Chapter 10
10
I’M A LITTLE fuzzy when I wake up, like I have some kind of Summoning hangover, which is not unusual.
The face in mine as I open my eyes, however, is.
I remember last night enough not to scream bloody murder at the ghost looking down at me, but it’s all sort of...jumbled details and panic as my heart tries to jump out of my chest.
“What the hell, Elizabeth?” I manage to get out when it’s clear I’m not actually having a cardiac event. I wish I could throw the covers back over my head rather than deal with ghosts today.
Or anything else.
“Is this...regular?” she demands, looking affronted for some reason.
I push myself up into sitting position, rubbing my hands over my eyes. “Is what regular?”
Elizabeth draws herself up while hovering in midair . “Sleeping all morning? Lazing about?”
I tap the phone on my nightstand, then scowl at her. “It’s seven in the morning. My shop doesn’t open until ten.”
She presses her lips together. “Shop? What kind of shop?”
It’s clear I won’t be falling back asleep. “I sell tea.”
“Tea,” she repeats wonderingly, as if this is her first inkling of any real magic around here. “Do you make remedies?”
“Remedies. Potions. And sometimes just tea.” I shrug, thinking of my holiday blends and novelty blends, like my perennial bestseller, Drink to Pretend You’re Single—always a hit with the wine o’clock ladies. “Whatever sells.”
She makes a noise, and I don’t know her well enough to characterize it, but it’s not disapproval. It’s also not that sharpness that reminds me too much of myself. It’s softer.
“I had dreams of a shop like that,” she says. “Remedies for maladies of all types. I thought it was for me, but perhaps it was for you.”
That doesn’t make much sense since I’m not her direct descendant. But it warms me all the same. “You never tried to open one? There were all kinds of shops here back in the day.”
I know this because I’ve been lectured extensively on this subject by none other than Emerson Wilde. Including the history of my building, which was first a blacksmith, then a haberdashery, then a millinery—which pleases me, as I like to think of those hat shop ladies reclaiming the building from all that maleness . I’m the first tea shop though, as far as I know.
Elizabeth fiddles with her dress and retreats until she appears as if she’s perched on the side of my bed. “Oh, no. My father wouldn’t hear of it. His unwed daughter in trade while he drew breath? Certainly not. Then I married Zachariah, without a penny to his name. My parents weren’t about to help me finance a silly dream after I’d lowered myself so far, and against their wishes, not even after he died.”
“A Good considered marrying a Rivers... lowering?”
Elizabeth gets a strange look on her face then. “Zachariah was very...odd. My parents were quite determined to turn around the Good name and reputation. Though it doesn’t appear to have worked.”
No, but what interests me is any member of the Rivers clan so strange that he was considered beneath the historically and currently problematic Good family. “How was he odd?”
“He had delusions of grandeur, I suppose.” Elizabeth presses her lips together as if she wants to say more but is holding herself back. “He had this little group of fellows who thought they had uncovered a great mystery of epic proportions, but it was little more than a fairy tale.”
Sounds a lot like us trying for ascension , I think to myself. Except the Joywood being evil is no fairy tale.
That’s a reality that I don’t really want to think about, but look at that, here comes all the anxiety that accompanies thoughts of the Joywood anyway. I decide I might as well get up to face the onslaught.
I wave Elizabeth away so I can get out of bed without climbing through her ghostly form—it feels rude—but as I do, I remember our conversation from last night. “What was that term you used? For your witch designation?”
She looks taken aback again, but in a way that makes me think she’s more comfortable with that than those softer reminiscences. That feels a little too familiar. “Revelare.” She sounds it out as if I’m dim. “Honestly, are all the witches in these times so ignorant?”
I want to say yes , mostly to annoy her, but if it’s true that we’re all ignorant, I don’t want to prove it by saying so. I need to speak to Georgie. Frost. Emerson. Everyone?
But today I’m babysitting a ghost.
I do mean babysitting . Elizabeth follows me everywhere . She talks at me constantly, following me around the room, down the hall, and even into the bathroom when I decide I’m going to hide out there with my phone. There’s no escaping her. If she’s not asking a million questions about faucets and light switches, she’s complaining about Zachariah, or casting aspersions on the waste and luxury of the modern world.
After at least an hour of this, I feel like I’m about to implode .
