Small town big magic a w.., p.22
Small Town, Big Magic--A Witchy Rom-Com, page 22
“Unlocked the cage around your magic,” Jacob says. “I was there. You touched my blood. Blood is memory, power. It unlocked what had been locked inside of you. But it didn’t create it, to be clear.”
Georgie stares at me, then Jacob. There’s more she wants to say, but she doesn’t say it. And I’m reminded of her talking about fate earlier.
This all seems to wrap around me, tight. Like a new sort of vine.
“Did Skip touch you?” Jacob demands. Out of nowhere.
I blink, uncomfortable. I feel oddly guilty, even though I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. I’ve talked to Skip like he was a friend, rather than a nemesis. And Jacob is demanding to know if he touched me like he’s allowed romantic possessiveness because of one kiss. It’s a patriarchal weaponization of scarcity fearmongering—
And what does this have to do with anything? “Yes. We made mad, passionate love on the sidewalk while everyone watched.”
Jacob looks as pained at that set of images as I’m sure we all feel. “No, not like that. Did he touch you at all? Shake hands? Bump shoulders? Anything?”
I think back to Skip walking with me. He had been oddly...physical. I wish I could lie about it, but I know now is not the time for my pride. “He put his arm around my shoulders. Took my hand and patted it.”
Jacob nods then. “That’s how he did it. He put some kind of dark magic in you.”
Zander studies me. “You’d feel dark magic in her, wouldn’t you?”
Everyone is now looking at me like I’m beneath glass. I can’t say I like it, but I submit to it, the lingering sensation of those dark vines around my neck keeping me quiet.
“He wouldn’t have to put it in her, just something on her.” Ellowyn looks at Georgie, who nods. She grabs Zander’s hand, and then Jacob’s. They form an interlocking circle around me.
“More circles?” I ask, trying not to sound alarmed.
“Just give us a sec,” Ellowyn says, her eyes already glowing. Light is already flowing, arcing around me.
The back of my hand burns, hot and sudden, so I lift it up to inspect it and my jaw drops.
There’s a mark. On my hand. Red and ugly—so I know it’s nothing normal or good. Besides, it’s right where Skip touched me.
My friends drop their connection and Jacob takes my hand in his. He puts his fingers on it, but hisses out a breath. “I’ll need to take her to the farm to really fix this.”
Georgie makes a noise of agreement. “Go, then. We don’t want to risk anything else until the mark is removed. Do you need us?”
“I have to get to the bar,” Zander mutters irritably, rubbing his hands over his face.
“Best if I do it alone anyway,” Jacob replies. “Clearly, too many suspicions have already been aroused. I’ll take her back to the farm. Georgie, Ellowyn—you need to make sure the book is hidden. And we have to be more careful. Something is giving us away and we all know what that could mean.”
They all launch into various actions, but I can’t move. Not for magical reasons, but because I’m left with a paralyzing realization.
I was wrong.
I made a mistake. I’m the something that gave us away. There’s no other explanation. I messed everything up by thinking I could handle Skip Simon and Nicholas Frost and the whole being-a-witch thing, just because I’m me and—
“Emerson?”
I look up at Jacob. His expression is blank. Because he’s mad at me. He has to be. If I’d listened to him, to all of them.
“Ready?” he asks.
I swallow hard, but I nod and he takes my hand. Wind. Night sky. And then the farm. Not inside his house as I expected, but in the backyard. The moon shines above, but the rest of the sky is covered in clouds. Thunder even rumbles in the distance, bringing in that storm Zander mentioned. I can almost taste it.
“We’ll have to be quick,” he mutters to himself.
I look at the moon, at the little wisps of cloud try to tendril over the light, but it’s almost like the moonlight is fighting them back. Cassie appears, whining softly. She has no snarky comments. She’s simply there.
For me.
I lift up my hand. The mark is still red and ugly. I don’t feel it anymore, but I see it. Like a brand. My stomach roils at the thought. “I thought I was safe on the bricks,” I say quietly.
