Page 37 of Big Little Spells
“Business calls. But I can’t open the shop until you tell me what actually happened with the immortal last night.”
I wince. Not just at the last of my pounding headache as Ellowyn’s drink chases it away, or the fact she can still read me so well, but also because I have to lie—
I stop this train of thought. Why should I lie? This isn’t about me and me alone. Facing down that flood was a group effort. Passing the pubertatum might be something I have to do myself, but Emerson will be right next to me. No doubt acing the whole thing and trying to carry me along with her... But the point is, I won’t keep Nicholas a secret. Not this time. Emerson said we had to be honest, that it was a lesson she’d had to learn. So Nicholas was going to have to learn it too. Or accept it.
He won’t be my dirty little secret ever again.
“I have been summoned by the great immortal for some kind of Beltane ritual,” I say grandly, then swallow down another sip of her magic elixir, no longer feeling much like a donkey at all.
“Is that code for sex?” I glare at her, but she lifts a shoulder. “I wouldn’t judge you. Particularly on Beltane. Beltane is a judgment free zone.”
“I would judge me. He’s a dick.”
“Sure, but hot, foreboding older men are kind of your thing.” She smiles slyly. “And apparently young, tattooed, and pierced witches are his thing if last night was anything to go by.”
Heat wants to creep into my cheeks but I refuse—refuse—to give in to it. “He’s just playing out a power trip.”
“Okay, but then why you? Why you, specifically?”
I lift a shoulder. “I’m an easy target.”
Ellowyn throws back her head and laughs. “Yeah. Right.” She waggles her eyebrows at me. “Witchling,” she says in a deep, mocking voice.
“Condescending nicknames aside—”
This time she hoots. “Condescending? He doesn’t call any of the rest of us witchling, and let me tell you, Rebekah, he’s plenty condescending to all of us.”
I legitimately don’t know what to say to any of this. That bruised feeling inside me seems to get deeper, uglier. Especially when Ellowyn is laughing like it’s all a joke.
This is what terrified me, back when I was seventeen and desperately hung up on an immortal older man who only wanted to hone my magic. This is what kept me up at night then—worrying that he would never see me as anything other than a tool he could shape, then wield at will...
Or, worse, that it was all a joke.
And I’m much too aware that nothing has changed.
Nicholas least of all.
“Rebekah...” Ellowyn is studying me, a faint line between her eyebrows. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”
I stare at her for a long moment. Here it is. A chance to tell her everything. All that truth I was just so righteously ready to expand on. But if I go there, then I have to go other places as well.
To Nicholas being my secret tutor all through high school. To how he let me fail, then let the Joywood claim all my magic was black—when I hadn’t been intending to use dark magic at all. Then delivered me to my grandmother and told her everything I did—with absolutely no context or sugarcoating.
I could and should tell her.
But I don’t.
Instead, I let the moment go. I crack a joke. I don’t even know what I say.
Anything to escape the moment.
We go get breakfast and I hold my secrets as closely as ever. Here in St. Cyprian, where I settle into my old life as if I never left it.
I wake up in my childhood bedroom every morning. I text Aunt Zelda every day. I tell her I’m facing down the pubertatum again, but before that, the Beltane prom might kill me. What a nightmare, she agrees. I think I would throw myself in the river if I had to suffer through a school dance again—you’re tougher than me!
But she doesn’t let me see that for myself. She still says she’s not feeling well enough for visitors. Day in and day out.
I tell myself that’s not necessarily bad news.