Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(37)
“What’s happening?” I half squeaked, in higher-pitched tones than was probably cool, my skin bunching into goose bumps. “Dude, I do not like or appreciate this, I really, truly do not—”
“Try to stay calm, Harlow.” Her hand tightened reassuringly on mine. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just . . . the forest saying hello to me, let’s say. It can feel a little scary, but it’s just a greeting, that’s all.”
While I tried not to breathe like a hyperventilating rabbit—apparently I aligned much more closely with the Thorns than I’d thought, when it came to a strong preference for warm and sparkly breeds of magic—Talia led me over to a massive oak, its trunk knotted into such mournful burls that it looked like it was sprouting eyes just so it could weep.
She bent to set the lantern down, then tugged off the fringed shawl draped across her shoulders and spread it over the damp ground. Then she lowered herself cross-legged amid the oak’s leviathan roots, gesturing me down across from her until we sat knee to knee. With a soft sigh, she pressed a palm against the peeling bark.
“The veil is very thin here,” she said quietly, her eyelids dropping to half-mast as she focused on something beyond my perception. “Even if you don’t make a study of the liminal boundary like we do, you can probably feel that much instinctively. And places where the veil is sheer . . . they belong to us.”
“How do they belong to you?” I asked, echoing her hushed tone. I knew that of the families, it was the Avramovs who dealt most easily with the spirit world, but it wasn’t like they were known for being chattily forthcoming about their affinity. If anything, most of them were notoriously secretive, shrouding themselves in very deliberate—and occasionally insufferable—mystery.
“Something about us naturally attracts the other side,” she said. “We’re extra alive, somehow. Bright in spirit, I guess you could say, very cheesily. It makes the denizens of the other side drawn to us—almost like our presence thins the veil wherever we happen to be.”
I considered this; the idea of Avramovs as paranormal lightning rods felt somehow viscerally right. “You’re like ghost magnets.”
Her lips quirked with repressed amusement. “If you want me to take back what I said earlier about your poet’s soul, then sure. But if you’re into less banal metaphors, we’re closer to beacons, or lighthouses. The dead can see us more clearly from beyond the veil than they can see other living; a moth-to-a-flame type of deal. It’s part of our magic—the part that also lets us manipulate ectoplasm.”
That much I did remember from Baby Emmy’s eager perusal of the Grimoire, though I’d never understood it in any meaningful way. “So, you work with spirit stuff, basically. I take it that’s what you used as your suspension medium at the lake today?”
“That’s right. It’s a pretty cool material, naturally malleable and versatile.” She wrinkled her nose a little. “Once you get over the inescapable ick factor, that is. It is not the nicest texture imaginable. Like some raunchy mix of spiderweb and eel skin. From what our oldest accounts say, not even Yaga completely loved working with it.”
“Intriguing, yet also gross,” I said, making a face. “So if ghosts are inclined to flock to you, how do you keep from being haunted? Or even possessed?”
“Well, we do have a fair amount of activity at The Bitters, which can’t really be helped.” She touched the jewel suspended above the hollow of her throat, still aglow. “That’s where our garnets come in. The living and the dead can’t—or shouldn’t—mix too much, and the same goes for working with ectoplasm. The garnet fixes us here, stabilizes our living energy like an anchor. Makes sure we don’t risk our own essence when fraternizing with the other side.”
“And that’s why it’s glowing now?” I asked, a little anxiously. “Because you’re, uh, fraternizing as we speak?”
She nodded, still trailing her fingers over the jewel’s facets. “There are shades in the Witch Woods, what you might call active ghosts. And they’re very eager to latch on to anything alive.”
“I knew it!” I hissed, flinging a panicked look at the whirlpool of mist curdling around the edges of our makeshift picnic blanket. “That’s what the mist is made of, right? Ghosts?”
“No, no, the ghosts live in the trees,” she said, waving my concern away.
“Talia. In no way is that better.”
“Maybe not, but it’s true,” she said, with a little shrug. “They slip through the tears in the veil, and then they affix to the brightest life they can find—which, here, happens to be the wood itself. Sometimes they stay for a long time, even centuries. Long enough for their inhabitation to distort the tree’s shape.”
I shuddered a little, twitching my wrap tighter around me. “Honestly, that sounds like it super blows for the tree.”
She patted the oak’s hideous trunk, smiling at it as if at an old friend. “I don’t think they mind so much. Unlike a person, an inhabitation doesn’t drive the tree insane. And the lodged shades are anchored, less restless. No real danger to anyone who wanders into the woods.”
“What is it that the shades want, anyway?” I asked, trying to understand why she seemed so sympathetic to them.