Page 97 of Big Little Spells

But I should have told them.

“You know, some of us work the evening shift,” Zander says, yawning into his tea.

“I’ll be quick then,” I say, when normally I’d give him a hard time. But he isn’t just working the evening shift. He’s watching his mother get sicker by the day. Whether she can admit it or not. He’s holding his father up, handling the ferry, handling the bar. He’s a one-man show doing all sorts of shitty things he shouldn’t have to do—not yet, anyway. While all this other crap goes on around him.

It isn’t fair.

So, I dive right in. “I’m sorry about last night. All of it. I wanted to hide. I didn’t want to face the mistake I made.”

“I would have done the same thing,” Ellowyn says with a shrug, which is both a huge surprise and exactly what I expect from her. It makes my heart swell a little in my chest. “I just would have told you all before a decade passed.”

“Yeah, you’re real good at laying it all on the line,” Zander mutters.

She flashes a nasty grin at him. “I said it, so it must be the truth, babe.”

The awkwardness from our dinner after Beltane has reverted to their normal antagonism. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

But it’s normal. I have to love it for that alone.

Still, I walk them through that terrible night. What I felt, what I did. I tell them about Nicholas when we were kids. I really do lay it all on the line. Both because it’s the right thing to do, and because it matters. “The point of rehashing this isn’t just that I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, though I am. It’s that they’re going to pull the same shit,” I tell them while they’re digesting all the secrets I kept. “It worked last time.”

“But only for a decade,” Georgie points out. “It wore off.”

“Which means they’ll hit harder this time,” Zander says darkly. “They’ll want to make it two decades this time around.”

Or forever, I think to myself. A handful of executions, and problem solved. “That little movie last night does two things. One, it discredits me—despite the fact I obviously have power. But it goes further than that. It discredits anyone who backs me.”

“But it also discredits the Joywood,” Georgie points out. “They said you two didn’t have power. Not that it was bad power or whatever.”

“They’ll spin it,” Emerson says with a frown. “I think they’ve been deciding how best to handle this since I broke Carol’s obliviscor. Nicholas mentioned steps, right?”

“Where is the old fart?”

I glare at Zander. “That’s the second thing I want to discuss.” I try to emulate Emerson’s no-nonsense, presidential way of speaking.

“How good ancient immortals are in the sack?” Ellowyn asks with a grin, earning a low groan from Zander.

But I am not Emerson, and Ellowyn’s joke reminds me of that. “A discussion well worth our time, but no. He’s up to something.”

“Something bad?” Zander asks. “Hate to break it to you, cousin, but that’s kind of his whole thing.”

I tell myself this is not a betrayal. These people love me, and because they do, they will help me love him. Whether they would choose him for me or not.

All of these things are love. “I think... I think he’s trying to make amends.”

Ellowyn considers that. “For what?”

“Whatever he did to get him immortality,” Zander says, tossing a crystal from hand to hand. “If I had to guess.”

“That first lesson Emerson and I had to sit through after Beltane was all about sacrifice,” I say. “But the practicums, the test, are all about balance.”

“Sacrifice can be part of balance,” Emerson says. “That’s how they teach the kids.”

“Yes,” I say softly. “But who came up with the curriculum?”

Everyone looks at me, but it’s Jacob who speaks. “You think he’s going to sacrifice himself.”

I nod. “I do.”

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