Payback's a Witch Read online

  She chuckled, taking a sip. “Not-impossible-though-fairly-unlikely hedgehogification aside, the Grimoire doesn’t forbid the next-eldest Harlow of the younger generation from taking your place. Delilah could certainly have stepped in for you.”

  “Oh, I just bet Delilah could have,” I muttered under my breath, trying to stifle the reflexive eye roll my cousin’s name reliably provoked.

  “Don’t be mean about your cousin, darling. She’s only a bit . . . eager.”

  This was one of my mother’s epic British understatements, as Delilah was both the eagerest of beavers and the ultimate Harlow stan. She was a year older than me, but unfortunately for her, she wasn’t the firstborn of the Harlow main line—which automatically disqualified her from serving as Arbiter unless I stepped down.

  Delilah’s borderline obsession with our family history had always struck me as kind of hilarious, given the role the Harlows actually played in the founding of the town. Legend had it that a little over three hundred years ago, four witches were drawn to Hallows Hill, lured by the siren song of magical power that emanated from this place. To consecrate the founding of the town below, Caelia Blackmoore conjured a spectacular lightning storm, Margarita Avramov summoned spirits from beyond the veil to serve as witnesses, Alastair Thorn called down the birds from the sky as his congregation, and Elias Harlow drew forth his mighty quill and . . .

  Took a bunch of notes.

  Seriously, that was it. My esteemed ancestor participated in this magical event of unprecedented majesty and drama by writing it all down in the driest possible manner, diligently avoiding wit or flair lest a historical account actually entertain future readers, perish the thought. Making him more or less the equivalent of the accidentally purple-haired lady named Irma who jots down the talking points of every town council meeting ever.

  To be fair, Elias was also responsible for the Grimoire, the spellbook that contained the four families’ collected spells and the rules for the Gauntlet of the Grove, the tournament held every fifty years to determine which founding family got to preside over all things magical in Thistle Grove. According to the rules, the competition was intended for the rising generation, so that each new Victor started their reign in the prime of their life—which meant that the firstborn scions of each line, the heirs apparent, went up against one another, as long as they were older than eighteen.

  The Harlows didn’t even compete, being so magically stunted that we’ve historically overseen the proceedings instead. And as the Harlow heir and the other scions’ peer, the Grimoire also demanded that I be the Arbiter, rather than my father.

  Woot for tradition.

  “Well, bully to Delilah,” I replied a little sourly. “But, huzzah, here I am! So she still doesn’t get to steal my thunder as Emmeline, scion to House Harlow, the magical admins of Thistle Grove.”

  My mother frowned at me over the rim of her mug. “If you’re going to be so glib about it, darling, perhaps you really should have let her step in for you. You know respecting the spirit of the thing is terribly important to your father.”

  I leaned back into my chair, my insides churning. I did know that, thanks to the tragically heartfelt and impressively guilt-trip-ridden letter my father had sent me a few months ago. Even thinking about his swooping script across the grainy Tomes & Omens stationery made my stomach twist, with the particular flavor of angst reserved for disappointing daughters.

  Dearest Scoot, I know you’ve chosen to make your life a different one—a separate one from us. But, please, consider coming back to the covenstead just this once, for tradition’s sake. Consider discharging this final obligation to your history and kin, to your mother and myself, and I promise this is the last we’ll ever speak of duty.

  How could I have said no after that—especially to parents who had always been so supportive of my choices, and my magicless life in Chicago? A life they’d never understood, and one that so pointedly made no room for them?

  “I know that,” I said, not mentioning the letter, because there was no way my mother would have let him send something so emotionally manipulative had she known about it. My parents were basically the living embodiment of #relationshipgoals, and I had no desire to stir the pot between them. “And the spirit of the thing demands that it be me. And since the Blackmoores have won since pretty much time’s inception, it’s not like I’ll have all that much arbitration to even do.”

  This was technically incorrect. The Thorns won once, back in 1921—but only because Evrain Blackmoore was such a roaring drunk he lit both himself and the Avramov combatant on fire while transforming a fishpond into a fountain of flaming spiced rum.

