Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(44)
As the last of the sleep cleared and my heart settled down, I reached for the candle, unable to believe it. But the flame flickered lively between my hands, showing no signs of winking out. Happiness stole over me as I considered it, warm and sweet as melted butterscotch.
I had done this. I had made this little spell, entirely on my own.
Unlike the huge enchantment of the mantle, with its otherworldly feel—a magic that felt so indisputably other—this small spell was mine. And, as I tested my control over the flame, stretching it up and down like a fiery thread of taffy before winding it around my finger, I found that my control was consistent again. Maybe even fractionally stronger than it had been before I left. Even when I let the flame die out, I could feel the magic still surging inside me, glittery and buoyant, effervescently alive.
As though it had never left me at all.
I held the candle for a long while after that, cupped between my hands, so deeply happy I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Happier, if I was willing to be honest with myself, than I’d been in years.
16
Big City, Little Orphan Witch
If not particularly helpful to the cause, the Arbiters’ records of the Gauntlets turned out to be of unexpectedly top-notch entertainment value.
“I’m pleased to report that Arbiter Savannah Harlow was a deadass comedian,” Talia said, still chortling as she flipped closed one of the slim tomes, sleeved in crackled caramel leather, that I’d dug up early that morning in the Gauntlet-designated section of the Harlow archive. “Get your affairs in order, Harlow. Savannah’s out to kill.”
I held out my hands as she lobbed the volume at me from where she lay sprawled on the ancient corduroy couch, worn down to its nap, tucked into one of the attic’s corners.
“I want to see, too!” Linden exclaimed, abandoning the records she’d been reading and trotting up behind me to peer over my shoulder. “Wow, is that a—a stick figure with gigantic balls?”
“It’s perfection, is what it is,” I said gleefully, cracking up as I leafed through pages of flowing copperplate script—in sharp contrast to margins doodled with strutting stick figures, all featuring comical expressions and equally funny distinguishing marks, illustrating the one Gauntlet in which the Blackmoores had lost to the Thorns.
“She calls Evrain Blackmoore ‘the prancing ballsack’ every time she refers to him, but then strikes it through—very neatly, of course, so you can still read it just fine—and ultra-courteously replaces it with his actual name.” Talia grinned, her eyes sparkling with admiration for my irreverent ancestress. “You know, for propriety’s sake. She must have despised him.”
“Doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to picture what he must’ve been like. She, on the other hand . . .” I said, feeling genuine fondness for my grandmother several greats removed. “Clearly a legend.”
Talia, Linden, and I had been in the Tomes attic for hours, breathing in the magic-suffused air and reading by the dreamy, consistently late-afternoon light that slanted through its windows no matter the actual time of day. Since Mondays tended to be quiet, my father had taken one of his rare days off and flipped the shop’s sign to closed, so there was no one around to disturb us. Rowan had declined to join our research session, trusting Lin to fill him in later on anything we turned up; allegedly he was busy with work, but I had a suspicion his absence had more to do with a desire to avoid being in close quarters with even a friendly Avramov.
It suited me just fine, given how upbeat I was feeling, so hopeful and optimistic I would have resented anything killing my vibe. I could feel the cleared fresh air between Lin and me, breezy and open as new spring; room in which she and I could find each other again. And I kept thinking back to last night, to the candle and my bespelled little flame. Every so often I’d test it, surging a little magic into my fingertips, letting the heat build inside my hands like tangible potential.
And each time it held steady, ready to realize my will, excitement glimmering inside me like a horde of fireflies trapped in my chest. There was no question that after years without it, my magic was fully, reliably back.
I was a real witch again.
Then there was Talia, the willowy length of her stretched across the dumpy old couch like some sexy sylph wandered out of myth, her shining hair flowing over its arm. We’d been trading heated little glances all afternoon like passed notes. Every time I looked over, I’d find her already looking back at me, a hidden smile tugging at her pillowy lips.
Taken together, it was all extremely fucking distracting in the best of ways, and the reason I couldn’t bring myself to be bummed by how little of use we’d managed to dig up.
“Shouldn’t these be, like, a little less crass?” Linden wondered, still engrossed in Savannah’s lurid artistry. “I mean, not that I’m gonna shed any tears over the Blackmoores’ maligned dignity or anything. But I always thought Harlows were supposed to be, you know. All bookish and dispassionate.”
“I can’t decide if I feel attacked, or like you haven’t even met me,” I said, though I was also taken aback by the, shall we say, lighthearted approach some of my ancestors had taken to chronicling the Gauntlets. Many of the records read nothing like the bloodless academic drone that I remembered hating in parts of the Grimoire; apparently not all Harlows were cut from Elias’s cloth. It gave me a weird feeling, acknowledging their humanity that way. Like they weren’t all the severe, humorless, hidebound monoliths I always imagined when I thought about the line of forebears that wound into my past.