“You haven’t used magic once.”
She chuckled. He felt more than saw her stand up and move toward him. “I have been the whole day. I’ve been getting flashes of snow, ice, and freezing. And a white light, but that’s probably something else coming.”
He frowned. “You don’t understand the visions you get?”
“Can we have this conversation in bed? It is freezing in here.”
It was far from freezing with a giant stove taking up half the room, but he wasn’t going to argue with her.
He felt something brush his thigh, and she shrieked as she tumbled into him. He ended up clutching her waist and one arm as he tried to steady her.
“Sorry! I thought you were a foot that way,” she said as she fell against him even as she tried to get away.
He flexed his fingers, and she said, “You have to let me go.”
The words landed like a blow. He knew she meant it literally, but it was also true in every other way. Tomorrow morning, he had to let her go, leave this cabin, and disappear from her life forever. He would go back to New York and try to find a shifter, magically rebaptized by an avalanche and renewed by a primal battle with hypothermia.
The prospect made him nauseous.
“Mateo?” she asked, quieter now, and he wrenched his hands away.
She rolled, and he heard her pulling at the covers on the bed.
He slid in after her and hissed at the frozen sheets as he settled on his side.
“I need something to gaze into to See,” she said, and for a second, he didn’t know what she was talking about and then remembered he had asked her what happens next.
“What, so you need a crystal ball?”
She laughed. “I need about a thousand, yeah.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, or something to scry into. Not every divination witch does, and not everyone prefers something clear. Some have completely made up their own thing or need nothing at all, but I’ve never understood either of those. How can you look at muddy tea and See anything? I’ve always needed clear things like water or a crystal. But crystal cracks if you look at it wrong, so I have to save them up for really important questions.”
“Do you do tarot?” he asked.
“What? No.”
There was emotion in her voice. “I’m sorry I asked?”
“No, it’s just that I know there’s a long tradition of that in Romania, but I was severed from any traditions we had before I was adopted. My first memory is of an orphanage.” She sagged against the pillow. “Maybe that’s why my magic is so limited? If I’d learned more of my history or learned more tools to use, maybe I would be better at this, but I picked up a crystal ball because I first noticed visions in water, and another witch suggested that maybe crystal would work too.”
He was horrified but knew he couldn’t say that. “That must have been, um, hard.” He cringed.
She sniffed. “It’s okay. I also maybe wouldn’t be as good as I am, I think? Especially working for strangers. Most witches only get visions about their family, but since that was never an option, I can be of a lot more help to a lot more people. And maybe if I’d had someone in my ear telling me it wasn’t possible, I would’ve been limited. It’s not like we have one perfect future and the rest suck.”
“I can see that.” He cringed again. His heart broke for her, but he could not say that, so he was pulling out all the meaningless platitudes he’d ever learned.
“People don’t understand that when they ask me for a vision. They want to know if what they want happens, but I can’t even explain that sometimes getting what you want isn’t the best option. And that’s not me saying everything happens for a reason because nothing does. It’s just that life is more complicated than that.” She cleared her throat. “But anyway, to answer your question, no tarot, just crystal. Either way, they’re just crutches.”
“Would you do without your, um, crutch?”
“Hm, interesting question. I don’t think I would. Don’t you have anything in your life that makes the rest of it easy?”
“Like a stress ball?” he said and then felt stupid.
“I guess so?”
