Page 58 of Big Little Spells

That feels like a blow and it shouldn’t. Not from him. “Yeah, and look where that got me.”

“It got you here. To this moment. Did it ever occur to you that now is where you were meant to be?”

Literally not once. Not in the way he means. “You, the oldest witch of them all, believe in things like fate? Destiny? In what’s meant to be? I thought you ran around thumbing your nose at such pedestrian beliefs.”

“Never.”

It’s a grave response. A sort of resigned acceptance that I find hard to argue against. He has seen it all after all.

He’s still holding the bowl, like he can wait me out and more, will. “Try it. Just once.”

We both know he could make me. He could snap his fingers and rid me of every piercing and all my ink. And it’s not as if he’s pleading with me instead. There’s too much steel in him.

What he’s demanding isn’t only that I take my piercings out.

It’s that I choose to obey him.

He does me the courtesy of not pretending otherwise.

And maybe that’s why I find myself reaching up to take my earrings out. He’s asking, in his way, rather than telling. Rather than waving a languid hand and compelling me. I can’t seem to resist it.

I use my fingers to take out all my earrings, while whispering a little incantation to take out the rest, and my tattoos as well. Metal and ink float into the little bowl he holds—almost like an offering. I drop my earrings into the little soup of what I’ve long considered fundamental parts of my identity, then work up my courage to meet his intense gaze. “Happy?”

“We’ll see.” He looks me over, then gestures to my hand. “The ring as well.”

I curl my fingers into my palm. “No.”

Because it feels wrong. I don’t love the feeling of losing all the metal that helps me dull everything. I made sure my piercings blocked my meridian points, deliberately smoothing away the worst of the visions that come at me, so I would never accidentally use too much magic to handle them. I feel naked without them, but I can deal. I hope.

What I can’t do is take this ring off.

Nicholas studies me a moment, then frowns at the ring. He tilts his head as if examining it, though he does not reach out to take my hand or bring the ring any closer to his face, the way I feel certain anyone else would.

“Did you...” He trails off, and all I can think is that I’ve never heard Nicholas Frost trail off as if he’s not sure how to proceed. Something in me goes a little seismic. “Did you bring the crystal?” he asks roughly.

I pat the little pocket in my ridiculous white dress—perhaps its only saving grace. It was something Emerson insisted upon after a lengthy lecture about pockets and feminism, and my mother relented only because it was the only way to shut her up, I’m pretty sure.

“Have you noticed anything different?” Nicholas asks with an intensity that makes the earthquake in me pick up speed and force.

But I shove that aside. I think about Carol approaching me. Skip the weasel. Ellowyn, so sick she had to leave. And yet none of that is what he means. Even the crystal doing its work to heal the burning sensation I felt after Carol isn’t quite what he’s after. “No.”

His eyebrows turn down slightly. Is it disappointment? Confusion? Some emotion that’s so foreign to him that his face doesn’t even know how to arrange itself?

I fish the crystal out of my pocket and hold it out to him. It’s a tiny little thing. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do, but then the flames flicker around us as if the wind has finally pierced Nicholas’s spell. As it does, the crystal pulses. Then lifts, of its own accord, out of my hand and into the air.

I feel my other hand being tugged up, like there’s a magnet directly above it. It should alarm me, but it doesn’t. The unseen force lifts my hand up and then out in front of me, so the ring points toward the moon. The crystal still hovers in the air, then moves until it’s above the very center of the ring.

There’s a pause, like the crystal is waiting for my permission. But for what? How can I agree if I don’t even know what’s happening? But when I look across at Nicholas, he looks taken aback, like he didn’t expect this either.

I think of how he asked me for my piercings when he could have taken them, and how much more powerful I feel for having chosen to surrender. Like it isn’t a surrender at all. The crystal seems to gleam at me as I consider this, and I know I’m right. This isn’t the Joywood. This is the kind of magic my grandmother taught us. Choice, yes, but responsibility above all things. The responsibility that power breeds and can too easily stain. The responsibility inherent in having magic at all.

Grandma was all about responsibility and I failed her once. I won’t again.

I look past the hovering crystal, my raised hand. To the immortal standing there, seeming to block out the world.

When his gaze meets mine, all I see are flashes of light, like a thousand stars I can feel deep inside me. A part of that seismic shift, that heat and hunger.

He feels like magic too, and not only because he has so much of it.

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