“It’s all so wild,” I went on, taking a sip. “I mean, I shouldn’t even have been able to find Caelia’s rose at all. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out that clue.”
My father frowned, setting his mug down on the coffee table. We hadn’t talked much all night, more sat together in companionable silence after we each had the obligatory tumbler of scotch to celebrate the victory I’d won for Talia.
“Then how did you find it?” he asked, voice brightening with interest, the inquiring scholar’s mind behind his eyes firing up like an engine fueled by curiosity.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Thistle Grove showed me where to look, sort of. Which sounds truly nuts, now that I say it out loud, but that’s what happened.”
I tried to explain that multifaceted awareness, the sweeping mind meld between myself and what felt like the essence of the town.
“And it’s been happening since I got back,” I went on. “It’s like I’m . . . merging with Thistle Grove, somehow? Which sounds downright disturbing, only there’s nothing scary about it at all. I figured it had to do with the mantle magic, since that’s the only thing that’s changed since I came back. But then I ceded the mantle to Lilah, and it kept happening.”
“It’s not the mantle, scoot,” my father said, an unfamiliar sadness creeping into the corners of his smile. “It’s you. Your Harlow blood.”
“My Harlow blood . . . what are you talking about?” I said, uncomprehending.
“There’s a certain aspect to our history that’s reserved for elders only,” he said, clearing his throat. “And that’s the role our family plays in this town. Elias Harlow found this place first, you know, felt its distant call all the way from Virginia. He was already here when the other three arrived, a little down the line—and they only came at all because he’d tempered the magic, enough so they could feel it, too. Made it . . . accessible to other witches.”
Margarita’s perplexing words rose like bubbles to the surface of my mind. Dreadful bore that the man was in life, our little Grove would still have been nothing without his hand at work.
“I still don’t understand.”
“Thistle Grove magic comes from the lake,” he went on. “We don’t know why or how, but we all know that it does. But that’s in its rawest form—a white water torrent, wild and unmanageable. To most witches, trying to draw from it would be like putting your mouth to a firehose. But not to Elias. And not to us, his descendants, who share his blood. Strained through us, rendered through our witch’s souls, it’s a viable and potent power source for others with the gift. Like the rest of the families.”
I pressed my fingers to my temples, which had begun to ache with strain. I’d never even considered the possibility that the intense way I experienced Thistle Grove magic was somehow different from how it felt to other witches. How would I even have known that it didn’t feel the same to them?
“So you’re saying we’re like filters?” I attempted.
“Very good, yes!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly, like he might slap a gold star sticker onto my forehead if this went on. “The magic sieves through all of us, every Harlow who lives in Thistle Grove. But this rendering down we do . . . paradoxically, it makes us weaker witches than the other families. Presumably because most of our gift is preoccupied, at any given time, with filtering all that raw magic into a more manageable fuel.”
Somehow this made perfect, if unfortunate, sense. We were busy distilling down something so tremendous, so elemental, that the process of it left very little bandwidth for any actual spells we might want to cast. Our magical hard drives were nearly maxed out, almost no more processing power left.
The rawest of deals, just like Nana Caro had said; and this must have been exactly what she meant. This town is in your blood, she’d also said, in ways you might not yet understand.
At the time, I’d thought that she was being figurative. It made more sense now—except for one thing.
“Then why wasn’t my magic stronger, instead of weaker, when I left town?” I challenged.
“Because living here has changed all of the families, altered the fundamental texture of how we work our spells,” he replied, pushing his glasses up his nose with his index finger. “We’re used to the lake’s power now, dependent on it. It’s become a part of both the town and us—the magical fuel that we instinctively reach for, that we know how to work best. Beyond its reach, our own gifts wane.”