Big little spells, p.5
Big Little Spells, page 5
Ellowyn always says that people like things simple.
But it’s more than the fact that we couldn’t prove ourselves ten years ago. That the Joywood didn’t let us prove it. Not to them. It’s been pretty clear to me for a long time that they know exactly what Emerson and I are capable of and what powers we’ve always had.
What they really didn’t want was us proving that to everyone else.
Because that would also prove that the great Joywood coven, who know all and see all, were completely wrong about the Wilde sisters.
For our entire lives.
And they can’t have that.
“Emerson,” I say. My visions are fractured and still don’t make sense, but there’s something in them. Something about being here after ten years of a break from St. Cyprian that lodges the idea inside of me. So deep, so true, I have to say it out loud. “Did it ever occur to you that we didn’t fail the pubertatum?”
5
EMERSON’S EYEBROWS DRAW TOGETHER. “What do you mean?”
“We have magic, Em. I always knew it. And look at you—whipping up breakfasts and ghost power points. Killing adlets.” The scariest monsters in all the fairy tales we were ever told as kids. The ones that aren’t supposed to be real but she, the spell dim disappointment who earned her mind wipe, fought them off anyway when they attacked her last month.
She shakes her head, but she doesn’t look as certain as she usually does. “It was the adlets and their attack that awakened my power, and then Jacob and I got together and that cemented it.” She looks over at him, but he’s frowning too.
“Do you really think that you just came into your power? Randomly?” I ask.
“It wasn’t random.” She blows out a breath, but it doesn’t sound the least bit steady. “It’s a Confluence Warrior thing. That’s how the book made it sound.”
“If all of that power was in you all along, why didn’t the Joywood try to help you?” I ask, reasonably enough. I think. When I didn’t even know this argument was simmering inside me. “I’ve always seemed to have as much magic as anyone else. And enough to help beat back a flood in the here and now. Why didn’t they see that back then? Why wipe your mind and exile me?”
Emerson is blinking too much. “Because that’s the law.”
But she doesn’t sound sure.
And no one else is eating any longer.
“It’s divide and conquer,” I say into the quiet, to all those stares. “A divided house cannot stand and all that. It’s a performance, so everyone believes the Joywood have our collective best interests at heart. But what if they don’t? And never have. They can’t have us challenging them, can they? No one ever has. Isn’t that what we’re taught in school?”
There’s an expression I recognize on my sister’s face. “Were you actually listening during history class? That one time?”
But I don’t take the bait. “We’re supposed to believe no one stands against them because they’re just that benevolent and good. Are they? They’re sending us back to high school. Humiliating us. Belittling us. Playing their little mind games on us. And it’s not like this is the first time. We believed them when they said we had no power as kids—everyone in town believed them. Our own parents believed them. Now, in addition to growing up as supposedly powerless witches, the objects of ridicule in this town, we’ve spent the past ten years paying their prices, not our own.”
Silence descends around the table. It’s not the censuring kind. I can tell everyone is filtering back through their memories, wondering if I’m right. If they fooled us back then. Lied to us. Took advantage of us.
I don’t have to wonder.
There’s not one part of what I’ve said that feels fractured or blurry to me. I know I’m right.
“Just what is it they think we can do?” Georgie asks. Her voice is raspy, and then she clears her throat. “If they want to strip your power and punish you again—and all of us, too—there has to be a reason.”
“Can’t it just be that they’re assholes on a power trip?” Ellowyn asks, chomping on her apple irritably.
“This seems like a lot of work if there’s no ulterior motive,” Emerson says, clearly considering. “We’re threatening.” She looks back at me. “Specifically us. There are plenty of young witches—powerful or not—who they haven’t wiped or exiled. It’s something about us. We’ve always been threatening to them.”
I don’t have any interest in forming covens or participating in Ascension like Emerson, but this all makes me think she’d have a chance. A real chance to beat the Joywood. Why else would they care?
But before we can worry about what we might do in the future or figure out what happened in the past, we have to focus on the present. Last time, we accepted the Joywood’s pronouncements because we didn’t expect them. Everyone else accepted them because it seemed to follow the law, because we’d been set up to look like lifelong weaklings with no real power. Emerson and I were silly enough to believe that we could show the world they were wrong by passing our pubertatum. We thought it would be fair. That there were no decks stacked against us.
This time we know better. All the decks are stacked against us.
“We have to go back to high school,” I say, trying not to wince. “Not to prove that they were wrong about us, but to beat them at their own game.”
Zander lets out a long sigh that matches the pinched look on Ellowyn’s face.
But Emerson, being Emerson, grins. She looks around the table at each of us. “And once we do, we can build a future that looks the way we want.”
I know it’s getting ahead of ourselves, and I know the future Emerson and I want isn’t the same at all, but I can’t help but smile back at her and all her optimism.
Because if I have to be home, might as well make it a home I don’t hate.
We finish our breakfast, and there’s much discussion of the differences in our binders. How much school Emerson and I will be required to attend, while our friends—the accomplices—only have to appear for the more social events of the season.
