Truly madly magically, p.1
Truly Madly Magically, page 1
Praise for the novels of Hazel Beck
Small Town, Big Magic
“The magical world of St Cyprian is one readers will never want to leave. Small Town, Big Magic is an absolute triumph of a debut... Hazel Beck has created the perfect blend of magic, humor, world-ending peril, friendship and romance, brewed into a spellbinding combination that readers will adore, and that will have them desperate for the next book!”
—New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates
“Emerson Wilde is a smart, funny protagonist whose unshakeable belief in herself will charm the reader from the very first page of Small Town, Big Magic. A diverse coven of witches, an enchanted history, and a dangerous adversary all add up to an absolute delight of a magical tale.”
—Louisa Morgan, author of The Age of Witches
“A fresh, fun, zany spin on paranormal romance, Small Town, Big Magic casts a big spell. Take one girlboss witch, add a magical journey of healing and self-discovery, and sprinkle in a dash of romance, and you’ve got an enchanting read perfect for fans of The Ex Hex and Payback’s a Witch.”
—Ashley Winstead, author of Fool Me Once
“[A] spellbinding magic-infused rom-com... Beck delivers a wonderfully realized heroine with a voice so clear readers will feel like one of her friends. This is sure to be a hit with any fan of paranormal romance.”
—Publishers Weekly
Big Little Spells
“Beck’s second entry in the ‘Witchlore’ series brings back a charming cast of characters and offers a heart-rending story of personal strength, growth, and fated love.”
—Library Journal
Also by Hazel Beck
Small Town, Big Magic
Big Little Spells
To learn more about Hazel Beck, visit www.hazel-beck.com.
Truly Madly Magically
Hazel Beck
If you have a mother, are a mother or play those roles in your chosen families, this book is for you.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
1
WHEN I OPEN my eyes, I know immediately that I’m not dreaming.
The woman sitting at the end of my bed is here. She’s spirit rather than flesh and blood, but it’s her. Not fully herself, but so much her it hurts.
Zelda Rivers is the aunt of my best friend, the mother of my ex-boyfriend, and she was one of the few adults who never made me feel bad about the fact I’m only a half witch. Zelda was confirmation that my mom was right that not all the witches out there were going to look down their noses at the mixed-blood half human and sniff. Dramatically. The way so many did here in St. Cyprian, Missouri, the charming little river town that’s also the hidden-in-plain-sight witch capital of the world.
But I know exactly why Zelda is here tonight, a couple of months after she died in June.
“Ellowyn, you have to tell him.”
I think about pulling the covers over my head and pretending she’s a dream. But she sets me straight. Three loud bangs shake the whole room and what feels like my entire apartment, my tea shop below, and most of Main Street.
Zelda was always excellent with the nonverbal communication.
“Ellowyn Sabrina Good, you have to tell him.”
My hated middle name, courtesy of my human father who thought it was “cute,” does the trick.
I look at Zelda, or the fuzzy vision of who she was when she had a body. She was with us on Litha back in June, her spirit having not made the crossing yet as she’d only died that very morning of the summer solstice, but I haven’t seen her since. Ghosts need time to figure out how to be dead, after all.
Time’s up tonight, apparently. She sits there, her eyes the same gray and gold—and worse, she reminds me of the him she’s talking about.
“Now,” she tells me, in that firm mom voice of hers. It makes me remember the time she caught me and Zander a little too naked in the storage room at Nix, the bar that the Rivers family have run as long as anyone can remember. It’s almost a fond memory now, when I let so few of my high school memories of him be fond.
“Tell him,” Zelda orders me, though her voice is waning along with her image.
I’m a Summoner, and the past is my thing. And I’ve learned in my many run-ins with the spirits of the past that newly deceased spirits are still learning. How to project, to connect. It takes a significant amount of energy—and I don’t know how spirits gather their energy in the great beyond, but Zelda’s is currently running out.
Her form is getting paler. I can see my window behind her. Through her.
“You can’t wait, Ellowyn. It’s imperative you don’t wait.” Then she slips away once again.
Leaving me wide-awake, feeling guilty and wishing it didn’t hurt.
Some would say the connection I have with the past is a gift, and I try to think of it that way. I really do. But sometimes, being alive in a sea of the dead and gone, lost and forgotten, feels as isolating as being the only half witch in your generation.
Imperative, she said, that I tell Zander what’s going on—but that’s an odd way to put it. He’ll figure it out eventually. Do I really need to tell him?
Yes. Zelda’s voice, or my conscience, is firm then.
I sigh. Because I know she’s right, no matter how little I like it. Hence the guilt. I have to tell him. Hiding it is getting harder by the day. An extended glamour takes a certain amount of energy, and that’s just to glow things up. Hiding things is even harder to sustain for any length of time.
