Shannon O'Reilly was bullied and everything his older sister wasn't. When his sister Sarah gives him a chance to change things through a single wish things don't go as planned.     I Wish: Book 5 Chapter 2 Fireworks By Amethyst

It was the screaming that snapped me out of my dazed state. It appeared that Rebecca had fallen asleep at some point and was having one hell of a nightmare, not that I could blame her after opening the cockpit to find something like Khinara and the Wraith of Aarianna standing by her mother’s dead body and her entrails all over the cockpit. I felt a sudden stab of guilt for making her go into that cockpit to keep us flying, who knew how that was going to affect her already delicate psyche.

I crawled over to where she was sprawled in the sand, shifting and whimpering in her sleep, and sat her up to put my arms around her. “Shh, everything is going to be okay,” I whispered as I held her tight. I wasn’t sure how though since we were stuck on a distant plane of existence, my friends were scattered to the four winds, I was alone with someone who hated my guts, and to top it off, I had no magick to draw on.

“No, this doesn’t change anything,” I told myself sternly. “We knew coming in that we’d probably be separated for a while once we got here and we still need to find one another and wherever Jalael the Serene is entombed. Okay, so there’s no ambient magick energy to draw on, and that definitely sucks, but the rules for magick are different on every Plane. Maybe here there’s a different way to gather and use magick energy, and I’m damn well going to find it.”

It was still dark, though the pair of moons were further along the night sky than before when Rebecca started to stir in my arms. It seemed that her nightmare had ended, or perhaps wasn’t as bad and she snuggled into my arms, and whispered, “M… Mom?”

I sighed and took a deep breath before saying as gently as I could, “I’m afraid not.”

Rebecca jerked away from me as if she’d been burned. “What the hell were you doing?!” she snapped.

“You were having a nightmare, I was trying to help,” I explained. I should have known she’d react like that.

“I don’t need your fucking help!” she screamed, turning away to look around us and once her eyes saw those twin moons she once again collapsed to the ground. “It… wasn’t a dream. Oh God, Mom…” She couldn’t seem to finish that sentence as I heard her sniffle and her shoulders started to shake as she cried.

I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder but stopped myself as I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how hard it was for you to see that and then keep the plane in the air but I know…”

She swiveled around to give me a red-faced glare of pure rage and loathing as she shoved me away. “You don’t know anything! You’re pretty and popular and perfect! I’ve seen the billboards, you’re Miss Divine, with the perfect fucking life! How could you possibly know what it’s like to lose your mother, to be in a trapped in a body that feels wrong, or to be treated like shit and bullied every fucking day for being different!”

I pushed her right back. “I have had it with your jealousy! I’ve tried being nice, I wanted to help you, but you see someone pretty or athletic and you automatically think they’re out to get you! You don’t know one single thing about me! I know what it feels like to lose a parent, both of mine died in a car accident three years ago! Three months ago, before I turned sixteen, I was a scrawny boy, bullied by the jocks, and the only person who gave a shit about me was my sister!”

“Bullshit! There’s no way that someone who looks like you were a boy three months ago! Hormones don’t act that fast, Miss Fashion Model!” Rebecca snarled.

“Magick, moron!” I snapped back in anger at being called a liar. “Think about what happened on the plane and take a good look at where we are and tell me that you can’t believe in it! On my birthday my sister gave me a magick candle and I wished to be like her so it turned me into a younger version of her and I’ve been stuck this way since! I never wanted to be a girl, and sure, the wish has helped me adapt and feel more comfortable but it felt like I was in hell at first! Every time someone told me how much I looked like Sarah it was like a knife twisting in my soul! And the only reason that I’m a model now was so I could help my sister’s career!”

Rebecca feigned wiping tears away, though I could tell that there were real ones there as she taunted. “Oh boo-hoo! Look at me, I’m just so hard done by. I make so much money just sitting in front of a camera and looking pretty, it’s so much work and I’ve had everything handed to me and I don’t have to lift a finger to help people who are really hurting.”

“Fuck you! Are you ever not a bitch?!” I shouted, barely resisting the powerful urge to slap her. “Modeling is hard work and I’ve been working my ass off! Not only do I have a job to do and school but I spend nearly every minute that I’m not doing those or training my magick hunting down Demons, trying to keep people safe, and prevent an invasion! I want to be able to help everyone but I can’t!”

“If you’re so fucking sympathetic and have magic then why the fuck didn’t you help me or those like me at the meetings!” she screamed.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself enough to explain. “Magick can’t become common knowledge among humankind, it would lead to disaster. Even if I knew enough to do a transformation like what you want without possibly harming you in the process, or could create an artifact like the one that changed me, I couldn’t change all of your records or the memories of everyone that you ever met and you’d have no legal identity. We had enough trouble changing my records and stuff and my name was gender neutral leaning toward feminine when I was born. And how would you explain waking up a girl one morning, cooties? I wanted to help you, but what help I was trying to offer you threw in my face so how could I expect you to accept my help for anything even if you did believe in magick?”

“So, change me now then, whip up one of those candle artifact thingies and let’s do this. Mom’s fucking dead, probably because those things on the plane were after you, so I think you owe me.”

Her accusation hurt, probably because it was true. Rebecca’s mother would still be alive if Khinara hadn’t come after us. I should have been more careful; I should have realized that I was being watched or at the very least thought to take measures to keep anyone else on the plane safe. We had thought that we’d be safe in the air, that a portal would be difficult to target on a moving airplane but it seemed that Aarianna’s Wraith wasn’t only watching me but had also signaled to Khinara the best time to attack and acted as an anchor for her portal.