“Okay,” I say briskly, cutting off a soliloquy about purchasing unnecessary items, brought to me by her floating out through the window to see the signs of the shops along Main Street—none of them the butcher or farrier or baker she recalls. “I need some privacy. I’m going upstairs, alone. You can stay here. Or you can go downstairs and haunt someone else—just so long as it’s not me.”
She’s quiet for a moment, but then gives me a demure smile that I can see very well is fake. “If you insist on being ill-mannered, Ellowyn, I cannot stop you.”
I actually feel bad—but not bad enough to take back what I said.
I go upstairs and use Georgie’s bathroom to enjoy a very long shower, uninterrupted by spectral asides, thank the elements. I magic myself a selection of different outfits, because that takes even more time, and I’m thinking I’ll have my tea in Georgie’s room—where she is probably communing with her crystals, hopefully quietly—but as I start down the hall, I hear Elizabeth calling me from the stairway.
I look right, then left. Georgie’s rooms are down in the turret end, but across from the bathroom up here is a linen closet.
No one, not even a ghost, is going to find me in the third-floor linen closet. Please Hecate.
I magic myself inside without even blinking—
And slam into a warm body.
“Ouch,” comes Zander’s low voice.
But I already knew it was him.
I would know him anywhere—even the dark depths of a linen closet I don’t think a soul has used in decades. Not even the local spiders.
“What are you doing in here?” I demand in a whisper, trying to back away, but there’s nowhere to go. It’s not the tiniest closet in the world, but then Zander isn’t the tiniest man either.
In fact, he’s big everywhere, like the jock he was in high school—playing every game he could, simply because he could, and, naturally, was good at them at all. I can confirm that that particular athletic body type is not a glamour. Not on him.
Focus , I order myself.
“I’m guessing I’m doing the same thing you are,” Zander whispers back, though even his whisper has that growl in it. “If Zachariah wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him.” I can’t see Zander in the dark of the closet, but I can feel him. Heat and strength and Zander, everywhere. “All he talks about is hunting for crows. Crows , Ellowyn, since four thirty in the damn morning. On a day I foolishly believed I might actually get to sleep in a little, for a change.”
“At least you don’t have Elizabeth asking you questions about how every modern convenience works, like I have any idea, and then telling me how they did it better with less convenience and more good old-fashioned grit back in her day. When she’s not doing that, she’s...”
I trail off, because, belatedly, I realize I’m talking to him like we’re friends.
“Let me guess, bitching about Zachariah the way he’s bitching about her.”
“Constantly.”
“It’s really fucking annoying.”
It is. But. “I guess we should apologize to our friends for the last decade.”
He laughs. “We aren’t that bad.”
He can’t see me in the dark of the closet, so the way I roll my eyes is lost on him.
“We aren’t ,” he insists when I say nothing.
“I’ll be sure to take a poll later.”
Because I think we have been that bad , actually, as uncomfortable as that is to accept when I’m watching another Good and Rivers couple act out their feelings and not liking what I see.
This seems like a really bad place to get into all that us stuff. Dark. Close.
Dangerous.
Especially when we agreed to get along with each other only yesterday.
Something we’ve never managed to do. Not even when we were together, if I’m being honest.
I clear my throat and cast around—maybe a little desperately—for something else to talk about. “Here’s a weird thing, though. Elizabeth acted like they didn’t have Summoners or Diviners in her day. She said she was a Revelare . That she summoned and had premonitions.”
There’s a pause, like he’s thinking. When he finally says something, it’s, “Huh.”
“Huh, indeed.” The silence draws out between us, but all I can feel is the heat of him, even though we’re not touching. Because of course we’re not touching. I estimate there’s at least two inches between our bodies—and maybe more, given how I’m pressing myself back into the dusty shelves behind me. It’s that awful, life-ruining chemistry forever arcing between us, closing the space, making me tell myself lies like this time it will be just fine if I lean in and —I cough again. “Well, Georgie will know. Or Frost. I need to go find them.”
He sounds gruff when he speaks, so I know he feels what I do. “So go.”
“You first.”
My eyes haven’t adjusted, but I can still practically see the way he lounges back against his own dusty shelves, like he plans to move in here for the duration. “I don’t need to go find anyone. I plan to stay here until my afternoon shift at the ferry or until Zachariah finds me.”
This sounds like a better plan, all things being equal, but if I stay here...here we are.
Zander and me.
In a dark closet.
With too much body heat and electricity and magic straining toward each other because that’s what happens when we’re alone and too close. Something inside of us is wired to make the same very, very, very bad decisions.
