Page 61 of Big Little Spells

Fire above. Fire below. Fire within.

The wheel of the year is turning.

Beltane fires are burning.

Brand me with your clarity

Lighten the darkness within me.

Fire above. Fire below. Fire within.

“Commit it to memory,” he says after I read it as I was told, his hand still on my shoulder. I know his power has translated the words for me, but now it feels like it weaves around me to keep the words in my head. To anchor them inside me.

Making them part of me.

“Now, Rebekah,” he urges me then, his voice like a new spell. “Walk.”

It’s almost as if I’m in a trance, but I’m too aware. Of his hand. Of his breath. The way he stands behind me, dark and sure. The way I feel in my own body, somehow new and fragile yet wise and strong.

The flames rise in front of me. The moon above, the wind all around.

But there’s no fear. I know what I have to do, and I do it. The words from the book dance in my head, then come out my mouth, word perfect.

And as they do, Nicholas is chanting his own.

I move toward the pyre we built and I pull my dress up with my hands. I keep saying the words, over and over.

Then I pick up one foot and put it in the fire, as if that’s a rational, reasonable thing to do—

The words, witchling, comes his voice inside me, as something rolls over me, a lot like a scream.

I don’t scream. I breathe out, then put my weight on the foot engulfed by flame and step forward.

Then I take another step. And I’m in the fire.

It burns bright.

But it doesn’t burn me.

Fire above. Fire below.

Maybe I’m saying the words. Maybe I am the words.

What I’m not is the girl who spent ten years pretending magic is the same as cocaine.

Because cocaine can’t keep a person from burning in a fire, though I suppose it might keep them from feeling it. But magic—my magic and Nicholas’s plus these old, powerful words—keeps me safe. It’s not that I can’t feel the fire. It’s that I want to feel it, and so the flames lick over me and through me.

It’s nothing like the water scrying or Carol’s slap of white-hot power in the gym.

This isn’t something I’m doing or even something being done to me. This is something that I’m submitting to, of my own free will, and the flames of my choice tonight are...purifying.

Like the ritual says.

Whatever hisses and sizzles and turns to ash inside of me were things I didn’t want or recognize in there anyway. I move through the flames, and I am free.

Light.

Whole.

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