Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(38)

She drew her lower lip through her teeth, considering. “To be alive again, mostly. Which is a tall order, but understandable; I think we can all agree that being dead and restless sucks the big one. Barring a do-over, I think they just want to be seen by someone. To be touched. You know, pretty much the same things everyone wants, even while alive.”

She leaned closer to the tree, stroking the trunk in a slow, deliberate way, like you’d pet a skittish horse or some other leery animal. As if beckoned by her touch, a dark vapor began rising from the bark.

It sifted through the tree’s rough skin, coalescing into ferny fronds of ectoplasm; glistening, gelatinous, inkily alive. Once freed, it curled and roiled, churning itself into a roughly humanoid silhouette. Something that insinuated a feminine shape, with the suggestion of overlong and thinned-out limbs, and a smoky curlicue like a plume of hair. It had no discernible features, save for two eyelike patches of deeper darkness in the smudge that passed for its face. In the green-skewed light of our lantern, it looked like some baleful specter conjured up by Maleficent.

When the apparition bent toward us, I thought my heart might leap out of my mouth and go tearing off into the undergrowth. The only thing that kept my shit remotely together was the utter lack of fear on Talia’s face as she looked up at the shade.

“Hey, sweet pea,” Talia crooned to it, her voice low and even as she reached up to cup the general vicinity of the thing’s cheek. “How’ve you been, hmm?”

It leaned into her palm like a cat, issuing a series of faint keening sounds that made all my hair stand on end. Talia merely smiled in response, as if this was the equivalent of a pleasant and normal exchange.

“Of course, whenever I can,” she said to it. “I know it’s been a minute this time, but I’d never come through without saying hello.”

“What is that, Talia?” I said softly, almost afraid to speak. “Or, who?”

The shade twitched toward me at the sound of my voice, before turning pointedly back to Talia, as if it had decided it couldn’t care less that I was also there. I felt, perversely, kind of hurt.

“A girl, who died a long time ago,” Talia replied, without taking her eyes off the shade, her fingers combing through its plume of ghostly hair. “In childbirth, maybe, or from some disease antibiotics would have knocked out in a week. Old-timey bullshit of that nature, probably. I don’t know any of the details, it’s all too faded. But I know she went down kicking, and she’s still too stubborn to consider crossing over fully. Gotta respect that kind of grit.”

Based on what her spirit was making the tree look like, I thought it might be time to entertain other options—but hey, that was just me.

“Good night, sweet pea,” Talia said, lowering her hand. “Back to bed. And see you again soon.”

The shade gave a distinctly skeptical wail, cocking its head at her.

“Soon, I swear,” Talia said, laughing. “Upon my witch’s soul.”

The shade bobbed once in acknowledgment, then turned away and drifted toward the tree, losing cohesion slowly until it dissipated altogether, sucking back into the bark.

“Well, that was horrifying,” I breathed with a half laugh. “And extremely rad. I had no idea you could talk to ghosts like that.”

“That’s who we were, before Margarita came here,” she said, turning to me, her face still dreamy from her communion with the shade, her eyes aglitter with that ineffable tenderness. “Speakers to the dead. Necromancers, if you want to get technical about it. It’s much more diluted now, no longer our main thing. But most of us can still do it to some degree.”

“You didn’t seem afraid of it—her, I mean—at all.”

She shrugged one shoulder, a delicate, birdlike flick. The rustling canopy above us parted just enough to let the moon pick out a single stripe of shine in her inky hair. “I wasn’t. When I’m talking to one of them, I can feel an echo of who they were in life. It’s . . . intimate. A little bit like love.”

“Then they’re lucky to have you love them,” I said without thinking, a blush igniting in my cheeks as soon as the words were out.

Talia’s silvery eyes widened, lips parting. Then she smiled at me, slow and lush, reaching up to brush away a strand of hair the breeze had strung across her mouth. The atmosphere between us altered in a breath, as if the barometric pressure had dropped precipitously, turning charged and unpredictable like a coming storm.

She shifted her weight toward me a little, one light hand settling on my knee. “Harlow,” she said, her voice throatier than I’d heard it before, “would this be way too weird a time to kiss you?”

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. A dazzling smile streaked across her lips like a lightning bolt. Then she closed the space between us, her mouth settling over mine.

Heat ignited in my belly, fanning out and spreading toward my thighs. She kept the kiss light, only grazing my lips with hers, fingers stroking underneath my chin and trailing toward my throat. Her lips were a softness beyond soft, plush and smooth and tasting of lipstick and red wine. That bewitching perfume crept into my lungs with every unsteady inhale hissing through my nose. It made me feel giddy and undone, so drunk with want I all but forgot where we were. For all I cared, we could have been in one of those outer rings of hell I’d have followed her into just as readily.