  See? Suck it, Delilah, I did know my Thistle Grove history.

  My mother sighed softly and capitulated, rubbing her temples. “I suppose that’s true. And you’ll have a few days to rest up before the tournament opening on Wednesday. Acclimate a bit to being back.”

  At the mention of rest, I tried to stifle a yawn and failed miserably, my jaw nearly unhinging from the force. “Sorry,” I barely managed through it. “I’m just beat.”

  My mother pushed back from the table and swiftly gathered up our empty mugs, then set them in the sink. “No worries, sweet. I have the carriage house all ready for you,” she told me over her shoulder as she rinsed them. “I thought, for a whole month, it would be nice for you to have your own space rather than a guest room in the house proper.”

  “That would be great,” I said, my heart lifting at the prospect with genuine pleasure. I’d loved the carriage house as a kid, and spent most of my sleepovers with Linden Thorn sequestered out there, apart from my parents but never too far away for help if any was needed. The kind of distance they’d probably envisioned would carry over into my adulthood, instead of the two hundred miles of Illinois flatlands that now yawned between us, vast and intractable.

  Together, we lugged my things out the back door and down the paved path that led through my mother’s flower garden. The night bloomers stirred in their beds, swaying toward one another and tittering in high-pitched tones like gossiping fairies. Jasper trotted over to sniff a particularly lively evening primrose, leaping like a rabbit when it leaned over with a tinkling giggle to bop him on the nose.

  It was a simple animating spell, though nothing like what a Thorn could have done with one. Flowers in a Thorn-animated garden might have distinct names and personalities and the power of speech, all the trappings of sentience. I knew because Linden Thorn, my best friend of over twenty years, once animated a cherry tree in the Honeycake Orchards for me as a birthday present. Cherry—so styled by yours truly, the world’s most literal eight-year-old—whooped my ass at chess a solid four games out of five, and enjoyed regaling me with its gorgeous, uncanny dreams.

  Sometimes I still really missed that tree.

  We both dropped my luggage at the threshold with a pair of matching, extremely unladylike grunts, grinning at each other as she handed me a key.

  “Your dad may very well sleep at the shop if the night gets away from him,” she said, rolling her eyes fondly. “As they so often do. So don’t rush to breakfast tomorrow on his account.”

  “I have brunch plans with Linden anyway.” I’d messaged Lin a few weeks ago to let her know I’d be in town for the Gauntlet, and to see if she wanted to get together as soon as I was back. We were still close, mostly thanks to Lin’s staunch commitment to keeping us abreast of each other’s lives even from a distance, so I figured it was on me to swing our first real-life reunion in years. “But I’ll stop by Tomes and Omens right after, if that works?”

  “Of course it does,” my mother said, leaning over to brush a kiss over my forehead. “Good night, my darling, and give me a shout if you need anything at all. It really is so very lovely to have you back.”

  2

  The Shamrock Cauldron Fiasco

  Inside, the carriage house was an airy l
oft open to the rafters, complete with a kitchenette, a rustic little fireplace, and a queen bed positioned right beneath the skylight. It usually served as my mother’s candle-dipping studio, but her creative clutter was nowhere in sight. Instead, every surface all but sparkled, and she had even left out a bowl of dimpled Sumo oranges, my favorite.

  The effort she’d put into my homecoming made me yearn for a drink, in a way that might be considered a tad problematic if I allowed myself to dwell on it too long.

  After I tucked the very last set of I-probably-won’t-need-these-BUT-WHAT-IF-I-DO shoes away and slid my suitcase under the bed, I found that my exhaustion had morphed into the kind of maddeningly buzzy fatigue that I knew wouldn’t let me sleep without some help. And the last thing I felt like doing was venturing back to the house in search of the kind of complicated liquor that my parents, who were both “two fingers of scotch for special occasions” kind of people, weren’t even likely to have.

