Page 105 of Big Little Spells

This isn’t a terrible theory, so I force myself to smile. We sit and talk some more, but soon it’s clear that Jacob needs to recover from the day’s healing. And Zander has to go to the bar. We’re all reluctant to leave each other—and even more reluctant to say why—but Emerson, ever practical, insists we all need a good eight hours of rest. She even orders us off to our various beds with sleep spells wafting over us.

I wave mine away. And I don’t go home to Wilde House. There’s something I need to do first since I likely won’t see Nicholas prior to the Litha ritual tomorrow.

In fact, if I was a suspicious sort of person, I might even say that he’s going to make absolutely certain I don’t see him ahead of the test. I’m okay with this, because it’s so telling. If I couldn’t stop him, he wouldn’t care if he saw me. That means I have my window—I just need to find it and make sure to use it.

When I get to Frost House, he’s standing on his widow’s walk, the night dark and deep around him. Instead of cloaks and drama, he’s in jeans and a T-shirt. It’s no less breathtaking. I don’t like thinking about the widows who paced around on rooftops like this. It all seems a little too on the nose, suddenly. But his magic pulses in the night. It calls to me, and I have no defenses against it.

Or him.

And I don’t want any, so I throw myself into all that pulse and passion and let it raise me up to meet him.

“You should be with your little coven,” he tells me darkly with his hands in my hair. “Celebrating your last hours before Litha.”

“And yet you’re not there. You are our Praeceptor.”

He grunts. There’s an edgy energy inside him he’s trying to hide. It isn’t working.

The stone is in my hand, shoved deep in my pocket, pulsing with old spirits and new heat. I say a little spell in my head so that the stone melds with a chain and become a kind of medal. The kind Catholics wear, especially in St. Louis.

Not that I want to think about how people become saints. No martyrs, please.

I pull the stone on its chain from my pocket and hold it out between us. “I made you a little something.”

He blinks. Then again. Then he raises his cool blue gaze to mine. “I think you missed the part where I’m an immortal being of incalculable power, witchling. I do not require protection charms from minor covens.”

I know him well enough by now to be touched that he feels the need to make us sound like less than we are. It’s as good as a rousing pep talk from anyone else.

I smile at him until his eyes flash and his hands tighten in my hair.

“I prefer to think of it as a talisman.” My voice sounds rougher than it should. I want to smile. I want to cry. I want to wrap myself around him and grow roots, deep into the earth, and hold us here forever. But the moon is high and it is nearly Litha and we are out of time. I keep going. “When I was in exile, I couldn’t use my magic. I treated my visions like migraines and waited them out with a cool compress in the dark. But I could hold on to precious rocks and pretty crystals and ask them for the help they would give anyone, witch or human alike.”

“And you think I require this...gift shop aid?”

“What I think,” I say quietly, “is that we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. But if I’m not here tomorrow night, I want you have something to remember me by. Something—” and I raise my voice a little over his scowl and the protest he begins to make “—that I made with my own magic and imbued with all four elements, to be with you if I can’t.”

It’s not a love poem. Not quite. And yet he looks as if I reached over and tore his heart from his chest. He drops his hands, and I take that as an invitation.

I go up on my toes and loop the chain around his neck. He does not stop me. And the things I see in his gaze make my own heart hurt.

Nicholas looks at the stone as it lies there against his T-shirt, in that hollow between his pecs where I like to press my face, then back to me. The magic in him seems to pulse harder between us, around us. His hand moves to cover the stone. Then his gaze bores into me.

“You should know that if I fall—”

“No one’s falling, Nicholas. We’re witches. We fly.”

He shakes his head, his eyes ancient, now. “We all fall, witchling. When our time comes.”

Those words my grandmother taught me ring in me then, but tonight they feel less like a comfort and more like an omen. Time is mine until time takes me home.

“When my time comes, I will not be able to return like your grandmother,” he says, very intently. Making certain I hear what he’s telling me. What it means. “The choices I have made before and after becoming immortal preclude me from the kind of afterlife that would be...useful to you.”

“Nicholas.” And it costs me something to even attempt to get near a daisy sort of smile for him. “This sounds suspiciously like a goodbye. And we know you don’t do that. You prefer the puff of smoke. The flash of light. A goodbye is too mortal, surely.”

“These are my consequences, Rebekah,” he tells me quietly, as if I haven’t spoken. “Not yours.”

I see it for what it is. The goodbye, sure, that I don’t plan on letting him make. But he’s also protecting me or reminding me. If I cannot conjure him, the fault lies with him. Not with me.

There is something else in his words, little as I want to hear it.

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