Case in point, our impending parenthood.
“It isn’t Beltane,” he says, low and hot .
It’s the thing we say to each other. It’s not a warning, though. Not when he says it.
It’s an invitation to break our agreement.
I always say no. I take pleasure in saying it. In waiting until the last possible moment to say it, even.
Because I always put so much stock in our agreement. So certain it would save me, and yet here I am anyway. Pregnant with our child and decidedly unsaved .
What could be the harm? I ask myself when I know that even asking the question is the harm right there. Or maybe the harm is in how I didn’t magic myself right back out of this closet when I found it occupied.
We’ll never know because it’s dark, and maybe it’s so dark it doesn’t even count that I’m the one who leans in and—
“There you are!” comes the voice I least want to hear, along with a shock of light, beaming in from the hall outside.
I nearly scream.
I tell myself this humiliation almost occurs because I’m startled. Not because I’m frustrated to be caught about to kiss my ex-boyfriend and current baby daddy—a term I realize I need to start using as much as possible to horrify all our friends.
First I have Elizabeth’s ghostly head to contend with, poking through the door from the hall and letting the light in with her.
“What are you doing?” she demands, looking back and forth between the two of us like she already knows.
Maybe we all know.
In which case, there’s no need to litigate it now.
I push open the door and leave without looking back. I figure Zander understands because he’s the one who closes the door behind me—with him still inside. He’s still hiding from his ghost.
I have no such luck, so I march down the hall. Elizabeth floats right beside me. “Can’t you go occupy yourself?” I try to sound...not caring , exactly, but less salty than I feel.
“I can’t do anything,” she says, holding up her ghostly hands as proof, as if we don’t both know that ghosts can do all kinds of things. If they want to.
“Why don’t you go bother your husband?” I suggest, still going for the low-sodium version of my voice and not quite getting there. “Practice your best poltergeist? Haunt a villager?”
She floats around so she’s in front of me and holds out a hand like a stop sign. “Listen to me, child. Goods and Riverses don’t mix.”
For once she sounds dead serious.
No pun intended.
“It’s a little late for that warning,” I say, waving at my belly. I stop walking, even though I know I could plow right through her if I wanted. “But thank you.”
“Their honor always gets in the way,” she tells me, her violet gaze seeming to glow brighter than the rest of her.
Blaming honor doesn’t make any sense. Or it makes too much. Either way... “What’s wrong with honor?”
“Nothing, until it’s the sword cutting everything in half.” She makes a cutting in half motion, and I don’t know if that’s some kind of memory charm, but I see that Beltane prom night ten years ago. Zander handing me not a ring or a promise , but his pendant that I’m currently wearing to protect me. Back then, it was to go be free .
Somewhere far away from him , was what he meant.
It is not a great memory. Not just because of that moment, but my reaction to it, which was almost as bad.
I walk through Elizabeth then, with prejudice.
Georgie’s door is open at the turret end of the hall. I take this as an invitation and walk right in to find Georgie pretty much how I expected to find her. Sitting in the middle of her wooden floor meditating, her crystals floating all around her while the light from outside her bay windows pours in.
I want to interrupt her immediately so I can start firing questions at her and escape my own head, but I don’t. I take a deep breath and try to sort myself out.
I am an adult.
Maybe someday I won’t need to remind myself of that fact.
The crystals gleam, then hum a little as they float to the ground. I choose to take that as hope.
Georgie opens her eyes and smiles at me, then stretches as she gets to her feet. “No glamour today? And you look like you caught up on some sleep. You look good, Ellowyn.”
I don’t do well with compliments, so I make a sort of grunting noise to acknowledge what Georgie said. And I figure I might as well dive right in. “Ghost Elizabeth here says she wasn’t a Summoner or a Diviner.”
Cue an instant judgmental sigh from the spectral audience who followed me in here. “I summon. I divine. I do not understand why this is such a hardship for you to understand.”
I ignore her since Georgie can’t hear her anyway. “She says she had premonitions. She summoned with the best of them. She calls herself a Revelare.”
“I don’t call myself anything,” Elizabeth grumbles irritably. “That’s what I am.”
Georgie is frowning at me, her big Historian brain clearly turning this over. “I don’t think I know this word.”
“ You don’t?”
She shakes her head. “Not in any kind of historical aspect. Certainly not as a designation. I’ll ask Frost, of course, but... Well. I have seen the word once...”
