18. Carvings in the Tree
Carvings in the Tree
T eleporting actually blows chunks. Or at least, it will make you do that if you aren’t prepared.
Don’t get me wrong. Is it an amazingly convenient form of transportation that is straight out of a sci-fi fantasy novel? Hell yes ! For a flat fee on most one-way trips within the city limits, you can use a wild combination of both magic and science to go damn near wherever you want in record time. You can even bring luggage with you. The problem is you have to be able to stomach traveling against the natural flow of space, time, and reality and having your atoms deconstructed and rearranged back together again to get you from Point A to Point B. The longer the trip, the worse the tele-lag. At best, you feel nauseous for a few hours. But at worse?
There are teleportation recovery clinics around Blackbell for a reason, okay?
With my anxiety already turned up to eleven from everything that happened today, adding more nausea wasn’t ideal. But Maisie lived far from a Midnight Railway Station, and I wasn’t in any mood to risk talking to anyone in the backseat of a Broomshare. I would rather vomit my breakfast than deal with a stranger trying to make small talk right now.
Simone and Maisie seemed to feel the same way. After Aran’s summoning call, Maisie just wanted to take a bath and drown herself in wine while watching some new reality show that bills itself as a social love experiment. She declared herself done for the day and didn’t want to think until tomorrow at the earliest. We all agreed before Simone and I took our leave and parted at the Teleways.
I stepped off the Teleway platform. To stave off most of the strong desire to vomit from both the teleportation and my general anxiety, I popped a ginger candy in my mouth. I pulled my coat tight around me to fight the chill. I put my headphones in to listen to my favorite album when I needed to drown out my feelings and not think: Fall Out Boy’s “So Much (For) Stardust.” Walking toward home, the guitar solos and rhythmic lyrics pounded through my ears and straight to my heart.
The buildings in Blackbell were outnumbered by the beautifully tall evergreen pine trees. Among the branches, pine needles, and leaves, there were homes and businesses for the various creatures who thrived off the woodland like nymphs, elementals, and some kinds of fae and witches. They looked like treehouses up there, with steps and ladders made of wood and mushrooms. Near the sidewalk just before the Waterways and the road, a garden of flowers and bushes bloomed despite the chill of the fall, serving as a home for pixies and all sorts of tiny supernatural creatures that were always flying about like butterflies. The large amount of flora and fauna turned the city into an almost literal forest rather than a concrete jungle. It made it feel like you were always walking through a never-ending park.
Despite the beauty and magic all around me and the strumming guitar and drum beats in my ears, my brain still insisted on wandering to exactly where I didn’t want it to go.
I would at least make your death easier and more profitable. What had Aran meant by that? Who would want me dead? Why would that be monetarily advantageous at all to anyone? I wasn’t someone incredibly special. I was a nobody. Up until this morning, I thought I was human honestly. What reason would anyone want me dead? Why was Aran such a major dickwad? What did someone as sweet as Ms. Repond see in him in the first place? The grimoire… My grimoire… My family’s grimoire, what had my mom known about it? Why was I finding it now? What did any of it mean? If I wasn’t human, what was I? Had my mother known? Why hadn’t she or Pops told me? Who had created that spell in the book fifteen years ago? Why?—?
A ding paused the chorus of “Heartbreak Feels So Good” and my thoughts. Siri read in her usual artificial monotone: Queenie red heart emoji said, “Would you still want to talk to me if I was a worm?” sent with the looking eyes emoji.
Then: Queenie red heart emoji also said, “What about an octopus? Could you be friends with an octopus?”
And: “Speaking of octopuses, did you know they have terrible eyesight but three hearts?”
And: “I think there’s something poetic about that,” sent with a red heart emoji.
And: “I’m so sorry if this is random. I have ADHD, so my brain works… not normal. I’m so weird, I’m sorry! If you hate it, you should leave now,” sent with a crying laughing emoji.
I laughed hearing her amazing text messages read aloud in such a dull voice. I pulled my phone from my pocket to respond to her. But my fingers hovered over the virtual keyboard. I wanted to answer her questions, to reassure her that I thought her brain was perfect. I adored how her brain worked, the connections she could make. I was deeply obsessed with it. Maybe it was the demisexual in me, but hearing how her mind functioned was so adorable to me that I could scream with joy.
Her brain was why I wanted to tell her all about today, everything from the mundane start of my day with my quiet commute and Ethan’s passive aggression to finding out about the grimoire and everything that entailed to everything that went down at Maisie’s house. I wanted to hear her thoughts on it, to see if I was as crazy as I felt.
At the same time, I didn’t want to even think about any of this anymore. I was so tired and worn raw like an overly exposed nerve. My constant thinking and turning over every pebble of information from today was enough, more than honestly. My overthinking would make me talk to myself more than I could with anyone else. No, I wanted— needed —a distraction.
