Page 40 of Muddled Magic

Sawyer tucked himself into a ball, leaving a bloody smear on the ground where his mouth had been, and I snatched his scruff to drag him under me like a mother hen shading her chick from a storm. Five of the six witches rushed forward, iron cuffs blazing with smoldering runes and red sparks, their hands writhing with ivy-green battle magic as they lunged for me.

I rammed the claw deep into the demon half-heart.

A ground-shaking toll of thunder preceded the shock wave, and the entire coven was knocked clean off their feet. Except Grandmother.

The emerald cracked with an ear-splitting shriek, plumes of black shadow jettisoning up from where the claw punctured the half-heart.

Hauling Sawyer with me, I scuttled back like a crab as the ragged shadows sharpened and slashed the air in their death throes. The other witches lurched away, half of them flinging up sparkling green shields. The remnants of the parasite spun like the tenacles of an octopus caught in a whirlpool, their darkness thinning to a shroud-like gray before they ripped completely apart and dissipated like smoke in a breeze.

The clear gem-like husk of the half-heart sloughed off the grimoire, taking the demon claw with it, and shattered into crystalline glitter the moment it hit the mortal earth. The wrinkles of the leather cover smoothed as a darkness lifted from its surface like a mist. It disappeared on an invisible breath of air just as the shadows had, leaving nothing but a spell book bound in smooth leather dyed to match the deep green of pine needles in winter, the iron clasps now the same smooth silver color as the lettering across the top.

I rocked back on my heels, my body deflating with bone-deep relief. The curse was destroyed, and the grimoire healed. My family was free.

“What have you done?” Grandmother whispered.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Wh-what?” I sputtered. “I freed you. Look at the grimoire. Look at them!” I thrust my hand out at the rest of our family.

They had abandoned Lewellyn and Arthur, and the shifters were taking advantage of the neglect by helping Lewellyn break out of his cage as inconspicuously as they could. The coven clustered together in a loose circle, touching each other’s cheeks in wonder and sliding their black robes’ sleeves up past the elbows to study their forearms, wrists, and hands. Except Mom and Dad. He sought to examine her as she covered her face and wept quietly.

“M-Mom?” I whispered. Her scream was still fresh in my ears, and I glanced down at my cuffs, at the runes that still merrily blazed with their new color. I quickly snuffed them out. “Mom?”

She didn’t hear me. None of them did. They were too absorbed with the changes they were witnessing in each other.

A pallor none of us had ever noticed before had lifted from their skin. Their hair shone as if freshly washed, the browns richer, the grays more like finely-made steel than aged iron. An invisible weight had been lifted, and with it gone, eyes had brightened and cheeks had dimpled with smiles. On every face, even Marten’s.

While Grandmother’s appearance had also been reinvigorated, she was not smiling. Not one bit.

“What have you done?” she shouted, seizing my shoulders and shaking me.

Two figures blurred to my side. Mom hauled her own mother off me at the same time Arthur wrestled me behind him.

Arthur.

His touch had always sent shivers racing through me, but the sensations that now thundered through me from his hand on my arm were something else entirely. It was electric. It was the barrage of a river after a torrential rain, the fury of a stampede, the rush of a falcon diving thousands of feet towards the earth.

It was as if there had been a dampener between us this entire time, a barrier neither of us had sensed, that had vanished seemingly at the same time as the curse. Arthur sensed the change at the same moment I did, risking a glance down at me with wide hazel eyes.

I choked on a dry throat. I knew those eyes, but somehow the browns and golds and greens within their depths were a hundred times more vibrant. His lips, the expanse of his brow, that jawline under his beard, the tiny creases at the corners of his eyes from all those years of smiling—I saw them all with fresh, unhindered eyes. Despite the coldness of the November air, anti-frost wards aside, the heat I felt roiling off him was intense. As if his blood burned only for me.

“Meadow.” My name was a breath filled with wonder and reverence. As if he was seeing me for the first time after a lifetime apart. It was the sense of coming home, and I gasped in awe as that invisible tether between us reforged into an unbreakable chain.

His hand threaded into my hair, his fingernails grazing deliciously against my scalp. I reached for that face I knew, heart hammering in my chest, and whispered his name. A fire kindled in those hazel eyes, his grip tightening.

A throat cleared itself. Loudly.

“Shifter.” Dad held out his robe, flicking his gaze down to Arthur’s hips before narrowing it into a warning glare.

A low growl at the interruption emanated from the lumberjack shifter’s throat, but he accepted the robe and knotted it around his waist. Arthur was too tall and broad in the shoulder for the shortened battle robe to have fit and hang properly.

I was pretty confident—one-hundred-percent sure, in fact—that my entire body was blushing, not just my face. It was almost unnerving to realize that just a simple look or touch from him now nearly brought me to my knees, even in the face of everything that was going on around us.

Focus, came that annoying reminder. But it was right. All embarrassment faded at the sight of my mother groaning and once again slumping into Dad’s arms. Her eyes were swollen, red, and puffy, but not from crying.

“Mom?” I tried again, voice quivering.

“I’ll be alright,” she said, voice low and pained. “Already healing.”

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