Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(35)

“Um, thanks?”

Her eyes, still dancing with amusement, strayed to Linden, and she gave a pert salute. “I see you, too, Thorn. Must have been epic, watching that messy motherfucker go down like that. I thought I was gonna pee my pants when that squid clocked him in his shitty face.”

“A certain amount of petty thrill may have been involved,” Linden admitted, as I remembered that Isidora had been the one to suss out Gareth’s cheating in the first place.

Issa’s eyes shifted to Rowan, who’d just rejoined our group after wandering away to add more to his plate. In an instant, all the warmth fled from her face, leaving her affect so cold and implacable that she seemed almost like a different person. As her fingers drifted up to graze one of her pendants, the occult accoutrements suddenly took on a more ominous mien. She looked like she’d stepped from one of those tales in which the arrogant young noble doesn’t pay proper respect to an impoverished crone, who later turns out to be a powerful, grudge-keeping (and usually foxy) sorceress.

“Rowan Thorn,” she said, making his name sound like a two-word hex.

“Isidora,” he replied, in a wary tone. “Hello. Thanks for, uh, having us.”

“You didn’t say he’d be coming, Talia,” Issa said as if he hadn’t spoken, imbuing the single pronoun with an impressive amount of contempt.

“You knew we were working together,” Talia replied through an exasperated sigh. “Expecting him tonight wasn’t exactly a leap. Besides, I didn’t think it was still quite this much of a deal.”

“Well, it is,” Issa said, continuing to glare balefully at Rowan. “And it will continue to be.”

“Well, okay!” Rowan said, eyebrows shooting up as he began to back away. A solid move, given that the younger Avramov was radiating such hostility it all but rippled the air around her like heat distortion. “This has been . . . fun, but I think I’ll be calling it a night. Lin, did you wanna stay with Emmy, or—”

“Nope!” Linden replied, so hastily I turned to her, wondering what she could be picking up through her empathic bond with Rowan that would give her such a deer-in-the-headlights look. “I mean, Em, if that’s okay with you? I don’t want to leave Rowan to walk home by himself.”

“Um, sure, if you really don’t want to stay,” I said, increasingly baffled.

“I’ll make sure Emmy gets home safe,” Talia assured her. “Thanks for coming. Sorry you have to leave so soon.”

“No worries!” Linden called over her shoulder as she raced after her brother, who was already beating a speedy retreat toward the woods, his tied-back locs swinging against his broad back with each long stride. “Em, come by the orchard tomorrow for lunch?”

“I’ll be there,” I called back, as they disappeared into the darkness of the overgrowth beyond the clearing’s light, vanishing from one step to the next as though the woods had swallowed them whole.





13





No, No, the Ghosts Live in the Trees


What was that all about?” I asked Talia as we wandered toward one of the pillowed divans near the brazier. Isidora had stalked away in a huff to rejoin the party, and now waves of nervous excitement lapped at my belly; I hadn’t expected any time alone with Talia tonight.

“I don’t really know what happened there,” she said, sitting down with one fine-boned foot tucked under her as I followed suit. Her ankle was tiny, dainty as a doe’s, and I had a momentary image of lacing my fingers around its span before I dragged my attention back to what she was saying.

“Issa’s been ultra tight-lipped about the whole thing, which isn’t like her. But I do know they weren’t involved or anything like that. I think they just worked together for a while a few years back, and it ended badly, somehow? And Issa’s probably blowing it out of proportion, as is her general wont.” Talia shook her head with fond exasperation. “When it comes to keeping grudges, Iss makes me look like a Disney princess.”

“Well, that’s a terrifying thought. Though less so than your baby sister with the alleged hexing fetish. Is that even true, or were you just screwing with Rowan?”

Talia chuckled, a honey-dipped rasp of a laugh that reverberated down my spine. “I may have been exaggerating slightly for Thorn’s benefit. He’s just such an easy mark, you know? Who could blame me?”

I gave her a look. “So does she or doesn’t she turn people into naked mole rats for fun?”

“Now there’s a visual. Definitely don’t float that idea within Addie’s earshot.”

When I didn’t lessen my stare, she relented. “Okay, for real. No, she’s never successfully mole-ratted anyone. But one of the lesser Blackmoore brood rubbed her wrong her freshman year in high school, and she tried to curse the little turd bucket into a blobfish—which was no more than he probably deserved. Fortunately Issa caught her and cast a counterspell before Addie could land us all in deep shit, casting hexes as an unsupervised minor.”

For all of Talia’s playful talk of hexes, dark magic of that ilk was severely frowned upon by Thistle Grove’s magical judiciary—especially with Igraine Blackmoore at its head. Even the littlest witches knew not to so much as play pretend at it.