And now the threat’s cologne was lingering in her office.
He was easy, at least. Transparent as a piece of Saran Wrap, and just as simple to tear apart. So desperate not to get blood on his hands that he was willing to see good intentions around every corner.
“You get on a path and before you know it, you’re stuck and you don’t know how to get off.”
What absolute bullshit. You set your own damn path, and if you didn’t like it, you forged a new one. No matter what it took.
Sylvia stared down at the caster that rested on her desk. Careless, for her to have dropped it. Sloppy, for her not to have noticed it was gone.Strange, that the thing that had been glued to her hip for the last thirty years had been missing for days and she hadn’t cared.
There had been a time when she wouldn’t have let that caster out of her sight. When the sense of the woman she was had been so tied to the woman who had given it to her that she couldn’t imagine parting with it.
She picked it up, turning the knife over in her hands. Staring at the gold inlay on the handle—a butterfly. At the time, she’d thought it was sweet.
She opened her desk drawer and shoved the knife all the way in the back, burying it under old receipts and empty wrappers.
Fuck Nina Khatri.
1997
Sylvia was twenty-two, and she was settled.
She’d had a good run, keeping her unsettled magic until only a few months earlier—far longer than most. For six years, she’d been the most powerful witch in the most powerful coven in the country.
And she’d never been able to do a goddamn thing with it.
Strength, it turned out, didn’t mean power. She could run magical circles around everyone in Noctis, but she couldn’t make them listen to a word she said. She wasn’t just other—her unsettled magic and her lack of pedigree made herless than.
And then she settled.
It was like a switch flipped in her body. She went to bed limitless, and she woke up limited. The loss was indescribable. That itch, the burn that had been a constant for so many years, was gone. Her skin was just skin, nothing roiling underneath. The same people who had sneered at her unsettled magic now sneered at its lack, telling her in hoity-toityterms how much of a relief it must be and at the same time looking down their noses at her because they knew she was now stuck with the same awful restrictions as them.
Her unsettled magic had been a key part of her, and now it was missing. She’d lost a friend.
Her magic wasn’t the only friend that she was losing.
Since she’d followed Vikrant into that office building, every member of Noctis had avoided her, save one. One bright-eyed woman who wore butterflies over her heart. Nina had never sidestepped to put extra distance between herself and Sylvia in a hallway. Nina had never lowered her voice when she saw Sylvia coming, scared ofthat unstable girloverhearing her conversation. Nina had never seen Sylvia as anything other than an equal.
Nina treated it as a foregone conclusion that they would be best friends, and who was Sylvia to go against that? She let Nina sweep through her life like a freight train, remaking her in her upper-crust New Yorker image, paying for a new wardrobe and a fancy haircut and biweekly trips to the nail salon. Nina was Sylvia’s whole life, her only tenuous tie to social acceptability.
And now, Nina seemed to be done with her.
Vikrant had first asked Nina out two years earlier. Even Sylvia—still the subject of Vikrant’s barely hidden scrutiny—had to admit that it was endearing to see how nervous he was when he offered to take Nina to dinner. Their courtship was quick, their genuine love for each other and the constant comments from everyone about howrightthey were together making their eventual marriage a foregone conclusion. The five-hundred-guest wedding had come and gone six months ago; Nina had been pregnant for four. Sylvia had smiled and hugged her tight when she’d heard the news, murmured congratulations into her hair, pushing her desire to scream down, down, down…
But it wasn’t the disapproving husband on Nina’s arm or the burgeoning child in her womb that was coming between them, as Sylvia had feared. No, it was something she hadn’t suspected.
Sylvia, it turned out, was very good at being a settled witch.
Nina, it turned out, did not appreciate that.
Sylvia looked over at Nina now, standing next to her in front of a table in one of Noctis’ spell libraries. The marriage had brought with it a number of perks, including easy access to all of Noctis’ spellbooks. Nina had been generous in passing those benefits on to Sylvia at first, but as Sylvia’s skills improved, Nina’s willingness to share had tapered off. She hadn’t invited Sylvia to practice with her in weeks.
Sylvia was working on a spell for plant growth that Nina had said, through gritted teeth, was “very hard, but will probably only take you a few minutes to figure out.”
Nina had never been jealous when Sylvia was unsettled. Then, her strength had come with caveats.
Now, though? Now she was competition.
Sylvia pulled out her caster and flipped the blade open, staring at the butterfly on the hilt. Nina had given it to her the day after she settled. Had shown up at her apartment with a wide smile on her face and a box swaddled in haphazard Santa Claus wrapping paper held behind her back. Sylvia had laughed as she tore it open. “It’s not even Christmas,” she’d said.
