I tilted my head from side to side, still not quite convinced, tapping my fingertips against my upper arms.
“What’s the hesitation, Harlow?” Talia prodded, leaning over the table and fixing me with that disconcerting stare.
“Honestly? I’m not sure it’s worth all this effort, just to keep Gareth Blackmoore from taking home yet another trophy, even a major one like this. I don’t love the idea of being so focused on him.” I thought back to last night, the effortless ease with which Gareth had unbroken my glass. “Especially if he’s still likely to win no matter what.”
Talia’s gray eyes narrowed, gaze intensifying until I could almost feel its weight alighting on me like some tangible, predatory force. Something with talons, and a very wide wingspan.
“Listen,” she said, interlacing her fingers on the table. “We all know Gareth’s likely to get the win anyway. But just think . . . how fucking satisfying would it be to see him squirm, make him look bad in front of everyone? Can you imagine how much it would sting, getting his ass handed to him at even one challenge?”
“You do have a point there,” I conceded.
“I sure as shit do, Harlow. That entitled dickhead has sailed through his whole life with a silver spoon in his mouth, getting exactly what he wanted at every turn. Including the three of us. So let’s not let him have this, too.”
I flicked between Lin’s pained expression and Talia’s stormy eyes, struggling to keep abreast of my own tumbling thoughts. Gareth had stripped the three of us of so much, stolen from us like a thief. My future in Thistle Grove, Linden’s faith in love conquering all, Talia’s . . .
Well, maybe he’d only dinged Talia’s pride. But the Avramovs put a lot of stock in their pride, something I keenly understood, and the casually deceptive way he’d treated sleeping with her had clearly stuck in her craw.
“The thing is, I’ve already let Gareth shape my life more than I’d like,” I said, trying to articulate what was really bothering me here. “And as much as the idea of bringing him down sounds fantastic, I came back here because it was important to my family that I uphold Gauntlet tradition. I didn’t come back for that asshole, not in any shape or form.”
Talia’s eyes thawed at that, reminding me of the oddly gentle and earnest way she’d listened to me last night, the heat of her hand over mine.
“And I respect that, Harlow,” she said. “I do. Consider, though, that this isn’t just about him. It’s also about the Blackmoores stacking the deck in their own favor for centuries.”
“What do you mean?”
“Four families founded this town, not one. But they’ve been making Thistle Grove all about them, edging the rest of us out since they built that trashy monstrosity and called it a ‘historical’ attraction. And put yourself in a tourist’s shoes—if you come here to get your Halloween fix, what do you spend your money on? A séance at the Emporium, or a whole fucking medieval castle with all the bells and whistles?”
“She’s right, Em,” Linden said somberly. “We’ve been feeling the pressure, too. The Blackmoores have their own pumpkin patch and sunflower farm out at Camelot now, too, even a whole jack-o’-lantern display every season.”
I remembered Gareth bragging to his bros about the expansion of Camelot last night at the Cauldron, even raising a toast to the new additions. So this was what he’d been so proud of, stealing business from Talia and Lin. For all I knew, they were planning on opening a themed bookstore, too, and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet; I wouldn’t have put it past them.
“We’ve really had to tighten our belts this year,” Linden went on. “That’s why the liquor deal with them was so important in the first place.”
Talia nodded, her face hardening until her delicate features looked chiseled from some unyielding stone. “Things continue the way they are, the Emporium only has another season or two before it goes under for good.”
A sudden anger spun up in me, like an unforecasted hurricane, at the thought of the Blackmoores turning this enchanted jewel of a town into a cheesy spectacle engineered purely for their profit. There was so much more to Thistle Grove than the Blackmoores, just like Talia had said. Four witches founded Thistle Grove, and its power was meant to be shared equitably between their families—not hoarded by one family year after year, until they eclipsed the others into irrelevancy.
Maybe the founders would never have established the Gauntlet in the first place, had they known that this was what would come of it.