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“Webby – hey, Pink, wake up. Wake up.”
Webby’s eyes snapped open, and as she lay there gasping for breath in the darkness, she slowly realized that she and Lena were both in her attic bed, and that both of her hands were clutching the front of Lena’s nightgown, and that for once it was she who had woken Lena up in the middle of the night, rather than the other way around.
“S-Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. Bad dream.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
Lena paused for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. She really wasn’t used to being on the other end of this interaction.
She settled on rubbing Webby’s back with one hand and saying, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Webby shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
“Whatever’s scary enough to have the fearless Webby Vanderquack playing the part of ‘Lena’ tonight can’t be nothing.”
Webby was quiet for a while. Lena kept rubbing her back in gentle circles. Webby had done it for her, once, during a two-in-the-morning panic attack, and it had worked to calm Lena down. Maybe it would help Webby, too.
“Why did Magica say you were a shadow?”
Lena’s hand froze on Webby’s back. Webby tilted her head back to look at her face.
“Lena?”
But Lena’s gaze was somewhere far away...
Lena finally managed to stumble free of the crowd, and she stood there for a few moments, panting. Even this far away from the stage, she could feel the vibrations from the music coming through the dirt ground and into her feet. No wonder those stagehands she snuck in with had been wearing earplugs. Ordinarily a concert this big would be the perfect kind of overstimulation, enough light and noise and chaos to drown out everything she didn’t want to think about. But for some reason, tonight, she couldn’t stand it.
She shivered. A moment ago she’d been stifled and sweating, but now it was like a shard of ice had stuck itself under her heart. What was wrong with her? Was she sick? Or was this a side effect of – but no, she wasn’t thinking about that. She was having a good time, out on the town, all alone in Europe with no teachers, foster parents, or other assholes to worry about, free, finally free…
There it was again. That laughter. It was quieter than the Featherweights’ backing music and the Parisian concert crowd, and yet she heard it clearly, as if it were louder than everything. The laughter had followed her here, all the way from Italy – no, no, she wasn’t thinking about Italy. Lena put her hands over her ears, and then put them down to hug herself, because she was shivering again.
Her eyes fell on a lump of fabric on the ground near a row of portable toilets. She stepped over and picked it up. It was a grey striped sweater. Someone must have discarded it in the heat of the crowd. Lena pulled it over her head; it was baggy, the sleeves just a bit too long for her arms, but at least it was warm. She pushed the sleeves up and stepped into one of the toilets, latching the door behind her. It stunk in there, but at least it was a little warmer, and a little farther removed from the noise.
There was a pale light installed on the ceiling of the narrow toilet stall, probably to help keep drunk concertgoers from missing the bowl in the dark. It turned everything around her a weird shade of green, and twisted the shadows into weird shapes, the shadows from the doorlatch and the hand sanitizer dispenser and her own shadow on the wall.
As she watched, her shadow continued to twist, and lengthen, until it wasn’t hers anymore. It was someone else’s. And that someone else grinned at her.
“Hello again,” it said. “Having fun on your little Tour de France?”
“Go away,” Lena said, climbing up onto the toilet seat, as though it would distance her feet from the base of that shadow. It didn’t, of course, but she crouched there on the seat anyway.
“I can’t,” said the shadow. “Surely you’ve realized it by now. We’re in this together. And that’s just the way it should be. Short of me having my actual body back, of course, but we can’t always get what we want, now can we?”
“Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any part of it,” said Lena.
“Oh really?” The shadow had no eyebrows to lift, but its tone and posture were clear enough. “Then why did you come all the way to Mount Vesuvius to find me? You ran away from home, you crossed oceans, and you performed a tricky little ritual to summon me back from the Shadow Realm – shoddily performed, I might add, what do they teach you in school these days? But why would you go to all that effort, if you didn’t want me around?”
Lena covered her ears, though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. “Maybe I changed my mind,” she said.
“Then why did you keep the amulet?”
Lena opened her mouth to deny it, and then closed it again. What was the point of lying? The shadow seemed to know everything. Of course it knew that the purple amulet was tucked under her shirt, still hanging from her neck, as it had been since she found it on the volcano.
She should have thrown it in the Mediterranean. Or the canals. Or the Seine. She’d thought about doing so every time she passed a body of water, but she hadn’t.
Why hadn’t she?
“Because you knew it wouldn’t make a difference,” said the shadow. Could it – she – read her mind, or was it just a good guesser? “Even if you wanted to – what did you say your name was? Lena? ‘I’m Lena, I’m your niece,’ isn’t that what you said?”
“Shut up.”
“I wasn’t aware I had any family out there anymore. No family that mattered. Not that you matter, of course, you’re mostly useless. But you know we’re connected. You can feel it. You’re meant to serve me. You’re here to be my little shadow.”
“You’re the shadow, not me!” said Lena.