Jacob is making things appear. A table. Jars. Candles. “Everything I’ve been told, taught, believed my whole life says you should be. But he bartered his blood, his soul. The rivers are rising. You’re a Confluence Warrior. Maybe the old rules don’t matter anymore. Maybe we’re that out of balance. Regardless, this mark can’t hurt you on its own. There was some protection from the bricks. You had to be vulnerable for Skip to be able to reach you through it.”
I like the idea of being vulnerable even less than being wrong. “We were protected. You made a bubble. Georgie made a circle. Ellowyn said the bookstore was safe. Centuries of witches made it safe.”
“But you weren’t protected from within, Em. Only from without.”
“From within?”
“We’ll get to it. First we have to get the mark off. Come here.” When I do, he points to the ground. “Sit.”
I do and he sits next to me. He takes my hand and places it on his knee. He traces the mark with some kind of wax or oil, then he places some mixture of dried herbs over it, like a poultice. He chants words and light sparkles from his fingertips. When I look up at his face, it’s tight with concentration. He’s controlling all that power, making it precise.
So serious. So focused. So gentle.
He uses the light of the moon, his own power, this combination of things. And the mark begins to fade. I feel the power surge all around me. The mark recedes before it, in it. And then it’s gone.
Jacob doesn’t look as spent as he has after the other healing episodes I’ve seen. That’s good. But the bottom line is he did heal me. He removed the mark. He’s cleaning up all my messes, over and over again.
And I’m the one who apparently has to make all the right choices to beat back the damn dark. I’m the one who’s supposed to be a Warrior. Not just any warrior. A Confluence Warrior. An extraspecial warrior.
I feel...like someone else. Like a failure. Like I suck. Objectively.
Jacob frowns at me. “What’s wrong, Em?”
“Everything I’ve done since I found out is wrong. Wrong choice after mistake after bad move. You all come in and sweep up my messes, but I just go make new ones. How can I beat back the dark when I’m not making any right choices here?”
“You only know about beating back the dark and Confluence Warriors because you went to Nicholas Frost,” Jacob says, and he sounds patient. Reasonable. It’s enraging. I want him to be as mad at me as I am. “Not every choice you’ve made is wrong, Emerson, even if we—if I—didn’t agree with it. And even right choices can include mistakes along the way.”
I don’t want this either—being treated like I didn’t make mistakes, when I know I did. “How are you going to absolve me for Skip?”
He sighs, his attention on my hand, still in his. “Ignorance. You’re used to thinking of Skip as pointless and ineffectual and in a lot of ways he is. Dark magic is what changes his threat level. None of us thought he’d go so far as to get at you from the inside.”
“You were mad at me this morning, and now you’re not. Why?”
He gives my hand a squeeze and then does the most surprising thing. He brushes a kiss over where the mark used to be, and my heart stutters. “That he marked you is as much on me as you.”
He reaches out and touches the charm he put on my necklace this morning. I remember the vines shrinking back.
“Your grandmother gave that to me after I brought you home and told her about the obliviscor,” he tells me now. “She talked me out of trying to take on the Joywood and gave me that charm to keep for you. She said I’d know when you were ready for it. I never understood why she didn’t give it to Georgie or even Ellowyn. And so many times I thought, I should just hand it off to Georgie. She lives with you after all. But I never could. Your grandmother entrusted me with it, so it never felt right.”
I peer down at the necklace. The miniature bluebell. My grandmother did love bluebells.
“I should have given it to you the minute you showed power,” Jacob says. “Maybe you should have had it all along, but I never thought the time was right. I was waiting for a big sign. But if you’d had it, it would have stopped Skip from marking you.”
“I had crystals from Georgie, charms from Ellowyn, and this pendant from Zander. I wasn’t unprotected, Jacob.”
There’s a softness in his green gaze. “Now who’s trying to absolve who?”
