Page 21 of Just a Little Wicked (Wicked Sisters #2)
Winter
Are you guys available for a video call?
Aunt Daisy
For you? Always.
E rikson found a dingy motel fifteen minutes outside Jonesport.
They probably would have been better off staying in Lubec, but they’d been too excited to get an early start the next morning.
Once again, they were the only guests and he was easily able to secure two rooms, putting both their luggage in the same room.
The entire time Winter followed after him like a zombie, her thoughts far away from mundane tasks. She noticed Erikson was careful not to so much as brush his shoulder against her, and she would have been offended if she weren’t also completely spooked about what had happened on the shore.
Winter dealt with a lot of strange things other people didn’t even know existed, but she’d never had an out-of-body experience like that before. She had been so consumed by her playing, by the rightness of it, that it had almost felt like her soul had shed her flesh.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. She was always so carefully in control, but ever since the vision with the Shadow Council had invaded her peace, she’d been floundering.
Things were spinning so fast and so far out of her reach that she felt like she was coming apart at the seams. She needed structure.
She needed boundaries. She wanted her old life back.
As soon as the motel door was locked and she and Erikson were sitting side-by-side on the suspiciously stained polyester bed cover, she took out her phone and FaceTimed her Aunt Rose. Aunt Daisy was nearly blind and didn’t have a phone, so they shared one.
Aunt Rose answered on the third ring, the video centered at her forehead.
After some fumbling and muttered curses, she rightened the video until she and Aunt Daisy were both in the frame.
They were squished together on a floral couch Winter didn’t recognize, wearing matching expressions of worry and delight on their faces.
“Winter!” Aunt Rose exclaimed. Her fuzzy red sweater matched Aunt Daisy’s fuzzy yellow sweater. They weren’t even that old, despite their prematurely white hair, but her twin aunts had taken to grandmother fashion with gusto. “We’ve been worried about you.”
Just seeing their faces had Winter’s shoulders relaxing.
After her mother had died and her father had abandoned her and her sisters, Aunt Rose and Aunt Daisy had left their jobs as librarians and taken on the task of raising three grieving, powerfully Wicked girls without a single complaint.
They’d loved Holly, Winter, and Missy with a fierceness that had kept the girls healthy and whole.
Aunt Rose was skilled at making potions, and she’d used them to conceal the girls’ powers despite the crippling arthritis she’d suffered for utilizing her skill for good rather than evil.
Aunt Daisy waved, her black-gloved hand entering the frame. “Is that Erikson Grimm with you?”
It always amazed Winter how damn much her Aunt Daisy could “see” when her eyes were clouded over and nearly sightless.
Aunt Daisy possessed a death touch, which she used to ferment apples—the secret ingredient in Wicked Good Apples cider.
There may have been a time when Wickeds with a death touch didn’t need to wear gloves, but if so, any knowledge of how to do that had been long lost. Now, Daisy had to wear gloves unless she wanted everything she brushed against to perish.
“Yes.” Winter angled the phone better so that Erikson’s handsome face came into view. He flashed her aunts a boyish grin.
“Aunt Daisy, Aunt Rose,” he said by way of greeting.
Winter sniffed. “You realize they’re not your aunts, right?”
He pressed his palm to his chest, like she’d wounded him. “But my brother is marrying into the family.”
“We’d love for you to call us Aunt Daisy and Aunt Rose,” Aunt Rose interrupted, her eyes crinkling. “You’re already like a son to us.”
Erikson’s teasing smile warmed into something genuine and a little tentative, and Winter had a flash of insight.
Had he felt as parentless as she had growing up?
His mother and father had been alive, but from what he’d shared, they’d been resentful and absent much of his childhood.
At least she’d had an Aunt Daisy and Aunt Rose in her life. She decided she could share them.
“Where are you?” Aunt Rose asked. “Holly said something about you and Erikson on a little lover’s getaway?”
Crap, she’d forgotten about that lie, and she wasn’t sure she had it in her to uphold the falsehood to Aunt Rose’s face. She deflected by asking, “Where are you ? Holly’s wedding is in three days. Shouldn’t you be home already?”