“Are you sure?” Magica de Spell’s voice lowered into a sinister hiss. The other shadows around Lena began to lengthen, filling the tiny space in the portable toilet.
“No,” she gasped. “Please.”
“Are you quite sure?” Magica said again. “Because I have some friends on the other side who are so very eager to see you again. They’ve certainly accepted you as one of their own, don’t you agree?”
Lena squeezed her eyes shut and curled tighter into herself, teetering dangerously on the toilet seat. They were grabbing at her, whispering at her, trying to pull her back down to that horrible flat place – she’d just finished the spell, just invoked her aunt’s name, just had barely enough time to wonder if it had worked before her own shadow had risen up from the ground and thrown her down into somewhere else, somewhere awful, and it had stood over her and laughed and laughed and laughed…
“Stop. Please stop. Make it stop!”
Silence, except for the dulled music and cheers outside the stall. Lena slowly opened her eyes, slowly uncoiled herself. The shadows were gone, besides the small shapes that they ought to be. Magica was gone. Just like that first time, on the volcano, she was being dragged downwards and downwards and just when she had really begun to panic – she was back, and alone.
Was it a trick? Was she being toyed with? Or was this the limit of how long Magica de Spell could manifest, in her current tenebrous state?
Lena put her hand up to the chain around her neck, hidden beneath two layers of clothing. She should pull it off and shove it down the toilet, and then run, run as fast and as far as she could.
But she had come so far. Could she really give up the first link she had ever found to her past? The evidence of the first real, serious magic she ever performed? It had felt good, hadn’t it, to speak her desires to the world, and have them fulfilled?
On the other hand… she couldn’t live with those things grabbing at her forever. What kind of freedom was that?
She pulled the chain out from under her shirt and up over her head, hesitating for just a moment longer before peeling open her fingers and letting the amulet fall to the plastic floor with a dull thud.
Lena stepped down from the toilet seat, kicking the amulet behind her as she opened the stall door.
The music washed over her again, and the light from the spotlights as well, casting her shadow across the dirt –
– and it snatched up at her with fingers like black claws.
Lena jumped backwards, falling back into the portable toilet once more.
“You think I’m in the amulet?” the shadow cackled. “Oh, my dumb, dumb little Lena… I’m not going anywhere. You summoned me, remember. You want me here. And you’re going to need that amulet to help me get what I want.”
“Wh-What do you want?” Lena stammered. The shadow’s grin widened, without any joy.
“I want my body back,” it said. “I want my power back. Most of all, I want revenge against the one who took everything from me – Scrooge McDuck! And you’re going to help me get it.”
Lena closed her eyes. Maybe if she pinched herself hard enough, she’d wake up back in that miserable boarding school. Or in the house before that. Or the apartment before that. Or… she couldn’t decide where the nightmare began. It had been her entire life, really.
“Now, Lena…” Magica’s voice was very close to her ear, and Lena couldn’t help but flinch. “Don’t be difficult. You know you’re meant to serve me. And if you’re a good little girl, I’ll even make it worth your while. Just say what you want. When I’m at my full power once more, I’ll see to it all. It’s more than you deserve, but I’m in a generous mood tonight.”
Lena kept her eyes shut.
“All I want is to be free,” she said. “If I do what you want, if I help you get your revenge… then you’ll go away? You’ll give me my freedom?”
She could practically feel the shadow smile. “If that is your dark heart’s fondest desire, then it will be done.”
Lena took a deep breath, and she reached an arm back across the floor, her fingers finding the chain of the amulet and curling around it.
“Deal.”
“Lena?”
Lena blinked, and shook herself, snapping back to the here-and-now. “Uh. My turn to say sorry? I guess I zoned out for a bit.”
“If that was a bad question, like a too-invasive question or a bringing-up-bad-memories question, you don’t have to answer,” Webby said quickly. “I mean it’s not like you need a reason to not answer, you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer, I just –”
“It’s fine, Pink. You’re fine.”
Lena took in a deep breath and let it out again.
“Magica de Spell… she tells you what she wants you to believe about the world,” she explained. “That’s where she’s really dangerous. Beyond the sorcery and shadow magic. She tells you something false, but in just the right way that it gets in your head and sticks there. She did that to me, a lot. Telling me that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t real, that I wanted to help her, that I was made to help her…”
“I’m going to kill her someday,” said Webby, as matter-of-factly as if she were saying it was supposed to rain the next day, though she wrapped her arms a little more tightly around Lena.
“Be my guest.” Lena returned the hug. “Of course she’d try to do that to you, too, telling you I was just a shadow. She probably thought it’d give her an edge in the fight, if you believed her.”
“I didn’t believe her,” said Webby. “Not for a second… though I guess a bit of it got stuck in whatever part of the brain dreams come from anyway.”
Then she remembered that she wasn’t going to tell Lena what happened in her dream, and she shut her mouth.
“It’s not your fault,” said Lena.
“I know. It isn’t yours, either.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I know.”