I haven’t told Zander. I haven’t told anyone, not even my very best friends—who also happen to be my coven, the Riverwood. I think Jacob North might have his suspicions, but that’s the problem with being friends with one of the most powerful Healers in the world. You can’t claim hangovers and food poisoning all the time—I’m half human, so I can claim that I might suffer from such all-too-human ailments sometimes—without a Healer wanting to help.
He’s never acted like he knew. He’s never said anything to me about my little secret that would have stopped being a secret to him the moment he touched me. A brush of a hand, a jostle, anything.
Hell, he probably knew before I did.
I moan and groan and kick my bed a few times, and then I roll over and poke the screen of my phone. Harder than necessary. The time reads 2:45 a.m., flashing a bright light in my dark room, like one more imperative I could do without.
He’ll be up. It doesn’t matter that he’s been working the ferry nearly all day, every day, because his dad is still only barely functioning after losing Zelda. Zander still works his shift at the bar and doesn’t stumble home until around three in the morning.
Things I wish I didn’t know, but I do, like his every move is etched into my bones.
If I get up, I can beat him there. Then again, I could also send a note. Or Ruth, my owl familiar, to do the dirty work. People always want to kill the messenger.
How kind of you to volunteer me, Ruth says in my head, where only I can hear her, filled with owlish sarcasm.
I throw the covers off and get myself ready with a glamour. Not for Zander. But for myself. I consider it battle armor.
I look at Ruth, perched on my windowsill. “You can stay here.”
But the drama, my familiar says wryly in my head, her eyes gleaming as she performatively ruffles her feathers. How could I miss that?
I wrinkle my nose at her, but I also know she’s not going to let me out of her sight. It’s got very little to do with the drama and much more to do with war.
The war that the Joywood, witchkind’s ruling coven, promised us was coming on the night they intended to kill us in full view of the whole town and claim it was justice.
Absolutely nothing noteworthy or overtly terrifying has happened since that June night. We stood up to the Joywood and somehow lived—but the dread gets worse by the day.
None of us are safe.
I shake off the sense of impending doom and picture Zander’s place, his little house on stilts across the river. He can look out over the water and see our hometown, a gathering place since not long after the Salem Witch Trials for witches, spirits, and more than one enchanted statue that might once have been a magical creature.
I want to cry, but I never cry. Instead, I push it away, and focus on what needs doing. Call me whatever you like—I can promise you, I’ve heard worse—but I will always suck it up and do the thing. Eventually.
Tonight the glamour takes a lot more muttered spells than usual to hide my little bum
I guess that’s fair enough in the middle of the night.
Though I’m seeing an ex, so obviously I’d rather gleam.
Instead, I strap my trusty athame to my hip. I tell myself, piously, that vanity has no place here on this night of great virtue and overdue truth-telling.
It’s not that I lied. I can’t tell a lie to save my life. I literally, physically, can’t form the words to lie. It’s a curse.
An actual, very real curse, courtesy of my well-meaning mother.
But omission hides a host of sins, and magic helps.
I step out the little door onto the second-story balcony that runs along outside my apartment. Half of why I picked this building for my tea shop when I inherited my grandfather’s little nest egg was this balcony. I can look down St. Cyprian’s pretty Main Street in the middle of the night and lose myself in the way the quiet streetlamps glow, the graceful trees stand like sentries down by the river, and the Missouri starlight dapples over the bricks. Magical bricks. Protective bricks.
Because this is the one place all witches and magical beings are supposed to be safe—even half witches keeping all-too-unmagical secrets.
I breathe in the night air. Summer is hanging on even though we’re in September, but autumn is there too. The soft scent of gently letting go underneath that stubborn Midwest humidity that doesn’t want to lift. I close my eyes and let the magic take over.
Then I fly.
Up above the buildings and into the stars. The night pulses around me, bright with starshine magic. I hover for a moment, high above the river, and follow the gleaming line of it with my gaze to the place where three separate rivers—only two to human eyes—merge and mingle and meld. The reasons the witches chose this place to settle after the ravages of Salem.
Power. Magic.
Wild as the stars, thick as the night, and almost lost to the dark.
I helped save that confluence. Me, a piddling half witch with a questionable ability to control her magic, the past, the spirits, or any of the things a Summoner is supposed to do with ease. Still, I fought. I always fight and I always will. To help my friends. To save my family.
But that word hits harder tonight.
Because as soon as I share my secret, family means more than my mother, the slightly notorious Tanith Good of the more-than-slightly-notorious old Good family of witches going back centuries. Currently tucked away in her historic house with her partner, Mina Rodriguez.
Does she suspect the little secret I’ve been carrying around since Beltane? I’m not sure. Tanith is not the kind of woman to keep quiet, especially if that’s the wiser course of action.
