“Goddamn,” he muttered under his breath, his kind face dissolving into an expression of such sympathy that it abruptly tipped my humiliation into rage.
As if on cue, the tumbler shattered to pieces in my hand.
“Oh, shit, your glass!” Gareth exclaimed, blue eyes flaring wide with genuine concern. For all his faults, he’d never been an intentional sadist. “Here, wait, let me help.”
Without asking for permission, he slid his palm around my hand and its fistful of shards. A tingling sluice of magic coursed from his skin and into mine, turning the tumbler’s shattered remains into an iridescent liquid, sinuous and glinting as quicksilver. It warbled and wavered in place before flowing back into its former, unbroken shape, crystallizing into solidity with a neat little snap.
That was what the Blackmoores did best—manipulating matter, turning one element into another with ease, breaking and unbreaking things at whim. The story was that they were descended from Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s legendary sorceress, as one could surmise from all their ridiculous Arthurian names. （Gareth had gotten off comparatively light in this respect, but the rest of them . . . not so much. Cases in point, his little brother, Gawain, and sister, Nineve.） They were staggeringly strong witches, hands down the most powerful of the families.
But even they weren’t usually so brazen as to work magic in full view of a regular human like Morty—who was staring at us with a slightly haunted expression, mouth working as he tried to reconcile the laws of physics with the unquestionable reality of the restored glass in my hand.
While we were all taught to avoid spellcraft in public as a general rule, the Avramovs had also cast a glamour over the town centuries ago as a fail-safe, to prevent locals from looking too closely at any spells gone astray. I could see it working on Morty already, misting his eyes with uncertainty as it rewrote his memory like a document being revised.
Gareth must have mistaken my own shock for awestruck fascination, because he let his fingers linger suggestively on mine. “Cool trick, right?” He leaned a little closer, a sour gust of liquored breath wafting over me as he struggled to focus on my face. I wrinkled my nose, wondering how I’d ever found this living, breathing, swaying cliché attractive. “Got more where that came from. You want, we could get out of here, and I could show you some even cooler shit.”
“Or you could get out of here,” I suggested hotly, snatching back my hand. “Ideally, next time I blink, you’ll already be gone.”
He leaned back, brow knitting with bemusement as he rubbed the back of his neck. “Or, bear with me, I could stay and buy you another drink?” he offered, still failing to fully process the idea of rejection by a tourist who must surely be starstruck by an encounter with the storied Blackmoore heir.
“She already said no, man,” Morty interjected. His face had cleared; he’d probably already forgotten the unbroken glass, or confabulated some story that lined up better with his understanding of the way the world usually worked. “And one ‘no’ is enough for a gentleman, am I right?”
A moment of bracing lucidity crossed Gareth’s face, and his jaw tightened with a sudden, dangerous belligerence. He glared at Morty, and then me, lips pursing as he slid his tongue over his teeth. From what I remembered, while entitled, overindulged, and clueless about his own failings, Gareth wasn’t an actual bully—at least, not when sober. But he was a Blackmoore, on top of being a tall and powerfully built drunk man with a crew of like-minded companions. I felt myself go a little jangly with adrenaline as I watched him pondering his options.
The tension gathered around us like an encroaching thunderhead—and then Gareth rolled his eyes elaborately, pushing back from the bar top with an exaggerated yawn.
“Sure is, Morty, my man,” he said, pointedly turning his back to me and clapping his closest cousin on the shoulder. “Hey, y’all, it’s getting a little stale in here. Let’s go hit up the Avalon.”
A chorus of hell, yeah, man and the like later, they’d all trampled out the door, leaving the atmosphere in the Cauldron almost palpably lightened by their absence. Morty and I sat in shell-shocked silence for a moment, regaining our bearings. Then Morty gave a full-body shudder as if to clear his head, and grimly poured us both a double shot of Grey Goose. I clinked my glass wryly against his, before tossing it back in a single swallow, hissing through my teeth.
“You okay over there, Emmy?” he asked, eyes warm with concern. “Can’t say I’m a hundred percent on what just went down. But I did manage to make out that Gareth is still an industrial-strength asshole, color me stunned.”