Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(32)

For a moment, I was Thistle Grove, and the town itself was me.

Having so much magic pounding through me should have been terrifying, but it wasn’t. Now that I’d chosen to let it run its course, it was gorgeous, revitalizing, like jumping into a lake after a decade of thirst, and sucking all that sweet water down your parched and aching throat.

And there was a poignancy to it, too, the bittersweet knowledge that this magic was only borrowed. For a moment, the thought of letting go of this, of the withdrawal that would set in once I returned to my small, real life, nearly bowled me over with anticipatory anguish.

Then the mantle’s magic doubled down, drawing my focus to a single point—bending Igraine to my and the mantle’s commingled will.

I folded at the waist until I loomed closely over her, my giantess’s face bearing down into hers. “Elder Blackmoore, are we understood?” I asked her in a more restrained tone, closer to a small avalanche than rolling thunder.

She struggled, lips twitching, the feeling of being outclassed clearly both new and distasteful to her. When she hesitated too long for the mantle’s liking, a bolt of lightning came streaking down from the churn of clouds overhead and leapt into my hands. It danced around them like a sparking web of electricity, warm and gently tingly, like touching one of those Van de Graaff orbs that made your hair stand on end.

It all fed very nicely into any superiority complex I might have been storing in the basement of my psyche. You know what? I could kinda get used to this.

“Are . . . we . . . understood?” I repeated, with slow and silky emphasis, twitching my fingers until sparks rained from them.

“We are, Your Eminence,” she managed, dipping into something between a curtsey and a bow. Like she’d reluctantly remembered that I hailed from royalty, or maybe one of the more obscure pantheons. “Though I did not intend any disrespect, House Blackmoore offers you apologies. Let us set aside this . . . unfortunate misunderstanding, and move forward in good faith.”

Okay, I could really get used to rolling like a demigoddess.

“Apology accepted,” I said, straightening. The tame lightning in my hands died down as though it had been grounded through my feet. Above, the welter of clouds fled to the horizon in a surging rush, like a time-lapse photograph of a retreating storm. “Once more, and for all to hear—first victory goes to House Avramov!”

This time, the resultant clamor was purely one of joy, pierced by a high, triumphant whoop I suspected belonged to Talia. When I looked across the lake to where her camp stood, I found her hovering above the Avramovs, still suspended in a cloud of that dark matter, like ink and raven feathers airily commingled.

Even enrobed by the mantle’s heady magic, the smile she flung my way, grateful and victorious and somehow semiferal, made me more exhilarated than I would have thought possible.





12





The Witch Woods


Listen, I did not sign up for this mess,” Rowan Thorn groused. The wine bottles he and Linden were bringing to the Avramovs’ bonfire clinked together in the apple-picking tote that swung from one of his hands. A luminous sphere of witchlight hovered over his other palm, lighting a path through the thick forest behind The Bitters. “Comrades in collusion? Here for it. But tell you what, fam, I do not need to be in these woods tonight, with those trees looking like they want to suck my soul out through my nose.”

“Quit being such a wuss,” Linden told her twin, easily keeping pace with him thanks to her long legs. Her illumination spell took a different form—a cloud of shimmering radiance that seemed to emanate from her skin, as though it was dusted by bioluminescent plankton. It was beautiful, and made her look like the most literal version of a land mermaid. “We promised Tal we’d come celebrate with her. And they’re just trees, which, need I remind you, happen to be our thing?”

“Our thing is nature. This?” He motioned at the sinister loom of woods around us. “This is some haunted-ass Avramov shit.”

“But I thought you liked Talia!” I protested, lagging behind a little due to the fact that I was depending on a plain old Maglite, and the darkness of the Witch Woods seemed to actively resist more mundane forms of light.

“Talia’s alright. The rest of that family, though, could sure stand some type of intervention.” Rowan rolled his shoulders, casting his eyes uneasily over the warped boughs hanging above us. “Especially if this is their party joint.”

He was right about that part; the Witch Woods were spectacularly creepy. Their official name was Heritage Forest, but I’d never heard a local call them that, for good reason. I, an actual witch, had spent the entire time we’d been walking peering nervously over my shoulder, the little hairs on my neck prickling like antennae. Overhead, the canopy knitted together so tightly it blotted out both moonlight and Thistle Grove’s glittering ice-chip stars. Tendrils of mist crept low over the ground, clinging to the root balls of the hulking trees. Wisps of it snaked up to coil around the branches of the ancient evergreens that towered here and there, as if it drifted up and down according to its own whim.

Which tracked, given that I was pretty sure this mist was made of ghosts.

Though the woods were technically public property, they were often treated as an informal Avramov holding, since nearly no one else dared venture into them. I’d snuck in a time or two in high school on a dare, like any self-respecting local teen, but I’d never wandered this far in, and certainly not at night. The darkness had a living feel to it, a slithery sense of motion at the corners of your eyes. As though things were constantly slipping in and out of sight at the edges of your vision.