1
Small Victories
The viridian teardrops should have been in bloom by now. That much, at least, I had no trouble remembering.
But I'd been trawling the Hallows Hill woods for almost four hours, walking the forest in as methodical a grid as one could manage on terrain that tended to shift around you like a daydream if you let your attention wander, and I hadn't spotted even a glimmer of the distinctive, iridescent color that gave the flowers their name. A languid twilight had begun to gather above the rustling treetops; a midsummer wash of dusky lavender that dipped the already hushed bower in an almost melancholy light, subdued as a sigh.
If anything, I was more likely to spot one of the elusive flowers now than I had been earlier. Viridians unfurled at dusk, revealing glinting amber centers like fireflies-the stamens that held the magically active pollen I was hunting for.
Six months ago, I wouldn't even have needed to traipse along a grid. I'd been hiking Hallows Hill for pleasure since I was a kid, even when I wasn't on the prowl for floral ingredients for a tincture or brew. Many of the plants that thrived up here were unique, native to Thistle Grove. Exactly which herbs, blooms, lichens, and mosses grew where had once been imprinted on my mind like an intricate schematic, a precise framework crystallized among my synaptic pathways. In the Before the Oblivion times, I'd had a photographic memory; the kind science wasn't convinced existed, even if every other neurodivergent TV detective laid claim to one.
But I'd really had one. The ability to recall whole pages of text I'd read only once, to summon up faded illustrations I'd pored over by candlelight, to confidently rattle off lists of ingredients for obscure potions I'd never even prepared. The Delilah Harlow of before hadn't had the first idea just how much she'd taken her keen mind for granted.
In my bleakest moments, I hated her for that smug complacency almost as much as I hated Nina Blackmoore for what she'd done to me.
With an effort, I shook off the creeping angst-in the months since I'd lost and regained most of my memory, I'd developed a maddening tendency to brood over my own misfortune, a waste of productive time if ever there was one-and turned my attention back to the forest floor. Viridian teardrops often grew in little clusters of three, usually around the exposed root balls of deciduous trees. By early July, there should already have been a good crop of them ready for harvest.
But Lady's Lake had been a little tempestuous lately. Nina Blackmoore's discovery of Belisama's statue at its distant bottom seemed to have stirred up the sleeping avatar, jolted the piece of the mysterious goddess that lived in our lakebed into some semi-elevated state of awareness. We now enjoyed the odd lightning storm crackling just above the lake on otherwise perfect days, while balls of Saint Elmo's fire had been spotted drifting down Hallows Hill and through the town below, rolling through walls like ghostly, electrified tumbleweeds and scaring the entire shit out of Thistle Grove normies. (The oblivion glamour cast over the town prevented memory retention of spells directly cast by Thistle Grove's witches, but it was nowhere near broad enough to cover all the other unusual "meteorological phenomena.")
Disturbances like that might have seeped into the forest as well, upset its natural growth rhythms or shifted them.
Just as I was about to cut my losses and call it a day, a flash of amber winked in my peripheral vision. I wheeled toward it, a flush of pure joy searing up my throat.
Sensing my excitement, my raven familiar, Montalban, hopped down from one of the boughs overhead, where she'd been examining intriguing insects and tracking my slow progress below. She landed on my shoulder, talons gently digging in for grip, then nestled her glossy dark head against my cheek and emitted a hoarse, contented caw. She didn't understand exactly what was happening; though familiars were empathically bound to their witches and attuned to magic, they weren't the snarky, anthropomorphized pets you saw in cheesy witch movies. But she could feel how happy it had made me to spot the viridians, that this was something important to me.
If nothing else, familiars excelled at very earnest "I love this for you" vibes.
Montalban and I had been bound for only a little less than six months; Ivy had thought that bonding a familiar might be healing for me as I recovered from the glamour, a friendly presence to both ground my mind and facilitate my scattered spellwork. But I already couldn't imagine life without my salty little sweetheart always at my shoulder.
"See?" I whispered triumphantly to her, though I didn't really have to vocalize; Montalban could pick up on the general gist of my thoughts. But I loved talking out loud to her, like the friends we were. "Still got it, my bitch!"