ME
Can I call you?
Barely ten seconds passed after I hit send before my phone rang with a video call. I smiled as I hit accept.
“Hi, sweetness,” Quinn greeted with a smirk. Her phone must have been propped up against something on the kitchen counter since I recognized her backsplash and oven of the Barn behind her. Glass bowls full of flour, brown sugar, vanilla, butter, and other ingredients were placed all around her with a whisk sitting next to it. Her plushy, wild curls were pulled back into a ponytail, but some strays stubbornly remained and framed her face nicely. She wore a navy blue apron with her name embroidered on the top front pocket. The sleeves of her maroon red t-shirt were stretched tight over her biceps, and I had to stop my brain from focusing too hard on those same biceps lifting me with ease the other night when I got too drunk at the party. Gods, she was so fine .
Focus, Byrd. Remember to stay strong. You promised. It’s all still an idea. Don’t think about touching… or, her touching you… or ? —
“Hi!” I said, trying to shut my brain up and ignore the heat I felt rise along my cheeks and… elsewhere. Instead, I tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other on the sidewalk.
“I’m so sorry for blowing your phone up with questions,” she said, pulling a large glass bowl of what looked like flour closer to her. “Sometimes, I just… You know how Clarkson got the zoomies the first time you met her? My brain does that sometimes, and I just have to ask things even if they are out of pocket. I know it’s a lot?—”
“Oh, gods, no, it isn’t at all,” I reassured. “It’s really fucking cute, actually. Uh, to answer your question, I would very much still like you as a worm or an octopus or a bird or anything. I like you, starlight, and I like your ADHD zoomies. That fun fact about octopuses—wait, octopi? Octopussies? Is that right?”
Quinn laughed, dumping the contents of a few bowls into the large bowl of flour before stacking them inside of each other. She grabbed a sheet of parchment paper and a sifter that she pulled from somewhere out-of-frame. She laid the sheet down and dumped the flour mixture into the sifter. While sifting onto the parchment sheet, she said, “Oh, I have no idea what it is, but octopussies is too perfect for me not to use from now on.”
“Hey! English is hard, okay? I think I read somewhere that any of those could be considered right!”
“There is no way that octopussies has come out of the mouth of a marine biologist unironically and with a straight face.” Quinn sprinkled something I guessed was salt onto the sifted flour.
“ As I was saying ,” I said through laughter. “I get it. I have really bad anxiety, so my brain does a zoomie, but it’s less of Sonic the Hedgehog and more of a train wreck. It’s kind of more of a brain spiral, like a plane crashing and falling out of the sky toward the ground.”
Quinn looked up at me from her, whisking the mixture with what looked like the tiniest whisk I had ever seen. I wanted to smile at the cutest kitchen utensil I had ever seen, but Quinn’s golden hazel eyes were alight with concern.
“Sweetness, is that why you asked to talk? Your anxiety?”
Her furrowed eyebrows and frown blurred as my eyes became teary. The question and the worry she had for me was almost too much after a day like this. I sat down on a bench in front of a dessert and coffee shop. It was peak witchcore with its dark red brick and the black cauldron sign hanging above the door. The smell of coffee, chocolate, and sweet baked goods wafted from the store for blocks onward. It was comforting, but I still had to try to swallow around the lump in my throat. I shook my head, looking away and toward the road.
“Byrdie?” My name from her golden accented voice snapped my eyesight back to her. I had never heard my name sound so beautiful. Quinn had moved the parchment elsewhere and replaced it with the biggest glass bowl yet. But her hands were braced on the counter, her eyes locked on me. I could feel the heat of it, even through the phone. “Are you okay, sweets?”
“I’m… I’m exhausted, Quinn.” It wasn’t the full truth and failed to really encompass all of my feelings, but it was definitely a start and far from a lie. I was emotionally, mentally, and maybe even spiritually drained.
“Is it work?”
“Not quite.” I shook my head again. I took a breath to steady myself and keep the tears at bay. “It’s honestly long and complicated. It’s about my tattoo.”
“Oh.”
“I found out more about it, but it’s… It’s not just about it anymore. It’s about my mom now and something she left me and magic and Maisie and?—”
“Hey, hey, hey, sweetness. Take a breath. Respire hondo , yeah?” Quinn said. She inhaled and motioned for me to follow her. I took a shaky breath in, held it with her, and then exhaled at the same time again. She did it with me a few more times before I felt the tears recede along with the quake in my breath.
Quinn continued. “We don’t have to talk about any of this if you don’t want to. Don’t feel obligated, especially if you are tired of it and it’s making you feel this way. Let’s talk about something else instead.”
“Like what?” I sniffed.
