Page 167 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

“Please don’t—don’t tell anyone,” I say.

“Of course not. I haven’t lived this long by being a gossip,” she says, winking one of her crinkled, golden eyes.

“So, have you been hearing what we’re talking about?” I ask. “Do you think it will work?”

“It sounds like it will. And you know you can trust your friends, right?”

I drop my gaze to the ground, feeling guilty.

“You can, Lillith,” she says. “I know it’s frightening—to put something so intrinsic to your being in the hands of someone else. But that’s what you do when you love someone. Even if it’s not so tangible as this plan of yours is, at some point, we all put something important and fragile in someone else’s hands, trusting them not to crush it.”

Some people are worth being devastated over.

“And what if it backfires?” I ask. “What if it rebounds.”

You know you can’t pregrame that shit, right?

Daisy smiles at me like she heard Damien’s words in her head, too. I tuck some of my hair behind my ear and frown. “Maybe I really am a coward,” I say quietly.

“Cowards bury their heads in the sand and hope it will all turn out. Cowards don’t make consistent efforts toward fixing things. Cowards don’t take risks like this.”

“But I’m terrified.”

“And you’re doing it anyway,” Daisy says, shrugging. “I used to know another witch like you. Worse, even. She was always downplaying her own strengths, not realizing the very things she felt made her weak were actually her greatest assets.”

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“She’s still living a blissful life with her husband. Realms away from here. They’ve been together since they were practically children. Went through hell and back, and came out the other side of the whole thing.”

“You think I’m going to come out the other side?” I ask.

“I do,” Daisy says, smiling softly at me. “And if this approach doesn’t work, something else will.”

My phone rings. I check it and find an unknown number on the screen. I send the call to voicemail and turn on Do Not Disturb. The last thing I need is spam calls while I’m freaking the fuck out. “I hope you’re right,” I say, tucking my phone in my pocket.

“I am,” she says, pulling me toward her for a hug and kissing the top of my head. “You’re going to be okay, Lillith.”

And for what it’s worth, I do kind of believe her.

ㅤ

One minute, we’re playing on stage to a sold-out crowd.

The next minute, things are on fire. Everything is on fire. The flames engulf the black curtains behind me. It singes my hair—the surface of my skin. And as the blazing curtain falls, arching over me like a cresting wave on an infernal sea, something crosses my mind.

I didn’t tell Lillith I loved her.

When we got off the phone. I just told her I would kill it tonight. I didn’t tell her I loved her back.

I didn’t say it back.

ㅤ

The spell circle is more of a spell triangle. Three points in the same clearing where I fucked Bastion during the Beltane rite. At the tip of each corner is another, smaller circle, where Wren, Bastion and Aemon have set up all of their tools and materials for the ritual.

I sit in the center, naked. Which wouldn’t be weird if Aemon wasn’t here. But he is here, and it feels a little weird, even though he hasn’t batted an eye or dipped his gaze past the curve of my collar bones even once.

I think I’m just... off. But I try to calm myself down about it, because at the end of the day, I don’t need to be on. I’m not doing any magic at all for this whole thing. I’m just the subject of the spell, not the caster. It’s okay if my mind is fucked up, because my intentions aren’t the ones that matter.