Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(17)

But even Morgan le Fay, the infamous Blackmoore ancestress—she’d lived, what, a solid thousand years ago? Maybe in her time there’d been sleeping goddesses lurking in every random body of water, and no one gave it so much as a second thought when they got summoned down for an impromptu dive by one of them.

But this was the twenty-first century, and these days we didn’t have deities traipsing all over Thistle Grove. I couldn’t remember a single story told during a Sabbat or Esbat circle, not even during one of the eight Wheel of the Year holidays, about a Thistle Grove witch encountering an actual goddess in either the flesh or the stone. Up until last night, none of us had even known what fueled the magic of the lake.

The idea that only I knew what was really down there—not the elders or the Harlow historians; not even Emmeline Harlow herself, the living Voice of Thistle Grove and the current Victor of the Wreath—made me want to melt into a puddle of stunned disbelief.

I buried my hands in my hair, nearly tripping over Nadja of Antipaxos as she twined between my ankles with an anxious purr. My sweet (and profoundly unstable) tabby familiar preferred to live under my bed rather than sleep in it with me, and I usually saw her only when I needed her help for spellwork, or in one of her rare bouts of manic love. The fact that she seemed legitimately worried about me now only amplified my distress; when Nadja bothered to make an appearance, that meant shit was getting real.

And why was this happening to me? Even for a witch, I was too damn average for divine visitations. Yes, I’d spent much of my adult life savoring rewatches of Supernatural and Torchwood and The Magicians alongside my many sci-fi favorites—but I was also a lawyer, a planner, an arguably overly enthusiastic spreadsheet maker. Hell, I wore suits nearly every day of my life and relished it. I was a grounded, competent, mundane person, someone who thrived on rules and stability.

What I wasn’t, was equipped to process the existence of an entire goddess—or a sentient statue of one, or whatever implausible thing it was that lived inside our lake.

“Screw it,” I muttered, bending over to scratch Nadja between the ears as she worry-purred. “This is just not gonna work for me today.”

I tried not to go into the office on Sundays, so I could at least maintain the semidelusional pretense of work-life balance. But now I desperately needed—scratch that, craved—the normalcy of my two-screen desktop, the extensive list of contractual law and employment issues that were on my agenda for next week. I even had a court appearance coming up for a labor dispute, an atypical and exciting challenge for me. It would be so easy, so satisfying, to shift my attention to that instead of dwelling on . . . this.

I knew, logically, that I should go to my mother with what had happened, first thing. Lyonesse was the Blackmoore matriarch, and had been since my grandmother had stepped down as elder following the Avramov-Harlow joint Gauntlet win last Samhain. But my mother could be . . . challenging, and I wasn’t sure if I could handle any further emotional escalation at this moment. And it wasn’t like the stone statue in the lake wasn’t going to keep for another day or two, after however many centuries—or hell, millennia, who knew—it’d been languishing in there.

Mind made up, I took a long shower, then picked out my outfit while my five-step skincare routine seeped into whichever dermal layers it was supposed to be targeting. By the time I’d blown out my hair and finished an understated no-makeup look, it was kind of demoralizing to see how clearly hungover I still looked. Dull and red-rimmed eyes, violet half-moons beneath them that even La Mer concealer couldn’t quite cover. That general listless quality that somehow sucked all the volume from your freshly washed hair.

But this, at least, I could fix.

In front of the bathroom mirror, I closed my eyes, bringing both hands above my head with my fingers steepled. I didn’t usually resort to glamour spells; unless you were doing them for some particularly worthy reason, they always felt a little bit like cheating.

But maybe, today of all days, I could give myself some grace.

Murmuring the incantation, I brought my hands down over my face, tapping a dainty, precise pattern against my skin with my fingertips. Magic surged up my arms and bloomed in my hands, all swirling heat and liquid honey, the usual exhilarating rush—but much zestier than normal, like someone had sprinkled some unexpected Carolina Reaper into the special sauce.

I opened my eyes, and gasped so hard at my reflection that I nearly inhaled my own tongue.

I’d intended the spell to just perk me up a little; erase those bruised circles, infuse a little bounce into my hair and glisten in my eyes. Instead, the glamour had not only understood the assignment, but racked up several thousand bonus points.

My dark brown eyes had turned a lustrous black that shone with refracted color, golden and ruby glints reflecting from my irises like gems. My eyelashes curled so extravagantly long and dark they looked like a doll’s, and my eyebrows, which had been perfectly fine before, now looked like the After picture at a very upscale microblading salon that catered exclusively to Beyoncé and Rihanna and other actual queens.

I tilted my face back and forth, inspecting my reflection with a slack jaw. My skin shimmered in a strange, glassy way, as if it had been airbrushed and then lightly dusted with crushed diamonds. My hair all but billowed around me, drifting in a nonexistent breeze, absurdly thick and glossy and nearly four-dimensional in color, as if my highlights reflected more light spectra than the rest of me.