“I was not in love with him!” Linden protested.
Talia waved away the semantics with an irritable swat. “Passionate and emotionally invested lust, then. Whatever you want to call it, you can’t pretend he didn’t break your heart.”
Linden sucked in a shaky breath and pressed her lips together, then allowed herself a clipped nod. Another spike of pain lanced through me at the thought of my childhood best friend and my most detestable ex not only together, but involved enough that it had left Lin this gutted. Whatever had happened between them, it had clearly run much deeper than a fling.
“He tried to give me that ‘so sorry, it didn’t mean anything’ crap, too,” Linden added tightly. “As if that ever flies.”
“I call bullshit, too. I have it on good authority that I’m an extremely meaningful lay,” Talia quipped. But her eyes flashed with restrained anger, simmering close beneath her flippant facade; she was clearly still smarting from the heedless way Gareth had treated her.
“And then there’s me, the one who kicked off Gareth’s streak. We really are the coven of the scorned, aren’t we?” I murmured, dragging a dismal hand down my face. “Maybe a new age has dawned—and it’s terrible.”
“Or maybe it has, and it’s fucking fantastic,” Talia countered, a dangerous smile playing on her lips, “because it’s a time of comeuppance for cocky dipshits who think they’re larger than life. Starting with Gareth Blackmoore, Prince of Bastards.”
5
The Witches’ Vengeance Pact
So, what exactly are you proposing?” I asked, taking a sip of lukewarm coffee to jolt my lagging brain back into life.
“Sweet revenge, of course,” Talia replied, crossing her arms and leaning back against the booth. “When I found out what was up, I reached out to Lin to see if she was interested in some payback. Because obviously this level of abject fuckery could not be allowed to stand.”
I glanced dubiously over at Linden, who’d never been much of an eye-for-an-eye person, preferring instead to trust karma with the meting out of just deserts in due time—only to find her nodding along with Talia, steely-eyed, her shoulders squared with unusual resolve. Gareth really had left scorched and salted earth behind him yet again. For a moment, I found myself marveling over the way he managed to continuously one-up himself when it came to reprehensible behavior, like a constant and perplexing self-own.
From a certain angle, that much skullduggery was almost impressive.
“First I thought, maybe Issa had a point,” Talia continued, “and we could look into some suitable hexes. You know, a lifetime of erectile dysfunction, uncontrollable overgrowth of pubic hair, that type of shit. However, Angelcake McSparklepony over here would ‘not be privy to causing harm.’？”
She put this last in finger quotes, rolling her eyes, as if an aversion to causing harm indicated a moderately loathsome weakness of the temperament. Linden blinked beside her, mutely repeating sparklepony to herself.
“Sparklepony?” I asked, barely managing not to laugh.
“Like a unicorn, but worse,” Talia replied with an exaggerated shudder. “Unwilling to impale even the deserving with one’s head.”
“First off, I am not a . . . a sparklepony,” Linden said hotly, having regained the power of speech. “Forgive me for having a working moral compass, I know it must seem super weird to you. Second, stop acting like you’re some kind of bad-bitch warlock. As I recall, you weren’t down for any hexing, either.”
“I’ll allow that I’d prefer not to fuck with the powers of darkness if an alternative is readily available. And lucky for us, one is.” She tipped her sleek head toward me, lazy grin glinting like a blade’s edge. “Enter the final member of our vengeance coven.”
“And I come into play how, exactly?” I said, a murky possibility looming out of my mental fog like an iceberg. “Might this have something to do with the Gauntlet of the Grove?”
“Indeed, it might. Because what could be a better punishment for Gareth than losing the Gauntlet to Rowan Thorn?” Talia bit her full lower lip through her sly smile, her gray eyes widening with anticipation. “Or, better yet, losing it to me?”
What with last night’s emotional turbulence and the ensuing brownout, it had somehow entirely slipped my mind that while I arbitrated the Gauntlet, Gareth, Talia, and Linden’s older-by-six-minutes twin brother would actually be duking it out against one another as the Blackmoore, Avramov, and Thorn scions, respectively.