"Craw!" she agreed, ruffling her feathers.
It wasn't a typical cluster trio, I saw as I bent to examine the flower. Only a solitary blossom, and on the smallish side as viridians came, growing in a nook just by a slim sycamore's base. But its teardrop petals were plump and glossy with health, a gorgeously vivid bluish green-and nestled within, the stamens quivered with a rich dusting of that precious yellow pollen. If I was meticulous about extracting it, this single flower would be enough to cast a full iteration of Marauder's Misery-one of the anti-theft wards I'd been restoring at Tomes & Omens ever since Nina Fucking Blackmoore undid three centuries' worth of them in her brief and catastrophic rampage as a demigoddess.
Flames and stars, living in this town could be exhausting.
I sank down by the tree's base, pebbles and blades of grass pressing imprints into my bare knees. Then I closed my eyes and reached for the flower, cupping my hands around it without grazing the petals.
Sensing the flow of magic, Montalban brought her focus to bear on the spell, too, facilitating my work with it. She couldn't make me stronger than I was; that wasn't how familiars helped. But her added attention was like a lens held to the sun-anything I cast, she rendered finer and more precise.
Like most magically imbued flora, viridians couldn't just be plucked by mundane means. They needed to be harvested with the use of a particular preservation spell, to keep their potency intact. Magical botany was like that; infinitely fascinating and challenging, and also finicky as fuck. Hence, why I loved it. It demanded expertise and finesse, a deep understanding of theories and disciplines that the other Thistle Grove families largely cast aside in favor of relying on their natural talents. Even the Thorns didn't bother with it much, given their affinity for magically coaxing plants into simply doing whatever it was they wanted them to do.
But arcane knowledge, and its practical applications . . . that was where Harlows shone.
Especially this Harlow.
I took a slow breath, twitching my fingers into the delicate position called for by the spell, lips parting to speak the incantation. The words floated into my mind's eye in swooping antique copperplate; I could even picture the yellowed page upon which the rhyming couplets had been inked.
Then the entirety of the charm sluiced out of my head like water sliding through a sieve.
All of it, vanished in an instant. The words themselves, the lovely script, the aged grain of the paper. Where the memory had lived, there was now nothing. A cold and empty darkness, a void like a miniature black hole whorling in my head.
The panic that gushed through me was instantaneous, a prickling flood that engulfed me from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes, a flurry of icy pins sinking into my skin. And even worse was the terrible sense of dislocation that accompanied it, as if the entire world had spun wildly on its axis around me before falling back into place subtly misaligned. I'd known that spell, only moments ago. Now, I didn't. It was simply gone, lost, as if it had been plucked directly out of my head by some merciless, meticulous set of tweezers.
"Crawwww!" Montalban croaked into my ear, shifting fretfully from foot to foot as my distress seeped into her.
"I'm okay," I managed, through the terrible tightening in my throat. "It's okay."
But it wasn't. It felt nauseatingly like existing in two realities at once. One in which I was the old Delilah, a living library, a vast and unimpeachable repository of arcane information. And another in which I was a tabula rasa, almost no one at all. Just a facsimile of a person rather than anybody real and whole.
The dissonance of it was horrifying, a primal terror unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. The way, I imagined, some people might fear death, that ultimate disintegration of self if you truly believed nothing else came after.
Though to me, the idea of living with a mind that couldn't be trusted felt worse than even the possibility of a truly final oblivion.
I sank back onto my haunches, wrapping my arms around my chest. Goose bumps had erupted along the expanse of my skin, and I broke into a clammy sweat despite the buzzy warmth of the air, the humid heat that permeated the forest from the lake. "It's okay," I whispered to myself under my breath, rocking back and forth, feeling abysmally pathetic and weak even as Montalban nuzzled my cheek, desperate to provide some comfort. "You're alright. Try to relax and let it pass over you. Like a reed in the river, remember? Don't fight against the current, because the current always wins."
