When I came in through the back door, Liv was even giddier than normal.
She ran into the room the second I closed the door, beaming brighter than I had seen her do in a long time. She all but barreled into me, wrapping her arms around me. Stunned, I almost didn’t hug her back. She hadn’t been this effusive since we’d had sex. I wasn’t complaining; I much preferred this version of Liv to the one who avoided me like the plague, but I still hadn’t been anticipating it.
“Hey,” I said. “Is everything all right?”
She giggled as she finally took a step back, still smiling, her smile as beautiful and as enticing as ever.
“Things are great, actually. I have some pretty big news,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “That so? Well, then, I’m all ears.”
She gave a wide grin as a faint pink that made her seem radiant spread across both cheeks. “It’s more something I have to show you,” she said.
My brow furrowed. Liv was practically bouncing like a child at Christmas. Even for her, this seemed excessive. Whatever her “pretty big news” was, I couldn’t imagine anything could elicit that reaction.
“You aren’t going to give me a hint?” I asked.
“Where’s the fun in that?” she fired back, that stunning grin still spreading across her face.
“You’re really enjoying keeping me in suspense, aren’t you?”
She rolled her eyes, even as that smile continued to light up the entire room. “You’re no fun when it comes to surprises,” she lectured. Then, without any further explanation, she grasped my wrist and tugged me into the living room.
At first, I froze in the doorway, my mouth dropping open slightly as I took in the destruction. Glass and splintered wood littered the floor.
My first thought was that someone must have broken in, and a protective fury washed over me. It was a miracle they hadn’t hurt her. Except Liv seemed far too ecstatic for this to be a break-in. I rounded on her, only to see her still looking giddy, the wide, genuine smile dancing on her face catching me off guard. I preferred cleanliness and order—far more so than Liv, I knew—but I wouldn’t have expected her to look so thrilled over the mess and chaos.
“You wanted to show me a bunch of broken things?” I grumbled. “If you were mad at me, you could have told me instead of trashing the living room.”
“Of course I’m not mad at you! And I’m sorry for the mess,” she tittered. “I didn’t have time to really tidy up before you got here. Well, maybe I could have, I guess, but I don’t have a whole lot of control over it yet, so I didn’t really get a chance to practice and see what sort of thing I can do, you know?”
“Honestly? No. I don’t know.” I rubbed my temple, trying to keep my patience even as I tried to figure out what about this was supposed to be exciting. “Can you please explain what’s going on?”
“I told you: I have to show you.”
“So why don’t you show me?”
She was so excited that she didn’t even lecture me about being grumpy. She bounced up and down as she stared out at the mess that I was already trying to figure out how long it was going to take to clean up.
Except all those thoughts flew out of my mind the second the shards of the shattered lamp rose into the air and began zooming around the room, moving in large circles. A moment later, the broken picture frame followed suit. Stunned, I tore my gaze away to gawk at Liv. Her eyes had an almost glassy glaze to them as she watched the objects spinning around the room, her face set in concentration. I turned back to watch the floating objects as they bobbed back and forth, almost seeming to dance.
After a couple of minutes, the broken bits began to quiver, as if they had all gained a metric ton of weight. Then they crashed back to the floor, shattering into even more pieces. I turned to gawk at Liv, who winced as she pressed her hand to her temple.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how to put them back together, or even if I can. All of this happened before I even knew I could control it. I promise I’ll clean it up.”
I didn’t give two fucks about it being cleaned up or now. I was still too preoccupied with what I had just seen to care about the cleanliness of our living room. My mind seemed to go stupidly blank as what happened washed over me, bringing me to one irrefutable conclusion.
“You’re…” I trailed off, my mouth suddenly as dry as the desert. “You’re a witch.”
She nodded, her smile as bright as the sun. Meanwhile, I was thinking of all the ways this could go wrong. If the wrong people found out, it would put her in danger. It might ostracize her from the pack. Or the wraith might go after her, like it hadEmma. I tried to come up with a list of ways to handle this going forward, disregarding each of them until I came to the only one that made sense.
Keeping it private was the best course of action. It would keep Liv safe. A lot of people in town still didn’t trust witchcraft, regardless of all the good Rachel and Emma had done for the town. If people found out what she was, I worried they might turn against her, and I wasn’t going to let that happen to her.
Liv was still beaming. “I just found out while I was hanging out with Rachel and Jessie.”
So much for keeping it between us, then. Word would be out within a matter of days. And, considering Elias was Rachel’s sister, it wouldn’t take long for word to get back to Elias. At that point, there would be nothing I could do to protect what should be a closely guarded secret.
For her part, Liv didn’t seem to think this was a problem or a detriment at all. For that matter, I wasn’t sure I had ever seen her quite this enthusiastic. Which, considering this was Liv we were talking about, was saying quite a bit.