Aunt Rose and Aunt Daisy had left for their New England trip earlier that fall, and as far as Winter was aware, they’d been doing a splendid job of reconnecting with their kind.
Since the world would always need more good than evil, there were fewer Wickeds than Witches, but there were enough that her aunts had had no shortage of people to meet.
They were keeping a book of everything they learned and sending photos of the pages to Connor, who was practically salivating over the opportunity to collate the history they were recovering.
“We’re at Brenda Gartner’s house.”
A woman with wispy blond hair stuck her head in front of the screen and waved. She looked to be in her early fifties. “I’ve heard all about you, Winter!” she cried cheerfully. “You’re the seer, right?”
“Yes. It’s nice to meet you, Brenda.”
“I’ve only met a handful of Wickeds before your aunts, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to be part of this.
We’re starting a private Facebook group!
” At Winter’s alarmed expression she quickly added, “Everything will be coded in cooking terms. Like ‘pasta’ will mean ‘power.’ So we can say something like, ‘I need advice, my pasta just blew out a two-block power grid. What do I do?’”
Winter bit back a groan. Hopefully whichever government entity ended up with that data would just think the women were a bunch of quacks.
Brenda stuck her head closer to the screen, so that her brown eye took up the entire thing. “My power is nightmares. I can give people bad dreams.”
“Brenda lives in New Hampshire. She was our last stop. We’ll be back at Wicked Good Apples tomorrow morning,” Aunt Rose said after Brenda retreated. “Now, enough deflecting, Winter. I can see something is troubling you.”
Winter tugged on her lip with her teeth.
Her aunts could always tell when something was bothering her, no matter how closed up and distant she tried to keep herself.
They also knew that she didn’t come to them easily, so when she did, it was usually a dire situation.
She took a deep breath and blurted, “My powers are doing strange things lately.”
Aunt Rose and Aunt Daisy exchanged a solemn look. “Such as?” Aunt Daisy asked.
Erikson circled his hand around her wrist, squeezing lightly.
Surprisingly, she didn’t hate the contact.
It felt . . . comforting. And for that reason alone, she slipped her wrist out of his grasp.
There was no way she was getting attached to a TV star who’d be on the first flight out of Maine after Holly and Connor’s wedding.
For the first time since she’d had the horrible vision of the Shadow Council, Winter told her aunts everything.
She told them about the three-hour-long vision of her family being murdered, and how it had felt sticky and wrong in her mind.
She told them about the Shadow Council’s “offer,” and how she’d seen into the past .
She opened her lips to share what had happened on the coast a few hours ago, but then something had her pressing them back together.
How could she put such a feeling into words?
What she’d experienced had been so raw, so ancient, that it almost felt like sacrilege to speak about it.
Erikson shifted beside her when she finished talking, and she knew he was wondering why she’d left out the strange event on the coast.
Aunt Rose and Aunt Daisy’s expressions were grave by the time she finished. Silence hummed on the line. Finally, Aunt Daisy said, “I’m sorry you felt like you had to deal with this alone, Winter.”
She fidgeted. “That’s not it. I know you’re always there for me.
The problem was I knew you’d all try to help, and I wanted to keep you out of it.
At first, I thought I could outrun the future, but I couldn’t, and now I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to go from here, and things are getting stranger by the day with my power. ”
She heard Brenda’s voice in the background, indistinct.
Aunt Daisy nodded in agreement. “We think so too,” Aunt Rose murmured.
Then, facing the screen again she said, “We’ve learned a lot during our travels, dear.
One thing we’ve discovered is that a Wicked’s power continues to grow with her as she matures, meaning the eldest, and wisest Wickeds hold the most power.
I suspect it was another failsafe built into our biology by Mother Mage; a boon to humanity.
She hoped that the power of the wiser would outweigh the impulsivity of youth.
Since we have no elder Wickeds in the Celeste family, and we’ve kept no records, this wasn’t known to us. ”
“Holly, Missy, and I are going to get even more powerful?” Winter whispered in horror.
“I’m afraid so.”
Winter’s fingers tingled with something that felt suspiciously close to panic. Her visions were already bad enough. She didn’t want more power. She didn’t want to be stronger. She wanted to be free .