BIG
LITTLE SPELLS
Author:
Hazel Beck
ISBN: 9781525804724
Publication
Date: August 29, 2023
Publisher:
Graydon House
18.99
US | 23.99 CAN
Book
Summary:
A smart, modern Rom-Com
about a witch banished from her coven who seeks help from the only person who
can prove she’s not a threat to witchkind—her annoyingly immortal childhood
crush.
Rebekah Wilde was eighteen when she left St. Cyprian, officially
stripped of her magic and banished from her home. Ten years later she’s forced
to return to face the Joywood Coven, who preside over not just her hometown,
but the whole magical world.
The Joywood are determined to prove Rebekah is a danger to
witchkind, and she faces a death sentence if she can’t prove otherwise. Rebekah
must seek help from the only one who knows how to stop the Joywood—the ruthless
immortal Nicholas Frost. Years ago, he was her secret tutor in magic, and her
secret, impossible crush. But the icy and frustratingly handsome immortal is as
remote and arrogant as ever, and if he feels anything for Rebekah—or
witchkind—it’s impossible to tell.
Now, she’s no longer a child…and this time what sparks between
Nicholas and Rebekah is more than just magic…
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Links:
Excerpted from Big Little Spells by Hazel Beck. Copyright © 2023 by Megan Crane and Nicole Helm. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
Chapter One
You don’t have to be an exiled witch
under threat of the death penalty should you cast the faintest little spell to
feel the magic in Sedona, Arizona.
But it doesn’t hurt.
The full moon is shining, high and
bright, making the red rocks glow outside my little bungalow. The air is soft
and dry instead of swollen with Missouri’s trademark humidity, which I’m not
sorry to leave behind.
If it was up to me, I would never have
gone back to Missouri at all.
Because one thing exile has taught me is
that magic is as much a habit as anything else. Unnecessary at best. Dangerous
at worst. An addiction, in other words.
These days I am all about recovery.
Except for tonight. Tonight, admittedly,
has been a bit of a relapse.
I breathe out and try to blow away the
past while I do.
I’m standing out in my little yard, my
head tipped toward the Arizona sky and my shoes kicked off so I can feel the
earth and as many vortexes as possible. Because I’m a hippie, I tell myself.
Just a run-of-the-mill Sedona hippie. Hair down, feet bare, crystals hanging
all around like every other New Ager around here.
Not magic, just vibes.
But before I manage to fully ground
myself here, I feel something grab me, like a huge, magical hook around the
center of me—but inside out. It’s dark. Hard. Kind of slimy, really—and it
makes my stomach heave.
This particular
magical tug is a summons, yanking me out of the life I fought so hard to
build, all on my own. Not for the first time.
Not even for the first time tonight.
Though this summons is harsher than the
one before. Meaner.
I know instantly it’s not him.
Because he yanked me back to St. Cyprian too, but it didn’t hurt when he
did it. It’s not supposed to hurt at all, and he made it feel almost good—
But I stop thinking about the maddeningly
beautiful, impossible immortal witch who ruined my life once already, and
start worrying about me.
There’s only one reason for me to be
dragged back home against my will. And it’s been a long night already. My
sister, Emerson, who I haven’t seen in person in a decade, formed her very own
coven made up of our closest friends and one obnoxious immortal. Then,
together, we all fought off a major, magic-induced flood that would have
submerged the town of St. Cyprian and most of Missouri.
The final jerk makes Sedona disappear
into a blur of red, then there’s a whooshing
sensation while whispered words fill the air around me.
Rebekah
Wilde, come before us, the voices command me.
And I’m back.
Right where I don’t want to be.
I’m standing outside a farmhouse across
the river from my hometown. And instead of the terrifying wave of water and my
sister ready to dive into the middle of it all like the first time I showed up
here tonight, the river has settled down. The fight is over.
Or…maybe it’s only just begun.
