“Unfortunately, the hands are pretty useless when it comes to matters of the heart,” Lin replied, with a rueful smile. “Trust me, both Rowan and I have tried all sorts of charms to that effect. Turns out it’s true what they say, about how nothing quite does the trick like time. Although, TBH, vengeance pacts also do seem to help.”

“Leave it to magic to let you down when you need it most.” I slumped back against the sofa chair, heaving an exaggerated sigh. “Guess I’ll just be doomed and wretched. Is that what the fortune says?”

“Let us see.” She unrolled the paper then looked up at me, shooting me a conspiratorial grin. “ ‘When Pearl Dragon and cheap wine and even magic have all failed us . . . there will always be Buffy marathons.’ ”

“It does not say that.”

She shrugged, toggling her phone into remote control mode. “Nah, it says that your business will prosper. But as your forever bestie, you can’t tell me I don’t get to take at least a little poetic license.”

26

Sly Cantrips and Tricky Spells

Places from the past are usually much smaller than you remember when you return to them years later, shocked that they’d ever managed to command so much space in your brain at all.

This was not the case with Castle Camelot.

The keep loomed against the night, so broad and imposing it could have served as a real fortress, the black-and-gold Blackmoore pennants strung from its corner towers snapping in the wind. The whole thing looked like a middle-school “elements of a medieval castle” diagram come to life in all its cheese-bucket glory, complete with ramparts, a drawbridge, and a parapet walk, along with lots of other intimidating bits for which I’d never learned the proper names. Floodlights set at its base illuminated the rough-hewn facade—as if it was some painstakingly preserved historical monument, instead of a construction built circa 1998—flinging bars of green, blue, and pink onto the stone, their reflections caught by the rippling black water in the moat.

Now that I was here, I’d expected to feel some twinge of Gareth-related pain, from any remnants of teen Emmy that might still have been haunting my subconscious. But Gareth and I had spent more time together roaming the grounds of his family’s Tintagel estate, several miles down the road, than here—and it turned out all I felt was pissed. The castle had clearly been added to extensively since my day, as the Blackmoores churned the profits from their mini empire right back into expanding it.

It made me even more furious with them, this irrefutable proof of how they were flourishing as they turned the screws on the other families.

And I was more than a little preoccupied with Talia, whom I hadn’t seen since that night at The Bitters, two days ago. Now she stood in front of me, flinty-eyed and meticulously composed, with Gareth and Rowan flanking her, waiting for the challenge to begin. I’d thought about texting her dozens of times—okay, it was more like in the hundreds—in the past few days. But what was I going to say to her to bridge the rift? What was I supposed to offer to get us back to where we’d been, when I still wasn’t sure what I even wanted for myself, much less for us?