“I’m not sure how much more I need to understand about the Witch Woods, really,” I said, balking at the notion. “I feel like I got a plenty good sense of them on the way over here.”
“Just trust me, Harlow,” she insisted, in a satiny timbre I’d have been hard-pressed not to follow into one of the more moderately blistering circles of hell, much less just an eerie forest. “It’s worth it, I promise. And have I led you astray thus far?”
“Let’s be real, you haven’t had that many opportunities.”
She just watched me steadily, dark eyebrows raised. I hesitated for a moment longer, before deciding that, hey, at least I’d be plunging back into the woods more or less with one of the creatures that went bump in the night. Shit, that had to count for something.
When I laid my hand over hers, Talia tugged me up easily, leaving her fingers threaded through mine as we started toward the tree line. She paused by one of the tables to snag a hurricane lantern, with a freestanding flame that had been bespelled to glow an unearthly celadon green. Her skin was smooth and improbably warm against my own chilled palm, and the heat of it seemed to seep into my bloodstream. It made me think of what the rest of her might feel like, pressed hot against the rest of me, with nothing between us except the gossamer brush of peeled-back sheets.
When we stepped from the clearing’s light and back into the woods, any further sexy thoughts died a swift death. There was a new tension to the predatory hush; an attention larger and more ponderous, as if the forest’s own regard had fallen over us like an all-seeing shadow, or some yellowed Eye of Sauron strobing in our direction like a searchlight. As if to confirm my instincts, the rolling mist seemed to inch our way, and Talia’s garnet began to shed a warning glow.
“What’s happening?” I half squeaked, in higher-pitched tones than was probably cool, my skin bunching into goose bumps. “Dude, I do not like or appreciate this, I really, truly do not—”
“Try to stay calm, Harlow.” Her hand tightened reassuringly on mine. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just . . . the forest saying hello to me, let’s say. It can feel a little scary, but it’s just a greeting, that’s all.”
While I tried not to breathe like a hyperventilating rabbit—apparently I aligned much more closely with the Thorns than I’d thought, when it came to a strong preference for warm and sparkly breeds of magic—Talia led me over to a massive oak, its trunk knotted into such mournful burls that it looked like it was sprouting eyes just so it could weep.
She bent to set the lantern down, then tugged off the fringed shawl draped across her shoulders and spread it over the damp ground. Then she lowered herself cross-legged amid the oak’s leviathan roots, gesturing me down across from her until we sat knee to knee. With a soft sigh, she pressed a palm against the peeling bark.
“The veil is very thin here,” she said quietly, her eyelids dropping to half-mast as she focused on something beyond my perception. “Even if you don’t make a study of the liminal boundary like we do, you can probably feel that much instinctively. And places where the veil is sheer . . . they belong to us.”
“How do they belong to you?” I asked, echoing her hushed tone. I knew that of the families, it was the Avramovs who dealt most easily with the spirit world, but it wasn’t like they were known for being chattily forthcoming about their affinity. If anything, most of them were notoriously secretive, shrouding themselves in very deliberate—and occasionally insufferable—mystery.
“Something about us naturally attracts the other side,” she said. “We’re extra alive, somehow. Bright in spirit, I guess you could say, very cheesily. It makes the denizens of the other side drawn to us—almost like our presence thins the veil wherever we happen to be.”
I considered this; the idea of Avramovs as paranormal lightning rods felt somehow viscerally right. “You’re like ghost magnets.”
Her lips quirked with repressed amusement. “If you want me to take back what I said earlier about your poet’s soul, then sure. But if you’re into less banal metaphors, we’re closer to beacons, or lighthouses. The dead can see us more clearly from beyond the veil than they can see other living; a moth-to-a-flame type of deal. It’s part of our magic—the part that also lets us manipulate ectoplasm.”
That much I did remember from Baby Emmy’s eager perusal of the Grimoire, though I’d never understood it in any meaningful way. “So, you work with spirit stuff, basically. I take it that’s what you used as your suspension medium at the lake today?”