Page 8 of Big Little Spells

Smudge herself is curled up on my pile of clean clothes, looking like the outrageously fluffy, black stuffed toy she is not and never has been.

She blinks her yellow eyes open. Kind of you to allow this house cat to tag along, her raspy voice whispers inside my brain. She flicks her long black tail, a plume of floofy black. Because no, I was not supposed to be able to keep my familiar, but when I left here, so did Smudge. And she’s been with me ever since.

Her choice.

Because even the most powerful coven in the world can’t tell a cat what to do.

“Good morning and the sun’s many blessings to you,” I return in peak New Age hippie mode, ignoring her trademark grumpiness. “I suppose a ‘welcome home’ is in order.”

Smudge stands and stretches. It’s about damn time.

As if I’ve had any say in the matter. But she knows I made a life elsewhere because I had to, so I don’t argue with her. We both chose our exile.

And despite what I suspect are my sister’s fondest fantasies, being back in St. Cyprian doesn’t mean I’m stuck here forever. I’m not Emerson. I won’t be heading up any committees or spending every waking moment martyring myself to this thankless town. I’ll pass the test, get my magic back, and then leave of my own volition.

I won’t be chased away this time.

I get out of bed to find the sun is already warming up the room. It’s proof that today’s spring weather will do what it’s meant to do. Bring the slumbering plants back to life. Make the green things grow as we march closer to summer. The Midwestern seasons are always so distinct. Even when they fall over each other trying to prove their dominance, they are fully and wholly distinguishable from each other.

I try to tell myself I haven’t missed it. But there is something about knowing summer will come in with its heavy humidity, that the bright spring greens will deepen and darken. That the pastels of spring flowers will turn into the bright oranges and yellows of summer. And when all that’s over, the leaves will turn and fall on the bricks, on the rivers, on Wilde House itself. And then winter will blow in, shaking the trees bare as they reach up to an impossibly blue sky made that way by the freezing temperatures that are not restricted to the dark.

I breathe in, then out, reminding myself that I’ll be getting out of here before the worst of the summer heat settles in. No falling leaves and no winter wonderlands for me.

I remind myself I want it this way. That I chose it.

And that I will again.

I pad across the hardwood floor that generations of Wildes trod upon before me, and then kneel down in the center of the room while Smudge sits on one of the windowsills, cleaning her paws in a way that feels pointed. Because most of what she does is pointed. I ignore her.

The same rug is still right here in the center of the room. A great-great grandmother or some such ancestor braided it eons ago, weaving it with magic so it never fades, never thins. And better still, always hides what I want it to hide.

I pull back the edge of the rug and look at the wood planks beneath it. They look untouched, but I know better. It doesn’t matter what tests the Joywood had me take, how little they thought my magic could do, I did have magic.

I did, I think fiercely.

And I still do. I’ve had magic all along, spells or no spells.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I hold my hands out and feel all the power that has been used in this room. You can cleanse it, try to erase it, but for a Diviner the echo of that power can always be felt.

If you know how. And though I’ve pretended I don’t know how for a long time now, I do. Acknowledging that, finally, feels like its own homecoming.

“Reveal to me,” I whisper, the words of the spell still so familiar no matter how little I’ve used them, “what only I can see.”

The board before me twists, curls, and changes into a little door. I feel a rush of something inside me—relief, maybe? Recognition? I pull the knob and it opens easily. And there, beneath the floor, are all the things I once tucked away here. For a moment, I can only stare.

It’s all still here.

I can accept, now, that I was worried my magic was so weak, so ineffectual, that someone would have stumbled upon this hiding place at some point. Though maybe the fact no one did has nothing to do with my abilities at hiding things and everything to do with no one caring to look for my hidden secrets.

What’s worse?

I don’t want to know, so I reach inside and pull out the box of treasures. The first is a ripped-out piece of notebook paper, where Ellowyn drew a particularly hilarious caricature of Felicia during a very boring detention period. Even all these years later it makes me bark out a laugh—the bulging eyes, dripping fangs, and terrible claws where the older woman’s hands should be.

Beneath it there’s a thick yellow thread from the scarf I was wearing when I received my first kiss. Kevin Gregory was not a witch, but he was an older boy who bussed tables at the Lunch House and flirted outrageously with all the naive teenage girls with daddy issues. Witch girls with daddy issues were particularly enthralled, not that Kevin knew the difference. But what’s worse for an upstanding witch father from one of the oldest bloodlines in St. Cyprian than his daughter going around kissing unaware humans?

It’s somehow both a pleasant memory and a painful one. Because I’m not sure anything I did ever really got through to my father. Except the one thing, there at the end.

But I push that intrusive thought away and focus on the rest of the trinkets. Other mementos to remind myself of various high school crushes and conquests. A friendship bracelet Ellowyn made me when we were kids. A sweet miniature incense holder Emerson gave me for my sixteenth birthday. A little spell book from Zander’s mother, my aunt Zelda—then and now the only adult I could go to when no one else understood me. A birthday card from my grandmother that I hold for a moment, but don’t let myself read. And so on. I considered these treasures worthy of hiding away forever.

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