Because a quick glance around shows me
that Emerson is standing outside in the cool April night, looking like the
fierce Warrior she is, her eyes blazing gold with all her newly rediscovered
power. Jacob North, our old friend and a Healer—and, I think, my sister’s new
love—stands with her and doesn’t look any worse for the intense healing he did
when we came much too close to losing Emerson earlier.
Behind them is Zander Rivers, my cousin,
looking uncharacteristically grim for a guy who used to make the role he was born
into—a Guardian—seem a lot more fun than the name suggests. Next to him is
Georgie Pendell, Emerson’s best friend, whose entire family has been witch
Historians—and actual historians who run the town’s local-interest museum—as
long as anyone can remember. And last but never least, Ellowyn Good. My best friend. And also the Summoner
who helped Emerson contact me once Emerson remembered she was a witch, despite
the Joywood spell that took those magic memories away from her for ten whole
years.
Across from them stand all the members of
the Joywood, the ruling coven based here in my hometown of St. Cyprian, MO. The
authoritarian, bullying, small-minded coven that cheated me out of the life I
was supposed to have.
Seven dictatorial witches I had no
intention of laying eyes on again.
I feel a rush of a very old, too-dark
fury inside me—but stop myself. It’s practically a reflex at this point. I
don’t do outsize emotion or high drama anymore. I don’t do dark. That would lead directly to my death, and I’ve always been
pretty clear about wanting to stay alive.
If I hadn’t wanted to live—my life on my terms—I would have stayed here. I would have let these petty
Joywood tyrants wipe my mind the way they wiped my sister’s, taking away any
hint of ever knowing magic.
I tell myself that I’ve forgiven them. I
chant it inside me, not like one of
the spells forbidden to me, but like a mantra. They were only doing their jobs,
following their laws, as stupid as those laws might be. I forgive them because
forgiveness is mine to give. I don’t need to carry the bitter taste of St.
Cyprian and its ruling coven with me. I chose to leave all of this behind. I
still choose it.
Something—not quite a shadow—moves in my
peripheral vision, and I see him too.
Nicholas Frost, the one and only immortal witch. Some people call him a
traitor.
I call him all kinds of things and unlike
most, have done it to his face. But now is not the time to air all my oldest grudges.
His gaze from halfway across a field
makes everything inside me…change. Not so much that dangerous black fury any
longer. This is something else. A different kind of heat.
I don’t want to acknowledge it. Or him.
Especially not with this audience.
Even if, for a moment, it feels as if the
two of us are all alone here.
I have to remind myself that we’re not.
I
forgive you, I think at him, in my smuggest internal
voice. The best of a decade of recovery programs right there. And even though I
can’t—won’t—use a witch’s usual telepathic version of conversation, I suspect
he hears me anyway. Because his dark blue eyes gleam.
From all the way across the tall grass.
“Rebekah Wilde,” booms a voice I
recognize entirely too well, even though I haven’t heard it in a decade. Carol
Simon, the Joywood coven’s Warrior and therefore the leader of…everything
involving witches the world over.
I force myself to look at her, hopefully
without my feelings all over my face, and decide that teenage me was right. Her
frizzy hair really is unforgivable.
“You have been summoned here, to the site
of your infraction, to answer for your offense,” she intones.
I finally take note of the fact that she
and her cronies hauled me into this field, but not into the group of my friends
and family who also infracted tonight.
I’m standing halfway between them and the Joywood. As tempting as it is to
think that’s just carelessness, I know better.
They don’t do careless.
I slouch where I stand, because even
being across the river from my hometown makes me want to behave like the sulky
teenager I was when I lived here. That’s what Carol and her buddies likely see
anyway, so why not live down to their worst expectations? I’ve always been
excellent at that.
I lock eyes with Felicia Ipswitch, the
Joywood’s Diviner and my personal nemesis, and smirk a little. And just like
that, it might as well be tenth grade when Felicia was the high school
principal and I was a problem. A problem she thought she could solve with
draconian detentions and the kind of punishments that would send human
teachers to jail—but witch students heal up better.
Turns out I’m not over high school, which
doesn’t really do a lot for the sullen peace
and love vibe I’m trying to exude here.
