A complicated expression drifted over my father’s face. It was both speculative and knowing, tinged with something close to sadness. It vanished so quickly, like a suppressed memory, that I didn’t even have a chance to ask what he was thinking before he moved on.

“I thought I could give you a little primer on the Gauntlet,” he said more briskly, turning to head toward the back of the shop. “Run you through what everything will look like.”

“Sounds like a plan. I could definitely use a brushup.”

I followed him through the maze of stacks—my father had never believed in fostering any library-like semblance of order here, though the contents of the shop were flawlessly cataloged in his mind—to the spiral staircase in the back, wending vertiginously up to the bookstore’s attic. This was where the most powerful books were safeguarded, along with all the records of the founding families and the town’s magical history, which the Harlows have kept for centuries.

The attic swam with dust, too, maybe even more so than below, but it also smelled intoxicatingly of incense-sweet Thistle Grove magic. Some of the books themselves exhaled that distinctive scent, the fragrance seeping from their pages. Clear midday sun streamed through the dormer windows, and yet the light in here felt oddly golden, just like I remembered. Dreamy and sepia-toned, as if the magic had steeped into the molecules of the air and subtly changed their hue.

The Grimoire waited for us, set between two banker’s lamps on the hulking pedestal desk that occupied the attic’s left corner—and not the much more modest Harlow copy I’d grown up with, either. This edition of the Grimoire was massive and leather bound, with gilded lettering embossed on the age-weathered cover. And this version of the spellbook sang to me, in a distant whisper both dreamy and lilting, beckoning me over. It sounded like the ghost of some ethereal serenade, sung by sirens sprawled over ancient rocks; a gorgeous, faraway melody, enticing and just the slightest touch sinister.

Before I knew it, I’d crossed the room to place both palms flat on its cover.

Without warning, a gout of magic crashed over me like a breaking wave. It was akin to what I’d felt when entering the town, but magnified a thousandfold. The sensation literally took my breath away, roaring through me with untrammeled force, powerful and ravenous.

Weirder yet, I could feel my own dormant power surging within me in answer, rising up to meet it, uncoiling inside me like a dragon spreading its wings for flight. For a moment, it felt as if I was lifting into the air myself, my senses shooting out like tendrils to caress the sinuous boundaries of the town, as though I could feel Thistle Grove itself. As though I was inside it, in some much deeper way than just by physical presence alone.

All in all, it was way sexier than touching a dry and dusty tome should ever really be.