Sylvia tapped a nail on the dashboard, apparently deciding whether or not to lie. “You’re not wrong. Being an unsettled witch,survivingas an unsettled witch… it changes you. Many find it hard to go back to the homes they left.”
“Exactly.” Lily buried her head in her hands, trying to focus on her breathing, to stop the hitching in her chest from getting worse.
“But they get a new home. They get a coven.”
Lily scoffed into the cradle of her palms. “Right. With dickheads who sell drugs and boring meetings that no one wants to go to. Sounds great.”
Lily stilled, worried that she’d offended Sylvia. She didn’t want her magic, but she also couldn’t afford to alienate one of the few people who was willing to help her right now. But Sylvia just laughed. Lily lifted her head to look at her, confused.
“God, you remind me of myself sometimes,” Sylvia said. “You say what you think. And you’re right, we do have all of those things. But there’s more to it. I had a bad relationship with my family. My parents… They weren’t prepared to have a child, and they had no desire to become prepared once they got one. For me, magic was a way out.”
Lily jumped at a loud squeal. She looked out the window, where the culprit—a woman dressed as a ghost—was enthusiastically greeting a friend in a nurse costume.
“But even once I got out, I was still alone,” Sylvia continued. “Just like I had been growing up in that house. Until I joined a coven. It was the first place where I found people who valued me. Who wanted to spend time with me, who wanted to understand and help me. Covens can be beautiful things. My coven matters to me more than anything else in my life. I would do anything to protect Aestas.”
The conviction in Sylvia’s voice was almost enough to sell her. It was so close, that intangible dream of a place where she felt perfectly at home. But Lily already had a place where she felt imperfectly at home, curled up on the couch watching TV with Noah, the sounds of her dad banging pots in the kitchen and her mom running the dryer in the background. Her family was hers. She didn’t want a new one.
She wanted what she had.
“I don’t want a coven. I don’t want to go to some weird camp. I just want this power gone.”
Sylvia paused her tapping nail, turning to Lily again. It took her a moment to speak, like she was searching for the right words. “What if I could do that?” she finally said, her voice quiet.
Lily’s heart skipped. “You could take my power away right now? I wouldn’t have to wait until I settled?”
She jolted at the sound of the car’s blinker, the clicking loud and incongruous in the silence that had fallen after her question. Sylvia turned into a line of cars pulling into the parking lot of the massive shopping center on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. Lily had been here before—there was a Dave & Buster’s upstairs. A few months ago, she and her friends had come here and played Dance Dance Revolution for two hours straight, until their parents dragged them away for pizza and soda.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Sylvia inched the car forward, keeping her gaze on the man in the Volvo in front of them as the machine vomited a parking ticket into his waiting hand. She didn’t say anything as they pulled up next to the machine. But then, finally, she turned and looked at Lily.
“There’s a spell I can try, but it’s going to be risky,” she said, her voice practically a whisper. “Very, very risky. My power is stronger around people, but I’m not even sure being here will be enough for me to pull this off. There’s a chance it could go wrong.”
“But there’s a chance that it could work?”
“Yes.”
Lily bit her lip. Katherine had said there was no way this power could be taken out of her, and Sylvia wasn’t even sure it would work. But if there was a way everything could go back to normal…
The car behind them honked loudly. Sylvia’s finger hovered over the button to pull a ticket. “Am I going inside or am I turning back?”
Lily couldn’t pass up this chance. No matter the risk.
“I’m not strong enough for this power,” Lily said. “Take it.”
Sylvia took the ticket and drove them into the parking lot.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1991
Sylvia Page was sixteen, and she was finally free.
Sylvia stretched her arms over the back of the bench she’d snagged in the center of Times Square, not worried about the sun beating down on her pale skin. She didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. Consequences were no longer her concern.
Two days ago, she’d been staring down the barrel of a life in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania, working at the same shitty convenience store her dad had been working at his whole life, wearing the too-big hand-me-downs her mom threw her way in one of the rare moments where she remembered that she did, in fact, have a daughter she was legally obligated to take care of. Living in the same dirty, undecorated room she’d always lived in, dragging herself to the same shitty school, waking up every morning to the same, the same,the same…
And then it happened—hope. Hope, starting low in her belly, burning up her arms, through her hands, until it found her bed—the same bed she’d been sleeping in from age five, when it was too big, to now, when it was too small—and lit it on fire. It burned to ash beneath her, and as the rest of her house started to burn as well, she realized she had a way out.
