“Heeeeeey,” Gareth crooned at me, as if we ran into each other here on a regular basis, shooting me the lopsided grin that had once derailed my entire life. When he knuckled the sandy flop of hair off his forehead, my entire body clenched with mortification at his closeness, the devastating familiarity of a gesture I should have long since exorcised from my mind. “This seat taken?”

“It is, actually,” I forced out, heart pounding painfully at the base of my throat. “Extremely taken.”

“Really?” Gareth raised a bleary eyebrow and made a big production of scoping out the Cauldron’s mostly deserted expanse. “Because I don’t, like, see anyone else here.”

“The thing is, it’s always been taken. It has what one might call a long-standing tradition of not being free ever, so . . .”

He squinted at me, still giving me that slapdash smile, trying to determine if I might be screwing with him.

“Then why don’t I just hold on to it until its traditional owner returns—that work for you?” he proposed, leaning over conspiratorially, so close I could smell the beer and rye mingled on his breath. “Like a compromise.”

Shifting away from me in an alarming, full-body sway, he rapped his knuckles on the bar. When this failed to garner an immediate-enough response, he went ahead and snapped his fingers in Morty’s general direction, like an Entitled Drunk Shithead caricature of himself. “Hey, man, a round of Don Julio Real for the crew!”

I gaped at Gareth, appalled that the reality of him was somehow managing to be worse than even my vilest recollections. “Did you . . . did you seriously just snap your fingers at an entire living human?”

“Oh, it’s just Morty!” Gareth declared, spreading his arms wide in drunken bonhomie, abruptly enough to nearly elbow me in the face. “Morty’s my old pal. Morty doesn’t mind, right, my man?”

Morty, in fact, looked like he might choose violence tonight if Gareth said his name again in that heinously belittling tone. But he only nodded once, pressing his lips together until they paled, and turned to slide a silver-topped bottle off the highest shelf.

It was a cardinal rule in Thistle Grove, applying to the magicless and magicked communities alike: One simply did not fuck with a Blackmoore. Blackmoores were what passed for royalty in this town, and they did not take kindly to being fucked with.

I was something of an object lesson in this regard, given that literally fucking a Blackmoore had driven me into self-imposed exile nine years ago.

When I opened my mouth again to protest, Morty caught my eye and gave me a tiny shake of the head. Not even worth it, he mouthed at me as he poured tequila into six skull-shaped shot glasses, a thousand-yard stare he must reserve for just such distasteful occasions fixed on his face.

As Gareth lifted his shot and proposed some rambling toast to Camelot, the Blackmoores’ crown jewel, his attention thankfully shifted away from me. I curled both hands around my tumbler in a death grip, as though it might anchor me from spinning so far out of control that I wheeled into the mesosphere and then outer space beyond, so propelled by rage and anxiety as to actually escape the earth’s gravity well.