Chapter Thirty-Four
“Where are we going?” Bri asked as we hurried across the road, narrowly avoiding horse piles and mud puddles in our haste.
“To the shoppe. Thank you, by the way. How did you know where to find me?”
“I woke up and you were gone, and you weren’t at the shoppe and you weren’t at Finlay’s, so we realized you’d gone and done something profoundly Willowish.”
I couldn’t argue with her there. When we reached the shoppe, I fished in my pocket for the keys, unable to meet Finlay’s eyes. After our fight yesterday, I had no idea if he had forgiven me, but he was here now, and that was something.
That was everything, if I was being honest.
“Shouldn’t we go to the police?” Bri asked as we entered. “We need to report Mr. Wexley for what he’s done.”
“We will,” I said. I didn’t have proof Wexley had killed my father—he could already have hidden the ring, for all I knew—but I suspected that if the police dug into Wexley’s past, they’d find evidence.
Especially if they talked to Alfred’s mother again.
He had died in a very similar fashion to my father, and they’d both been rivals in Wexley’s eyes.
Not to mention that he’d threatened to kill both Bri and me.
“But there’s something we need to take care of first.”
After we’d removed our cloaks and hung them up, I motioned for them to join me on the floor. “I managed to find the anticurse just before Mr. Wexley caught me,” I explained. “Fortunately, it was simple enough to remember.”
Bri looked between Finlay and me, her lower lip trembling. “Do you think it will hurt?”
I smiled as reassuringly as I could. “I don’t think so. But we don’t have to do this right now if you’d rather wait.”
I’d asked Bri several times if she was sure about breaking the curse, and she’d never hesitated before. But today, she seemed unsure. A small, selfish glimmer of hope lit in my heart.
I snuffed it out immediately. “We could give it a few days, if you want to sleep on it,” I offered. “You’ll still be home in time to hug your parents for Yule.”
Bri took a steadying breath and released it slowly. “No. I’ve waited long enough. Just say the words.”
I nodded as she closed her eyes. I took my own deep breath and recited the spell I’d memorized the moment I saw it. Part of being an awakened witch, perhaps, since I had never had a good memory for this sort of thing before.
Mystical, magical, terrible, true,
This Hargrave curse I shall undo.
Magical, mystical, whimsical, wonder,
The curse will now be rent asunder.
When I’d finished, I watched Bri closely for any signs of transformation. It didn’t appear to be hurting her; it didn’t appear to have any effect at all.
After a minute, Bri opened her right eye, then her left. “Did it work?”
“Ehm, I have no idea. Do you feel any different?”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
“Here.” Finlay rose and reached for the nearest magical object, a small book entitled A Pocket Compendium of Improbable Creatures. “Touch this.”
“Wait.” I took it from Finlay before Bri could.
“We don’t know what this will do.” I flipped through the book until I landed on a page with a wee, innocuous-looking ball of pink fluff with two beady eyes.
“The pipin is a benevolent spirit that will answer one question before disappearing,” I read. “That sounds harmless enough.”
Bri nodded and reached for the open page, brushing her fingers against it. We all held our breath, but it seemed that the anticurse had worked. Nothing was happening.
Then, as if awakening from a long nap, the creature on the page began to twitch and tremble, becoming three-dimensional before our eyes.
“Drat!” Finlay swore.
“Who are you calling a rat?” the pipin asked in a voice that was so high and shrill it was almost impossible to understand.
Finlay shook his head. “No—I wasn’t … never mind.”
Bri let out a weary sigh. “Why didn’t the anticurse work?”
“Is that your question?” the pipin asked, waving its furred, mothlike antennae as it floated in the air between us. “I can only answer one before leaving this realm.”
We all looked at one another. At this point, I couldn’t think of a more pertinent question to ask.
“Yes,” Bri said. “That is my question. Why didn’t the anticurse work?”
The pipin closed its eyes, remarkably solemn for a talking powder puff. “Ahhhhh,” it squeaked, as though it were about to say something of great importance.
We all leaned forward, holding our breath.
It nodded, which was more of a bob of its entire body, considering it had no neck. “It didn’t work because you aren’t cursed.”
“Wait, what?” Bri and I shouted in unison.
I growled, ready to squash the gribbly little critter with my fist, but there was nothing to squash.