“Do you see anything nearby that I could use to make a candle?” I asked pointedly, gesturing broadly at the expanse of black sand around us. “Even if there was and I didn’t have to worry what to do about your sudden gender reversal with your family when we get back to Earth… I can’t.”

“I won’t tell anybody about your precious magic,” she said in a singsong tone before an expression of pain and uncertainty washed over her, quickly replaced by her usual disdain for me. “And I don’t have any family now, Mom was it. She and my asshole father got divorced because of my transition and I’m dead to him and his family. I got nothing to lose and everything to gain, so hit me.”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “I used up all of the magick energy that I had stored to get us here and make sure we weren’t followed. I haven’t been able to gather any since we got here. There’s none here to draw on and I need it to cast spells, like to find the others or get us home.”

“You mean that we’re stuck here?!” Rebecca yelled as she shot to her feet and glowered down at me. “Why the hell would you bring us to somewhere that has no magic if you need it to get us home?!”

“I’ll find some! The rules are just different here! We didn’t have much choice, unless you would have preferred staying in actual Hell and being tormented and killed by Demons!” I snapped back, getting to my feet to glare right back at her. “We didn’t know what this Plane was like, but we were prepared to come here! We had a gate prepared since we knew it couldn’t stay open long and we’d have to use it several times and it took less time to charge that one five times than it would have taken to draw an entirely new gate with specific coordinates on Earth!”

“You’ll find some?! I feel better already! It sounds so much better than, ‘I fucked up and we’re stranded!’ Where the hell do you expect to find some?! You just said that there’s none here!”

I was getting sick and tired of Rebecca’s attitude. “I said that the rules are different here! Magick doesn’t work the same way everywhere, there are differences! It’s been slightly different on every Plane that I’ve been to and I’m sure that it’s different here too. We just need to find out how! There is magick out there somewhere, I know it!”

“You know it?! That’s just so fucking reassuring! And how do you plan on finding it if ‘the rules are different’?” she shot back.

“Well we’re not going to find it by standing here yelling at one another,” I groused as I tried to calm myself down again. Rebecca was so damn infuriating. I had never met someone so negative in my life. I was trying hard to remain positive for both our sakes but she wasn’t making it easy. “We need to get moving if we plan on finding a source of magick, my friends, or what we came here to look for in the first place. If I’m right, we’re in some sort of desert and we’ll need to get under cover once it starts getting too hot to travel.”

“Assuming that there even is a sun here,” I heard my reluctant companion grumble before she snapped, “Fine, whatever,” and started walking away.

“We’re going this way,” I told her pointing in the near opposite direction.

“What?! Why the hell do you get to decide where we’re going? You’re as lost as I am! Who died and made you leader? Oh wait, my mom did!” she shouted in anger, though I could see that she was trying to act tough and hold back tears. It seemed like that was her answer to everything and I was pretty sure that it was only her anger and dislike of me that was keeping her from curling up in a ball and crying right then.

I tried to keep control of myself as I replied, “Yeah, I have no idea where we are, but I do know that Beth is in that direction. I can feel her.”

“Oh, you can feel her. Isn’t that so fucking sweet? The power of love is going to lead us to your jock girlfriend,” Rebecca retorted with a roll of her eyes and a snarky tone.

“She’s my fiancée,” I corrected as calmly as I could. “But she’s also my Familiar, which means that we can sense one another, no matter where we are. It’s a Witch thing.”

“More like a bitch thing,” I barely heard her grumble under her breath.

“Wow, and I thought that we left Hell to get here, maybe I was wrong. I’d rather go back there and face the Demons,” I muttered as I turned away and started walking.

We had been walking for a while with Rebecca keeping a good distance behind me. As much as she apparently loathed me, she still had the sense to realize that I was her only chance at surviving on an alien world and getting home. So she kept close enough not to lose me but far away enough to make conversation impossible. Still, she was close enough for me to hear her crying in the silence of the desert night as we walked.

As much as her attitude and blind hatred toward me infuriated me, I wished that she would let me in to help comfort her. We were the only company that each other had for now and it would get pretty lonely if we continued to ignore one another. She had just lost her mother, her only family, in a very traumatic way and the last thing she needed right now was to be alone.

I felt responsible for her, but then from what everyone who knows me says, I feel responsible for everyone. In this case though, I really was responsible for her. It was my fault that her mother died and that she was going through this right now. She had nobody else, she was only fourteen, she wasn’t used to magick or travelling to different worlds, and right now it was just me and her so I was going to have to take responsibility for that.

Dawn was starting to paint the sky in bright warm colors so I was able to deduce that we were heading northeast. By the light of twilight, I was also able to get a better look at the black sands around us. It stretched off in all directions as far as I could see and I saw something that made me halt my progress. There were tracks of some sort in the dark sand crossing my path, something small and something much, much larger. If Ziralin were with me she probably could have told me how old the tracks were, and anything else I wanted to know, but I didn’t share her skillset.

Rebecca and I needed to stick closer together or we’d be easy pickings for any predators out there. I was also going to need a few things. I waited for my caustic companion to catch up and said, “Rebecca, we need to stick together, maybe we should stop for a bit to rest and eat something, I need some things from my pack anyway.”

“Not hungry,” she said morosely, not even glancing in my direction as she walked past and continued walking in the direction that I had set us out on. Her eyes were red and puffy and it seemed that she didn’t even have the mental energy to scream at me or say something snarky. She did stop to sit in the sand though once she had put enough distance between us to make conversation impossible.

I sighed and turned around, watching her for a couple of minutes. I was about to go to catch up to try to talk to her when I heard a familiar voice say, “The two of you are going to have to learn to get along and work together if we are going to get through this.”