In so many ways, it’s like the last ten years don’t exist. Like I’ve been here, right here, all along.
Except it’s so clear we’re adults now. With jobs and responsibilities and, most notably, without my parents here to nitpick our every move. Jacob leaves to go take care of his farm chores. Zander mutters about getting some more sleep before his afternoon shift at the ferry and night shift at the bar.
And once they’re gone, like she’s been waiting to broach the subject until they left, Emerson turns her gaze to me. “Once you get ready, we’ll go see Frost.”
Just the name of my immortal makes little pricks of sensation break out deep inside. Not my immortal, I lecture myself, though the teen girl within disagrees. “Why would we be going to see Nicholas, ever, let alone at this ungodly hour?”
“We’re as familiar with the pubertatum as everyone else is, but we failed last time.” Emerson’s voice trips on the word failed just like my heart did on the word home last night. “And I doubt the Joywood will be teaching us what we need to know in these classes. So, we need help.”
“A lot of help,” Georgie agrees.
“If anyone can prepare us,” Emerson continues, clearly her plan and her mind already made up, “Frost can.”
“Nicholas is not the friend you seem to think he is, Emerson. He told you no last night.” I’m careful to keep my tone even. And not at all as intense as I actually feel about my immortal nemesis. I look at Ellowyn, because surely she’ll back me up. She usually does.
Ellowyn rubs her palms over her face. “I don’t trust that arrogant bastard as far as I can throw him. No one becomes immortal for good reasons.”
“But?” I supply for her, because I can feel the but lingering there, and it’s irritating enough to poke at.
Ellowyn’s gaze holds mine. “But he brought you home when we needed you. Even though he said he wouldn’t.”
“And he helped in the flood ritual,” Georgie adds, as if she feels compelled to be fair. “We needed everyone. Like it or not, he’s part of this.”
I want nothing to do with him. Despite the reaction I always have to him. But I also know that going along with Emerson’s plan will be much, much easier than fighting it. I sigh, and Ellowyn smiles at me, because I’m sure she knows where my mind is going.
We did a lot of giving in to Emerson back in the day, because it was easier. And she was often, annoyingly, right. Apparently none of that has changed either.
“All right,” I say, trying to sound as if I’ve come to a place of peace with this decision even though I really, really haven’t. “We’ll go ask the ancient immortal, known for offenses great and small against all of witchkind, for his charitable help. I’m sure that’s on offer.”
Emerson only smiles, but then, she probably knew she’d win either way. “Do you want to go get ready? I’ll put some coffee in a thermos for you.”
“Oh, I’m ready. And I don’t do caffeine. I’ve transcended the need for artificial stimulants.”
“But...” Emerson presses her lips together and looks at me as I stand there, leaning against Ellowyn’s chair. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. I’m more than familiar with my older sister’s judgments.
She is not reacting to my deliberately assy comment about caffeine, which isn’t even necessarily true. At the moment, what she does not approve of are my baggy sweatpants and the cropped sweatshirt I’m wearing that shows off the silver hoop in my navel.
I sweep a hand down the front of me. “I’m comfortable, and comfort is an important element of learning.” I smile fondly at her, and it’s only slightly put on. “I realized some time ago, Emerson, that societal expectations about what I should wear often chafe against my desire to be comfortable within myself. I’ve learned to value my own comfort first and foremost.”
Emerson nods along. “I appreciate that,” she says firmly. “It’s very evolved.”
I incline my head. “Just trying my best to be authentically me.”
I say that partly because it’s true. I do try to do that, generally speaking, because there’s only so much authenticity a witch pretending to be human can claim on any given day. But the other reason I say it is because it will annoy my sister.
Bonus: that is also me being pretty freaking authentic.
Her nod at that looks a little more forced. “But maybe you want to grab a notebook or your laptop?” Because she just can’t help herself, older sister that she is. No matter how she knows I’ll balk at being told what to do.
I let my smile go saintly. “My mind is the only tool I’ll need.”
Emerson smiles back at me, but I can tell her teeth are gritted. Just like old times. Because a girl can love her sister, but is it really love if you don’t also want to poke at her until she screams?
I glance at Ellowyn, and though she’s not grinning as widely as she might have done when we were seventeen, a corner of her mouth is curled up in amusement.
“We should go, then,” Emerson says briskly. “I have to open the store at nine.”
Somehow, I forgot about the store. Confluence Books. Not just my grandmother’s bookstore, but a building that’s been owned by women in our family going back generations. Emerson always got into studying and memorizing those women. She could likely recite our family tree with absolutely no prompting.
I never could keep all the Sarahs and Marys and Rebeccas straight. I was happy to know they existed, that I might have been cut from the same cloth. But the bookstore—as a building or business—never called to me the way it called to Emerson.
You are my two sides of the same coin, Grandma always said. First of the year, last of the year. Joined, destined. But that doesn’t mean you’re the same, or should be.
