Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(21)

I hoped they all still remembered their own middle names and social security numbers.

Then Gawain himself came tumbling out in typically severe emotional distress, mostly on the topic of his show having been ruined, just ruined, and what abject blackguard was to blame for this travesty, anyway? Gareth and I had only managed to talk him into flouncing off to take the rest of the day to “recenter and ground” when the missive spell arrived, winging through one of the arched windows with a muted screech.

It took the form of a snowy owl conjuration—part of the Harlow family emblem—which folded and rearranged itself in a series of improbable, Escheresque geometric conversions that produced an envelope, wax-sealed with Emmeline Harlow’s personal sigil as both Victor of the Wreath and Voice of Thistle Grove.

“Was all that really necessary?” I asked a little dryly, lifting an eyebrow as the envelope floated over into Gareth’s hands.

Gareth rolled his eyes almost fondly, shaking his head. “Nah, it’s just Emmy dunking on me again. Fair play, sort of, don’t worry about it. Let’s see . . .” He slit the envelope open with a thumbnail, then read the paper inside, eyebrows lifting.

“What is it?” I asked, stomach churning with apprehension.

“She’s calling an emergency quorum at Harlow House, right now,” he said, looking a little stunned as he met my eyes. “Apparently she somehow sensed what happened here today.”

“I . . . didn’t know she could do that,” I said faintly, a tendril of foreboding slithering through my chest as I considered what this might mean for my experience at the lake. Had Emmy felt that, too, that massive disturbance in power? Did she know, somehow, that I’d been there, too?

“Neither did I,” Gareth responded with a shrug. “But we’ve never had a double-threat Victor before, have we?”

That was true. Having traditionally served as Arbiters rather than combatants in the Gauntlet of the Grove—the spellcasting tournament that determined which family scion would govern Thistle Grove’s magical community for a generation—the Harlows had never even had a chance to win before. Apparently, this had been by design. Elias Harlow, the founder of their house, had been the first to discover the primal power of Lady’s Lake; something about his family’s particular brand of magic served as a funnel, allowing the rest of us to tap safely into the lake’s vast reservoir of power ourselves. The Harlows were functionally the power plants of the town, filtering and distilling the wild onslaught of magic that flooded from the lake. As the Voice of Thistle Grove, their reigning elder also enjoyed some strange, personal communion with the town itself.

That role had originally belonged to James Harlow, Emmy’s father and our head recordkeeper. It had transitioned to Emmy upon her participation in the Gauntlet as both Arbiter and combatant, once she’d stepped in as champion for House Avramov when its scion, Natalia, was hurt.

The Harlows’ tremendous boon to the town had been kept under wraps for centuries, due to Elias Harlow’s bizarrely skewed notions of honor and equitability—but in her new dual role, Emmy wasn’t handling it like that. Her first formal act as Victor had been to educate the witch community about what it meant to be the Voice, and the great service the Harlows rendered unto the rest of us. Even as it left them capable of casting only minor spellwork of their own as the heavy toll.

From the tone she’d taken with that message, we’d been lucky that she hadn’t seen fit to impose a tithe on the rest of us, to even out the scales a little.

“She also says there was an incident of some kind at the lake last night. A large-scale magical fluctuation,” Gareth continued, his eyes skipping over the rest of the letter. My fledgling chill expanded into full-blown frost, creeping down my belly as my suspicions were confirmed: so Emmy had felt that disturbance, too. But if I wasn’t being summoned to appear before the emergency quorum, maybe she didn’t know I’d been a witness to it. “She wants to discuss how the events might be connected, and then talk about next steps.”

“Got it,” I said faintly, pressing my lips together. “So I guess you have to run now, Scion Blackmoore, and go collect Mother as well. And Father, if she’s planning on taking him along this time.”

“Yes, but I’ll be back,” Gareth said, with more steel to his voice than normal. “And then we are gonna talk, Nina. Because what you did back there, with that Supersize Uriel’s Flame—don’t even try to tell me that was some kind of fluke. You blew right the hell past me, sis; you didn’t even bring me in at all. I know your magic packs a wallop, but I’ve never even felt anything like that before, and I’m supposed to be the scion here. The least you owe me is an explanation for how you pulled that off.”

I nodded briskly, lowering my eyes. Even though we did it as a matter of course when it came to managing our parents and our little brother, Gareth and I didn’t, as a rule, keep secrets from each other. For all that he could be an undeniably flaky fly-by-night, in many ways my polar opposite, my big brother had done a lot of (very belated) growing up recently.

And he’d never let me down before.

I could use his take, his counsel on whatever was happening to me now.

“Go,” I said shortly, giving him a little push. “And then we’ll talk, I promise.”



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