Page 106 of Big Little Spells

I could die tomorrow. I wasn’t saying those things about the talisman I made him just to keep him from guessing that I’m trying to save him—and from himself, if necessary. I could be extinguished as easily as a candle flame. To the sound of applause. It would take a wave of the hand—and there are no shortage of hands in this town.

Time has run out. It has taken me home, as promised. It has brought me here, to him. This man outside time.

So, I face him. “Say it.”

“What do you wish me to say?” he returns, but he doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what I mean. I’ll give him that. “Foolish declarations of love that mean nothing from an immortal who has no future?”

“Yes,” I say, unfazed. If this is all we are, all we have, why not?

But I don’t really think he’ll do it.

This isn’t the first time Nicholas Frost surprises me. He runs a hand over my hair. My cheek. He looks deep into my eyes. “I have loved you across time,” he says. “I dreamed you when I was still mortal, too many lifetimes ago to count. I knew you before I met you, Rebekah. I spent centuries fighting it, long before you were born, but all roads led me here. To you. Where I watched you grow and let you leave and knew all the while you would come back to me, like it or not. And so you did.”

There are a thousand things I could say. I want to say them all. I want the time to say them. Instead, I shake my head at him. “Do you have any idea how much I would kill to go back in time and tell fourteen-year-old me that the hot older immortal witch who’s always lurking around in the shadows really does like her back?”

And he breaks my heart by laughing. A real laugh. It makes me ache.

His smile makes it worse. “No one likes fourteen-year-olds, witchling. Love them? Yes. Hope for the best for them? Certainly. But no more.”

Then his hand is on my face, tracing patterns on my cheek. Ancient words, possibly even spells. Talismans of flesh. I can’t bring myself to mind.

“You must know, meae deliciae, my own witchling,” he whispers. “That none of this can matter in the end. What will happen tomorrow will happen.”

But I don’t want to talk about tomorrow.

And I don’t plan on letting him do whatever foolish thing he thinks he’s going to do, here on the other end of his extraordinary life. Because if it really was leading him to me, two months is not nearly enough time.

I know what people say. That it’s not the time that matters, but how you live it. That a moment can outweigh a millennium.

But I think that sounds like bullshit.

I want more.

“There is no future in this,” he says, though his eyes say something else. “No matter what happens tomorrow. Not the kind of future you mean.”

I could take tonight to argue with him. But I’ve never been so conscious of time before—or how little I want to waste it when I could be marinating in it instead. There are thousands of moments between now and the morning, and I want every last one of them to live in me like his millennia.

So I twine my arms around his neck and I jump, knowing he’ll catch me. He does, gripping my bottom so I can cross my legs at his back and smile down at him.

Daring him.

I watch my immortal lover’s blue eyes gleam in response, though he tries to fight it. But we are past fighting it, he and I. “Did you hear me, Rebekah?” he asks me in a stern voice that makes me shudder a little, deep inside.

Because I love a good power dynamic. I think I’ve made that clear.

“I heard you, oh great and glorious Praeceptor.”

He grins, but it’s a feral thing, as I press my body against his and move a little, just for good measure. “And?”

“And...” I draw it out. “Well...” I wrap my arms around his neck and look down at him, and love him so much it hurts. But I love that too. “I suggest you make sure that this night is the kind of memory that lasts. Long enough that it feels like a future. If you think you’re up to it.”

And when Nicholas Frost laughs, it sets us both alight.

28

LITHA MORNING DAWNS AND I am in my own bed. I left Nicholas in the smallest hours of the night because I couldn’t sleep. Too much fretting to do. And it feels weirdly right to wake up in Wilde House, just like I did ten years ago.

If you start crying now, Smudge says from where she’s curled up on my head, which is as uncomfortable as it sounds, especially in the Missouri humidity, you won’t stop.

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