We’re sitting in the grass, the clouds making the moonlight disappear. The two of us in the dark. I don’t see them, but I suspect our familiars are somewhere close. It’s peaceful here, connected to the land. Watched over by the night sky. It feels safe and protected. It’s restful.
Self-blame isn’t going to get us anywhere, I know that. I have to shake it off and make the right choices from here on out. But I’ve never felt more lost.
It’s a wholly unfamiliar feeling, in fact. No extra time with my planners and lists is going to help.
I think back to the book. My hand is still on Jacob’s knee. Jacob, who was there when I fought the dark magic that forged me. Who is the conduit.
“What does a conduit really mean?”
Jacob rubs his hand over his beard. “Georgie wasn’t lying to you. It’s a complement. A key to help unlock what you already have.”
“She wasn’t telling me the full truth either.”
“There are multiple meanings for conduit,” he says, loyally. “Especially when used in older books, different languages. But the one Georgie is leaving out amounts to what we might call...a soul mate. She probably thought you wouldn’t take that information kindly.”
“Fate. Soul mates,” I mutter, taking my hand off his knee. “Why should I take the idea of some outside force controlling me kindly? You wouldn’t take kindly to fate telling you what to do either.”
He frowns up at the last slivers of moonlight. “Except I don’t care. Fate. Soul mates. Destiny. Spirits. Magic. I don’t care about any of it. I know who I am. What I feel. What I want. If it aligns with all those other powers out there? Great. If not, it doesn’t change what action I plan on taking.”
I blink, because those words—what amount to a speech coming from Jacob—are some of the truest I’ve ever felt, deep and right. That’s got to be better than fighting fate for the sake of it. Than worrying that every choice and feeling is outside forces pulling the puppet strings. I don’t feel like a puppet. I feel like the woman I’ve always been, only more so. And I am all about making my own choices. Even with my decade-long mind wipe and memory transplant, courtesy of the Joywood, I charged along my own path, full speed ahead.
I pull my knees up to my chest. Lightning flashes in the distance. The storm is coming. I can smell the rain, feel the electricity in the air. I’ve always loved storms—I am a Midwesterner after all—but I’ve never had one feel like peace was on its way.
I rest my chin on my knees and look over at Jacob. He’s still studying the sky. His fingers dance over the grass, like he’s communicating with the earth underneath us. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him look so peaceful either. Even in those memories I can access with magic, there’s an edge to him. It’s the way he always holds himself so carefully apart.
But this is Jacob relaxed. Just him and me and the impending storm. He looks over at me, and for a moment my breath catches there in my lungs. His gaze holds mine.
Serious. True.
“If our fighting the adlets unlocked what you are, fantastic. I’ll always be glad I was that key for you. No matter what happens.”
I frown a little. What could happen? What would I want to happen?
“If I am your conduit, that’s only another name for what I’ve always felt,” he tells me, like the night all around us. That deep. That beautiful, like a vow. “It doesn’t change anything. For me.”
17
I’m rendered speechless. Maybe also paralyzed.
Except for the thunder in my heart.
Because Jacob and I don’t do this. We don’t admit things without prompting. Sometimes I push, but he always backs off.
Always.
The first fat raindrop lands on my nose. Another splashes on my arm. Jacob doesn’t make a move.
“It’s raining,” I say dumbly. “We should go inside.”
He looks at me as if I’m crazy for suggesting it. “A spring rain? It’s great for healing. Growth. It’ll be good for you.”
“To lie out here in a rainstorm?”
“Nothing better,” he says, and then lies back on the grass. Eyes closed, palms up, he just lies there as the rain slowly intensifies from droplets, to heavy droplets, on and on until it’s pouring.
I don’t know what else to do except follow his lead. It must be some witch thing as I’ve never seen him lying around in the grass during a rainstorm. So I lay myself back too. The earth is cold, the rain is cool, but somehow I’m not cold. It’s almost like there’s a little heater around us.
