Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(81)

“And it’s been happening since I got back,” I went on. “It’s like I’m . . . merging with Thistle Grove, somehow? Which sounds downright disturbing, only there’s nothing scary about it at all. I figured it had to do with the mantle magic, since that’s the only thing that’s changed since I came back. But then I ceded the mantle to Lilah, and it kept happening.”

“It’s not the mantle, scoot,” my father said, an unfamiliar sadness creeping into the corners of his smile. “It’s you. Your Harlow blood.”

“My Harlow blood . . . what are you talking about?” I said, uncomprehending.

“There’s a certain aspect to our history that’s reserved for elders only,” he said, clearing his throat. “And that’s the role our family plays in this town. Elias Harlow found this place first, you know, felt its distant call all the way from Virginia. He was already here when the other three arrived, a little down the line—and they only came at all because he’d tempered the magic, enough so they could feel it, too. Made it . . . accessible to other witches.”

Margarita’s perplexing words rose like bubbles to the surface of my mind. Dreadful bore that the man was in life, our little Grove would still have been nothing without his hand at work.

“I still don’t understand.”

“Thistle Grove magic comes from the lake,” he went on. “We don’t know why or how, but we all know that it does. But that’s in its rawest form—a white water torrent, wild and unmanageable. To most witches, trying to draw from it would be like putting your mouth to a firehose. But not to Elias. And not to us, his descendants, who share his blood. Strained through us, rendered through our witch’s souls, it’s a viable and potent power source for others with the gift. Like the rest of the families.”

I pressed my fingers to my temples, which had begun to ache with strain. I’d never even considered the possibility that the intense way I experienced Thistle Grove magic was somehow different from how it felt to other witches. How would I even have known that it didn’t feel the same to them?

“So you’re saying we’re like filters?” I attempted.

“Very good, yes!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly, like he might slap a gold star sticker onto my forehead if this went on. “The magic sieves through all of us, every Harlow who lives in Thistle Grove. But this rendering down we do . . . paradoxically, it makes us weaker witches than the other families. Presumably because most of our gift is preoccupied, at any given time, with filtering all that raw magic into a more manageable fuel.”

Somehow this made perfect, if unfortunate, sense. We were busy distilling down something so tremendous, so elemental, that the process of it left very little bandwidth for any actual spells we might want to cast. Our magical hard drives were nearly maxed out, almost no more processing power left.

The rawest of deals, just like Nana Caro had said; and this must have been exactly what she meant. This town is in your blood, she’d also said, in ways you might not yet understand.

At the time, I’d thought that she was being figurative. It made more sense now—except for one thing.

“Then why wasn’t my magic stronger, instead of weaker, when I left town?” I challenged.

“Because living here has changed all of the families, altered the fundamental texture of how we work our spells,” he replied, pushing his glasses up his nose with his index finger. “We’re used to the lake’s power now, dependent on it. It’s become a part of both the town and us—the magical fuel that we instinctively reach for, that we know how to work best. Beyond its reach, our own gifts wane.”

“So why couldn’t I feel it before I left?” I asked. “The town, I mean. It only really started when I touched the original Grimoire.”

“If you think back, you’ll find it first began when you returned to town for the Gauntlet, in your formal capacity as the Harlow scion, a rising elder,” my father corrected, and he was right—I remembered that raw swell of magic, so much bigger than anything I’d experienced before, that had greeted me so effusively as soon as I crossed town lines. “That would have been the beginning of the transition, from me to you.”

“What transition?” I said, my head swimming. I hadn’t slept at all, on top of being drained from my stint as Arbiter last night, and the aftermath of the adrenaline geyser that had been the tiebreak challenge. Even afraid as I still was for Talia, I was starting to flag.

“The Harlow elder serves as . . . well, think of it as an avatar of the town,” he said. “While all the Harlows take part in the distillation, only one of us at a time maintains such a strong, primal communion with Thistle Grove. And now that you’re back, and old enough to take it on, the communion is transitioning from me to you.”

“And what if I hadn’t come back? What would have happened then?”

“Then it would have shifted over to Delilah, just like the Arbiter’s role.”

But I had come back, just in time to ruin all the things for my cousin in one fell swoop.

“Why isn’t any of this in the Grimoire?” I demanded, massaging my throbbing temples. This changed everything about my place here, how I thought I fit into this town. We Harlows weren’t just the record keepers, after all, but something much bigger and stranger than that. And yet, I thought, with rising aggravation, I’d never even been told about any of it at all. “The Thistle Grove origin story we all get notably includes none of this. Why haven’t I ever heard any of this before?”