Chapter 13
I turned to confirm that he was teasing me, but he wasn’t smiling and his warm brown eyes were deadly serious.
“Olive has a poison garden. That tracks.” I nodded and pulled Jasper’s coat tighter around me.
“Which is why she’s absolved from bringing anything to our potluck lunches—ever,” Jasper said.
A laugh burst out of me before I could soften it. I was so loud, in fact, that I startled a bird off the roof of a nearby gardening shed. As it propelled itself into the air with its powerful wings, I noted it was a raven. I watched as it circled the rooftop before flying away toward Central Park.
“Beautiful birds, ravens,” Jasper observed.
“If you say so.” I shuddered.
“You don’t think so?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’ve had a particularly pesky one sitting outside my house on my mailbox for the past week. It’s a bit too Edgar Allan Poe for me. He’s always skulking around.”
Jasper frowned and looked about to protest, but both Miles and Tariq began to cough as if trying not to laugh. He glared at them, and I wondered what inside joke I was missing.
Before I could ask, Miles turned to me and said, “Have I told you that I once worked with your grandmother?”
“No.” I straightened up.
“It was decades ago.” Miles held out the empty two-tiered plate to me. “Sweet is on the top, savory the bottom. Tap either plate three times.”
I tapped the top one, naturally. Three perfect petit fours appeared as if they’d mushroomed out of the plate.
Tariq handed me a small plate to put them on. I picked up the pink one with the white frosting ribbon and sniffed it. It smelled of vanilla and strawberry and yum.
I glanced at Miles. “How?”
“It’s an enchanted plate,” he said. “From Versailles, during the reign of the Sun King, so it can only conjure the foods Louis XIV enjoyed.”
I took a small bite. It was delicious. “Wow.”
Miles passed the plate to Jasper, who tapped the lower plate three times. In a blink, three meat-filled pastries materialized. Jasper let out a low rumble of approval and set them on his own plate.
“You were saying about my grandmother?” I reminded Miles. The petit fours were drool-worthy and the magic plate a showstopper, but I wanted to hear his memories of Mamie.
“We were young, both still apprentices of the craft, but there was a dark witch terrorizing the covens of the Northeast, so an alliance was formed to rid the region of her.”
“How was she terrorizing the covens?” I asked.
“She was using dark magic to steal the powers of prominent witches and mages,” Miles said. “It was a very scary time.”
“I remember hearing about it from my mother,” Jasper said. “Ariana Darkwood was one of the reasons she didn’t want me to come work in the States.”
“My family as well,” Tariq said. “She took the powers of twenty-seven witches and mages.”
“Wait,” I said. “Ariana Darkwood? Isn’t she the one whose heart is trapped inside the book El Corazón in the BODO?”
“She’s the one.” Miles sipped his tea. “And that’s all thanks to your grandmother Toni.
She set a trap for Ariana, pretending to be a much more powerful witch than she was at the time.
She was absolutely fearless.” The admiration in Miles’s voice made me feel a surge of pride for Mamie.
“When Ariana stepped into her trap, a group of us bound Ariana with a spell while Toni used El Corazón to lock Ariana’s own powers into the book , which is that book’s intended purpose. ”
“When I first saw El Corazón on the shelf, I envisioned a beating heart encased in ice.” I picked at the yellow frosting flower on the top of a chocolate petit four, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone if I was completely off base.
“Because witchcraft comes from the heart, that is the form her power took when sealed inside the book,” Miles said. “The book was crafted by a dark mage with the intent of stealing his wife’s power.”
“Sounds like a swell guy.” I ate the chocolate pastry in one bite.
“He was jealous that she was more talented than he was,” Tariq said. “The story goes that he gifted her with the book to write her spells in, but when she did, the book stole her spells and her magic, leaving her powerless.”
“This sounds like a horrible fairy tale,” I said.
“Don’t blame the Fae for that spineless troll,” Olive said as she strode across the rooftop toward us.
Per usual, she was all in black. Today it was a black-herringbone wool blazer with a thick fur collar over a black turtleneck sweater and pants.
Her shoes were pointy-toed black loafers that made no sound as she glided across the gravel-strewn garden floor toward us.
How did she manage to be soundless on gravel?
This was not a skill that a normal person developed.
The Fae? Olive had said it as if she was defending the Fae. Was Olive a faerie? Yeah, there was absolutely no way I was asking her.
