Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(77)

Somehow, it suited her.

For a moment, I felt a bitter swell of envy that I’d never wear the mantle again myself, never feel that incomparable rush of old and massive magic pounding through my veins. But I had something more important to do, and I was at least a little glad that Delilah was finally getting to live the dream. She’d probably appreciate it more than I ever could, anyway, since I had technically never even wanted it.

More fool, me.

Then the Grimoire flared blue in front of her, and I felt another hollow gut punch of loss, because I couldn’t feel it; it wasn’t tugging at me anymore.

“Scions Thorn, Blackmoore, and Harlow,” she knelled, the air in my ears trembling with the force of her voice. Delilah’s timbre was deeper than mine, and in the Arbiter’s register it came across as a basso profundo that you could feel down to your bones. “The wreath awaits you, but it must be assembled. To gather up its pieces, you must find the remnants the founders left behind—Elias’s word, Caelia’s dream, Alastair’s heart, Margarita’s eye. And the soul that lies in the center of what they made together.”

Hey, silver linings: at least we seemed to be done with the shitty poetry.

As she finished speaking, banners of light streamed from the Grimoire and over to the three of us, winding around our bodies—just as they had done to transport Gareth, Rowan, and Talia to their respective orchard battlegrounds.

I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to be whisked away—but when I opened them again, I still stood exactly where I’d been; bookended by Gareth and Rowan, the ropes of light shimmering around me with pearly iridescence.

“Alastair’s heart,” Rowan was mumbling under his breath, musing to himself. “Could that be . . .”

He closed his eyes to complete the thought, and in the next moment he was gone. So, this was a portal spell, but one controllable by the bearer—which meant I was supposed to determine where I wanted it to take me, like a self-guided scavenger hunt.

“Caelia’s dream!” Gareth burst out, as something dawned on him, too. Then he vanished as well, leaving me to eat their collective dust.

Every competitive instinct inside me—and I had quite the collection of them, to be sure—roared to kicking and screaming life. This arrangement, in which I was the last one standing ignorant, was not going to fly.

“Caelia’s dream, Elias’s word, Alastair’s heart, Margarita’s eye,” I chanted to myself, palms slicking with impatience. I assumed the Grimoire didn’t mean the founders’ literal body parts; as far as I knew, no one was keeping Alastair’s heart or Margarita’s eyeballs preserved in a pickling jar—though with the Avramovs, who ever really knew for sure. But in any case, the dream and the word were abstract concepts . . .

And then, with a sudden bolt of inspiration, I knew exactly where to look first.

Tomes & Omens, I thought to myself, closing my eyes. Tomes & Omens. With a stomach-dropping lurch like falling in place, the world shifted around me—then I could smell dust and ink and dry, papery decay, a bell tinkling out warning of my arrival though there was no one else to hear it.

I opened my eyes to my father’s darkened bookshop, waiting until my vision adjusted enough to let me make out the bookshelves’ silhouettes before I went pelting toward the attic stairs.

“Let me be right, let me be right,” I whispered to myself as I clattered up.

As soon as I flung open the door, I knew that I was; the attic glowed an unearthly, vaporous blue, the same light that always emanated from the Grimoire. I dashed toward its source, a glass display case in the Harlow section of the archive—where we kept the owl-feather quill with which Elias Harlow had written the original spellbook.

Right above the case floated three feathers, wrought of delicate blue light; perfectly rendered down to the vane, the hollow shaft, and the downy barbs. Three, one for each of the combatants to collect.

And since all of them were here, that meant I was the first to decipher this particular clue.

Grinning, I reached to pluck one of the feathers from the air. As soon as I touched it, it absorbed into my palm with a tingling buzz. Surging with triumph, I turned in a tight little circle, rotating the rest of the clues in my mind. “Caelia’s dream” meant next to nothing to me, though there was the very faintest plink of recognition at the thought, like a drop falling from a leaky faucet several rooms over. Nagging and insistent, but not particularly enlightening.

But “Alastair’s heart” brought up something more concrete—a memory of a much younger Linden in spring, leading me by the hand to the copse behind Honeycake Cottage, where she rested her palm against the trunk of a tree blooming with pale pink flowers like pastel stars.

“This was my great-great-great-great-great-grandpa Alastair’s favorite tree,” she’d told me, patting the bark with something between reverence and fondness. I smiled at the memory, recalling how she’d always tacked on some arbitrary number of “greats” before his name. “The first one he planted on our land. If you fall asleep under it, you’ll dream of him. I always do.”

As the memory faded, I closed my eyes and thought myself toward Alastair’s ancient hawthorn.

When I opened them, I was standing beneath it, its branches bursting with scarlet berries like drops of heart’s blood crystallized. Just below one of the lower-reaching boughs hung a single glowing blue berry, like a ghost of the others, with two frilled leaves poised daintily to either side. I reached up to pluck it, my heart sinking a little; if there was only one left, that meant both Gareth and Rowan had managed to get here before me. Rowan, because of course he would have known where to look for Alastair’s heart; Gareth, because Linden had probably brought him here to introduce him to the tree, back when she still thought they were in love.