Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(61)

Slowly falling back under Thistle Grove’s spell without even putting up a fight.

Nana listened to me with an open stillness, the same way she had when I was twelve and broke an artifact at Tomes that I shouldn’t have been touching in the first place. Back then she’d snuck into the shop with me and fixed it with a simple restoration charm, and kept my secret ever since; my dad had never been any the wiser about the whole thing.

This time around, I didn’t think a spell was likely to do the trick.

Tears welled again, and I angrily dug the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Ugh, damn it, and then this! I haven’t cried this much in my whole life, and now it’s constant low-grade waterworks. Just absolutely horrible.”

“Sometimes it all needs to come out.” She patted my leg again, gave it a little squeeze. “Just think of it as venting built-up steam. It’s good for the pipes.”

I gave a wet little laugh, then took a shuddering breath. When I spoke again, I was fractionally calmer, at least enough to articulate my thoughts.

“It’s just that, I thought I never wanted to come back here,” I said, gears of pain turning in my chest like some rusting clockwork mechanism. “I thought I was done with Thistle Grove magic, with the way this place pigeonholes you into being only who you were born by blood. And it feels good to achieve things in Chicago, things that are interesting and impressive and substantial. I’m making a real life for myself, out there. I’m becoming someone.”

“Oh, honey, you were always someone,” Nana said with ultimate pragmatism, reaching out to finger a lock of my hair. “That what this is about, too? Don’t get me wrong, I was never one for the hassle of too much hair myself. And it suits you. But I do wonder if you really like it quite this short.”

Anyone else would’ve gotten reamed out for asking me a question of that ilk—but don’t you ever miss your pretty long hair—but I knew what she was driving at. I bit my lip, feeling almost shamefully caught out. “What do you mean?”

She gave me a forthright look, like, cut the crap, kid. “When you were little, you screamed blue murder when poor Cecily went after you for so much as a trim. And even when you were older, you looked like a frigging Tangled cosplay half the time. More hair than girl.”

Did I want to know how my grandmother knew about Disney movies and what cosplay even was, I wondered. Probably I did not.

“And then you leave town,” she continued, “chop it all off, and never look back? That’s a goddess-damned declaration, Emmeline. A rebellion. Or maybe even some kind of penance only you can understand.”

I sat, feeling desperately unmoored, wondering whether it was possible that I’d misunderstood my own intentions. That my haircut wasn’t just a celebration of a new identity, but also some obscure form of punishment; for the weakness I’d shown after Gareth, maybe, my willingness to take the easy road by running away instead of building myself back up, and for the way I’d treated those I’d left behind. I could tell myself all I wanted that I’d been just a kid doing the best she could, that I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, that I hadn’t even really known how much they were hurting.

But maybe that had never quite cut it, not for the inner judge and jury that presided over my own conscience.

“But trust me, I hear you,” she went on. “I know how this place can conspire to make you feel small, if you didn’t happen to pop out with the right last name. And you’re like me that way, peep. We weren’t built to live small, neither one of us.”

“But it’s still so nice here,” I admitted, closing my eyes at the sheer relief of saying it out loud after thinking it in secret for so long. “Just, incomparable. The smell of the magic, the way the air here buzzes. The night sky and the fall weather and the sheer stupid perfection of it all. It shouldn’t even exist, but it does, it’s real, and I’ve been lying to myself for years about how much I missed it. And it still . . .” I took a deep breath, girding myself for the worst part. “Even after all this time, it still feels like home.”

There was something apocalyptic about this admission, like I’d opened the Pandora’s box I’d kept buried in the cellar of my heart, along with all the other pale and withered truths I didn’t want to exhume. As if it couldn’t be unsaid or undone, now that I’d let it come swirling out.

“And you still love it,” Nana finished for me. “You love Thistle Grove, and you love our magic—even if we Harlows did get the raw end of the deal, in the grand scheme of things. Bitch of a thing, but the way it is.”

I burbled a sad little laugh at that. “Definitely a bitch.”

“The thing is, you’ve been trying to outrun this place for nearly a decade, peep—but maybe it’s time to admit that you can’t. Because like it or not, you’re a Thistle Grove witch, and a Harlow to boot. This town is in your blood, in a way you might not even understand just yet.”

“But you travel all the time,” I said, almost accusatory. “You’re always going somewhere else.”

“But I come back, peep,” she said, with infinite gentleness. “Every damn time. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

When I shook my head, turning away, she put a light finger under my chin, turning my face back toward hers.