Page 90 of Big Little Spells

My problem is, I still want everything. Even the things I know better than to want. Even things that were never mine to choose. Here by the river with the stars as witness and the wind stirring through the trees.

“I’d like to take you somewhere.” Nicholas sounds almost formal, and that strikes me as absurd when we’ve spent so much time turning each other inside and out. Because he’ll do anything that feels good, and I have no inhibitions at all. There’s nothing formal here. But he continues in the same tone. “It shouldn’t take long.” He even offers me one of his stiff little bows. “Consider it a goodbye gift.”

Goodbye cracks through me like a terrible chasm.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from this place, then trying to stay away. This should feel like a reprieve. A stay of execution—because sure, the Joywood might chase me down, but it’s just as likely they won’t bother. Either way, I get to be gone.

And if Nicholas helps me leave, he’s probably not going to haul me back again. I bet he’d even help hide me from nosy sisters and rampaging ruling covens alike.

I can finally stay gone for good.

It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.

So this is the moment I realize that I don’t want any of that at all.

I want to stay.

Here in this town with these people. With the weight of the past and the future. I want to fight beside my friends and build something new with my sister. I want to fulfill the prophecies and live up to my ancestresses.

I want to stay.

But it’s too late.

Nicholas’s hand is on my elbow and he flings us both into the dark night. And he flies the way he does everything else, with purpose and ferocity. Yet lands as easily as if he merely stepped off a low stair.

It takes me a moment to realize that he’s set us down just outside the cemetery on the other side of the river.

The only time I’ve been here since I left—and since my grandmother was buried without me—was the night we fought the flood and won. Where I stood next to Nicholas and poured my magic into my sister, to help her, to save her, to defeat the black in the confluence.

I have avoided even looking in this direction ever since. Emerson visits frequently and often invites me to go with her, but I can’t. I haven’t. I can’t bear to see my grandmother’s name carved into cruel, uncaring stone. I still refuse to accept that she’s gone.

Forever.

I turn to get the hell away from this place. Panic and dread and an old, familiar grief are a drumbeat in my head, my neck. Even behind my knees.

But I only run into the hard wall of Nicholas’s chest.

“I don’t want to be here,” I say to the steel and brick that make up his pecs.

“I think you do,” he returns.

So calm. So detached. Like he doesn’t care either way.

But when I try to get past him he holds me firm—with his strong arms and his wily magic and something else I can’t let myself name.

“Rebekah.” And his voice is so gentle it makes tears prickle behind my eyes. Nicholas Frost...gentle? How am I supposed to fight that? “Face her. You need to.”

He turns me around like a child and even nudges me through the black metal archway. I don’t want to know where she’s buried, but I do. Witches treat their dead better than humans do, and part of that, here in St. Cyprian, is familiarizing ourselves with our family plots. My gaze is drawn straight to the spot where I expect to see her gravestone standing next to my grandfather’s.

But instead, I see...her.

Not a stone. Not even her fox familiar in his statuesque glory.

It’s her.

I stop walking. I’m surrounded by gravestones, all of them bearing names I know. All of them marked with the small stone statues of creatures that the human population thinks are nothing but a cute little local tradition.

And my grandmother, who has been dead for years, is not beneath the ground. She is not floating in midair like a regular old haunt or common ghost. She is not flickering in the starlight, as she might if some medium raised her up for a brief chat.

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