I remind myself that never, in my whole life, did I think my future included me staying here. Much less working in a small-town book shop in the Midwest, in a place so out-of-the-way and unheard-of that I never tell people I’m from here. I just say St. Louis. Most coastal types find that hard enough to fathom.
This was never for me, this tiny little life, and I knew it from the start.
So there’s absolutely no reason for me to feel sad that I’m not part of that long tail of Wilde women who inhabit the Confluence Books building in town, all brick and history. No reason at all.
We say our goodbyes, then Emerson is bustling me outside into the cool spring morning. She makes a little hand motion, and I know she’s sending off some little magic love message to Jacob.
I don’t want to feel sad, so I grin at her. “Save the town. Get engaged. All in a day’s work for Emerson Wilde.”
Her mouth curves and I don’t know the look on her face now. It’s soft and kind of sweet. It makes me want to smile myself, just as softly, even though I’m walking down Main Street in my own personal, cobbled hell.
“It was a long time coming,” she says in a quiet voice that matches her expression.
“Why did you make your ring disappear?”
She blinks as if she’s surprised I noticed. “Well.” She takes an uncharacteristically long time to speak as she looks down at her bare hand. “So much is happening, and you’re back, and I’d like to enjoy telling everyone. So I just thought...we’d wait.”
“For what?”
Again she pauses, but this time she studies me while she does. I don’t know if I can read her mind or if I just know her so well. She’s giving me a chance to settle in, presumably without any more changes. She’s giving everyone a chance to be happy to see me, and vice versa.
It’s for me, and I hate it.
“Emerson,” I say, trying to sound all the things I’m not in this moment—at peace, calm, one with what’s happening to me, and in no way a sulky teenager. “Congratulations. I’m happy for you both.”
“Thank you,” she says, marching forward, still so...Emerson.
It releases that hard grip on my heart, just a little. I swing my arms more than necessary and question why I thought I needed to feel the cold morning breeze all over my abdomen. I look up at the bluff before us as we walk and tell myself the sudden chill I feel is my dedication to the crop top, nothing more.
That’s not entirely true. I can see Frost House sitting there at the top of the bluff, perched so it can look down on the town and the rivers and probably the whole world. It has the glamour to end all glamours on it, making it look like the sort of disreputable, falling-down Victorian that scary Halloween movies are made about. Everyone knows that the immortal likes it to stand there like a festering eyesore. No one knows why.
I don’t want to think about him. Or face him. At all. Here on these magical bricks of my hometown where the bricks aren’t just cute, they also stand as a safe space for any and all magical beings.
Ten years of being away hasn’t changed any of it. Ten years of Emerson not knowing hasn’t changed anything for her either, it seems. Except...
“Do you ever feel...” The words come out before I can think better of them.
“Do I ever feel what?”
There are a thousand things I want to ask her. A thousand more I want to know that I don’t know how to ask. I settle on the most obvious. “Ten years were stolen from us.”
Emerson’s expression goes dark. It surprises me, the strength of the bitterness I see on her face. “That’s not a feeling. It’s the truth. That’s what they did.”
“But you were here.” I can’t help but point out the difference. Maybe she didn’t know what happened to us, but she wasn’t an exile.
“I was. And I wasn’t.” Her eyes narrow as we reach the stairs in the hill that will lead us up to the fake eyesore that is Nicholas’s mansion—because underneath that witchy glamour is a glorious, immortal-worthy mansion. He would never live rough. “I’ll never let them take anything away from me again, no matter if they think they’re doing the right thing.”
Do they think they’re doing the right thing? I wonder. Or are they, for all their magic and years, just like humans. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. It’s a tale as old as time.
We’re walking up the steps that seem to grow in height and number as we go, slowing our progress until I’m nearly out of breath by the time we reach the top. And even though there’s no way anyone can sneak up on an immortal witch like Nicholas Frost—something I know from personal experience—the glamour is still in place now that we’re standing before it. Wheezing.
Up close, it looks even more like a haunted house.
Inside, I feel a kind of ticking. That restlessness that’s chased me all over the country, most recently to Sedona. I was thinking it was time I headed around the globe, but the Joywood intervened.
I glare at the rotted-looking front porch. I note the fine touches of spooky mist and a potential incoming storm in the sky directly above it. Only in the sky directly above it.
“You can’t accuse the guy of subtlety,” I point out. “Why not just put up a neon sign that flashes A WITCH LIVES HERE? It’s basically the same thing.”
“When I was spell dim and came up here, I didn’t think witches,” Emerson says, and she says that in such a matter-of-fact way that I wonder why I’ve never really thought about what a vile term that is. Spell dim. I didn’t like it when people said that’s what I was. But I was sure they were wrong, so that was different. It actually wounds me to hear Emerson call herself that. It makes me want to...break things. Like this whole town.
“It was just unsettling. I never wanted to linger, despite the fact there’s such a pretty view from up here. It just felt wrong. I think the haunted house thing is amped up for witches.”
