Lacey groped for the magic that the Queen wanted to take from her. It wasn’t her magic. It didn’t belong to either of them. It was the magic of a world that neither of them belonged in. Lacey could have thrown all that magic at the Queen, but why? It was what they’d been doing all along. The Queen threw magic like she threw words, like a vicious tennis match that could never end this way.

The rain began to bleed as Lacey fell to her knees. The White Wolf, careless of the pain of the magic-infused rain that pelted him as readily the Queen’s army, knelt in the slurping mud at her side. Rather than weaken Lacey’s magic, the sadness bloomed it, echoing her sobs into thunder, coughing up each hiccupping cry into lightning that finally broke over her emotions and wrung them out.

The rain fell in bloody, muddy drops over the stalemate their emotional pain wreaked over the hills of this world. Lacey couldn’t remain here and perpetuate the conflict, but if she left, it would mean the very end of the wolves and the other animal races. How was this different than the drudgery of her everyday life? She went to work to pay the bills. She went to school to try to make more money to cover more of the bills that, no matter how hard she worked, she’d never be able to completely escape. And in the little time after that, she napped by the bedside of the only person who had never left her. The cycle might have been less magical at home, but it was still an endless volley of give and take.

Lacey studied the magic even as they battered one another on a battlefield that existed only to allow the Queen to throw her tantrum. The armies were useless as they huddled behind shields and walls. Lacey could see that she was throwing her own version of a tantrum too, expressing all her hurt and abandonment issues in the form of destruction that was as useless as the words they’d thrown at each other. It had to end. There had to be a way to stop it, but Lacey couldn’t see it. As long as she and her mother existed, they would be forced to spearhead a battle that didn’t, and never should have, concerned them.

Nothing would work unless both she and her mother were removed from the equation. Even a truce was impossible with the way her mother held to the past mistakes of wolves that weren’t even alive anymore. Lacey couldn’t leave the wolves to their inevitable genocide, and her mother wouldn’t cease looking for reparations. They would both need to leave, but how could she convince her mother to do that? How did one convince someone of anything when they were so entrenched in pain?

Lacey’s emotional pain was raw and throbbing, allowing her all sorts of control over magic that her mother had had a decade to practice. All she could do was fight back, but was that true? What if she built a wall of magic between the two races? She had built a wall around her heart before. It had kept her from the relationships that might have hurt her in the end, but was that really a solution? She could split the earth and leave a canyon so wide that no one would try to cross it, but she had done that with her emotions too and it hadn’t made her better.

The White Wolf sat beside her through the battle, his head bowed to the power two strangers flung at each other. His hand remained firm and gentle on hers. It was almost like he was in prayer, he and his clan born down to a place from which none of them could rise. As futile as all of it was, she couldn’t leave him to be decimated by the pettiness of powerful people.

Whether she built a wall or she created a gap of miles of earth between the wolves and the goblins, it was still only a temporary solution. The eyes of the goblin elites shone with the same hatred that was creased into her mother’s face. They were raised in hate and knew nothing else. Lacey wanted nothing more than to broker some kind of peace, but faces of hate let her know that peace was impossible. How did one break through that wall?

“What would it take?” Lacey called to her mother.

“More than you have,” the Goblin Queen declared, and a full squad grunted agreement.

“For peace,” Lacey groaned out, waves of mud answering her to fling uselessly against the Queen’s shield. “What would it take to broker peace?”

“I’m not interested,” the Queen grit out, her magic only capable of keeping up the shield as Lacey battered against it.

“There must be something you want,” Lacey cried out, her focus on the faces of the White Wolf’s army.

Bedraggled, they leaned against their side of wall and each other, their heads barely able to stay low enough to avoid the occasional crooked arrows that were still arcing up over the Queen’s shield. Graham’s stiff chin. Poe’s sympathetic eyes mirroring his leader’s hopelessness, locked on the White Wolf’s bowed head. Smitty’s hands clutching the hilt of the cleaver. The smell of blood and mud mixing on a battleground so saturated with hate that it held the pall of death and destruction even without the players that played out their roles because it was what they did to survive.

Lacey could feel the goblin and wolf and animal blood that resonated in the earth. Whatever fantasy she’d chased through the portal, it was not more responsibility, especially with that responsibility seeming more heavy than she could hold. The White Wolf and the way his head was bowed reminded her that he hadn’t brought her here for a battle. He’d brought her here to end the battles.

If they’d been in a different place, one without her mother’s hate, that little snag of her heart might have led to the fantasies of her grandmother’s stories. The White Wolf could have charmed her. He had charmed her, and she was smitten. It was an odd thought since she hadn’t thought herself capable, but there was something in his noble bearing that was tempered with a quick wit, easy smile, and an ability to shlep off the tragedy that was his life to live in the moments between emergencies.

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Lacey had never known that was possible, but she felt she should have. There was work and school and the hospital drudgery. However, there was also the smile of Ms. Clara when she had an extra coupon at the checkout. There was the touch of a nurse’s hand on her shoulder. There was hot chocolate and the music she listened to on the walk home from the hospital.

