Page 67 of Big Little Spells

The words in that book seem like brands inside my body, all over my skin. Like tattoos I can keep. Who is Meant.

I don’t question it. I am it. It’s like walking through the fire all over again.

But it gives so much more.

This isn’t just sex—human or witch, and yes, there’s a difference, because magic makes everything different—but this is bigger than all of that. This isn’t as simple as pleasure, or transformation, lust or need or a bone-deep craving.

This isn’t as simple as a seismic shift, tectonic plates making the world new.

I want to say it is everything. A thousand lifetimes, immortality, the universe, and all of it like a white-hot, blinding burst of yes inside me.

Or maybe not inside me, because I’m pretty sure I say all that out loud. Or maybe scream it.

Sometime later, I blink my eyes open. It’s still dark, and though the moon is no longer filling the room with its silvery light, flickering candlelight has taken its place. If I fell asleep, it wasn’t for too long.

I sit up and see I’m in this huge bed alone, though Nicholas stands by the giant window, a dark and shadowed silhouette. From my vantage point I can’t see much beyond him except little pinpricks of light—bonfires in the distance and the streetlights of St. Cyprian below.

And Nicholas Frost looking down on it all. Not a dream.

A dream I’ve had, in one version or another, a great many times—though I never kept dreaming my way into waking up in his bed. That’s how I know this is real.

That and the fact I can still feel his hands all over me.

He does not turn, or move, but somehow he must sense I’ve awoken, because he speaks.

“This cannot happen again, Rebekah.”

He stares out the window. No, he broods.

It hurts, I can’t lie to myself about that, but I’m also not naive enough to believe that his cannots are about me. I shrug expansively, like the relentlessly chill woman I’m really not, not where he’s concerned. “Beltane, am I right?”

He looks over his shoulder at me, frowning, but then seems to think better of it. Probably because I’m not worried about covering myself up any more than he is. I feel his gaze move all over me before he turns back to the window. It’s a comfort that I get to him too.

“There are things I cannot explain to you,” he says darkly.

I crawl to the side of the bed and stand, but I can’t bring myself to put the Beltane prom dress back on. Even if I could find it, given I don’t remember taking it off. I want to laugh at the thought that if my mother knew what I’d done in that dress, she’d be just as horrified as when I tried to burn Felicia to the ground.

That lifts my spirits a bit. I magic myself something from my closet. I start to do the same with all my piercings and tattoos but stop. Because I love a piercing and some sick ink, like every other member of my generation, but I love my magic more. My innate power and clear visions. If I have all that back, more clear and powerful than when I was younger, why tamp it all down?

I settle for a glamour instead, so it only looks like I’m wearing all my piercings and tattoos. I might not need them any longer, but I still like them. A lot.

“Because you genuinely can’t explain or because you don’t want to explain?” I ask Nicholas when I feel sufficiently armored.

“Because of curses. Because of oaths.” I can sense the impatience all over him, even though he’s glaring out the window still. “There are reasons I act in secret, but I am also bound by promises I made long ago. In blood and with the most powerful witchcraft there is.”

“Yes.”

When he turns to look at me his eyes go narrow. Maybe he doesn’t like that I’m dressed. Maybe he doesn’t like the return of my jewelry, glamour or not. It’s possible what he doesn’t like is my easy agreement. Or maybe, just maybe, he’s starting to clue in.

“Yes?” he echoes.

I make a meal out of my careless shrug then. “Your clarifying trick really worked. I’ve seen some of those oaths.”

He’s looking at me with concern. And not, I think, for me. “You are not supposed to see backward. Only forward, into possibilities.”

That would normally be my cue to announce that I do, in fact, remember the difference between all the different designations, like every other witch who made it through kindergarten. I don’t know what stops me.

It’s something about that shadow I’m sure I can see in all that arrested blue. Do I imagine Nicholas Frost looks vulnerable? Or do I only want that to be true? “Maybe Chaos Diviners are different. Maybe backward and forward are the same when it’s all chaotic. You know, some people believe time is a sphere.”