you rudimentary spells. You didn’t need much help though. You could already influence things around you. When Eliza left, your powers dissipated. It was almost as if the two of you were connected and you couldn’t do much magic without her.”
“So now that I’m here with her, are my powers going to come back to me?”
“We broke your blood bond a long time ago. We would have to reconnect you for that to happen.”
Zoë opens her mouth to speak, but her mother holds her palm up in the air toward her. “And before you say anything, I will not put you in danger by doing that. This is not the time for that to happen.”
A strange vibration rumbles under my feet and spreads through my body. “What is that? Do you feel that?” I ask, my voice quivering.
“It is time for us to say goodbye,” Zoë’s mother replies. “Please focus your attention on the task at hand and do not worry about Eliza until after your return. This is too important.”
Everything disappears and I am thrown back into my body. My eyes fly open and I gasp for air. Panic floods me. I claw at the twine, trying desperately to rip it off my wrist, wanting nothing more than to run outside for air. “Emma!” Eliza calls to me. I barely hear her. She speaks louder, “Emma, stop! Emma, look at me. I can help you.”
Zoë grabs my hand to try to calm me down. Eliza’s palms rest on my cheeks. She quickly mutters words in a language I don’t know. “Calma e paz vir sobre vós. Demos e medo te deixar. Deixe a súa luz protexe-lo sempre.”
Warmth spreads through me, like a light is shining from within my body. My muscles are forced to relax and my anxiety slowly slips away. As my breathing methodically slows, I lift my eyes to Eliza’s. “You okay?” she asks.
I nod. “I’ll remove the twine now.”
“Why did that happen?” Zoë asks.
“Could be a few different things. One, she doesn’t have magic. Two, she’s been cursed into immortality for three hundred plus years and has a decent amount of tracking on her. Or three, whoever is tracking her found her and was close to capturing her.”
I swallow hard.
“So what did you say, when you calmed her down, or whatever you did?”
“I released her demons, whatever they may be. Put an orb of protection around her.”
Eliza carefully unwinds the twine in the same thoughtful manner that she placed it on our wrists with, never missing a beat in the conversation. “I’m going to cut this binding twine into smaller pieces and wrap them individually around your wrists. I’ll also enchant them so that nobody can see them besides the two of you. Nobody will know they exist unless you tell them. Leave them on, all the time. They’ll keep you linked, so you will never be separated.”
She starts with Zoë’s wrist. She places the entire piece of twine around her wrist and ties it off with a figure eight knot, before trimming the twine and moving to my wrist. “Why the figure eight?” I ask.
“It’s not really an eight. It’s an infinity symbol. It’s representational.”
“Representational of what?”
“Your bond. No beginning. No end.”
After she finishes knotting both of our bracelets, she takes the remaining twine and somehow manages to loop and twist the remaining twine into an elaborate ring sized hoop that she slides onto her left thumb. “Now I am linked to the both of you so I can offer you more protection. How much, I don’t know. I won’t have any way of knowing until it becomes necessary to try to protect you. So, do your best to stay out of trouble.”
“Did you hear everything we talked about with Mom?” Zoë asks Eliza, twisting the twine bracelet over her wrist.
She hesitates a moment before answering. “I did.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what? Create you?”
“Yes.”
She sighs deeply and once again moves around the room collecting items while she talks. “I knew I couldn’t stay. They were already talking with the elders about how to control me. Their magic wasn’t strong enough. They were scared. No matter what they did, they had no control over me. They pulled me out of school when I was twelve. I was a bit… destructive. It was pretty much all downhill from there. When I was fifteen I knew that I would have to leave. I couldn’t leave them alone though; they wouldn’t have survived. So I gave them the