Page 23 of Big Little Spells

Before I failed so epically.

And it’s a good thing I’m not my sister, because I view failure as an opportunity.

“Fractured,” I explain. “And no, it isn’t my piercings or my tattoos.”

Emerson is frowning at me. With worry, maybe, but something else too. Like maybe, for the first time, she’s entertaining the thought we might actually lose this whole impossible fight.

It’s not really a surprise that I’m turning out to be the weak link.

Which isn’t to say her thinking it doesn’t hurt almost as much as my not-really-charred hand.

“Try again.” Nicholas sounds bored, but why would he tell me to try again if he’s truly bored? It’s that and that alone—the idea that I’ve somehow interested the greatest Praeceptor of all time, according to what I assume is his own, immortal propaganda—that actually prompts me to try again.

Once he turned his back on me, but he isn’t sending me home today. Not yet. If I can prove to him...

These are old, disordered thoughts, I tell myself sternly. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone but yourself.

“Try again,” Nicholas says again, over some excuse Emerson is trying to make for me.

At the same time I say, “I’m going to try again.” Like it’s my idea.

Emerson clearly isn’t happy about it, but when I pull out of her grasp, she lets me. She takes one small step back, which for her is pretty much the same as leaving me here.

I pick up the wand and frown as I study it. Maybe there’s something wrong with it. Maybe Nicholas poisoned it to play some kind of trick on me, or the Joywood have imbued it with some sort of anti-Wilde hellfire.

If I hadn’t had my own fractured vision last night, I’m sure I’d believe either one of those options. Happily. But I had that vision all on my own. Something is going on here, and it isn’t in the wand. I’m pretty sure it’s in me.

I focus not just on the water, not just on the answers I seek, but on controlling that blistering pain. And whatever it is that’s fighting against me, cutting off my access to the visions that usually come so easily that I spent years learning how to keep them from swamping me completely.

I touch the wand to the water again. I focus. I chant the same words, simple but bright with power. “Wisdom of the water, show me your light.”

The pain is instant. Just as sharp, just as hot.

I make myself repeat the words through the punch of agony, and the visions come—but they are even more fractured. So garbled I can’t even make out details—no colors or people or messages, only flashes of light and pain.

So much pain it makes me think I might collapse. Or throw up. Or both.

I grit my teeth, hold the wand tighter, and let my gaze meet Nicholas’s across the bowl.

His blue eyes are so dark they’re almost black. And I think, I need that. That deep blackness. That textured dark. If I can touch it, harness it, use it, these visions will come together.

There are answers here. Somewhere in him, in us. Ones I didn’t expect to find. Ones I didn’t know could exist. I can feel them on the other side of that static. I only need to get there.

There is a flicker of something in Nicholas’s expression. I’m not stupid enough to think it’s concern, I just know it has some of the same markings as concern. Whatever that means on a soulless asshole.

“Stop,” he grits out at me.

But I can do this. I know I can do this. I’m so close to something...something big. Like Emerson diving into the river.

Witchling, he says in my head. A warning, but also...almost as if that term that sounds so condescending is actually an endearment of some kind.

But I don’t want his warning, and his endearment is clearly a foolish fantasy I’ve made up. I bear down. I reach for that space on the other side of all this static.

Crack.

There’s a flash of blinding light. Everything involved in the test is gone—the table, the bowl, even the wand I had a death grip on. All gone. The library is smoky, and Emerson looks terrified while Nicholas looks thunderously angry—which makes me think he wasn’t the one to make it all disappear.

I want to say something snide about that. Who knew the immortal witch could be played in his own house?

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