Which she would be, I told myself, over and over; I wasn’t letting in any negativity on that front. If I’d learned anything from the Instagram witches I followed, it was the power of manifesting hope against all odds.

And when she recovered, I hoped she would still want to talk to me—because I couldn’t wait to share with her the sweet, sweet moment in which Gareth’s face had finally registered the magnitude of his crushing defeat.

“It’s all so wild,” I went on, taking a sip. “I mean, I shouldn’t even have been able to find Caelia’s rose at all. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out that clue.”

My father frowned, setting his mug down on the coffee table. We hadn’t talked much all night, more sat together in companionable silence after we each had the obligatory tumbler of scotch to celebrate the victory I’d won for Talia.

“Then how did you find it?” he asked, voice brightening with interest, the inquiring scholar’s mind behind his eyes firing up like an engine fueled by curiosity.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Thistle Grove showed me where to look, sort of. Which sounds truly nuts, now that I say it out loud, but that’s what happened.”

I tried to explain that multifaceted awareness, the sweeping mind meld between myself and what felt like the essence of the town.

“And it’s been happening since I got back,” I went on. “It’s like I’m . . . merging with Thistle Grove, somehow? Which sounds downright disturbing, only there’s nothing scary about it at all. I figured it had to do with the mantle magic, since that’s the only thing that’s changed since I came back. But then I ceded the mantle to Lilah, and it kept happening.”

“It’s not the mantle, scoot,” my father said, an unfamiliar sadness creeping into the corners of his smile. “It’s you. Your Harlow blood.”

“My Harlow blood . . . what are you talking about?” I said, uncomprehending.

“There’s a certain aspect to our history that’s reserved for elders only,” he said, clearing his throat. “And that’s the role our family plays in this town. Elias Harlow found this place first, you know, felt its distant call all the way from Virginia. He was already here when the other three arrived, a little down the line—and they only came at all because he’d tempered the magic, enough so they could feel it, too. Made it . . . accessible to other witches.”

Margarita’s perplexing words rose like bubbles to the surface of my mind. Dreadful bore that the man was in life, our little Grove would still have been nothing without his hand at work.

“I still don’t understand.”

“Thistle Grove magic comes from the lake,” he went on. “We don’t know why or how, but we all know that it does. But that’s in its rawest form—a white water torrent, wild and unmanageable. To most witches, trying to draw from it would be like putting your mouth to a firehose. But not to Elias. And not to us, his descendants, who share his blood. Strained through us, rendered through our witch’s souls, it’s a viable and potent power source for others with the gift. Like the rest of the families.”