Page 80 of Big Little Spells

Her smirk should have fangs. “Nasty, dirty girls like you never know what time of day it is, do they?”

She means whores, I am fairly sure. I shrug as if unbothered, though it sets my teeth on edge. As it was meant to do. “Felicia. Surely you’ve realized by now that there are no girls like me.”

“You wouldn’t be the first woman the immortal used for his own ends,” she continues, jerking her chin up at Frost House, her voice full of pity.

I suppose it might have worked on me as a younger, more insecure woman. Or if the man in question hadn’t literally lived untold centuries already. Jealousy would be pointless in any situation, but especially in this one. I don’t expect to be the first of anything for him.

But maybe the last.

I shake that thought away, particularly since it’s somehow both a dire warning that I could kill him and a stupid fantasy that I could keep him.

“They’re really amazing ends, though, Felicia.”

“I suppose your sister found that out last month when she was cavorting up there,” she says in the nearly singsong voice some people mistake for sweet. “Did she share that with you, I wonder?”

The insinuation takes my breath away. Even knowing it’s not true, not in the way Felicia wants me to think, there is a weird arrow of jealousy that stabs through me anyway. Because even when there was nothing romantic between us, Nicholas always felt like he was supposed to be mine.

And even though I’m glad he helped my sister, there’s something in me that wishes he was only mine.

That part, I think, the ghosts of my ancestresses are welcome to haunt me for.

Felicia is watching me. She’s desperate for a reaction. I stay behind my protected wall, lounge on my step, and do my best not to give her one. “Is there something you wanted?”

Two can play the I can annoy the hell out of you game.

“Just some friendly advice,” she says, intimately, as if she’s ever been anything but rabid where I’m concerned. “If you think that immortal or anyone else is going to help you pass the pubertatum this time around, you really have learned nothing.”

“That’s what you all always told me, right? Stupid, stupid Rebekah. The dumb little spell dim witch, an embarrassment to her bloodline.”

“If the shoe fits.” She smirks. I want to slap it off her face, but what’s the point?

That echoes inside me. What is the point of this?

Felicia keeps going. “I suppose you think he’s helping you. I suppose you think your friends are truly welcoming you back into the fold. A little taste of redemption, but you and I know the truth, don’t we? You don’t belong here, Rebekah.”

I don’t mistake the threat.

I open my mouth to tell her I know what she’s doing. I know that the Joywood are scared of us and what we can do, even if I don’t know why. But there’s a whisper across my mind, and the ring on my hand pulses, like my grandmother trying to reach me across spirit worlds.

Felicia wants me to show my hand. That’s what the old Rebekah would have done. In my anger, in my hurt, I would have told Felicia exactly what I knew and what I was capable of.

I blink for a second, suddenly seeing the past unspool inside me in a way you’d think I’d need to be a Summoner to manage.

I see everything I was too furious, too wounded, too seventeen to see then.

My wild emotions, me tipping my cards so completely, was how they knew they could wipe Emerson with no ceremony. They knew they could prompt me into an explosion. Make me look dangerous. Split a wedge—memory and miles—between Emerson and me so we couldn’t fight back.

I felt them wipe her—it was no accident. They made sure of it. And then I tried to take Felicia down to prove a point. Chaos Diviner—destroy or heal, kill or birth. They knew they could push me into the wrong choices.

It was my fault, but now I understand, without a shadow of doubt or any self-serving need to excuse my part in it, that they planned it. None of it was happenstance. It wasn’t even because they didn’t like us, though they didn’t. They don’t.

It was a full-fledged plan.

Everything has been a plot all along—not just our failure that night, but everything.

They used my pride and my temper to help them make it work. They want to again.

It wells up inside of me like a tide I can’t control, roaring, but I think about the hours I just spent balancing light and dark. I have to control myself. This, right here, is what that dusty old book warned me about. My temper. My need to strike out. I already know where this leads.

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