I look away from that evil old hag to
find Emerson looking at me like I’m an answer. That’s not unusual. My sister
always thinks there is one. And better yet, that she can find it and implement
it.
I know better, because I made my own way
out in the world, relying on nothing and no one but me. I learned the hard way
that life and the world often have no answers, no neat little bows. For anyone,
witch or human.
I tell myself that it gives me great
internal peace to accept this knowledge, and maybe it will, someday. I grit my
teeth and think peace, please.
Especially when Carol starts to speak
again. Peace, love, light, I chant
inside me. No spellwork here. No witchcraft. Just words of power that anyone
could use while anointing themselves in essential oils and rearranging their
houses for better feng shui.
“I know you must think you did something
big here tonight,” Carol is saying, as if she’s never heard anything dumber in
her life. Her voice is so persuasive that I have to pinch myself to remember
that no, we weren’t giggling over a Ouija board, pretending we weren’t pushing
it while we clearly were. We actually fused together the way all the books say
true covens should, fought some gnarly dark magic, and won. Almost at the expense of my sister’s
life.
“But I’m afraid all you really did, Emerson
and Rebekah, is break the terms set down before you when you failed your
pubertatum.” She glances around. “And the rest of you broke several laws aiding them.”
The word pubertatum has not gotten any less obnoxious in the ten years I
haven’t heard it spoken aloud. It’s an ugly Latin word for a coming-of-age
ceremony where witches in their eighteenth year are required to demonstrate
their powers so they might take their places in witch society. Pass the test
and you answer a few questions to be herded into one of the seven witchkind
designations. Warrior, Guardian, Summoner, Healer, Historian, Praeceptor, or
Diviner.
Fail the test, like Emerson and I did,
and you get to be a zombie or an outcast.
“I have power, Carol. You can’t deny
that,” Emerson says, with her usual bouncy forthrightness, like she’s
flabbergasted at the possibility that Carol would bother trying to deny such a thing. When it’s so obvious.
I really have missed my sister.
“You told me I had none.” Emerson points
to me now. “You told us we have no
power at all. You were wrong. And then, all this power inside me you said I
didn’t have fought off your obliviscor.”
I expect rage. Carol has never been one
for being told she’s wrong. Her mind wipe spell wasn’t supposed to have failed.
But Carol surprises me.
She titters, and her cronies all laugh
along with her. I remind myself that it’s supposed
to make me feel wrong and stupid and vaguely humiliated. That’s what they
do. Better to rule us by making us hate ourselves.
“And you’ve turned a simple testing error
into some…nefarious plot? I do worry, Emerson, that fighting off the
obliviscor addled your senses.”
“We just saved St. Cyprian and possibly
all of witchkind, Carol,” my sister says, and not angrily. Just like she’s
reciting facts, inviting Carol to come aboard. She even smiles. “You’re
welcome.”
And I know hate is for the weak.
Forgiveness is power. Blah, blah, blah.
But Carol Simon makes the case for blood
feuds, forever. Especially when she rolls her eyes.
“We saved witchkind with no help from
you,” Emerson continues, as if she doesn’t see any eye-rolling. Because she
won’t give up. Emerson never, ever gives
up.
Even when she should.
“As a concerned, dedicated St. Cyprian
citizen who also happens to be chamber of commerce president, I have to
wonder,” Emerson tells Carol. But she also casts an eye over the rest of them,
these fixtures of St. Cyprian and my witchy past that I did not miss at all.
Like Maeve Mather, the Joywood’s Summoner, who used to go out of her way to be
mean to my grandmother. Just because she could. “Why, I’m asking myself, did
the ruling body of all witchkind not only turn a blind eye to the obvious
imbalance in our power source that’s been making the rivers rise so
dangerously, but also fail to help us fix it? Why did we have to stop it?”
“I assume because you wanted attention,”
Felicia says. It is a familiar sentence, meant to be pure condemnation. She
used to use it all the time as a precursor to her nasty little punishments. My
gaze moves across the dark field to find Ellowyn’s, and I can tell from my best
friend’s expression that she’s remembering the same thing I am.