The pipin exploded in a cloud of pink glitter, which flew in every direction, coating all of us in sparkly dust. I coughed and Bri blinked in rapid succession, her eyelashes heavy with sparkles.
We’d be pulling glitter out of every nook and cranny for days to come. Harmless, indeed!
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, feeling more desperate than ever. “Not cursed?”
“It’s wrong, clearly!” Bri shouted. “Look at the book again. There must be something else in there we can ask.”
“It would explain why the anticurse didn’t work,” Finlay offered, wiping glitter off his shoulders.
“But if I’m not cursed, what is wrong with me?” Bri asked, her eyes now wet with pink, shimmery tears. “Does that mean I was born this way and there’s nothing that can be done about it, ever? I’ll never be able to touch anything without worrying I’ll cause some sort of harm?”
Finlay only hesitated for a moment, apparently deciding that if it was good enough for Bri, it was good enough for him. He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “No, of course not. We’ll think of something else.”
“There is nothing else!” Bri shouted, pushing him away. “I’ll never be able to go home. I’ll never see my parents again.” She sobbed into her hands, her entire body shaking. I’d never seen her look so dejected, not even when we were in an inescapable prison cell.
“Oh yes, you will.” I rose in a cascade of glitter and finally, finally, did what I should have done all those weeks ago, when Bri first told me about her curse.
I’d been far too selfish to admit it, but deep down I’d known what I needed to do.
All this time, I’d had the answer to Bri’s problem sitting in my shoppe, and I had refused even to consider it as an option.
That one wish was mine, and while I still had no idea how I planned to use it, I wasn’t about to waste it on some outlander girl in an oxblood cloak.
But that wasn’t who she was to me anymore.
She was Brianna. Bri. She was kind and trusting, a person who had nearly sacrificed her life for mine on several occasions.
She deserved to hug her parents again. She deserved to be free.
Breaking the curse might not solve all her problems—and it damn well wouldn’t solve all of mine—but it was the right thing to do.
Just like dropping the dragon egg into the ocean had been.
And letting Finlay go would be, if that was what he wanted.
The wolpertinger had been bang on when it told me to beware the girl in the oxblood cloak.
Because back then, she was everything I feared, everything that threatened to turn my world upside down.
It must have foreseen that she would be my undoing, in the end.
That if she touched me, this thing I’d buried so far inside of me I didn’t know it existed would emerge.
But she was also exactly what I needed.
“Where are you going?” Finlay asked as I headed to the back of the shoppe.
I looked back at the two of them, Bri’s head still buried in her hands, Finlay looking on the verge of tears himself.
“To make a wish.”
The wolpertinger was back on its pedestal between us, still asleep or inert or dead; I wasn’t sure which.
“You can’t do this, Willow,” Bri said for the seventh time. “That wish is yours to use as you see fit.”
“Exactly. Which is why I’m going to use it to break your curse.
Or whatever it is that’s ruining your life.
” I placed my hand on the wolpertinger’s back.
“I’d like to make my wish now,” I said, hoping those were the right words to use.
This thing had been asleep for far too long. Maybe it wouldn’t wake up again.
Finally, after I was starting to worry that even my last resort might not work, the wolpertinger cracked open one small, dark eye with aggravating sloth. For a creature without eyebrows, it was gallingly expressive. “What do you want?” it asked in that deep, incongruous voice.
“I want to break Brianna Hargrave’s curse.”
The other eye opened. “The pipin told you she wasn’t cursed.”
“Well, it was wrong,” I said. “When Brianna was a baby, a man cursed her pregnant mother, and that’s why everything Bri touches turns to magic.”
The wolpertinger rolled its eyes. “The man did not curse your mother, Brianna. He removed the containment spell she put upon herself when she met your father.”
“What?” we all exclaimed in unison.
“Your mother is a witch,” it said.
Bri began to splutter in protest, but it continued on, as monotone and disinterested as a professor giving the same tired lecture.
“She met your father, a Foundationalist, and fell in love. But he could not, or would not, be with someone who possessed magic. Therefore, she put a spell upon herself that would contain her magic, rendering her powerless. The spurned architect, Montrose, knew this, and he went to a witch to ask for a spell to remove whatever was hiding who your mother truly was, believing that she would recognize her folly and take him back. Unfortunately, the spell was not quite specific enough, as the witch did not know your mother was pregnant. The spell removed the containment from you, her unborn child, but only partially. Just enough to prevent you from controlling your magic at all.”