Chapter Seventeen
Wyn was still sleeping when I felt Lydia crossing Lafayette Square, on the march towards Bell House.
‘What, no Fido?’
Ashley lowered her tattered paperback to observe me tearing down the stairs and past the parlour door, in an attempt to beat my best friend to the door before she could ring the bell.
‘He needs to rest,’ I replied, backtracking three breathless steps. ‘So if you could be quiet?’
‘Got it,’ she replied with a thumbs up. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’
It didn’t deserve a response, which was just as well since I had no time to come up with one.
‘Aggressive,’ Lydia said with a grunt as I threw the door open and tackled her across the porch. ‘Some might even say unnecessary.’
‘Sorry,’ I winced as she rubbed her ribs. Sometimes I forgot I was stronger than I used to be. ‘Wyn is upstairs asleep, I didn’t want the doorbell to wake him.’
‘Wyn’s here?’ Her eyes widened at the scent of scandal. ‘In your bedroom? Asleep? Girl, did you tire him out already?’
‘He’s tired because he drove down overnight,’ I told her, slipping my arm through hers and leading her around to the back garden. ‘Don’t get excited, nothing happened.’
‘Tell that to the stubble rash on your chin.’
She pointed at my face and cackled when I looked away.
‘Thanks for answering my questions anyways,’ she said, arms folded over her cropped blue button-down, one eyebrow quirked upward. ‘I was going to ask where you’d gotten to, but I know I can’t compete with his wolfiness up there.’
‘What are you talking about? I came by earlier,’ I told her. ‘Your grandmother said you were busy, told me to leave.’
‘Virginia told you to leave?’
She looked and sounded as though it was the most scandalous thing she had ever heard and I confirmed with a grim nod.
‘I think her exact words were neither her daughter, granddaughter or grandson wanted to see me ever again because I’m a bad influence.’
‘Damn.’
She dropped into a wrought-iron chair and swatted at a mosquito as it flew by her bare midriff. Mosquitoes loved Lydia.
‘That’s practically my grandmother’s version of spitting in someone’s face. Why didn’t she just slap you and have done with it?’
‘That’s what it felt like,’ I replied, perching on the edge of the seat across from her, our knees touching under the table. ‘Looks like she wasn’t nearly as impressed with Jackson’s overnight cover story as everyone thought she would be.’
I pulled a couple of leaves from a nearby lemon verbena plant, massaging them between my finger and thumb to release the oils for extra protection against the mosquitoes, then handed them to my friend.
Suddenly another horrifying thought occurred to me.
‘Oh God,’ I gasped, crushing another leaf in my palm. ‘Lyds, what if she told your mom?’
‘Oh, yeah. She probably did.’
I dropped my head to the table, mortified in advance but Lydia just laughed. ‘Don’t sweat it. Even if she did, Mom hasn’t blacklisted you. She’s the reason I’m here.’
Raising my head very slightly off the table, I gave her a quizzical look.
‘She wants to meet you,’ Lydia explained, sticking out her tongue to taste one of the leaves.
‘I told her you were stopping by this morning and when you didn’t show, she suggested we get a late lunch.
Don’t think she’d invite you out to eat if she was mad at you for whatever you did or did not do with my brother.
Unless she wants to know your intentions towards him. ’
‘Lunch? With your mom?’
Alex Powell. My dad’s best friend. The one person I knew for sure he’d been in touch with for all the years we’d lived in hiding.
‘I know, what a drag.’ She half-rose out of her chair, pulled a tube of mango lip balm from her pocket and passed it across the table into my hand. ‘She’s cool though. Most of the time. At least, she’s not an old-fashioned nag like Virginia.’
Dabbing the balm onto my chapped lips, I asked what I hoped was a very breezy question.
‘Is it just us or will Jackson be there too?’
‘Why?’
Apparently not nearly as breezy as I’d intended.
‘No reason,’ I replied. ‘Just wondering.’
‘Any reason why he shouldn’t be?’
‘No.’
She stood up and came around to stand behind me, freeing my hair from the claw clip I’d grabbed on my way downstairs.
‘Are you avoiding him?’
I was absolutely avoiding him but I did not want to talk about it.
‘Why would I be avoiding him?’
She yanked on my hair a little harder than necessary and I scowled straight ahead.
‘You tell me.’
‘Nothing to tell.’
‘If I were a less trusting woman, I might think you’re not telling me the whole truth,’ she said, loosening some of the strands and tightening others then fastening it with an elastic band retrieved from her sling bag. ‘But I’m hungry so I’m letting it go for now.’