“Well,” Quinn shrugged, reaching for four eggs. She began cracking them into the bowl. “I’m assuming you aren’t at work. Talking at a library is very illegal from what I hear, especially for a Library Manager. Probably breaks one of your sacred codes or something that would make getting arrested seem tame?”
I chuckled. “No, my boss let me have off for the day after what happened.”
“You have a fan-fucking-tastic boss. Must be nice.” Quinn took some softened butter and poured it into the bowl with the eggs.
“She’s pretty great. She’s less of a boss to me, and more like an Aunt. Her and her partners all are.”
“I love that. You must have known them a long time?” Quinn poured in some brown sugar next.
“Yeah, since I was about fifteen. I wanted to live at the Archive from the time I first set foot into it, but instead, I settled for working there. I had to beg and plead to do it because they didn’t want my education to fall by the wayside for a job that could wait. But I wore them down. I was able to work, go to high school, pay for my bachelors and my masters at a huge discount, and start a career all in one swoop. You know what they say, have a job you love and you never work a day in your life. They left out the importance of good benefits in that saying.”
“I think that would have been a hell of a mouthful,” Quinn snorted. “But I love all of that for you.”
Quinn used a regular-sized whisk to stir her mixture a bit before adding in what looked like pumpkin purée. While she was pouring in a dark liquid from a small glass bowl, I asked. “Okay, so what are you doing? You are clearly not at work.”
“Hey, now, I will have you know that baking cookies in a house before you show it damn near guarantees a sale. The smell makes it more homey and enticing.”
“Well, aren’t you a plethora of fun facts today, starlight?”
“I love when you talk academic to me, baby, with those SAT words.”
“You are such a flirt.”
“You are so into it.”
I rolled my eyes. “What are you baking in your house, crazy?”
“Once fall comes around—which is, like, August basically by Starbucks standards—all I want to do is drink and eat pumpkin anything. I’m one of those weirdos who literally has pumpkin creamer, pumpkin wine, pumpkin cookies—I think I have a pumpkin body wash that Nat bought me. I have a problem. Anyway, I say all of that to say that I’m making pumpkin bread prepared two ways, but all fresh with some homemade pumpkin purée I made at the top of the month. So, one loaf will have two kinds of chocolate chips on different halves and the other will be plain with powdered sugar on top.”
I moaned. It sounded so good. “That sounds fire as fuck, babe! You will have to bring me some!”
Quinn had lifted the parchment sheet of flour mixture hot dog style and was pouring it into the rest of the batter as she mixed. Still, she looked up from her work to give me that damn smolder. “I would do anything to hear that sound again, sweetness. And I like how you say fuck, too.”
I felt my face heat. Quinn knew how to get to me. “Most people make fun of the way I curse. Maisie always says it sounds like Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls trying to be angry.”
Quinn almost spilled flour all over her kitchen as her smolder was replaced by her bursting into laughter straight from her belly. It was deep and loud, making my heart swell. I wanted to make her laugh like that more. It felt like I had won something special. “Oh, I can absolutely see that! You are so adorable, it’s perfect!”
“Oh, my gods! You are one of them ! I can sound angry! I can strike fear into the hearts of innocents with my fury.”
“Not when you scrunch your nose like that.” She gestured to the phone screen, making me accidentally scrunch my nose more and then making her smile even more. “You’re like Jigglypuff more than an actual threat.”
“I will prove you wrong one day. I’m going to scare you so hard you—you’ll—you’ll be sorry!”
“Sure, Jan,” Quinn shook her head, dumping the rest of the flour into the mixture and lifting the bowl to mix more fiercely.
“You like it. I can tell from that smirk.” She rolled her eyes, and I chuckled. “So, do you bake often, pumpkin?”
“I love that,” Quinn beamed. “But uh, only when I’m stressed from work or want something sweet or both. So… always?”
I chuckled. “What has you stressed about work? Everything okay?”
Quinn shrugged. It was that same half-hearted shoulder lift and fall that she had done before when I asked her about her work. There was definitely something more that she wasn’t telling me. Her eyes were locked on the batter as she stirred vigorously. “I’m literally the best at my job. Everything is good with it honestly. It’s just… It’s just very demanding emotionally and psychologically.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, I’m not trying to invalidate you and your feelings, but is real estate really that rough?”
“Let’s just say that ‘real estate’ isn’t the main part of the business. It’s like saying that Microsoft just makes video games. So, you are kind of right, but mostly wrong.”
“So, your family’s business is more than real estate? What is it mainly then?”
“Other than messy and depressing?”
“I’m being serious.”
“I know, I know. There just isn’t a great way to describe it that I can say.” Before I could ask her to expand on that, she shrugged and moved forward. “I guess kinda like law enforcement or something?”