The rain increases, pelting my face, my body, and soaking me to the bone. I screw my eyes shut and try to breathe through my nose. I’m tense and uncomfortable, about to give up and run for the house. Or think myself into a hot shower.
Then Jacob’s hand clasps mine. And everything shifts. We’re both lying in the grass, rain pelting down on us. I can hear thunder and occasionally see a flash of light behind my eyelids, but the storm itself is still a ways off.
Jacob’s hand is holding mine and a kind of ease flows through me. My shoulders relax. I stop squeezing my eyes shut so tightly. I can breathe easy even as the rain pounds down on us.
Somehow I can feel every drop. Not so much in myself, but in him. Like he’s a plant, soaking up the rain, the air, the feel of the wet earth beneath us. This is what recharges him, I think. Just like executing the perfect festival recharges me.
I remember what Georgie said when she was trying to avoid the words soul mates. Complementary skills, she said. Jacob and I have always fit together like puzzle pieces. My prodding, his patience. My wild ideas, his insistence on coming back to reality. Both too stubborn for our own good so we can’t bulldoze over each other.
Is it fate? Or does it just feel like fate?
I turn my head to look at him to find he’s already done the same. His eyes glow in the dark, and I wonder if mine do too. I think back to the masking spell Georgie walked me through to hide the gold. To hide who I am.
I don’t want that. Not here. Not now. I want to be who I am, fully. In the rain. Next to Jacob. I think about the words Georgie used, then try to say the opposite. I can feel something slip away—that mask.
Jacob rolls onto his side, propping himself up on one elbow as he studies me. Though it’s dark, though it’s wet, there’s a faint light and a sweet heat encircling us. Maybe he cast a spell. Then again, maybe it’s just him.
“Still not used to that,” he says, indicating my eyes.
He’s soaked through. His hair drips and his clothes cling to him. The thunder rumbling around us is closer now. Lightning crackles through the sky, though it hasn’t fully broken. It’s building and building, just out of reach.
“This might be a good time to try to get your memories back,” Jacob says. “The storm is its own kind of power and protection. It would add to what I can do, or help you do.”
I want that. With a pain and desire that’s hard to breathe through. But there is a cascade of images in my head—Jacob hurting himself to protect me or help me, over and over again. I remember what Georgie said, so carefully. That he could push too hard. That he would.
“What if Carol felt it this morning? What if she’s suspicious? We can’t risk it.”
He reaches out and smooths a wet tendril of hair off my cheek. “Carol’s going to know eventually.”
I want to accept that, because I agree, but something in me—something important and deep inside—knows better. “It isn’t the right time. Not yet. Can’t you feel that?”
His fingers rest on my temple, warm and gentle. After a few moments he nods. “I can.” His fingers trail down my cheek, spreading so much heat I’m surprised the rain doesn’t sizzle. “But I waited years for this to feel right, and then the years were taken away.”
My breath comes out shuddery. I never expected Jacob to be able to make me weak-kneed with words, but here we are.
There’s a wealth of difference in our past ten years. I was wholly unaware anything had changed. I thought we were doing that age-old dance and he was his typically intractable, obstinate self. If the situations were reversed, would I have been able to do what my friends did? Hide the truth for our own good? I don’t think I could have. I don’t think I would have understood the weight of it. I would have wanted to change it. I would have insisted on changing it.
I was sixteen and planning treason. Of course I wouldn’t have accepted it if Jacob was mind wiped and I wasn’t. No doubt I would have finally paid the price for all my arrogance.
Luckily for me, Jacob was the one who knew the truth. And he was the one who put up that wall between us to keep us both safe. I even understand why he did it. But... “I know you couldn’t tell me about the witch stuff, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t...”
I’m at a loss for words. Nothing seems big enough for this. For us. Date me? Kiss me? It all sounds so childish, and maybe we were basically children back then, but we aren’t now.
