Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(9)

An absolute mindfuck, one which also happened to be my specialty. Holding coexisting yet contradictory lines of thought as truths was exactly the type of mental contortion lawyers engaged in all day. Only a handful of other living Blackmoores could pull a portal off, my grandmother Igraine and my mother, Lyonesse, among them. My little brother, Gawain, had always been too chickenshit to even try, and my older brother, Gareth, could travel only relatively short distances.

But to me, it had always felt like second nature.

Closing my eyes, I lifted my hands and chanted the words to Lightborne Folly, concentrating intently on both my inviolable individuality and my oneness with the cosmos as ribbons of light with a pearly rainbow sheen shimmered into being, weaving themselves around me. Magic rushed under my skin, a glittering flood like liquid lightning crackling through my veins. My pulse quickened, thudding in my ears as I wrested the swirl of light into the proper shape around me, and thought myself toward the lake.

For a brief, jarring moment, gravity and direction winked out altogether, and I tumbled through a vast expanse of nothingness.

The bottom of my stomach fell out, the lurching feeling of having missed the final step in a staircase, even as I lost any sense of myself as a physical object anchored in space. The closest analogue to the feeling was falling—but falling upside down somehow, like Alice plummeting down the rabbit hole. If you let your focus slip while you went hurtling like a wayward comet through this formless sea of in-between, no part of you would emerge on the other end.

A very powerful motivator to keep your will and mind firmly in check against a rising tide of instinctual terror.

From one heartbeat to the next, the world snapped back into place. A crisp skin of snow crunched under my boots as my feet suddenly found purchase, and a bracing gust of pine-scented wind curled around me like something old and sentient, stealing my breath and combing through my hair.

I stood atop Hallows Hill, with Lady’s Lake sparkling in front of me and the lights of Thistle Grove at my back, blinking like fireflies down by the mountain’s distant base.

This time of year, the lake somehow looked even more elemental. Like some primordial origin story, the place where winter’s cold heart had been born back when everything began. Up here, the sky had a brittle quality to it, a chilly purity so keen it made the slew of stars look nearly sharp, a frozen, milky spill shattered across the glassy sky. The pines ringing the banks looked like darker brushstrokes flicked against the night, their branches etched with white. The black mirror of the water held an emerald waver along the edges, a phantom ripple that echoed the flicker of the northern lights that danced above.

Thistle Grove had spectacular displays of aurora borealis in the winter, despite not being anywhere close to far enough north; another of those beautiful quirks that those of us who lived here simply took for granted.

All Thistle Grove witches loved the lake, but I loved it. The way you loved something that was only yours, even though of course Lady’s Lake belonged to all of us. Maybe to the Harlows most of all, since they were the ones who sieved its remarkable magic into something we all could use. But I’d felt connected to the lake ever since I could remember, as if part of it lived inside myself. Back when I’d gone to college and then law school in New York, I’d had the privilege of being able to portal back up here anytime I wanted, to sit on the shore and let the lake’s sustaining magic roll over me—with the significant fringe benefit of my own talent never waning with distance, as happened to other witches who spent significant amounts of time away from Thistle Grove.

Maybe, more than the fact that I loved it, sometimes it felt like the lake loved me.

Or maybe that was just the infamous Blackmoore egotism at play, our sense that this town revolved around us just because we happened to be the strongest of the families. I tried not to think like that when I caught myself doing it—being powerful didn’t make you better, not in any way that mattered—but when it came to the lake, sometimes I let myself slip.

I took a few crunching steps closer, wind lifting my hair as I approached the water’s edge, that muffled, wintry silence pressing into my ears. Each exhale turned into a spinning ghost in front of me, tumbling away into the night. It was so cold that my eyeballs burned with it, and I could feel a shiver start up even under my heavy-duty parka. Still, contentment curled catlike in my belly, that sense of pure belonging I only really felt up here.

Like I was known, and I was perfect, and I didn’t need to be anything beyond what I already was.

I sighed a little, wrapping my arms around myself and closing my eyes, wishing I could feel this untroubled all the time. Wishing I were different, stronger, better . . . that everything was different, but in a way that would let me make peace with myself. Discover the version of me that had it in her to be happy and confident, truly at home in her own skin.

The wind died down as if a switch had been flipped, so completely and abruptly my eyes sprang open.

Just in time to see the lake flare white.

It was brief but utterly dazzling, like a colossal flare had gone off somewhere in the depths, a controlled explosion that somehow didn’t so much as ripple the water’s surface. Then the blinding white seemed to fracture, dissolving into a glittering mosaic of silver and platinum, like a shower of falling stars—if stars could fall upside down, rising like bubbles from the bottom of the lake up to its smooth surface.

I stood rooted in place, shading my eyes and gaping as the water finally cleared, shifting back to black and green, a simple reflection of the night. I had never seen the lake do anything like that in my whole life, not even during the Gauntlet last fall. It had looked, for all the world, like some kind of enormous spell being cast somewhere deep beneath the water, farther down than anyone had ever reached.