Juniper lifted hers as well, hands trembling.
“On three,” Willow said. “One . . .”
Ash cleared her throat. “Juniper, Willow is not the boss of you.”
“Two . . .”
“You don’t have to swallow a dead baby chick. You really, really don’t.”
Willow’s voice rang out—sharp and urgent and commanding: “Three!”
Both sisters tilted their glasses, and the yolks slid into their open mouths.
Willow swallowed hers and slammed her glass down. “Yes!”
Juniper wasn’t as lucky. Her cheeks bulged, and a tremor rippled through her. Her hands grabbed and squeezed the picnic blanket.
Willow rubbed her back. “Hey. You’ve got this.”
Juniper fought valiantly—face straining, throat convulsing—and finally, miraculously, she swallowed. Woozy but proud, she looked to Willow for approval.
“You did it!” Willow exclaimed. “Juniper, you just changed the fabric of reality!”
Ash scoffed. “Yeah, sure. By giving yourself salmonella.”
A firefly blinked to life above Willow and Juniper, its golden light flickering once before vanishing into the dusk.
Then another. And another.
One by one, dozens more appeared, their tiny lights pulsing in the warm night air.
Juniper glanced up at them in awe. “Are they here because of me? Am I... magic now?”
The vision fractured, the fireflies burning too bright. The world rippled, and Willow was ripped from the yard of her childhood home, tugged too violently back to Amira’s house.
She jerked away from the scrying bowl, her pulse hammering in her ears. For a moment, she just sat there, stunned and aching. She missed her sisters. Even Ash.
“Willow?” Cole said. He gently shook her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Her surroundings came back to her in fragments—the polished wooden counter, the shelves lined with stoppered bottles, the curl of Amira’s heavy perfume.
Amira lifted her eyebrows and smiled, her expression that of a well-fed cat. “You want more,” she remarked.
Willow sensed danger lurking in Amira’s insinuation, but Amira was right. She did want more.
“So what now?” she said.
Amira laughed. “Nothing!”
Willow frowned. “But . . .”
“Magic has its own timeline,” Amira said, running a fingernail along the rim of the scrying bowl. The soft scrape of it made Willow’s skin crawl. “Move too fast, and it will rip right through you.” She flicked her gaze at Willow. “It does that sometimes, you know. It rips. It tears. It turns a person inside out.”
For a split second, the egg was back in Willow’s throat, thick and gelid, like something trying to crawl out of her. She clamped her hand over her mouth.
“Take Orrin,” Amira mused. “Did his lover kill him—or was it the magic that took his life?” She lifted both hand, palms up, two empty scales weighing invisible lives.
“I don’t know who Orrin is,” Willow said impatiently.
