Page 99 of Big Little Spells

“I’m just supposed to accept she’s going to die this young?” He belts that out, and then he turns on me, but he’s not seeing me. “I have magic. I am a Guardian of St. Cyprian. I’m just supposed to say, Okay, mysterious illness, you win. My mother dies, my father falls apart, and that’s what? Just life?”

He doesn’t say it isn’t fair. He doesn’t have to.

“I don’t think there’s a supposed to in this situation.”

“Meanwhile there are people walking around with lifetimes to spare,” Zander spits out. “Lifetimes they didn’t earn. How is that okay?”

I know he’s talking about Nicholas. But I lean my head onto his shoulder anyway, and I tell him what I know. “Your mother loves her life, Zander. She loves your dad and she loves you, and she lived the hell out of every day she got. I think what’s left once we lose her is living the kind of life that will make her proud.”

“You haven’t seen her in a long time, Rebekah.”

I swallow until I can speak. I think of what my grandmother told me about grief. “Maybe not. But I have ten years of daily text messages that are almost as good as visits. I know what I’m talking about.”

He breathes hard for a moment, clearly fighting with all the emotions warring inside him. And possibly the urge to storm Frost House while he’s at it. I don’t blame him. “I won’t rest until I figure out why this is happening.”

I don’t tell him there might not be a why. It wouldn’t be fair in this moment. But part of me wonders, even knowing Nicholas confirmed her illness is caught up in this, if it’s just...life. “No, we won’t rest until we figure this all out,” I say instead.

“You love that guy?” he asks me, his voice rough.

It should feel odd to discuss love with all of them before I’ve admitted it to Nicholas himself, but it doesn’t. It feels right. Even if calling him that guy does not. “I do.”

Zander remains quiet for a long minute. Then shakes his head. “I don’t know what to do,” he tells me, his voice barely a whisper. And I know this might be the gravest admission a man like Zander will ever make. That he doesn’t know the procedure. That he can’t find his way. “She refuses to see anyone aside from Dad, me, and Healers. And even me only every so often. Dad and I have tried to change her mind, but she’s so weak. It feels wrong to go against her wishes.”

I want to cry. I want to rage, throw things—but I know it won’t do any good. Not only because Nicholas and Grandma said so, but because I know. In that way I shouldn’t. There’s no changing this. “We’ll do whatever she wants. If it changes...”

“You and Em will be the first to know.” He tries to smile. “Hell, she’ll probably text you herself.”

This is the pain Grandma was talking about. There are going to be losses and some of them—this one, Grandma herself—will always feel too big to bear.

Hoping otherwise is just borrowing trouble.

“Go home, Zander,” I urge him. “Be with her. Or your dad. Do what needs doing. When Litha comes, I know you’ll be right where you need to be.”

He looks down at me. “That a Diviner premonition?”

I smile at him, ignoring the dampness on both our faces.

And then I lie. “Absolutely.”

26

JUNE ROLLS ALONG HUMIDLY, Litha is looming, and the entire town thinks I’m a fire-starting, dark-magic-wielding maniac who might, at any moment, set half of Missouri alight.

My father refuses to look at me and finds reasons to forever be away from the house. My mother openly weeps the first time she comes face-to-face with me after that assembly, but as the days pass, she manages to keep the tears in check. Still, there is a lot of tremulous gazing.

Not ideal. But also not the worst thing I’ve ever gone through.

Besides, the good news about the Joywood deciding to throw the big, heavy rock of those images into the St. Cyprian pond is that I get to see not only the people who support them completely, but the people who don’t. The seemingly innocuous clerk in Felicia’s office at SCH who gives me a thumbs-up where Felicia can’t see him. The clearly disaffected teenagers, already sporting the tattoos and piercings I was forbidden at their age, who can be heard challenging the kids who whisper about me. The random witches I pass on the street who don’t cross to avoid me and my pyromania, but stay the course. And sometimes whisper things like you go, girl or next time call me for backup.

I’m gathering a list of supporters and it’s not small. It’s not just us.

At the very least, it suggests that Emerson is on to something with her dreams of challenging the Joywood’s grip on not just St. Cyprian, but the whole of witchkind.

In the meantime, I’m studying as best I can for the test I’m going to have to take. The test we all know is going to be specifically unfair to Emerson and me. My sister’s position is that because we know we’re being set up to fail this time, we have to work harder to be better, and before the night of the assembly, I would have moaned about that. I would have rolled my eyes and acted like a lazy fourteen-year-old and done all the usual things I do so no one thinks I care too much. About anything.

But what’s that except another form of lying?

I’m done with that. So I embrace harder and better. I do my best to pay attention in class. I read Emerson’s meticulous notes. Nicholas works with me every day. And I can feel the power in me...shift. It feels less like a bomb I’m trying to avoid jostling and more like some kind of clay that I’m learning how to work with instead of against.

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