All of high school, basically. When
Principal Ipswitch dedicated herself to what she called our reprehensible,
attention-seeking behavior.
What amazes me is how little I’ve thought
about high school since leaving Missouri. Deliberately. And tonight, it’s like
I never left.
“I saw the darkness at the heart of the
confluence myself,” Emerson says with a great calm I certainly don’t feel.
Especially since I saw it too. That terrible, encroaching dark, eating the
world whole. It had hunkered there where the three rivers meet, waiting
malevolently. And then, tonight, it exploded. Emerson, with our help,
destroyed it. My heart starts kicking at me again, a riot of panic, like it’s
still happening.
“Are you accusing us of something?” Carol
asks, and she’s scarily good at this. She sounds on the verge of laughter, yet
somehow almost hurt. As if she cares deeply what Emerson thinks of her. Of
them.
I worry this will work on my sister.
Because the truth is, Emerson has no power here. She’s too honest, and this is
politics. Power. It’s ego and control. Emerson is a lot of things I roll my
eyes at all the time, but she’s never been ruled by ego or greed.
Not like these witches.
“I’m pointing out facts,” Emerson says,
sounding patient now. My sister has never met a windmill she didn’t try to
charge head-on. “And the facts are, we saved St. Cyprian. You could have helped
us, Carol. But you didn’t.”
“Oh, Emerson.” Carol sounds sad.
Legitimately sad, which would require emotions on her part. And I’m pretty sure
velociraptors don’t have emotions. “Why would we deliberately choose not to help save the place where we live? How
does that make sense?”
Emerson blinks. “You tell me.”
I want to give a short TED talk on
gaslighting and master manipulators, but this is not the time. It’s still not clear whether this is an execution or
not. Carol did mention infractions of the pubertatum rules, and last I heard,
me using magic the way I did tonight is a capital offense. Emerson wasn’t
supposed to be able to do it. I
claimed I could do it, but was exiled
because they said I had no real power—only the shameful, unsafe urge to use
borrowed force. Either way, using witchcraft as an exile is about as forbidden
as you can get.
I can always be counted on to rebel when
it will do me the most harm.
There’s a part of me that wants to turn
to Nicholas Frost, the only other being here who isn’t standing with a group.
He’s the one who came up with the goddamned pubertatum back when the earth was
young, or so they taught us in school. He is considered the first
Praeceptor—the teacher of all teachers, but not in a safe little classroom way.
Praeceptors in his day taught armies of witches, then wielded them.
But I know better than to look to him for
help.
Looking at him at all is fraught enough
when you were once a teenage girl with a teenage girl’s unwieldy crush. Those
things are hard to vanquish.
“We saved St. Cyprian,” Emerson says
again, as if saying it enough will get through to Carol when as far as I know, nothing has ever gotten through to Carol.
“Maybe you did save the town,” Felicia
says, with her little sniff of disdain that I remember all too well. “But if
you did, it was for your own gain and nothing more.”
I want to say that at least that’s better
than doing it for attention, but I don’t, because I’m evolved as fuck.
My sister’s eyes narrow. And here’s the
thing that most people don’t know about Emerson Wilde. She expends a lot of
energy trying to convince the people around her to see the error of their ways.
She embodies the notion that if you lead a horse to water in the right way, it
really will drink.
But when she’s done, she’s done.
As her little sister, I know this better
than anyone. So, I step in to stop the impending storm. “This seems
straightforward to me,” I say, doing my best to sound as if all this carrying
on is a waste of energy, and I low-key resent it. And as if I’m some kind of
authority here. “Emerson has some magic. Let her take the test again.”
Author Bio:
HAZEL BECK is the magical partnership of a river witch and an earth witch. Together, they have collected two husbands, three familiars, two children, five degrees, and written around 200 books. As one, their books will delight with breathtaking magic, emotional romance, and stories of witches you won’t soon forget. Find them at www.Hazel-Beck.com.
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