Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(50)

“I get that, but still. Feels like such a waste of effort.”

She flicked one gleaming bare shoulder in a shrug. “For me, it’s the satisfaction of it. You’ve fed someone, made them happy and comfortable for at least a little while. Taken care of them in a way that they could feel. Granted, there’s a way bigger payoff if you’re cooking for at least two—all that effort for just yourself is kind of a drag.”

I took the last sip of my cocktail, trying to process this new information. I’d never have pegged the Talia Avramov I remembered, self-contained, lovely, and elusive as a ghost flower, as such a nurturer and caretaker. But then again, this novel perspective fit better with the Talia I’d seen in the Witch Woods, the necromancer witch who’d spoken to a lonely shade with such tenderness. The Avramov who couldn’t quite understand the appeal of her own family’s unfettered lifestyle.

Maybe, I remembered her saying at the gala, I’m not such a bad decision anymore.

And maybe, just like the Thistle Grove I thought I knew, the aloof and heedless Talia I’d held in my memory since high school, like a petal caught in amber, was a reflection of someone who hadn’t really existed for years.

Somehow the complexity made her only that much more intriguing, an unexpected conundrum I badly wanted to unpack.

“What can I say,” she said, reading my mind with one skimmed look over my face. “Frilly aprons by day, ectoplasm by night . . . truly, I contain multitudes. Your turn, Harlow. What don’t I know about you that I should?”

“Hmm,” I considered, as our main course maki arrived. “Obviously you know I really like to read. But! I’m also pretty into ice-and roller-skating. I was even part of a roller derby league for a while last year, before work got too intense for all that time off elevating ankles and icing my various bruises.”

“No shit,” she marveled, a lip-biting smile curving her lips. “Emmeline Harlow, elbow-throwing spitfire on wheels. You’re right. Would not have guessed.”

“Make that Electra Hex,” I said, twirling one of my chopsticks with a dramatic flourish, “formerly of the Mass Marauders.”

“?‘Though she be but little, she is fierce,’?” she quoted, arching a playful eyebrow. “And don’t tell me that one’s overused, because I know—and in this case, don’t care.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. The rest of that quote doesn’t get as much love, but I like the whole thing. ‘Oh, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd! She was a vixen when she went to school.’ Such Shakespearean sass.” I grinned down at my sushi. “I always thought it might make a cool tattoo.”

“On you, it would.”

I canted my head, surveying the milky canvas of her shoulders and arms, my mind straying helplessly to the remembered salt-and-confectioners’-sugar flavor of her skin. “Speaking of ink, do you have any? Seems like it would be your thing.”

A complicated expression slid over her face like a passing cloud as she glanced down at her plate. “I’ve meant to do it, a time or two,” she said, quicksilver eyes flicking back up at me, both wary and vulnerable. “But it hasn’t quite panned out yet, for . . . various reasons.”

“You realize being cryptic about it is only going to make me want to dig deeper.”

“In that case . . .” Her gaze swept over the collection of tattoos on the insides of my forearms, darkening with interest. “I’ll make you a deal.”

Reaching slowly across the table, she grazed a fingertip over the line of designs that ran vertically above the veins of my wrist. I felt her touch, the warm pad of her finger and the sharp edge of her nail, like a blooming tingle spiraling through my body. Coursing down my arm and into my torso, dipping into my belly and coming to coil hot between my thighs, as if she’d skimmed her finger directly along the raw skein of nerves that tangled under my skin.

“If you tell me what all of yours mean,” she said, as I caught my breath, her voice low and honey glazed. “Then I’ll return the favor.”

“You’re on.” I cocked my head, feeling a little tipsy and a lot bold, her touch still lingering on my skin. “Do you . . . maybe want to come over? For a nightcap, and tales of tattoos good and ill?”

She considered me for a moment, anticipation leaping into those pale wolf’s eyes. “You know what, Harlow? I think that sounds exactly like what I want to do.”





18





Things Told in Confidence


My mother’s garden felt different with Talia beside me; more intimate, wilder in its magic. A wedge of waxing moon surveilled us as we walked along the pavers, a secretive face set in three-quarters profile against a curtain of damask dark. The primroses went oddly quiet when we walked by them, then broke into racing whispers like a rumor passed behind hands. And a wind had spun up, smelling not just of cold and fall but of proper Halloween, the way it only ever smelled in Thistle Grove—like restive spirits, and the darker, deeper magic of things teetering on the brink of death. It felt, for the first time, like Samhain was nearly upon us.

That smoky smell made me want to spend the whole night outside, standing under that watchful moon with my mouth wide open, breathing it all in. I suddenly felt like I couldn’t ever inhale enough of it, even if the night somehow stretched on for centuries.