Page 20 of Little Witch

I was going to go back eventually. I already knew that much about myself. The woods were a mystery that I was stupidly eager to solve...

I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest, staring out at a street that looked deceptively ordinary. Trees swaying in a mild breeze. A pair of magpies squabbling over something on the pavement two doors down. But underneath the calm, the whole town had a sort of... vibe to it. Like it was a Scooby Doo villain wearing a mask, and one day soon I was going to yank that mask right off.

The locket at my throat felt heavier than usual against my collarbone. I ran my thumb over the cool metal, turning it between my fingers without really meaning to, and found myself wondering — properly wondering, for reasons I couldn't yet name — what it actually did, beyond being the last real thing my dad had ever given me.

I got up, dressed in a rust-red jumper and jeans from the small pile of clothes Orias had let accumulate in the corner of his wardrobe over the last few weeks, since apparently neither of us wanted to say out loud how often I'd started staying over.

The house smelled like cinnamon and browning butter by the time I made it downstairs, which meant Orias had beaten me to the kitchen and was already several minutes into whatever he was cooking.

He could cook, unlike his twin. Which was why the scent filled me with happiness rather than nerves.

"Morning, little witch." He didn't look up from the pan, sleeves shoved to his elbows, a spatula working something golden around the edges. Dark circles sat heavy under his eyes, worse than they'd been yesterday, though he was doing a decent job of hiding it behind the usual grin. "Sleep alright?"

"Better than you did, clearly."

"Rude. Accurate, but rude." He plated the eggs and slid them across the counter, followed by a pumpkin-shaped mug with the coffee already fixed exactly how I liked it — too much cream, barely any coffee flavor left. He remembered that without ever once needing reminding, which was a small, stupid thing to feel emotional about at seven in the morning, and I felt emotional about it anyway.

I was clearly in dumb bitch emotions mode. That was fine. I could handle it.

I sat at the counter and let myself talk about the festival for a while — the maze getting bigger this year, extra traders coming in from the next few towns over, whether we'd have enough staff to cover both the shop and the stall we always ran on the green. Orias asked good questions, actually listened rather than just waiting for a gap to talk over me, and for a few minutes the tight coil in my stomach loosened enough that I almost forgot what yesterday had felt like.

Then something in his posture changed. He set his mug down slower than the moment called for, both palms flat against the counter like he needed the surface to hold him up.

"Amber." His voice had gone careful. "I need to tell you something. About your dad."

Whatever ease I'd built up over the last ten minutes evaporated in a single breath. "What about him?"

"Rowan found Cian's old journal this morning, back at the manor." He kept his eyes on mine, steady. "There's things in it. About your dad. Stuff that... that I found out not long after our mother's passed. Stuff your mom put in her own journals, and papers and... yeah."

I froze. "What kind of things?"

Orias had never been one to beat around the bush.

"He found out he was adopted. Not long before he vanished."

I blinked. "Adopted? My dad never said anything about—"

"He didn't know either. Not until right before he went into the woods." Orias's jaw worked, like he was deciding how much to give me at once. "He wasn't fully human, Amber."

I set my fork down. "That's not funny."

"I'm not joking." He said it quiet, steady, watching my face the whole time. "He was born into the Rose family."

"The Roses." The name landed somewhere half-familiar, like something I'd been told once and never thought about since. "Aren't they the ones who — the whole family died. Yeah. The entire coven of witches. Some spell that went wrong, years back."

"Decades back. He would've been a baby." Orias nodded slowly. "Somehow he made it out. Got adopted into a human family after, raised thinking that's exactly what he was."

My brows furrowed. "That's not possible. He never acted like there was anything different about him. Not once."

"Cian's journal says you used to hear the whispers too. When you were small." Orias reached across the counter, not quite touching me yet, just closing the distance a little. "Says your dad found a way to take them off you. Protected you from them somehow, and made you forget you'd ever heard them at all."

Something shifted loose in my memory at that — not a clear picture, nothing I could properly grab hold of, just an impression. A sensation of sound at the edge of sleep when I was maybe six or seven, a voice that wasn't quite a voice, and my dad's hand on my forehead afterward, humming something under his breath that had never made sense to me as a kid and had never once come back to mind since. I hadn't thought about that morning in fifteen years. The second Orias said it out loud, it felt less like a new idea and more like something surfacing after being held underwater a long time.

My hand found the locket on its own. It felt warm against my palm in a way it hadn't a minute earlier, a low, steady pulse of something I couldn't have described if you'd asked me to.

"He gave me this the day before he left," I said slowly. "Told me it was magic. That it would keep me safe. I never really believed him — figured it was one of those things parents say to make a kid feel better. Maybe it did something small. The kind of charm that works because a person believes hard enough in it, not because there's anything real behind it."

"If your dad was Rose blood," Orias said, quieter now, "that's not a small charm. And you're not just a person who believes hard, Amber. That would be magic and you would be too."