  Which left me with only one real option.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, I slid onto a stool at the Shamrock Cauldron, my gaze skimming over the familiar tangle of jaunty bat lights still strung above the gouged-up bar top, the same psychedelic green and purple shamrocks shimmering on the walls. And, of course, Dead Frederick: the plastic skeleton in a leprechaun’s top hat and Mardi Gras pearls who presided over the bar’s back corner with, puzzlingly, a ukulele propped on his bony lap.

  You really couldn’t beat the Cauldron when it came to class.

  The bar was off the beaten path enough to get only modest play with tourists, making it the perfect local haunt. Past nine on a Sunday night, it was almost empty, save for a solitary bachelorette with a bride-of-Frankenstein headpiece hanging askew on her disheveled hair, grimly sucking down a bright green cocktail by herself.

  At least someone was having a worse time tonight than I was.

  As I reached for the drinks menu, the bartender set down the tumbler he’d been wiping and leaned forward, squinting at me, before breaking into a broad smile.

  “Hey . . . Emmy Harlow? Shit, is that you?”

  I gave him a blank look, momentarily at a loss—then his adult face meshed with the memory of a younger face I hazily recognized from years of classes together. Same dark tousle of hair, same eyeliner around bright blue eyes; even the suspenders-over-a-blousy-shirt look felt familiar, though it was now rolled up over tattoo-sleeved forearms. Morty and I had been only passing acquaintances, but I discovered with a little shock that it felt surprisingly good to see him again, and better still to hear that he even remembered my name.

  “In the flesh,” I admitted, smiling back. “First night back, actually. How’ve you been, Morty?”

  “Can’t complain. Pops retired a few years back and charged me with the keeping of this stellar joint.” He waved at the Cauldron with an all-encompassing flourish. “Happy to report that our buffalo enchiladas are now edible, and that the craft cocktail list has been, mercifully, revamped. Get you anything?”

  I ran a finger down the new set of hideously schlocky-sounding Halloween drinks before reaching the classic cocktails. “Just an old-fashioned to start, please.”

  “Coming right up.” He shot me another grin, wide and disarming, as he reached for a shaker. “It’d be great to catch up once you settle in. Would love to hear what you’ve been up to in the city all these years.”

  It gave me an unexpected pang to hear that an old classmate not only cared to know what I’d been doing, but had even bothered to find out where I went after I left. When he slid the cocktail in front of me, I downed half of it in three smoky-sweet, delicious mouthfuls, thinking that, just maybe, being back for a month might not be quite as bad as my worst fears.

  Then the Cauldron door swung open, letting in a chill blast of autumnal air—and I heard his voice, followed by the unmistakable whipcrack of his laugh.

  Gareth Blackmoore himself came tripping into the bar, his little brother, Gawain, and a welter of interchangeable Blackmoore cousins trailing in his wake, all of them obviously only a half step shy of being fully stumbledrunk.

  “Are you fucking serious, universe?” I moaned to myself through clenched teeth, barely refraining from sinking my head into my hands.

  And because I’d clearly committed unspeakable crimes against both kittens and human babies in a former life, Gareth shambled over to the bar top and dropped onto the seat right next to mine. His entourage filed in after him, still man-cackling and jostling each other as they commandeered the remainder of the bar.

  “Heeeeeey,” Gareth crooned at me, as if we ran into each other here on a regular basis, shooting me the lopsided grin that had once derailed my entire life. When he knuckled the sandy flop of hair off his forehead, my entire body clenched with mortification at his closeness, the devastating familiarity of a gesture I should have long since exorcised from my mind. “This seat taken?”

  “It is, actually,” I forced out, heart pounding painfully at the base of my throat. “Extremely taken.”

  “Really?” Gareth raised a bleary eyebrow and made a big production of scoping out the Cauldron’s mostly deserted expanse. “Because I don’t, like, see anyone else here.”

  “The thing is, it’s always been taken. It has what one might call a long-standing tradition of not being free ever, so . . .”

  He squinted at me, still giving me that slapdash smile, trying to determine if I might be screwing with him.

  “Then why don’t I just hold on to it until its traditional owner returns—that work for you?” he proposed, leaning over conspiratorially, so close I could smell the beer and rye mingled on his breath. “Like a compromise.”