There were moments in Lacey’s life where she could choose to live instead of just exist. She could tell Ms. Clara a joke on the days she was too broke to buy that little treat that the coupons allowed. She could dance to the music instead of trudging home, hunched over like it was raining all the time. She could spend an extra dollar to buy a treat for herself and then share it with someone. The bill collectors were as mad about late payments on a hundred dollars as they were for ninety-nine. That dollar didn’t matter much to them, but it could change everything for her.

The White Wolf spent his days and nights fighting a war and still found time for an ale, even if it was laced with a potion. The ale hadn’t been necessary, but he’d tempered the bitter pill of distrust with the camaraderie of a drink together. He’d taken a moment in the battle to touch her hand, hand her a fruit, smile. It wasn’t much but it was more than she’d done most of her life of building walls against getting hurt.

“There must be something you want that would bring peace,” Lacey hammered at her mother again.

“Why!” she spat back. “Are you getting tired? Are you ready to quit?”

“Tired?” Lacey would have wiped away tears but with the rain, it wouldn’t have mattered. “I am tired. I’m tired on fighting and we only just started. Aren’t you tired after a dozen years?”

“Never,” came the reply that Lacey dreaded but expected. “All I have to do is outlast your weakness.”

Lacey was pretty sure that the Queen’s hatred could last forever. Could Lacey’s compassion outlast it? Is it how she wanted to spend the rest of her life? She didn’t want to do that any more than she wanted to return to the day-to-day garbage of her old life. Lacey had always felt trapped, but this was a new level of it. Here she had access to magic that reflected her every emotion with the power to halt armies in their tracks and she was still stuck? What did she want? Escape is what she wanted.

“Get over yourself!” Lacey screamed in frustration, but then slumped next to the White Wolf.

The spark of that desire for escape grew in her mind and the magic grew with it. The wisp of hope was enough to distract Lacey from the fight and the wall was battered with the Queen’s entitlement. Lacey ignored the Queen, sending only a halfhearted response of thunder with half her mind. With the other half of her heart and mind, Lacey chased another escape. If escape had gotten her into this mess, maybe it could get her out.

It was just there, that spark. It whirled with black sparkles. It was a portal, and it was answering her call. Lacey studied it carefully to see if it was real or just a bit of imagining on her part. If she could summon a portal, then surely so could her mother. Why hadn’t she?

“I knew you’d wear down faster than me,” the Queen grit her teeth and stepped forward, her shield parting the river of mud.

Lacey let her come, only slightly slowing the Queen’s progress with splashes of mud that were more for show than effect. Lacey’s true concentration was on that swirling window of escape and hope.

“You’re just like her, your grandmother,” the Queen surged forward and several of the Wolf’s army flinched into drawing melee weapons. “Hopeless, weak little romantic! You have no chance against me.”

There was a chance. The swirl answered Lacey’s call, but as it came closer, the shudder of unease of the White Wolf’s army made Lacey look up. Before her was the window into the other world. She could see her grandmother lying on the hospital bed, the light from the window shining in on her beloved face. Lacey yearned to step through.

“Is that?” Poe gazed in awe at the circle that stood just an inch from Lacey’s knees.

The White Wolf stared at the circle as Lacey stared at him. His eyes were wide but pinched with hurt and a little fear. Did he truly believe that she was leaving him in these dire straits? Lacey thought, then berated herself. Did he have any reason to think otherwise? Lacey put a hand on his cheek and turned his face so that he could see her eyes. Would he understand her smile?

The laughter of the Goblin Queen broke their gaze. “Run, child,” she commanded, using a rock to throw it through Lacey’s portal. “This is perfect! Yes! Run! Go back to the woman you adore and leave me just like I left you. I didn’t want you here anyway!”

The rock that flew through the portal struck the hospital bed and Lacey flinched at the sound. It could have been worse, but it proved that Lacey still had little choice in it all, and she rolled her eyes to the heavens and fates that seemed set to leave her helpless in everything.

“I have to go,” Lacey told the White Wolf even as her heart tugged at the thought.

“Lacey,” his eyes pleaded, and she wondered how his opinion of her meant so much when she’d only just met him.

“Trust me,” she nodded her head and then rose to her feet.

Rather than enter the portal, Lacey brought it along behind her as she rose and walked toward the Queen. A play of emotions ran across the Queen’s face as it became apparent what Lacey planned. The fear that settled in her mother’s eyes didn’t soothe anything for her, but it didn’t stop her any more than her mother’s cruel words had done. Lacey swung first one and then the other leg over the wall, the White Wolf on her heels and his army on his. The Queen threw more magic into her shield and called for them to back away.

In that moment, the magic whispered to Lacey of secrets. It didn’t use words any more than words could command the magic. It used emotions and, in those emotions, the magic told Lacey that she would only have control of the portal while she was on this side of it. Once she passed through, the portal would close for good. She could save the wolves, but she’d have to leave for that to happen. Lacey took another step forward, the portal swinging in front of her to make the threat clear to all involved.

The portal passed easily through the Goblin Queen’s shield, but the Queen, in her hubris, waited too long to turn and run. Even as she gathered huge swathes of red and white velvet into her arms to free her legs to run, the portal rotated in anticipation of her flight.

“I’ll kill you!” was the screeching sound that left the battlefield.