Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(69)
We were still glowering at each other when Delilah returned, ten minutes later. She glanced briefly between me and Gareth, flicking one eyebrow up at the obvious tension curdling the air between us, but refrained from any comment.
“These are some of the artifacts in our safekeeping,” she said, delicately unfolding a black velvet cloth on the counter, pulling the corners smooth. A cracked-open, creamy pink shell sat tucked inside, with a tiny pearl glimmering within it, next to a miniature stone carving of a cow, and what looked like a small, flat river rock polished to an almost mirror gleam. “That have made their way to us, over the centuries. Each one of these is said to have belonged to a particular goddess, or been touched by one with intention—and they are true magical artifacts. Talismans of pure power. I want to see how you react to them.”
“Which goddesses?” I asked, my gaze drifting over them. I could feel the magic she’d described; the air above them nearly wavered with it, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. “How did you pick these?”
Delilah shook her head, holding up a finger. “I don’t want to bias you with any prior knowledge. Just touch them, handle them a little. Let’s see if any of them speak to you.”
I reached out, let my fingers hover over the trinity. It was hard to tell if any of them drew me, when the warble of magic was so powerful in all of them, creating that collective, compelling thrum. On impulse, I reached for the shell—probably only because it was so pretty—curling my fingers around it. It felt cool and slick, somehow watery, even though it didn’t look at all wet. I could hear a rushing in my head as I held it, like the swishing give-and-take of the tide, along with the hiss of sea-foam and the crash of cresting waves.
But there was nothing beyond that, no particular resonance with me.
“It feels like the sea,” I said to Delilah, setting it back down on the velvet. “But I don’t sense any personal connection to it.”
“So not Cliodhna, then,” Delilah said with a nod. “That one seemed like an obvious possibility, given your name. And since we happen to have one of her wishing shells, I thought, why not?” She jerked her pointed little chin back toward the items. “Try again.”
I went for the cow this time, again for no particular reason other than that I found it kind of cute. I felt water from it, too; but more like the snaking wind of rivers cutting their serpentine paths through soil, the stir of submerged cattails growing near their banks, the marshy, saltless smell of river water drifting in the air. And there was a sense of pervasive relief to this one, too—a feeling that it abhorred any kind of pain.
“Water, again,” I told Delilah, when I opened my eyes. “But riverine, this time. And . . . healing, maybe? Something to do with alleviating pain, at any rate.”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, her mouth twitching into a tiny smile, like a prickly teacher grudgingly pleased with a student’s progress. “This one is a figurine sanctified by Damona, who appears in both the Celtic and Gallic pantheons. She’s associated with rivers, and with healing. And cows, apparently.”
Nodding, I set the cow back down and reached for the river rock, expecting to experience nothing of any greater intensity.
Instead, as soon as my fingers wrapped around it, I became a living star.
The heat that filled me was searing, scorching, yet somehow not painful at all. A sense of liquid light rushing through me, streams of flame being poured into my mouth and ears and nose, roaring like a fierce yet benign flash fire through my veins. I could see myself begin to glow, shedding a light so dazzling that both Gareth and Delilah cried out, flinging their arms up to shield their eyes.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” I gasped, and my voice emerged tripled with harmonics, wavering as if it were being filtered through water. “WHAT—”
A cascade of water abruptly crashed over my head, as if a waterfall had opened in the ceiling just for me.
Lake water, to be exact, drawn specifically from Lady’s Lake. I knew what it was, could sense the precise difference between this water and the sense that I’d gleaned from the other two artifacts.
As if their sources were different, on both a magical and a molecular level.
“My books!” Delilah was shrieking in a full-blown panic, frantically casting some sort of protective working. I realized I could see the skeins of magic as they rippled out from her, clicked into place like keys sliding into locks, fitting into the workings already encasing the shelves. She was triggering the anti-damage wards that shielded the books, specifically the ones that guarded against water.
Well, that was also new, I considered dimly, as if from a great distance from myself, so caught up in the euphoric blaze of elation that I could barely think. Non-Blackmoore spells had never been visible to me before, magic itself never made manifest like this.
“Put it down, Nina!” Gareth was shouting, one hand still flung up to guard his eyes. I was glowing even through my personal deluge, like some underwater beacon, my skin shedding a furious, fiery light as the water coursed over me. “Just drop the fucking rock!”
I let that terrible, tremendous, ecstatic feeling flood through me for a moment longer—the idea of losing it felt unbearable, the worst kind of devastation—and then I reluctantly managed to pry my fingers loose of the stone, letting it fall to the floor.
The waterworks above me cut out, as if someone had swiftly turned a faucet off. Meanwhile, the molten light inside me began to subside, ever so slowly, the fire leaching out of me in wisps, smoking off my drenched hair and clothes. I dried out in an instant, and the water that was puddled around my feet disappeared in the blink of an eye, as if it hadn’t even been there at all. Even the water that had splashed Gareth and Delilah and the counter vanished in a breath.