felt like drowning. It felt like dying. My face burned with the strain of it as blood rushed to the surface, panicked by the lack of oxygen. I felt my eyes water, and tears roll down my puckered face. I was suffocating, my body screaming out for air.

I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t so much as think the word ‘breathe.’ I was trapped—frozen in an eternal second of suffering. I was not of my own mind at that moment. Even if I had been, I doubted I could have given name or voice to what I was feeling. Pleasure fell short. Pain was too kind. It was everything and nothing. It was light. It was darkness. It was harmony and balance, but also discord and madness.

Magic. Power. Knowledge. All these things and more.

I felt full to bursting, as though the words were somehow replacing what I had been before—pushing me out of my own skin.

Something deep inside me gave way.

It was like a heavy bolt falling out of a lock—I felt it in the clenching of my solar plexus, in the pressure beneath my sternum, in my chest, in my hands. Then, suddenly, the pressure was gone. Weight after weight lifted off of me—both without and within my body. Tension eased out of my neck and shoulders, pain evaporated from the crown of my head and brow.

My bones vibrated with the power coursing through me, marrow humming, blood signing. I was alive in ways I had never before dreamed. I could feel the world around me, not just as a being passing through it, but as a part of it.

My flesh was the flesh of the Earth, my blood the Fire beneath the Earth’s crust, my tears the Water of life, my breath the Air through the trees.

Light flooded my vision, my thoughts, my senses until I was indistinguishable from it. Bliss washed over me. I was adrift on a current of pleasure and exhaustion. Feeling it was the right thing to do, I let the current take me, releasing myself from my inhibitions, my fears, my doubts, my anxiety.

Even my flesh.

I was no longer Amber Perkins.

I was something more.

I fell forward, my body limp, and into the embrace of my grandma. Somehow, she seemed smaller. Everything did. I tried to speak with tongue as solid as honey. Little spasms of something wonderful coiled and uncoiled in my belly. It sparked at my mouth, my fingertips, my hair like static electricity.

“You did so well,” Grandma cooed, stroking my hair. Her voice was quiet, gentle as a lullaby. Distantly, I was aware of her coaxing me into the crawl space. My mind was too preoccupied with the way the stale air in the crawl space felt against my skin, the way every fleck of dust felt as it touched me or entered my lungs, or the feeling of the splintered wood beneath my hands and bare knees.

“Stay in here until we come for you,” my grandma instructed. “We’ll explain everything.”

Weary in a way I never imagined possible, I lay down. Grandma smiled at me, and closed the secret panel to her crawl space.

I sighed and shut my eyes. All the world dropped dead.