She flicked her eyes over my baggy T-shirt and bike shorts when I stood up and turned to face her. ‘But not so hungry you don’t have time to go change. My name is Lydia Powell and I do not approve this message.’
‘Give me two minutes.’
She appraised my outfit once more.
‘I’ll give you five.’
Rolling my eyes, I slipped back inside the house. Everything else might be changing but at least Lydia was always going to be Lydia.
‘Then I said, you’re so wrong you don’t even know how wrong you are, literally do not come to me with your theories until you’ve read every book in the series because you don’t know the characters, you don’t know their motivations, you can’t spell the dragon’s name right!
Like, you are showing your whole ass and I’m embarrassed for you. ’
Lydia’s arms flew around in the air, gesticulating wildly as we waited to cross Gaston Street to Forsyth Park.
‘Then what happened?’ I asked, anxiously tugging at the hem of my white linen tank. It was creased. I should’ve ironed it but Lydia had insisted there was no time and it was parental approved.
‘He deleted his account. The romantasy subreddit is no place for amateurs. Hey, did you finish the book I loaned you?’
‘I’m kind of avoiding romantasy right now,’ I admitted, studying the don’t walk sign, every second stretching out into an eternity. ‘Feels a little too much like homework.’
‘Does that mean fae are real?’ she asked, her eyes bugging out of her head. ‘And dragons and direwolves and selkies and—’
‘I hope not,’ I cut her off before she could really get going. ‘But who knows?’
When the light changed, Lyds strolled easily on as I bounced along on pins and needles. What would Alex be like? Would she think I looked more like my mom or my dad? What if she didn’t like me? What if she thought I would be a disappointment to my parents?
‘Em?’
‘Lyds.’
‘Does Wyn have a knot?’
‘Oh my God,’ I howled, wrenched out of my panic spiral by my best friend’s wild laughter. ‘Please never ask me that again.’
‘Gotta admit it’s a maybe,’ she said with a note of caution. ‘Like you said, who knows?’
Forsyth Park was packed, teeming with Savannahians and visitors of all ages.
Lydia danced around a pair of bubble wand-toting toddlers while I smiled politely at an older couple, watching the world go by from one of the benches that lined the main footpath leading from Gaston Street to the fountain.
The trees were happy here, surrounded by life and love.
The live oaks, the sycamores, the cedars and the gingkos, they all grew tall and proud, and I heard whispers on the Spanish moss as I passed by, my skin tingling all over.
‘I know we can’t talk about this in front of my mom but I’ve been doing some more digging into the family tree,’ Lydia said, pushing her curls away from her face and holding them back with a stretchy hairband she’d had wrapped around her wrist. ‘There’s definitely a bunch of weird stuff going on.’
‘Such as?’ I asked, one eye on the sky above us.
The forecast was for sun all day but the way my panic kept rising and falling, I couldn’t be certain we weren’t in for an unexpected shower or two.
‘You know how old southern families are.’ Lydia examined her silver-painted nails as we walked.
‘We love to chart that ancestral line. Virginia must have three hundred years of photographs and paperwork, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licences, graduation diplomas, everything for everyone. Or at least everyone except my great-aunt Juliet.’
‘Great-aunt on Virginia’s side?’
‘Uh-uh. She died when she was sixteen. Virginia was still a baby so she never knew her. There are photographs from when she was born, a few school pictures, some early birthday portraits, but as soon as she hits fifteen, boom, she disappears. It’s like she just ceased to exist two years before she actually died. ’
‘Maybe she was sick and didn’t feel like having her photo taken,’ I suggested.
‘Nope. I asked Virginia and she said Juliet died suddenly, right before her seventeenth birthday. But that could make sense, couldn’t it? If Juliet was the last witch and she died before she could go through the rituals, our magic would’ve been lost.’
‘It’s possible,’ I admitted, tugging on my locket. ‘Catherine told me, if a witch misses her Becoming, all the magic in her family dies.’
‘And if my great-aunt was supposed to be a witch, her granddaughter would’ve been the next one. Not me.’
All the sounds of the park were deafening, but all I could hear, all I could feel, was Lydia’s disappointment.
‘Even if everything lined up and you were supposed to be a witch, I still don’t know whether or not I could help bring your magic back,’ I said softly, seeking out her hand and holding it tightly.
‘The prophecy says I will awaken my sisters’ dormant magic.
It doesn’t say how or when. Could be old magic families, could be new ones.
Either way, I know you don’t want to hear it now but, Lyds, you’re safer without magic. ’
She stopped in front of the fountain and the lightest mist hit my hot skin.
‘And are you safer without a sister witch?’