Page 20 of Big Little Spells

It’s him.

Are you sure this is the tack you want to take? he asks me. When what I’m sure about is that I can feel each and every one of the nine hundred lives he must have lived already, swirling in me like another seismic event.

Like too many of them.

I’m sure, I tell him. I already know what happens when you pretend to “help.” You know what they say. Fool me once, fair enough, because I was a teenager and you’re older than dirt, as well as an asshole. There won’t be a fool me twice. I’m not actually masochistic.

His dark blue eyes gleam, like he knows better.

“We might as well run a test now, then,” he says in a low voice that moves down my spine like a touch.

“Great,” Emerson says. “I can—”

“I know what the little Warrior can do. We all watched her fight last night.” Nicholas does not acknowledge any connection to the Joywood. He does not acknowledge our past. He looks at me like he’s never seen me before and I hate it, which tells me things about me I don’t want to know. “But what about you, witchling? Can you do anything but run your mouth?”

7

WELL, SHIT.

It’s not that I’m not capable of doing something, it’s more that I don’t want to have to prove anything to anyone—particularly him. Tests of any kind have never been a strength of mine. I don’t like being judged.

Things I’m also not good at include: knowing when to quit, acting demure, and admitting I’m wrong.

“Your sister killed a host of adlets.” He spares her a glance. “Allegedly.”

“Allegedly?” Emerson lets out a cry of outrage, and I watch her fight with herself. I can practically hear her inner lecture. Don’t give him the reaction he wants, don’t poke at the scary immortal. But there are things Emerson is powerless against, now and forever, and being underestimated is one of them. “Don’t forget that time I stopped a flood and saved the sacred capital of witchkind.”

Nicholas looks unimpressed. “Typical Warrior things.”

“Right, because Confluence Warriors are so typical,” Emerson huffs.

But none of this is about Emerson. It’s about me. He doesn’t have to look at me directly for me to feel the force of his attention, though he does that now. It’s like I’m in his high beams and he’s not slowing down at all. “What designation do you fancy yourself these days, Rebekah?”

I narrow my eyes at him. There’s a war going on inside of me, the kind I tried to leave behind. The kind I thought I had left behind, but something about his arrogance and what happened between us ten years ago makes all that growing I did seem to melt away. Like nothing’s changed in me at all. “You know what I am.”

I feel connected to the old me in a way I haven’t in...maybe ever. Because beyond the shame of failure and the disappointment and that look on my grandmother’s face I can’t bear to recall, there was this.

Me.

The me that Nicholas Frost sought out. The one he offered to tutor and help guide, once upon a time. The me who was prepared to accept her exile until I felt what Carol did to my sister, abruptly wiping her mind of all magical memories without the courtesy of the traditional ceremony.

The seventeen-year-old me who stood up against what was obviously wrong, because of what they did to my sister. The scared kid who dared to try to fight against the Joywood—and particularly against Felicia.

And, okay, I didn’t do that in a way I’m proud of—but I still tried.

I’m still me.

The same me who then watched this immortal bastard, who’d claimed he was only in my life to help me, turn his back on me when I needed him.

It doesn’t matter that I lost that fight. All those fights. Or even that I crossed lines and shamed myself in the fighting, because I knew who I was then. I knew why I did what I did. I know now too.

Maybe I say that to him without meaning to, in this connected channel that shouldn’t exist between us, because he almost smiles.

“Diviners are the rarest witches around,” he points out, sounding lazy again. Which means he’s anything but, especially when he shrugs. “Rarer still to be born of two Praeceptors, no matter the bloodline or pedigree. What makes you think some spell dim exile—”

“I don’t appreciate that term, you know,” Emerson interrupts, and I want to groan. I want to get this over with, not argue over a term I don’t love myself. When it’s an ugly fact of life here, thanks to the Joywood and their spells to supposedly preserve the peace. “It’s pejorative at best.”

“You’re not required for this, little Warrior. You can be sent home at any time.”

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