  Shifting away from me in an alarming, full-body sway, he rapped his knuckles on the bar. When this failed to garner an immediate-enough response, he went ahead and snapped his fingers in Morty’s general direction, like an Entitled Drunk Shithead caricature of himself. “Hey, man, a round of Don Julio Real for the crew!”

  I gaped at Gareth, appalled that the reality of him was somehow managing to be worse than even my vilest recollections. “Did you . . . did you seriously just snap your fingers at an entire living human?”

  “Oh, it’s just Morty!” Gareth declared, spreading his arms wide in drunken bonhomie, abruptly enough to nearly elbow me in the face. “Morty’s my old pal. Morty doesn’t mind, right, my man?”

  Morty, in fact, looked like he might choose violence tonight if Gareth said his name again in that heinously belittling tone. But he only nodded once, pressing his lips together until they paled, and turned to slide a silver-topped bottle off the highest shelf.

  It was a cardinal rule in Thistle Grove, applying to the magicless and magicked communities alike: One simply did not fuck with a Blackmoore. Blackmoores were what passed for royalty in this town, and they did not take kindly to being fucked with.

  I was something of an object lesson in this regard, given that literally fucking a Blackmoore had driven me into self-imposed exile nine years ago.

  When I opened my mouth again to protest, Morty caught my eye and gave me a tiny shake of the head. Not even worth it, he mouthed at me as he poured tequila into six skull-shaped shot glasses, a thousand-yard stare he must reserve for just such distasteful occasions fixed on his face.

  As Gareth lifted his shot and proposed some rambling toast to Camelot, the Blackmoores’ crown jewel, his attention thankfully shifted away from me. I curled both hands around my tumbler in a death grip, as though it might anchor me from spinning so far out of control that I wheeled into the mesosphere and then outer space beyond, so propelled by rage and anxiety as to actually escape the earth’s gravity well.

  Just when I thought I might have gotten something approaching a grip, Gareth swung back to me. “So, anyway,” he said, as though we had been having a mutually amiable chat before he was called away. “You in town for the weekend, or what? D
on’t feel like I’ve seen you in here before.”

  I stared at him, confusion warring with resentment at the fact that he’d gotten even more attractive with age. He was wearing a slightly rumpled pinstriped suit that fell elegantly across his broad shoulders, and his blond hair was expensively cut, swept away from the darker eyebrows and gas-flame blue eyes my seventeen-year-old self once found so inescapably compelling. And his face was a little leaner than I remembered, both jawline and brow heavier and more defined. Being nine years older, woe and alas, actually suited him.

  His personality, on the other hand, was clearly still in dire need of an overhaul.

  “Gareth Blackmoore, are you fucking with me right now?” I demanded. “You don’t feel like you’ve ‘seen me in here before’? What the hell is that, some pickup artistry bullshit? Because if so, that’s a stunning new low even for you.”

  “Hey, easy now,” he drawled, eyebrows lifting as he held up both palms. “Shit, I feel like we got off on, like, a real wrong foot. I’m Gareth, and—wait, but you already knew that, right? Hey, new girl, how come you know my name?”

  As a slow grin began spreading over his face, I found myself struck with one of the most tragic revelations of my life. Gareth Blackmoore—my first love, my most humiliating and heart-crushing breakup, and the reason I abandoned an entire life—genuinely did not remember me.

  Forget unspeakable crimes. I clearly straight up ate kittens and babies in a previous life, until a pitchforked mob drove my monstrous self out of that town, too.

  To be fair, it had been nearly nine years since we really saw each other last, not counting the glimpses I’d caught of him back when I still used to come to Thistle Grove for covenstead holidays. My style had changed quite a bit since then. Instead of a wild, sun-bleached tangle that nearly whisked my waist, my hair was dark and sleek, cut in an asymmetrical bob that whispered by my chin. Small tattoos were scattered across my forearms, and these days I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the fluttery white-witch dresses Gareth used to like so much on me.