Page 59 of Big Little Spells

I honor my grandmother and myself, this man and this moment.

I focus all my attention on my raised hand and what hovers above it.

And with all I am—what I was and what I will be—I think, yes.

Yes.

17

THAT YES IS LIKE another great, old bell tolling, deep within. It seems to carry on the wind, tangling with the rivers down below and the dancing Beltane firelight, making the Missouri hills and fields glow.

Up here on this widow’s walk the night seems darker, the moon brighter.

Coronis lets out a low, wild croak, another kind of yes, as if he’s singing it back to me. As if he’s giving me his raven blessing.

The perfectly spherical stone lowers, then sits in the middle of the ring. And it’s as if the ring absorbs it, until it becomes the center of the narcissus. Then blooms.

Like it was always meant to go right there, in the ring my grandmother made. For me. This crystal that Nicholas gave me at a dance that felt stupid, on a sacred night that’s anything but.

There’s an immediate release inside of me. The static that has hounded me, all those fractured things that flit through my brain even when I’m alone, are gone. In an instant. The instant the stone touches the ring, I feel new.

Or like myself again.

A bolt of terror slams into me. I remember, too well, what it was like before I was allowed to go out into the world, sent off into exile, and figure out what I needed to do to stop the onslaught. The constant barrage of images. The lack of control and the chaos that slammed into me all the time, without warning, without any of my piercings or tattooed wards that aren’t quite spells to help.

I brace myself. I’m holding my breath.

But there is no assault, no clatter of visions. There is only a calm inner silence. It pulses with power. With connection. Yet not with all the normal mess.

“What did you do?” I ask Nicholas, struggling to take my eyes off the ring. But when I do look at him, those blue eyes blaze like flame. Not ice.

“It’s a clarifying crystal. It...clarified.”

It’s no ordinary clarifying crystal, the sort of thing humans use as worry stones. It’s something special, and more powerful than anything a human could get their hands on. It has fixed this static inside of me in an instant.

Add to all that, it is somehow mine. Meant for me.

By him? By my grandmother?

By destiny?

I look up at him as another realization comes hurtling at me.

He has been missing in action for two weeks. Not making immortal demands from on high, not whispering in my head. Maybe that’s normal for him, but that wasn’t how it went the last time I lived in St. Cyprian full time.

It almost feels like... “You went and found this. For me.”

“There was a problem. I solved it,” he returns with absolutely no emotional inflection. Not even his usual snide condescension. He sounds completely flat.

I’m tempted to imagine it means something.

Especially when his blue eyes glitter.

“If we’re finished with the clarification process,” he says in the same flat manner, as if I was the one running around with crystals and staircases to the sky, “perhaps we can return our attention to the ritual. While it’s still Beltane.”

“The ritual,” I murmur, hoping I sound vaguely affirmative. “Of course.”

But suddenly, what I’m thinking about is Beltane. And, more specifically, the usual activities adult witches get up to while the bonfires light the night. The kind of activities, in fact, I saw Nicholas himself getting up to in those snatches of visions earlier.

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