Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(71)
“We’ve all been banging our heads against the wall, trying to get to the bottom of it,” Delilah muttered, shooting me a viciously indignant glare. “Emmy, most of all. And here you are. Here you’ve been, this whole time, keeping the answer to yourself. Selfish and greedy and heedless of anything that doesn’t benefit you, like every last Blackmoore that ever lived.”
“I didn’t realize,” I protested weakly, shaking my head. “I didn’t know . . .”
“Well, now you do. And more importantly, now I do,” she snapped, reaching for a parchment scroll from beneath the counter, an owl’s-feather quill floating to her hand from the stacks behind her. “And as a Harlow recordkeeper, it’s my duty to report what I’ve discovered to the Victor—and more importantly, to the Voice of Thistle Grove.”
“Nina,” Gareth muttered into my ear, hand clamping down harder around my arm as Delilah bent over the parchment and wrote in a furious scrawl, sparks billowing around the scratching tip of her nib. A basic missive spell, one that would likely appear in Emmy’s hands in moments once Delilah was done composing her letter. “You can’t let her do this. You can’t.”
I could hear the wavering discord of panic in his voice, feel the way it set the wick of my own alight. If I allowed Delilah to share this knowledge with Emmy, what kind of disaster would it bring down on our family’s heads? And what would the Victor do with me?
Would she force me to give up this magic—this blessing—now that I’d only just tasted the full extent of it?
She would, of course she would. Emmy would never allow one Blackmoore’s strength to outstrip that of the entire town, not on her watch. She’d see me as a looming threat to her flock and its magic, a danger to the community she was bound to protect and serve and lead. And yet, with Belisama’s rock, I could become what my mother and grandmother wanted me to be—more, even, than they could ever have expected. More than any of us could have dreamed, when it came to restoring Blackmoore glory within our lifetimes.
If that was what I chose to do with it.
At the very least, I needed time, the chance to think clearly about this. I couldn’t allow Delilah to strip me of that control, to take even that choice away from me.
“Gareth,” I said, drawing up my spine, making a split-second decision so instantaneous it felt more like reflex or instinct. “Take the stone. I can’t touch it right now; I don’t know what else might happen if I do.”
“Excuse me?” Delilah hissed, head snapping up from the parchment. “You will not steal—”
“Forget,” I began, lifting my hands to cast the oblivion glamour. The words that actually emerged from my mouth sounded more like some savage echo catapulting around a mountain range, shrieking, OBLIVION.
I’d never cast any version of the oblivion glamour before; had never needed to, given the mega version of it already cast over the entire town, specifically geared toward managing normie exposure to magic. And memory-tampering spells were strictly prohibited by the Grimoire when it came to witches using them on each other. I should know; back when Igraine had been the Victor, I’d sat on her tribunal a few times myself, to determine punishment for those who’d violated that precept. The consequences had never been pleasant for the caster, and I could remember my own righteousness, the moral certainty that they’d done grievous wrong.
But model student of the Grimoire that I was, I knew the incantation—and I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t let Delilah render me helpless this way, take the decision out of my hands by alerting Emmy now.
I needed her to forget that Gareth and I had been here, talked about this. I needed that time alone, to decide what I was going to do, chart my own course.
Boosted by demigoddess magic, the oblivion glamour struck Delilah like something physical. A supersonic boom, a wave made of air. I could see her hair fly back as if in a whooshing gust of wind, her entire head rocking back so hard it must have jarred her spine. Then her face went disturbingly, awfully slack, her eyes emptying like an upended hourglass sifted free of sand. The hand clutching the quill drifted aimlessly back down to the parchment in slow motion, like a sparrow drifting on a wind current.
When her fingers uncurled, it dropped out of her hand, rolling off the desk and landing soundlessly on the floorboards.
“What?” she whispered blankly, blinking as if to clear her eyes, struggling to focus on us. “Who . . .”
I clapped my hand to my mouth to stifle a moan, engulfed in a wild, sickening regret that rose up in my throat like bile, threatening to choke me. This was beyond wrong. This was terrible. I had hurt Delilah, erased her memory, possibly caused damage not even yet perceptible. And I’d done it anyway; for myself, my family, in one semi-unthinking instant. For something I wasn’t even sure I wanted, much less deserved.
And the superpowered glamour hadn’t even stopped with Delilah.
Too strong to contain, or to spend itself entirely in her, it unfurled away—leaping along her still-open connection to the many Harlow wards that wreathed the bookshelves. Even though it had already wiped her memory clean, it still brimmed with too much power, far too much. So much of it that it rattled the floor under our feet, made the shelves themselves tremble with its force like a minor earthquake, books shuddering against each other.
Then, layer by layer, it began to peel away the wards themselves, like stripping wallpaper in great curls. Making the spells themselves forget what they had been cast for, what it was their duty to protect. What generations of painstaking Harlows had intended as their purpose.