Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(87)
Just as I was about to cut my losses and call it a day, a flash of amber winked in my peripheral vision. I wheeled toward it, a flush of pure joy searing up my throat, like, See? You’ve still got it, my bitch!
It wasn’t a typical cluster trio; only a solitary blossom, and on the smallish side as viridians came, growing in a nook just by a sycamore’s base. But its teardrop petals were plump and glossy with health, a gorgeously vivid bluish green; nestled within, the stamens quivered with a rich dusting of that precious yellow pollen. If I was careful with it, this single flower would be enough to cast a full iteration of Marauder’s Misery—one of the anti-theft wards I’d been restoring at Tomes & Omens ever since Fucking Nina Blackmoore undid three centuries’ worth of them, in her brief and catastrophic rampage as a demigoddess.
Flames and stars, living in this town could be exhausting.
I sank down by the tree’s base, pebbles and blades of grass pressing imprints into my bare knees. Then I closed my eyes and reached for the flower, cupping my hands around it without touching the petals.
Like most magically imbued flora, viridians couldn’t just be plucked by mundane means. They needed to be harvested with the use of a particular preservation spell, to keep their potency intact. Magical botany was like that—infinitely fascinating and challenging, and also finicky as shit. Hence, why I loved it. It demanded both finesse and expertise, a deep understanding of theories and disciplines that the other Thistle Grove families largely ignored in favor of relying on their natural talents. Even the Thorns didn’t bother with it much, given their affinity for magically coaxing plants into doing whatever they wanted them to do.
But arcane knowledge, and its practical applications . . . that was where Harlows excelled.
Especially this Harlow.
I took a slow breath, twitching my fingers into the delicate position called for by the spell, lips parting to speak the incantation. The words floated into my mind’s eye in swooping antique copperplate; I could even picture the yellowed page on which the rhyming couplets had been inked.
Then the entirety of the charm sluiced out of my head, like water sliding through a sieve.
All of it, vanished in an instant. The words themselves, the lovely handwriting, the aged grain of the paper. Where the memory had resided, there was now nothing. A cold and empty darkness like a miniature black hole whorling in my head.
The panic that gushed through me was instantaneous, an icy, prickling flood that engulfed me from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes, a flurry of pinheads sinking into my skin. And even worse was the terrible sense of dislocation that accompanied it, as if the entire world had spun wildly on its axis around me before falling back into place awry. I’d known that spell, only moments ago. Now, I didn’t. It was simply gone, lost, as if it had been plucked directly out of my head by some merciless, meticulous set of tweezers.
It felt nauseatingly like existing in two realities at once. One in which I was the old Delilah, a living library, a vast and unimpeachable repository of arcane information. And another in which I was a tabula rasa, almost no one at all. Just a facsimile of a person rather than somebody real.
The dissonance of it was horrifying, a primal terror I’d never experienced before. The way, I imagined, some people might fear death, that ultimate disintegration of identity if you truly believed nothing else came after.
I sank back onto my haunches, wrapping my arms around my chest. Goose bumps had mustered along the expanse of my skin, and I broke into a clammy sweat despite the buzzy warmth of the air, the humid heat that permeated the forest from the lake. “It’s okay, Lilah,” I whispered to myself under my breath, rocking back and forth, feeling abysmally pathetic and silly and weak. “You’re okay. Try to relax, and let it pass over you. Like a reed in the river, remember? Don’t fight against the current, because the current always wins.”
Sometimes, the simple mantra Ivy had taught me worked, bleeding off some of the panic.
Other times, it did absolute fuck all.
The worst part was that no one understood why this was still happening to me. As a Harlow recordkeeper, I should have been shielded from a conventional oblivion glamour in the first place. Given our role as the memory keepers of our community, Thistle Grove’s formal occult historians, we were all bespelled to be immune to such attacks. But Nina’s form of the spell had been superpowered, whipped to unfathomable heights by the kernel of divinity that had been lodged inside her, the deity’s favor she’d been granted by Belisama.
Why that entitled Blackmoore bitch had been deemed deserving of a goddess’s favor in the first place was still beyond me.
In any case, even after the mega glamour dissolved—helped along by my cousin Emmy’s and my uncle James’s efforts—I wasn’t rid of it entirely. Almost six months later, I still sometimes lost memories like this, little aftershocks of oblivion fracturing through me even after all this time. Other times, I reached for knowledge that I should have had—that I knew I’d once possessed—only to discover an utter, sucking absence in its place. As if some vestigial remnant of the spell lurked inside me like a malevolent parasite, a magical malaria that only occasionally reared up.
The lost memories did return sometimes, if I relaxed enough in the moment, or if I was able to revisit their original source—reread the page that held the charm, pore over the missing diagram. But sometimes they simply didn’t, as if my brain had been rewired and was now inured to retaining that piece of information. And it was unpredictable. Just when I’d begun to tentatively hope that I might be on the upswing, I’d tumble into yet another mental vortex, shifting quicksand where I’d once reliably found the diamond edges of my mind.