Witcha Gonna Do? (Witchington #1)(38)
“My family has been in Saint Augustine since it was founded in the 1500s—and my mother’s side was there even earlier than that—and for that entire time we’ve been hiding our core magic. We are duíl.”
Birdie lets out a gasp and presses her hand to her heart, and out of the corner of my eye I watch Eli put an arm around her waist and tuck her against him. My focus, though, stays on Tilda, watching for any sign of fear or censure, bracing myself for either or both or worse. Instead, all I see is curiosity.
“That’s rare magic,” she says.
“And hunted.” That’s why we moved so often growing up. We never lived in the same town for more than a year or two and never in a city where we were likely to attract the attention of the Council. Of course, we were on borrowed time and we all knew it. “When I was fifteen, the Council came for us in the middle of the night. We spent a month going through tribunal judgment before being exiled. I got sent to a boarding school that was more of a reeducation center.” Cold. Clinical. Controlling. It hadn’t taken me long to learn that no one could be trusted, not when spilling secrets meant getting a rare lukewarm shower or an extra helping at lunch. “My parents spent those years learning how to survive on the tundra in The Beyond. By the time we were reunited, they were living off the occasional wild hare, turnips, and undersized potatoes, with just enough food donation boxes dropped by drones to keep them from dying but not thriving.” The point had never been to kill us, only to break us and make us pliant to their demands. “And when the Council came to me with an opportunity to move my family from the tundra to the warmer coastal district, I did what needed to be done.”
“For your family,” Tilda says, understanding softening her gaze. When I nod, she asks, “Where are they now?”
I clamp down on my emotions, shove my fears into a box in my mind just like I’d learned in The Beyond, but they leak out anyway and my voice shakes as I answer. “I don’t know.”
Tilda makes a sympathetic groan and wraps her arms around me, her cheek resting against my chest above my heart. Everything stops for a moment, and the salty scent of my magic mixes with the buttery smell of warm movie theater popcorn and fills the air around us. She looks up at me, a divot of confusion between her eyes as if she’s not sure why she’s comforting me. This is the exact moment when I should tell her everything and explain how I cursed us both without meaning to and that I’ll fix it as soon as we unfreeze her family and find my parents.
But that’s when she squeezes me a little tighter in a hug, and it’s like standing by the fire after walking in from the cold and finding a hearty rabbit stew simmering in the cook pot hanging above the flames—as if even only for an evening, everything is going to be okay.
“The Council has them?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Griselda said the Resistance got them out, but I don’t have any more than that.”
“And now she’s frozen.” Tilda swallows hard and steps back. “I’m so sorry.”
“We’re gonna fix it.” There isn’t another choice. “And this is how.”
Making sure there’s at least three inches between Tilda and myself, I summon up my magic.
“Ostende,” I say as I wave my hand at the fireplace. The kindling sparks and catches fire, revealing a copy of a museum in the flames. Tiny Degases line the walls, along with a wall-sized oil painting of Washington crossing the Delaware on his Continental Army–issued broom made from birch twigs and a hazelwood handle emblazoned with the army’s seal. In the middle of the room, set in a glass case high above the average height of a witch is The Liber Umbrarum.
“There it is,” I say, using the iron fireplace poker to point at the book. “That glass was enchanted to be unbreakable prior to its installation at the museum. It’s seven and a half feet off the ground and accessible to one person at a time for viewing via a narrow, enclosed staircase that locks at the top and bottom so that whoever is viewing the book has to be let in and out by a guard who unlocks the door with an optic scan. There will be more than one hundred úlfhe?nar guards placed strategically through the museum and on the grounds. Oh yeah, and there will be a protection dome so no one can summon any spells.”
Eli strides over to the flames and swipes his hand through them, scattering the magical blueprints before turning to stare at me, disbelief etched into his face. “Stealing The Liber Umbrarum is impossible.”
“True,” I say, sending a know-it-all smirk the big witch’s way just to make him glare all the harder. “But only if you don’t have a witch with giant relatives in the family tree so he stands over seven feet high with a three-foot reach.” I turn to Birdie, who has a police file on her an inch thick, which Cassius slipped to me as part of the background report for my mission. “Or a witch who spent ten years as a pickpocket before becoming an accountant.” Turning from Birdie’s shocked expression, I look at Tilda and force myself to shove my hands in my pants pockets so I won’t reach out to touch her. “Or one of the most distracting women in all of Witchingdom.”
She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Is that your way of saying that everyone stares to see what I’ll mess up next?”
“Yes,” I say, because what’s the point in fluffing it up? “And we’re going to use that to save your family.”