Page 38 of Truly Madly Magically

I can’t imagine anything Elizabeth is talking about is going to be illuminated by a kids’ book about princesses. Still I turn it over in my hands a few times, almost like I can’t bear not to. It’s been worn and read and well loved, that’s for sure.

“It’s my favorite. When I was a child, of course.” Then she flashes a bright, real smile, warmth radiating off her. “You know, you should take it.”

“Take it?”

“Sure, you’re going to have a child who’ll want to hear such stories eventually. As Sage likes to point out, kids’ books are meant for kids.”

Sage Osburn is her boyfriend, and I want to like him. I do. I eye her. “What if I prefer tales of existential dread for my baby?”

Georgie shakes her head at me, because I said it as a question instead of a fact, and she knows my tricks too well by now. “Take it. Consider it your first baby gift.”

I want to argue with that, but it feels good, if weird, to accept. I suspect it would be strange and wrong, somehow, to say no. So, I take it.

Then I take Elizabeth’s witch designation down to breakfast, and to Frost.

The former immortal does not do breakfast. He stands in the kitchen because Rebekah is there, both watching and not watching her lounge around with her tea.

“It sounds familiar,” he says when I ask him about the term, but he gets that dark, dangerous look about him. The one we’re all beginning to associate with something he thinks he should remember but doesn’t. He looks at Georgie, who pads in behind me, all bare feet and wild red hair. “We’ll go through my library today.”

Georgie nods. Emerson and Jacob stop conferring—both of them smiling the way they only do with each other—and she shifts to her Warrior mode to hand out safety buddy assignments. Yes, she’s made specific assignments and a number of charts she’s only too happy to magic about in the air of the kitchen, all without disturbing her familiar, Cassie, who is lying at her feet in a sunbeam.

It starts off a domino effect of days that go by quietly and without hiccup. We know the Joywood are planning something. They get quiet when bad, bad magic is brewing, and all we can do is wait.

Or, if you’re Emerson, start making flyers and posters to encourage our fellow witches to choose us once we’re officially taking part in the ascension on Samhain. With so many promises of what she’ll do you’d be hard-pressed to believe them—unless you know Emerson.

We research and discuss around-the-clock now that we’re all staying in Wilde House, but there’s precious little clarity to be found. Georgie and Frost can’t seem to find any further details on what ascension rituals will take place once we have our sponsors. Nor do they find an explanation of why Revelare was a witch designation in Elizabeth’s time but not now, much less how both Summoning and Divining were a part of it. We still have no idea why shapeless dark shadows came for us.

We try to imagine what we would do if we were evil, the better to predict what the Joywood might do, but it never seems to work. And Emerson usually gets a little too wound up at the very notion that any of us could do such horrible things, no matter how many times Frost gets that intense look on his face and tells her that power can change a person.

“Only if we let it,” Emerson replies calmly.

We do our jobs. We are never by ourselves or off the bricks if we can help it. As if all of this isn’t weird enough, Zander and I are also getting along for the first time in, well. Ever. Maybe because the ghost relationship we see spooling out before us night and day is a mirror.

And we don’t like what we see.

We plan, we prepare, and we gather. Day after day, night after night. With an agenda in place for the town hall meeting, I find myself filled with the strangest sensation.

I almost don’t recognize it.

But as the days pass, it settles in until even I can’t deny it, much as I’d like to.

For the first time in months, I have something that’s been sorely missing for this entire strange year.

Hope.

11

BY THE TIME the town hall finally rolls around, I’m looking forward to it. It’s action, when everything about the past few days has felt like waiting.

Besides, it’s an opportunity to dress to kill, as is always my preference. Black. Leather. Skin. Hell yeah. I wear Zander’s pendant, though it’s hidden. I haven’t taken it off once.

Protection. For the baby.

I have to ask Rebekah for some help with my hide-the-bump glamour. The Joywood might know that I’m pregnant, and why they care about that I can’t begin to fathom, but I can’t help but feel like it’s best if they don’t know that we’re aware of their interest. Secrets have power, so why not keep ours?

Elizabeth does not approve of my outfit, something she makes clear by telling me she does not approve. Repeatedly. Five days of sepia-tinted judgment has gotten old, I will admit. I’ve enjoyed conversations about my witchy ancestors and St. Cyprian’s older days, but I’m not sure I’m going to be entirely sad that she’ll be heading back to the spirit world tonight.

“You consider this appropriate dress?” she’s asking me as I head down the stairs, as if repeating the question will change my mind. “For anything at all, but particularly for an ascension ritual?”

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