Chapter 16
Days had passed since the coven meeting. Since her mother laid out what Samhain would require.
Gwen had been finding excuses for every one of them.
The tours needed scheduling. The herb garden needed winterizing. Her cottage needed cleaning—desperately, according to no one but herself.
Forbes wasn’t fooled.
“Ye’re stalling,” he said from her mother’s kitchen doorway, coffee in hand, watching her reorganize spices that didn’t need reorganizing.
“I’m not stalling. I’m... preparing.”
“Ye’ve alphabetized the oregano three times.”
“It’s a complex herb.”
He set down his coffee and crossed to her, gently removing a jar of thyme from her hands. “Gwen.”
“I know.” She let out a breath. “I know. I just—” She gestured vaguely at herself, at the kitchen, at the entire impossible situation.
“What if my mother’s wrong? What if I go out there and try to access this supposedly enormous power and nothing happens?
What if I’m exactly as broken as I’ve always thought? ”
“Then we’ll come back inside and have tea and try again tomorrow.”
“That simple?”
“That simple.” His eyes were warm, steady. “There’s no deadline on this, lass. No grade. No audience waiting tae judge.”
“Samhain’s coming.”
“Aye, but today isn’t about Samhain. Today is just about you. Seeing what’s there.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “And I’ll be right beside ye. Whatever happens.”
The tension in her chest eased. Not confidence—not yet—but something close to permission.
“Fine,” she said. “But if I set the backyard on fire, you’re explaining it to my mother.”
“I’ll tell her it was a controlled experiment.”
“She won’t believe you.”
“No, but she’ll appreciate the attempt.”
The clearing behind Bishop House had been used for practice since Gwen’s great-grandmother’s time. Private enough for mishaps. Far enough from neighbors that no one would call the fire department.
Again.
The October afternoon was crisp and golden, the kind of weather that made Salem feel like it belonged on a postcard. Leaves crunched underfoot. The air smelled of wood smoke and decay and something sweeter underneath—the last of the season’s apples, maybe, from the neighbor’s tree.
Gwen stood in the center of the clearing, trying to remember how to breathe.
“What exactly are we doing?” Forbes asked. He’d positioned himself a few feet away, close enough to reach but far enough to give her space. “Is there a... ritual? Words?”
“Usually there are words. Candles. Components.” Gwen shook out her hands. “But that’s for normal magic. Small magic. Mom says my problem is I’ve been trying to squeeze myself into workings that were never built for what I carry.”
“So, what’s built for what you carry?”
“I have no idea.” She laughed, a little wild. “That’s the terrifying part. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be smaller, and now I’m supposed to just... not?”
Forbes was quiet for a moment. Then: “When I started writing fiction instead of academic papers, I kept trying tae make my novels sound scholarly. Footnotes. Formal language. Careful hedging.” He smiled ruefully.
“They were terrible. Unreadable. It wasn’t until I stopped trying tae be what I’d been trained tae be and just..
. wrote... that anything good came out.”
“You’re comparing my magic to your writing process?”
“I’m saying sometimes the thing that feels like letting go is actually the thing that sets you free.”
Gwen stared at him. This man. This impossible, constant, secretly romantic man who’d shown up in her life two and a half weeks ago and somehow understood her better than people who’d known her for years.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m going to try.”
She closed her eyes.
For years—decades—she’d approached magic like a faucet. Turn it on carefully. Control the flow. Don’t let too much out or everything floods.
The birthday candles that exploded instead of lighting. The protection charm that set off every car alarm on the street. The neighbor’s cat that glowed green for an hour after she’d tried a simple calming spell.
A lifetime of too much, spilling over, ruining everything it touched.
But that wasn’t what she was. She wasn’t a faucet. She was, apparently, a fire hose. An ocean. Something vast that couldn’t be measured in careful portions.
So she stopped measuring.
She stopped trying to find the edges of her power and hold them in. Instead, she just... reached. Inward. Downward. Toward the thing that had always been there, waiting, patient, too big for any container she’d tried to force it into.
For one awful heartbeat, she felt nothing. The same hollow silence she’d felt a thousand times before—reaching for something that wasn’t there.
Then the world exhaled.
And it answered.
Power flooded through her—not violent, not overwhelming, but immense. Like stepping into a river and realizing it was actually a current that had been flowing through her all along, and she’d just never stopped fighting it long enough to feel which way it wanted to go.
She gasped. Her eyes flew open.
The clearing was glowing.
Not dramatically—not like special effects in a movie. But every leaf on the ground seemed lit from within, autumn gold intensified to almost amber. The air shimmered faintly, like heat rising off summer pavement, except it was October and the shimmer felt like safety. Like home.
Forbes’s eyes were wide. “Gwen...”
“I feel it,” she whispered. “I actually feel it.”
The glow pulsed gently, responding to her heartbeat. She could sense the edges of the clearing—the old oak at the property line, the garden wall, the house behind them—all of it held within her awareness like objects in a room she’d finally turned the lights on in.
This was what protection magic was supposed to feel like. Not the sputtering candles and smoking rosemary. Not the desperate grasping for something that kept slipping away.
This.
“Can ye—” Forbes stepped closer, then stopped. “Is it safe tae—”
“I don’t know,” Gwen admitted. The power hummed through her, vast and patient. “But I think so. I think it wants to protect, not harm.”
He closed the distance between them anyway. Took her hands in his.
The glow brightened the moment he touched her—a warm pulse that wrapped around them both, like her magic had been waiting for him specifically. It settled into something steadier. A warmth that felt, absurdly, like welcome.
“Hello,” Forbes said quietly, and Gwen realized he was talking to her magic like it was a living thing.
Maybe it was.
“This is terrifying,” she said, half-laughing, half-crying. “And amazing. And I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“You’re doing brilliantly.” He squeezed her hands. “You’re glowing, Gwen. Literally glowing.”
“That’s probably not normal.”
“Nothing about this is normal.” His smile was crooked and tender. “It’s remarkable. You’re remarkable.”
The glow faded slowly, like embers settling, leaving the clearing ordinary again. Ordinary except for the way Gwen’s whole body thrummed with energy, with possibility, with the bone-deep knowledge that her mother had been right.
She wasn’t broken. She’d never been broken.
She’d just been too much for anything small to hold.
“I need to sit down,” she said.
Forbes guided her to the old stone bench at the edge of the clearing, keeping her hand in his. She leaned against him, her limbs warm and heavy, as if she’d run a great distance without moving. Not exhaustion exactly—more like her body catching up to what her magic had just done.
“That was real,” she said.
“Very real.”
“I made the leaves glow.”
“Ye made everything glow.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “Including, I should mention, yourself.”
“That’s going to be hard to explain on the tour.”
He laughed—that surprised, genuine sound she’d come to crave. “We’ll work on your subtlety.”
“I don’t think subtlety is really my thing anymore.”
“No.” He pulled back just enough to meet her eyes, his expression soft with wonder. “I don’t think it is.”
Gwen sat with him in the golden October afternoon, her magic humming contentedly beneath her skin, and let herself believe—for the first time in her life—that she might actually be enough.
More than enough.
But for now, this was enough.
This was everything.