Sometimes, the simple relaxation mantra Ivy had improvised for me from her meditation practice worked, bleeding off some of the panic. Other times, it did absolute fuck all.
The worst part was that no one understood why this was still happening to me. As a Harlow recordkeeper, I should have been shielded from a conventional oblivion glamour in the first place. Given our role as the memory keepers of our community, Thistle Grove's formal occult historians, we were all bespelled to be immune to such attacks. But Nina's form of the spell had been superpowered, whipped to unfathomable heights by the kernel of divinity that had been lodged inside her, the deity's favor she'd been granted by Belisama.
Why that entitled Blackmoore bitch had been deemed deserving of a goddess's favor in the first place was still beyond me.
In any case, even after the mega-glamour dissolved-helped along by my cousin Emmy's and my uncle James's efforts-I wasn't rid of it entirely. Six months later, I still sometimes lost memories like this, little aftershocks of oblivion riving through me even after all this time. Other times, I reached for knowledge that I should have had-that I knew I'd once possessed-only to discover an utter, sucking absence in its place. As if some vestigial remnant of the spell lurked inside me like a malevolent parasite, a magical malaria that only occasionally reared up.
The lost memories did return sometimes, if I relaxed enough in the moment, or if I was able to revisit their original source-reread the page that held the charm, pore over the missing diagram. But sometimes they simply didn't, as if my brain had been rewired and was now inured to retaining that piece of information. And it was all horribly unpredictable. Just when I'd begun to tentatively hope that I might be on the upswing, I'd tumble into yet another mental vortex, a churning quagmire where I'd once reliably found the diamond edges of my mind.
But the self-soothing methods Ivy had taught me were always worth at least a try. I repeated the sappy "reed in a river" mantra to myself several more times-trying my damnedest not to feel like someone who'd ever wear Spiritual Gangster apparel in earnest-all the while inhaling deliberately through my nose and exhaling out of my mouth. The familiar smell of Lady's Lake calmed me, too, the distinctive scent of the magic that rolled off the water and through the woods, coursing down the mountainside to wash over the town. It was the strongest up here, an intoxicating smell like some layered incense. Earthy and musky and sweet, redolent of frankincense and myrrh laced with amber and oakmoss.
As a Harlow, my sense of the lake's magic was both more intimate and more acute than that of members of the other families-and the flow of it up here, so close to its wellspring, reassured me. Left me safe in the knowledge that I was still Delilah of Thistle Grove, on her knees on Hallows Hill with her beloved familiar on her shoulder. A Harlow witch exactly where she belonged.
Abruptly, the harvesting charm slid back into my mind. A little frayed around the edges, some of the words blurring in and out of sight, as if my memory were a dulled lens that had lost some of its focus. But it was back, restored, intact enough that I would be able to use it to collect the viridian.
"Oh, thank you," I breathed on a tremulous sigh, my limbs turning jellied with relief, unsure whom I was even thanking. Ivy's mantra, the goddess Belisama, the magic itself? When it came down to it, it didn't really matter.
Sometimes, you had to take the smallest of victories and run with them.
Sometimes, they were all you had to cling to.
2
Mystery Objects
It was past nine by the time Montalban and I got home, the harvested viridian pulsing in my backpack, safe inside the transparent little globe of magic I'd conjured for its keeping. I lived on Feverfew, only a few streets over from Yarrow Street and Tomes & Omens, the family occult and indie bookstore that was now largely my charge. Not even a five-minute walk away, but far enough and residential enough to cushion me from the relentless hubbub of rowdy tourists that traipsed through Thistle Grove almost year-round.
Witch-crazy visitors were Tomes & Omens' bread and butter, but that didn't mean I had to like the noisy bumblefucks, or the overly familiar way they pawed my books and artifacts. You'd think tourists itching for a slice of occult history would approach it with more respect, and yet they dropped fragile artifacts, spilled their obnoxious unicorn lattes into sticky puddles on my floors, and chased my poor raven around the store as if they had the slightest hope of clapping their grubby paws on her.
But that was people for you, and why I generally preferred to stick to books and familiars.
Copyright © 2023 by Lana Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