“So, like cops? Security detail and bodyguard work? Or like, private investigation? Or something else entirely?”
Quinn finally looked up at me. I watched in real time as her once-dark hazel eyes brightened with shock and curiosity. Her slitted eyebrow raised. She sat the mixed batter on the counter in front of her, strong arms framing either side of the bowl. “How do you know about that?”
I chuckled. “True crime, for one, but my uncle for another. Well, more like my play-uncle and godparent, so no blood relation, but uncle for all intents and purposes. Anyway, he does various contract work for the Department of Supernatural Operations and tells me about it after he finishes because he knows I love shit like that. It could be anything from bodyguarding a supernatural politician to doing some investigative work on a case to doing some murderous things. I have heard the whole gambit. Is any of that like what you are talking about?”
“Uh, yeah, kind of actually.” Quinn evenly poured the mixture into two greased-up glass bread pans. She started sprinkling chocolate chips on one side and white chocolate chips on the other of the same loaf. “The other cousins and I do contract work alongside my dad, traveling the country and handling different jobs, while my mom and aunts do more of the business stuff like accounting and finding leads for work. They are able to do the work, but they prefer administrative things instead. It’s kind of complicated, though. It might be easier to talk and explain it later in person.”
“Makes sense. Well, did you work today?”
“I got back from it this morning.”
“Tell me something good about it.”
Quinn closed the pumpkin loaves in the oven and set an old-timey kitchen timer. She raised that same slitted eyebrow at me again while she wiped her hands on a tea towel. “Are you going to make me ask you to explain?”
I smiled at her confusion. “When I was a kid and would have a bad day, my mom used to ask me to find something good about the bad I experienced that day. She used to tell me that there is no such thing as something being wholly bad and that there’s always something to enjoy in the sucky. So, for example, I had a bad day today, but I got to spend time with my friends and I had some really good cups of coffee. I learned some new things that, while throwing me for a loop, were things that I needed to know and I’m better for knowing now. So, give me something good now, pumpkin.”
“Okay, okay,” Quinn thought for a moment. Then she said, “Well, I saw a Highland cow today! She was so adorable! I was driving back home with the windows down for Clarkson?—”
“Aww, Clarkson was there?! Do you take her on all of your jobs?”
Quinn beamed. “I take her almost everywhere with me because she’s the bestest, goodest girlie!” Clarkson barked out of frame, and Quinn bent down to pick her up and shower her in kisses. “She’s super helpful in my line of work, so I take her with me when I can.”
Quinn put Clarkson back down, and I could hear her little nails on the floor playing with one of her many toys. Quinn smiled toward her as she continued. “We were driving back home on some backroads, and we came across a farm with some cows near the fence. When I slowed down, a cow, like, leaned toward the car. Clarkson started to bark at her, which I guess annoyed her. So, she mooed at Clarkson, and Clarkson got so scared! She immediately got back into the car and went into the backseat, poor thing.”
Quinn and I laughed, genuinely and hard. Soon, we fell into a comfortable silence. It should have been awkward and strange, but somehow, for some reason, it was nice. Quinn’s eyes twinkled as she watched me through the phone’s camera. My cheeks were starting to hurt from how much I was smiling. I really liked this conversation. It all just made me giddy.
Gods, I had the biggest crush on Quinn.
Something deep within me stirred, taking up more and more space.
“Are you feeling better, sweetness?” Quinn asked, bringing me back to the present.
I nodded. “I do actually, thanks to you. You have this way of bringing me out of my spiral and making me happy instantly. It’s hard to feel sad or anxious when I’m talking to you. You make it too easy to just smile and laugh instead.”
Quinn beamed. It was the opposite of her smolder. Instead of being hot, dark, and sexy, it was cute, bright, and kind of goofy in the most adorable way. I loved the warmth it sent through me as much as the heat of her smolder. “I love that. Talking to you is my favorite thing. I cannot get enough of it. It’s like my latest hyperfixation or a new dessert that I want to keep getting delivered from Publix.”
Now, it was my turn to smile and glow. Before I could respond, though, Quinn said, “Oh, my mom is calling me. Can we go back to texting after?”
“Of course! I have to get home, anyway. I’ll talk to you later, starlight!” I waved.
“Bye, sweets.”
The call ended then. We had been talking for an hour, but it felt both long and like no time at all. My music started again, but I swiped to my music app to change to something to fit my mood better. I started up Sabrina Carpenter and got up from the bench. My heart swelled as I made my way home.
I didn’t feel the cold anymore, feeling warm from the inside out, but it felt temporary. I had a feeling my muscles would be sore from shivering again, my teeth achy from chattering, my whole body numb from the chill that seemed to come from somewhere within me.
Maybe Maisie had the right idea. A nice hot bath with some wine sounded perfect.