“I’m sure Zoe didn’t mean it like that,” Jasper said, casting me a meaningful glance.
“No, of course not. Um…did Ariana die?” I asked. While I was all for Mamie stopping the dark witch from stealing others’ powers, I wasn’t so hot to discover she’d committed murder.
“No, Ariana was merely rendered powerless. The alliance banished her to a ghost town—an old mining town in Pennsylvania where the abandoned mine had been burning for over fifty years—where there was not a vestige of magic to sustain her. She died twenty-seven years ago.”
“The same year as Mamie.” The idea of a dark witch stealing powers was chilling.
I hunkered deeper into Jasper’s coat and took a bracing sip of hot tea.
It occurred to me that this was exactly the sort of thing my mother had been talking about when she’d said she was trying to protect me. That, too, felt like a gut punch.
“Quite a coincidence.” As Olive came closer, I noticed that long, curved claws were visible on the ends of the fur wrap she wore. I shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.
“Olive, I haven’t seen you up here since the last of your autumn crocuses bloomed,” Miles said.
“And you won’t see me again until it’s time to plant the datura.”
I was about to ask when that was when I noticed that her fur moved. No, it didn’t just move. It climbed, tightening about her shoulders until a little head with a short snout and two round eyes popped up and peered at us from behind her back. Olive’s fur was actually a sloth!
“Well, hello, Sir Napsalot the Sage,” Miles said. “I didn’t think he ever left the greenhouse when the weather got chilly.”
“He doesn’t,” Olive said. She reached back and lifted the creature off her back, setting him on the ground. “But one of his powers is to bring tranquility, which I was in need of a few moments ago.”
She nodded at the sloth, and he studied our group. When his gaze met mine, I could have sworn he could see into my very soul, which would have been alarming except I could swear he was smiling at me. A feeling of peacefulness passed over me and I felt myself relax.
“All right, that’s enough, Napsalot,” Olive said. “Back to the greenhouse with you.”
He turned away from us and started to drag himself the thirty feet to the greenhouse. With an impatient huff, Olive scooped him up and carried him the rest of the way. We watched as she placed him on a low-lying branch of one of the many tall trees in the greenhouse.
“Just to be clear,” I said, “Olive’s familiar is a sloth?”
“Yes, but I’d strongly advise you not to take the mickey out of her about it,” Jasper said.
“She’s a bit prickly in regard to him,” Tariq agreed. “Plus, we all love Sir Napsalot. He’s good for her.”
“You called him the sage ,” I said to Miles.
“One of his many gifts is divination,” he said. “Along with time disorder and secret keeping.” He looked as if he’d say more, but Olive was striding back toward us and we all grew silent.
“What did you need tranquility for?” Miles asked.
Olive turned to me. “Because someone managed to summon Freya and she appeared in my office ten minutes ago and has been yowling nonstop ever since. I had to summon Naps just to calm her down.”
“That was me,” I confessed.
Jasper sent me a sympathetic glance, while Miles and Tariq appeared surprised. Olive, per usual, looked annoyed.
“Not to press you,” Miles said, “but I was under the impression that you had made a vow not to practice magic.”
It was moment-of-truth time. I didn’t want pity, so I kept it short and sweet and just the facts. “When my mother dropped me off at boarding school when I was fourteen, she made me promise to never use magic or witchcraft again. She said she was doing it to protect me.”
I kept my gaze fixed on the magical plate. I didn’t want to see their expressions. “She blamed herself and her witchcraft for my father’s death. She wanted to spare me that sort of heartache, so I made the promise and I’ve never done any magic until today, when I managed to call Freya to me.”
They were all silent. In fact, they were quiet for so long, I was forced to glance up from the plate to see what they were thinking. Miles rubbed his chin thoughtfully, Tariq and Jasper looked empathetic to my plight, but Olive—once again—looked annoyed.
“Well, it’s clear to me that the reason you have been unable to translate your own family’s grimoire is because your witchcraft has been woefully neglected and your ability stunted.” Olive turned toward the building, calling over her shoulder, “Report to my office first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. But…why?” I raised my voice to be heard as she was striding away. She paused and turned to face me.
“Tomorrow, we start your magical training. Miles will teach you magical theory and safety protocols, Tariq potions, Jasper energy manipulation, and I will cover the basic spells.” She spun on her heel and with a wave of her arm, the door opened, she stepped through it, and it slammed shut after her.
I had to give it to her; it was an impressive exit.
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