Witcha Gonna Do? (Witchington #1)(66)
Tilda sets the tray with its empty cereal bowl and half-drunk cup of tea on the bedside table.
It’s now or never.
Nerves eating away at my stomach lining, I smooth my hand over the pages. “This is what I wanted you to look at.”
She tucks her hair behind her ears and then straightens her glasses before peering down at the book as if she’s looking at one of those hidden items pictured and needs to locate the golden hammer. “Why?”
“Read the description.”
Yeah, my vibe is getting to that weird intensity that makes my skin all itchy, but I have to push forward. Tilda needs to know who she is. She needs to understand that what happened at the museum wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Eli and Birdie. It was her. As a spellbinder, she alone can take a spell and juice it to its most powerful form. She’s not just the rarest kind of witch out there, she’s also the most powerful.
Holding back as she reads the entry is pure torture, but it doesn’t take her long to read all of the cramped writing on the page. By the time she’s done, her eyes are wide with shock and her hands are shaking as she reaches for her cup of tea and takes a long drink, draining it.
When she tries to take another sip from the empty cup, I take it and put it back on the table. “You see it, right?”
“See what?” She tries to play it off, but she can’t fool me.
I pull her onto my lap and wrap my arms around her, tucking her in against me. “Denial won’t change anything.”
“It can’t be right,” she says into my shoulder. “My family, they’d know.”
I brush a kiss across the top of her head. “Who says they don’t? Griselda—”
“She knew?” Her face falls. “Of course she knew. It’s her job to ferret out the magical talents of Sherwoods on their first birthdays.” Her pitch goes higher with every word as reality settles in. “There’s a whole ritual with incantations and special tea and—”
“Tilda.” I cut her off before the panic eating away at the edge of her voice can gnaw its way inside.
Once that happens, once the panic infests your soul, it’s hard if not impossible to strip it out. That’s why on cold nights, the kind where the chill settles deep inside you, I still hear the creaks and the groans of my first boarding school in The Beyond.
“No, it can’t be right.” She scrambles off my lap, out of the bed, and begins to grab her clothes from where they’d fallen the night before. “My parents would have had to know. They wouldn’t lie to me about something that important. They wouldn’t have let me think that I was a null.” Looking at the sparkly green dress in her hand with annoyance, she throws it onto a nearby chair and snags a pair of my sweats from my duffel bag on the floor. She looks pissed off, but there’s no missing the red flush at the base of her throat or the way her bottom lip trembles or the fact that she’s blinking her suddenly watery eyes a mile a minute. “And Griselda! She would have had to have known if this was true. She was there when I was born. She was the one who confirmed I am an outré. She doesn’t lie. Not for anything.”
“To protect you she would. They all would. An outré is the perfect cover for a spellbinder since they can’t start their own spells.”
“Protecting me from what?” She yanks one of my T-shirts over her head with enough force to hand start a stubborn lawn mower. “Why would they do that to me?”
As she paces, working through all of the information bombarding her, I turn the page in The Liber Umbrarum. On the next double-page spread, there’s another watercolor of the witch from before. This time, however, she’s tied to a stake set in the middle of a pyre. The fire is just starting to lick at the witch’s purple robes as a crowd of magical creatures and witches holding torches celebrate in the background. My first instinct is to slam the book shut so she doesn’t have to see that, but I can’t do it to her. She’s lived her life in forced ignorance. From now on, she has to be able to access the information she wants and use it how she sees fit.
“We learned about the purge edict in The Beyond,” I start. “Any witch who stood out, anyone who broke tradition, anyone who went beyond the Council’s strict definitions of what a witch could or should be was burned.”
“All of that is in the past though.” She stops her pacing and stares at me from the foot of the bed, her hair going in a million directions, denial obviously pushing her away from accepting the truth. “No one is out here burning spellbinders.”
“That’s because they only come along every few generations.” I get up and cross over to her, wanting to gather her up in my arms and act as some kind of protective barrier against the world opening up to her. “Their power, your power, scares the ever-loving shit out of the people who like to think they hold the most sway in Witchingdom. That’s why the Council puts so much effort into researching every witch who doesn’t conform to their expectations.”
“Like outrés,” she says, sounding defeated.
Guilt, heavy and acidic, burns a hole in my gut. “Like outrés.”
“That’s why we kept getting set up together on dates.” She sinks down into the slipper chair, her shoulders curled forward. “The Council had you doing research ops on me.”