She trails off. Then she shakes her head and gets that dreamy look about her that I’ve come to realize is her disguise. I used to think she was an airhead. Now I think she likes people to think that she is.
“I’ll ask Frost,” she says again.
But she’s lying . “Where have you seen that word, Georgie?”
She reaches out and gives my arm a squeeze. “It won’t help us.”
“You know this for certain?”
She sighs and walks over to her bookcase. She has an entire room across the hall filled to the brim with books and scrolls and odd objects she claims are of historical significance, but this bookshelf is about her own personal history. The books she read as a kid. The books she reads now. All well-handled, with spines creased, unlike the historical tomes she treats like a stray breeze might destroy them forever.
She pulls out a ratty paperback, sized for the children’s section. “It’s not a text or a codex or anything. It’s a cute kids’ story.”
I accept the slim volume. There’s a very intricately drawn illustration on the cover. A dragon, a crow, and a redheaded princess with a shining sword. Ribbons of water, almost like rivers, twine around them and into the background.
I can’t imagine anything Elizabeth is talking about is going to be illuminated by a kids’ book about princesses. Still I turn it over in my hands a few times, almost like I can’t bear not to. It’s been worn and read and well loved, that’s for sure.
“It’s my favorite. When I was a child, of course.” Then she flashes a bright, real smile, warmth radiating off her. “You know, you should take it.”
“Take it?”
“Sure, you’re going to have a child who’ll want to hear such stories eventually. As Sage likes to point out, kids’ books are meant for kids.”
Sage Osburn is her boyfriend, and I want to like him. I do. I eye her. “What if I prefer tales of existential dread for my baby?”
Georgie shakes her head at me, because I said it as a question instead of a fact, and she knows my tricks too well by now. “Take it. Consider it your first baby gift.”
I want to argue with that, but it feels good, if weird, to accept. I suspect it would be strange and wrong, somehow, to say no. So, I take it.
Then I take Elizabeth’s witch designation down to breakfast, and to Frost.
The former immortal does not do breakfast. He stands in the kitchen because Rebekah is there, both watching and not watching her lounge around with her tea.
“It sounds familiar,” he says when I ask him about the term, but he gets that dark, dangerous look about him. The one we’re all beginning to associate with something he thinks he should remember but doesn’t. He looks at Georgie, who pads in behind me, all bare feet and wild red hair. “We’ll go through my library today.”
Georgie nods. Emerson and Jacob stop conferring—both of them smiling the way they only do with each other—and she shifts to her Warrior mode to hand out safety buddy assignments. Yes, she’s made specific assignments and a number of charts she’s only too happy to magic about in the air of the kitchen, all without disturbing her familiar, Cassie, who is lying at her feet in a sunbeam.
It starts off a domino effect of days that go by quietly and without hiccup. We know the Joywood are planning something. They get quiet when bad, bad magic is brewing, and all we can do is wait.
Or, if you’re Emerson, start making flyers and posters to encourage our fellow witches to choose us once we’re officially taking part in the ascension on Samhain. With so many promises of what she’ll do you’d be hard-pressed to believe them—unless you know Emerson.
We research and discuss around-the-clock now that we’re all staying in Wilde House, but there’s precious little clarity to be found. Georgie and Frost can’t seem to find any further details on what ascension rituals will take place once we have our sponsors. Nor do they find an explanation of why Revelare was a witch designation in Elizabeth’s time but not now, much less how both Summoning and Divining were a part of it. We still have no idea why shapeless dark shadows came for us.
We try to imagine what we would do if we were evil, the better to predict what the Joywood might do, but it never seems to work. And Emerson usually gets a little too wound up at the very notion that any of us could do such horrible things, no matter how many times Frost gets that intense look on his face and tells her that power can change a person.
“Only if we let it,” Emerson replies calmly.
We do our jobs. We are never by ourselves or off the bricks if we can help it. As if all of this isn’t weird enough, Zander and I are also getting along for the first time in, well. Ever. Maybe because the ghost relationship we see spooling out before us night and day is a mirror.
And we don’t like what we see.
We plan, we prepare, and we gather. Day after day, night after night. With an agenda in place for the town hall meeting, I find myself filled with the strangest sensation.
I almost don’t recognize it.
But as the days pass, it settles in until even I can’t deny it, much as I’d like to.
For the first time in months, I have something that’s been sorely missing for this entire strange year.
Hope.