Even enrobed by the mantle’s heady magic, the smile she flung my way, grateful and victorious and somehow semiferal, made me more exhilarated than I would have thought possible.
12
The Witch Woods
Listen, I did not sign up for this mess,” Rowan Thorn groused. The wine bottles he and Linden were bringing to the Avramovs’ bonfire clinked together in the apple-picking tote that swung from one of his hands. A luminous sphere of witchlight hovered over his other palm, lighting a path through the thick forest behind The Bitters. “Comrades in collusion? Here for it. But tell you what, fam, I do not need to be in these woods tonight, with those trees looking like they want to suck my soul out through my nose.”
“Quit being such a wuss,” Linden told her twin, easily keeping pace with him thanks to her long legs. Her illumination spell took a different form—a cloud of shimmering radiance that seemed to emanate from her skin, as though it was dusted by bioluminescent plankton. It was beautiful, and made her look like the most literal version of a land mermaid. “We promised Tal we’d come celebrate with her. And they’re just trees, which, need I remind you, happen to be our thing?”
“Our thing is nature. This?” He motioned at the sinister loom of woods around us. “This is some haunted-ass Avramov shit.”
“But I thought you liked Talia!” I protested, lagging behind a little due to the fact that I was depending on a plain old Maglite, and the darkness of the Witch Woods seemed to actively resist more mundane forms of light.
“Talia’s alright. The rest of that family, though, could sure stand some type of intervention.” Rowan rolled his shoulders, casting his eyes uneasily over the warped boughs hanging above us. “Especially if this is their party joint.”
He was right about that part; the Witch Woods were spectacularly creepy. Their official name was Heritage Forest, but I’d never heard a local call them that, for good reason. I, an actual witch, had spent the entire time we’d been walking peering nervously over my shoulder, the little hairs on my neck prickling like antennae. Overhead, the canopy knitted together so tightly it blotted out both moonlight and Thistle Grove’s glittering ice-chip stars. Tendrils of mist crept low over the ground, clinging to the root balls of the hulking trees. Wisps of it snaked up to coil around the branches of the ancient evergreens that towered here and there, as if it drifted up and down according to its own whim.
Which tracked, given that I was pretty sure this mist was made of ghosts.
Though the woods were technically public property, they were often treated as an informal Avramov holding, since nearly no one else dared venture into them. I’d snuck in a time or two in high school on a dare, like any self-respecting local teen, but I’d never wandered this far in, and certainly not at night. The darkness had a living feel to it, a slithery sense of motion at the corners of your eyes. As though things were constantly slipping in and out of sight at the edges of your vision.
The kinds of things that had no intention of hanging in any congenial way.
“You’re not wrong,” I told Rowan, wedging my flashlight under my arm so I could unscrew the bottle of Tanqueray I was bringing as my contribution—Talia surely wouldn’t mind if it was already open, right?—and take a swig. The herbal taste twanged in my mouth and burned comfortingly down my throat. Instant ghost repellant, or at least the mental equivalent. “I’m also not loving it here.”
“The good news is, we’re almost there,” Linden said, fishing her phone out of her pocket and squinting at the bluish glare. “Tal said to hang a left at the, quote, ‘sycamore that looks like a hellmouth.’？”
“Amazing,” I said under my breath, half tripping as my toe caught a hidden root. “What could be better.”
“Horrible, yet helpful!” Lin replied sunnily. Gareth’s downfall, and my cutting Igraine down to size, had done wonders in boosting her spirits. “There it is right there, I think.”
I took another bracing swig as we rounded the corner, averting my eyes from the twisted burls of the sycamore’s trunk as we passed by. Talia had nailed it with that description; the thing was supremely Guillermo del Toro–looking, even by Witch Woods standards.
The glade that lay just beyond it came from a very different cinematic genre.
Without the obscuring loom of trees, the clearing ahead seemed to almost glow beneath the pour of moonlight and sugary spill of stars. At the center, a flame roared in a copper brazier on an elevated stand, spitting a shower of hissing sparks. It was less your average low-key bonfire, and more a standard-bearing flame of Olympic proportions; the Avramovs clearly had no qualms about leaning hard into Talia’s triumph.