Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(29)
“Why should I believe you?” he demanded, drawing up his spine. “Why should I believe any of this wild bullshit? Maybe the thing I can do with my hands is some kind of, I don’t know, weird-ass fluke. Saint Elmo’s fire or something. A freak accident of physics that might have a scientific explanation, something that isn’t magic.”
“I guess that could be true,” I said equably, lifting up my own hands. “But even if that were the case . . . what do you think you’d call this?”
Closing my eyes, I summoned up witchlights of my own, letting them flare above my palms. Pulsing and expanding, shifting in color from warm amber to dazzling platinum, melting into sapphire blue followed by rose gold. Then I opened my eyes and murmured the incantation for Phoenix Rising, an illusionist spell we sometimes used in the shows.
The globes of witchlight spun themselves up into whirling helices, then expanded into delicately drawn avian silhouettes, graceful as calligraphy. Radiant birds built entirely of light, rendered in perfect detail to their outstretched downy wings and the swooping fronds of their tail feathers.
They rose to hover above each of my shoulders, wings softly fluttering. This was where the spell usually drew to a halt, the firebirds shining like bright beacons before fading away. But I’d forgotten that I was now supercharged, and that Phoenix Rising had no intention of phasing out at any reasonable stopping point. Instead, the birds grew larger and brighter with every beat of their wings, blazing so radiant that the entire bar drowned in their pulsing light, iridescence bouncing off every reflective surface.
The inside of the Shamrock looked like it’d been swallowed by a rising newborn sun, a shimmering dawn confined to these four walls.
Morty threw up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare, just as a shower of sparks began to fall from the firebirds’ crested wingtips, a golden flurry that swooped into a whirl above our heads before bursting into miniature fireworks as the birds winked out of existence.
“Oh, shit,” Morty breathed as he slowly lowered his hand, staring at me with something between sheer terror and awestruck amazement. “Fuck me. You . . . you had fire in your eyes, Nina.”
Had I? Well, that was not customary.
Luminous specks were still drifting down to coat every surface, glimmering like phoenix dust. Some of them landed in the dark ruck of Morty’s hair, and sprinkled onto the bridge of his dainty nose; I felt the insane urge to reach out across the bar and brush them away.
“You are definitely not just a lawyer, are you?” he said, gaping at me, still teetering on the dividing line between aghast and wonderstruck. “You’re a . . . a goddess or something. Or, like, an actual fucking superhero.”
“No,” I said simply, lowering my hands and folding them primly on the bar, even though on the inside I still felt like a gorgeous, raging maelstrom, like the blaze that now lived inside me had guttered but far from died. “Believe me, I definitely am a lawyer—and I’m also a witch. And what you just saw? That was magic. Not Saint Elmo’s fire, not some physics freak show. Real magic, the kind they tell stories about.”
“Why don’t you wait right here, please,” Morty said abruptly, turning to dash toward the door behind the bar. “I’m gonna need a minute to go breathe into a paper bag and handle my shit.”
By the time he returned, I’d drained my martini and the phoenix dust had evanesced, leaving the Shamrock speckled only in its own gaudy and entirely mundane glitter. With an air of restrained, buzzing energy, Morty silently shook us another martini each—a double this time, by the looks of it.
“Alright,” he said, tossing back half of his, still blinking a little rapidly. “That was, uh, very impressive, yeah. And convincing as fuck, tell you what. You’re a witch, everyone is witches, no further proof necessary! Are they all . . . is everyone else like you? That crazy strong?”
“Not exactly. Blackmoores are the most powerful of the lot of us,” I said, leaving out my own recent indeterminate power surge. “But the rest of the families have different talents, their own mythologies. The Avramovs, for example, are Baba Yaga’s descendants, necromancers from—”
Morty’s head shot up. “The fuck you say! Baba Yaga? Necromancers? You’re—you’re telling me Micah, Talia, and Issa, all of them . . . they raise the dead?”
“Well, not exactly,” I hedged, tilting my head back and forth. “I mean, I believe they could if they wanted to, but resurrecting the deceased is severely frowned upon. They incline more toward divination, communing with spirits, working with ectoplasm. The more benign aspects of being speakers to the dead.”
And occasionally, one of their restless dead possessed a living Avramov and wreaked utter hexing havoc upon the rest of us—but based on Morty’s reactions, I was getting the sense that such a story was out-of-bounds for this preliminary conversation.
Morty gave a tortured little moan, nostrils flaring as he took deliberate breaths through his nose. “Ectoplasm. Like the shit they talk about in Ghostbusters?”
“Well, it’s not exactly like that, but same general principle, yes. Spirit stuff. Ghostly matter.”
“They work with ectoplasm,” Morty repeated to himself, looking haunted. “Hell, I used to date Micah, a little while back . . .”
This little nugget of information gave me an indistinct, pulsing pang of discomfort, something I probably needed to address for myself at a later time.