But it’s hard for me to believe that the mother who knows me so well doesn’t have some inclination that there’s something different going on.
I run my hands over my little bump. Then I fly away from my view of the confluence. Ruth soars lazily beside me, down along the Mississippi toward Zander’s place. The stilts it sits up on are a nod to the capricious nature of the rivers and the determination of river town residents. Floods are in our bones, even when we’re fighting against them. Maybe especially then.
The lights in his windows are on, and I see him moving around inside. He’s probably exhausted, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a little drunk. God knows he hasn’t been eating right or taking care of himself since Zelda died.
Out here in the dark, I allow myself to feel the intense sympathy I never let him see.
The only good news about Zander’s grieving this summer is that he hasn’t been partaking in his usual string of human one-night stands. Don’t ask me how I know that or, better yet, why I track it so I can stick my fingers in that unhealable wound.
I land on the rickety porch, also on stilts. I can hear the sound of birds huffing about up above. No doubt Ruth greeting Zander’s eagle familiar, Storm. I don’t know what familiars get up to with each other, or even how they communicate, but I know Ruth and Storm have never had any of the animosity toward one another that I felt they should.
Traitor, I think pointedly at Ruth, but she ignores me.
So I take a deep breath. I knock, hard, before I think twice.
There’s a beat as I stand there on the porch. Then Zander hauls opens the door. Maybe someday the punch of him won’t wind me, or so I like to tell myself—but tonight it does, the way it always has, since we were young and stupid. Even though his dark, wavy hair is disheveled and a touch too long, his moody gray eyes are shadowed, and the beard that I know hides a moon-shaped birthmark just under the right corner of his lips is getting a little wild these days. He reeks of alcohol, which I know could be the bar or his choices lately.
I think it’s probably both.
He looks behind me as if expecting the rest of our friends, clearly not believing I’d come here on my own. And I wouldn’t. Not for any other reason. Not on a random night in September, anyway.
“Can I come in?” I sound weird and formal, but it’s the best I can do.
“Uh. Sure.”
He moves out of the way, and I step inside.
Zander’s never been known for being particularly neat or tidy. He’s a typical guy, but this is a new low even for him. Paper plates litter every surface. Empty beer cans, stacks of mail, dirty clothes everywhere with random socks scattered across the floor, T-shirts tossed over the backs of furniture, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the counter in the small galley kitchen. Next to a whole lot of empties. The air is scented with the sharpness of hard alcohol and the heavy staleness that comes with grief and depression.
He’d refuse to admit to feeling either of those things if I asked.
I don’t ask.
I’ve spent a decade hardening my heart to this man, but the past few months have made my previous attempts at ironclad resistance wear thin. I feel for him. I worry about him. I want to comfort him.
I have allowed myself almost none of these indulgences. There’s a reason our historic deal remains in place. We’re weak when it comes to each other. That’s always been true.
But we’re also fucking toxic.
Our friends think we’re bad now, with our bickering and general harshness toward one another. They have no idea how we’ve grown and matured.
The fact we can even share space these days is a testament to that. And how much we love Emerson Wilde, I suppose, because watching out for her after the Joywood wiped her magical memories at our high school graduation ceremony forced those of us who love her to grow up. Fast.
Emerson’s sister and my best friend, Rebekah, had to choose exile to survive, but the rest of us stayed for Emerson. Zander. Me. Georgie, her best friend, always right by her side. Jacob, too, but with enough emotional distance to stave off what I think must have been inevitable—given that they’re engaged now.
Maybe I hate the Joywood for that as much as anything else.
Which is why, along with the fact I love my friends, I’m part of this whole coven thing in the first place. Made up of cast-outs, grumpy Healers, former spell-dim witches, the most feared once-immortal witch of all time, and Zander. We’ve decided we want a chance to ascend—to become the ruling coven ourselves. A decision that has earned us all targets on our backs. Not to mention the enmity of the most powerful witches alive or dead, and ample opportunity to fight off their dirty, too-dark magic
In the meantime, Zander and I are going to be parents.
Another fast-forward leap into serious adulthood that I can’t say I’m at all comfortable with, but here we are.
I know I should start laying the groundwork on that. So, remember Beltane this year? After I got sick but Jacob healed me right up? I can’t bring myself to go back there. The past might be my thing, but my past is a shitstorm.
What I can deal with is this pigsty, so that’s what I do. I magic the trash away and the clothes into one pile in the corner instead of many piles strewn about. With a lift of my hand, the bottle of Jack hovers off the counter and upends, dumping its contents down the sink.
Zander watches all this and scowls at me. I conjure up a little concoction, and because his place is disgusting, I even magic up a mug from my own apartment. Everything lands with a thump in front of him on the counter where he’s planted his palms.
