Page 12 of Big Little Spells

Georgie appears on the stairs, her curly hair in a messy red halo, wearing a thick, bright red robe with the bored-looking Octavius, her big orange cat familiar, following along behind her. She stops on the landing and blinks at us for a moment before she decides to come the rest of the way down. I note that she rests her hand on the creepy dragon post and clearly doesn’t get a shock. “What did I miss?”

Ellowyn hands her a binder with far too much relish. “Felicia dropped this off for you.”

Georgie looks intrigued at the prospect, but her smile dims as she opens it and begins to read. “This is insulting.”

“But we can do it easily,” Emerson counters. “I think we should look at it as an opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what exactly? Abject humiliation?” I demand, wondering how my sister can be so...herself sometimes.

“Wait. If we all got one...” Ellowyn trails off.

As if she knows it’s coming, when that’s supposed to be my thing, she looks over at the front door as it flies open. I half expect Felicia, but it’s Zander who storms in—and it is a whole storm. He’s holding his own binder. He’s also wearing black sweats and a black T-shirt that look like he slept in them. His eyes are bloodshot and a little wild, and his hair is a crazy mess. He looks more feral animal than the easygoing witch he pretends to be. “What the fuck is this?” he growls.

“I’ll make breakfast!” Emerson offers brightly and then takes off toward the kitchen.

“I’ll help,” Jacob mutters. Georgie follows them, looking back at Zander once before disappearing. I make as if to go too, but Ellowyn glares at me and I stay put.

“I’m not going to Beltane prom,” Zander belts out. “Someone must be drunk.”

He doesn’t look at Ellowyn when he mentions the prom, so I try not to either. But obviously all I can think about is what happened at Zander and Ellowyn’s actual eighteenth-year Beltane. Which is still manifesting itself in all the ways they snipe at each other.

I push my free hand through my hair while Smudge does little figure eights between Zander’s legs as if she’d like to comfort him, when shouldn’t it be her job to comfort me? I sigh. “We should eat something. Let Emerson rah-rah us into complacency.”

Ellowyn snorts. Zander does too, and again, they don’t look at each other. “Yeah, you’re real complacent, Rebekah,” he mutters. “You’re known for that.”

As if ten years hasn’t changed a thing. Maybe for us it hasn’t. Maybe it never will.

Ellowyn and I move in tandem toward the kitchen, Zander grumbling as he trudges behind us. When we get into the kitchen, Emerson is already magicking breakfast ingredients through the air. Jacob is acting as some sort of witch sous chef while Georgie sets the table.

I wish I could just be happy that we’re all together. Instead, I feel full up on dread. I only glanced at that binder and I already want to forget this whole thing. Especially with a St. Cyprian High Beltane prom hanging over my head like a guillotine from hell.

Emerson murmurs spells, and as she does, a perfectly appointed breakfast begins to arrange itself on the old, scarred table where I used to sit and watch my grandmother weave baskets for her flowers with spells that made the air brighter. But I’m not ready to let myself think about Grandma just yet.

When Emerson sits down, she’s so pleased with herself I can’t help but smile. Then I remember that magicking a whole meal must feel completely new to her, still. Because it’s only been a little while since she found herself. I feel the enduring ache of what the Joywood have done to us all over again. And maybe Emerson and everyone else sat here and had breakfasts while I was gone, but not like this. Not with magic, not with me.

The Joywood stole even something as simple as breakfast from us.

They stole us.

Somehow we’re here anyway—the way we should have been all along—and it makes me think there’s more hope to be found than there seems in the whole humiliation of it all.

I frown down at the binder in my lap and the offensive St. Cyprian High butt lettering, and think about Emerson wanting to prove to everyone, not just the Joywood, who we are. With a little revolution thrown in, just for fun.

“I don’t get why I’m being dragged into this,” Zander is saying in the same cranky way, loading his plate with enough food to set a bear up for several winters of hibernation.

“You’ve been a part of this from the beginning,” Ellowyn retorts, using the sharp-edged athame she always carries on her hip to slice an apple. Clearly at Zander. “One could even argue you and Jacob started it, what with the whole hounding people about the imbalance in the rivers and everything else the past few years.”

He scowls at her, but he doesn’t argue. Instead, he nods at the offending binder he threw beside his plate. “Why waste their time slapping us down with pointless bullshit?”

“They don’t think enough of us to pull out the pitchforks?” I offer. “Or even rustle up a decent mob?”

“I don’t think that’s true.” Georgie cups her mug of coffee and looks like she’s filled with less rage and more rational clear-thinking than anything I have going on. “This is a lot of performing if they really think that little of us. The binders. The delivery. The obvious attempt at humiliation, treating us like we’re still kids. Is it really all that different than the stocks? The point is to embarrass—not just for us, but to prove to everyone all the ways they shouldn’t cross the Joywood.”

“It’s performance with a purpose,” I mutter. But it’s more than embarrassment. It has to be. Emerson and I have broken the most sacred of witch laws.

“They don’t want us to win, that’s clear,” Jacob says. “So whatever this is supposed to do, it isn’t to help us.”

“We can’t just think about us. About how it feels for us. We have to think about this globally. They’re performing looking like they’re helping us,” Georgie adds.

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