Witcha Gonna Do? (Witchington #1)(62)
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tilda . . .
My feet may be planted firmly on the train’s floorboards, but I am still flying, and the fact that I don’t have electricity shooting out of my fingertips like laser beams blows my mind. That was petrifying and thrilling and not something I want to do again exactly, but wow what an experience.
I’m dripping all over the floor and all four of us look like half-drowned witches while Vance uses the train’s intercom to tell the engineer to get us back home like the dogs of hell are nipping on our heels. I don’t think Erik is quite that bad, but he is definitely not a fan of ours right now. Once I get back home and unfreeze my family, I’ll return the book immediately. I’ll have it back by dawn at the latest.
Part of me can’t believe we pulled it off—especially with all of that chaos at the end there—and part of me is all fuck yeah! And judging by looking around, I’m not the only one feeling like a can of soda that has been tossed in the passenger seat of a car and then driven down a pothole-heavy dirt road at a hundred miles an hour. Birdie’s eyes are wide with excitement, her cheeks are flushed, and she is talking a mile a minute bringing Vance up to speed about what went down at the museum. Eli, meanwhile, can’t keep his eyes off of Birdie, tracking her every move as she paces the train car, moving closer as the train starts rumbling down the tracks, no doubt so she has someone solid to hold on to in case we have a bumpy ride.
I look over at Gil and catch him watching me from his spot across the room. Something shifts inside me, a comforting warmth filling me right up—that is, until the moment I spot the tarot cards on the table spread out in the five-card formation I left them in after my last reading. The decorative globe, pure power in card form, sits in the middle of the circle formed by the other four cards.
Leona.
How in the hell could I have forgotten about my sister? How could I be that selfish? They were destined to be together, at least according to the cards as I dealt them. But really, if it wasn’t true, how would I have ended up with the exact same cards in the exact same order twice in a row? Suddenly, all of the excitement fizzing inside me goes flat and the effort of keeping my shoulders straight and my chin up becomes too much.
That’s when Gil moves from his spot by the bar over to the tarot table, where he moves the globe card from the center of the spread to the top right.
I hustle over. “What are you doing?”
“The order was messed up,” he says, his attention focused on the cards. “The world card, it’s in the personal identification spot when in a five-card spread like this it should be over here in growth.” He looks up at me. “Did you do this?”
I nod.
He grimaces and rubs his palm hard against the back of his neck as he contemplates the spread on the table. “Makes sense.”
Well, ouch. Forget being a two-liter bottle that someone left the cap off of, now I’m the drink dispenser that ran out of soda syrup. “Because it’s wrong?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “It’s because of what happened tonight. That was your power, didn’t you feel it?”
Feel it? I could probably have powered a small town with the amount of their excess magic rolling through me while they did the spell. “I was just completing the circle.”
“It wasn’t that and you know it.” Gil takes my hand, sending off sparks of awareness, anticipation, and something that feels a lot like home. “Tilda, there’s so much we need to talk about.”
Yeah, it is definitely beginning to feel like that, but it is so much to process. If I’m wrong about the tarot cards pointing to Leona—Griselda all but said I was—what else am I wrong about? The power part is sweet, but I spent years trying to cast spells on my own in my room. I memorized the most popular spell books from front to back and in some cases, back to front. I wasn’t even able to make a feather float. It took years of going to my magical misfits group sessions to start to accept who I am—a null, a dud, an outré.
I’m about to tell Gil exactly that when Vance lets out a belch loud and long enough to set a record, a gross record but still a record.
“Okay children, go get out of those wet clothes before you all catch your deaths. We’ll be back in Wrightsville in the morning.” Vance unwraps the oil paper from around The Liber Umbrarum and settles into a reading chair with it. “Go on. Get.”
Hand in hand, Birdie and Eli head off to the sleeping car in front of the lounge car with their rooms in it. Meanwhile, Gil and I go in the opposite direction to our sleeping car, leaving a trail of rain droplets in our wake.
“What did you mean out there, about my power?” I ask as soon as we cross the gangway into our car.
“Tilda, you know that was because of you. You made all of that magic happen.”
He says it with such sincerity that I want to hug him as we walk down the narrow hallway and stop in front of his room. I know all I added was moral support, but the magic rubbed off on me anyway, leaving me all tingly and desperate for an outlet for all the adrenaline coursing through me.
“Gil, I need something from you.” I reach behind him and open his bedroom door, slipping around him and going inside before I lose my nerve. “Can I stay the night?”
“You don’t believe me about the spell and your power,” he says, his disappointment evident as he comes inside the room, his shoulders slumped.