Page 93 of Wicked Witch of the Wolf

“You’d lose that bet.” I’d learned it in similar ones I’d picked up all over the country. Most of which had burned in the trailer fire. “Also, it disturbs me to hear you call it a ‘headshop.’”

“Is that the wrong nomenclature?”

“No, it’s just weird coming from you. You make the word sound dirtier, somehow.”

“Then heed thiscoming from me. Stop using magic books. Though you’ve been educated by powerful magicals, you are not a taught witch, Lilibet Lennox. You are an elemental. An earth witch. Act like it.”

This woman truly irked the hell out of me. “Back off, Margaux. I’m trying to bring back Bronwyn the only way I know how.”

“If you didn’t like hearing the word headshop coming from me, you’re really going to hate this one.Bullshit.” She coughed again, and sagged against the chaise, her eyelids sinking.

I went to her, ensured thehealcharm I’d given her was against her skin. “Rest. You can chew me out later.”

“This isn’t the only thing you know how to do. You’re fighting your own magic. Remember what I told you—what your mother said.”

I remembered. It’d been eating at the back of my mind since she’d said it.

“When you’re at full strength, you have to expel and destroy the hex bags then anchor the roots of the largest saguaro to yourself. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but you have to do it to connect with the soil.”

The hex bags were long gone.

Earlier, I’d fed some power into Red’s roots, but I hadn’t anchored myself to them. I wasn’t even sure I knew how.

I was exhausted beyond anything I’d ever felt in my life and somehow still on my feet. I was heartbroken, scared, and mourning a missing man so important to me that I felt sick at the thought of existing a single day without him.

Yet I’d bonded with soil that didn’t belong to me to battle a rival earth witch and nearly taken down a powerful wolf alpha in the process. If I’d chosen to kill Floyd, no one could’ve stopped me. Not Desmond, not the witches, and not Mason Hartman.

I put theWeret-hekau Maleficiumback in the null bag and walked out without looking back. It was time to fully connect with my soil.

Though tempted,I didn’t call Fennel or Cecil or alert Ida.

This was something I had to do alone.

“I’m a travel witch at heart, Red—we Lennoxes are. Mom was a travel witch, as was her mother before her, and hers before her, and so on, ad infinitum. It’s the way things have always been done. When she changed that … it scared me.”

“I’m scared, Mom.”

“That is as it should be. To form a deep connection with anything, soil or person, you must show that you’re willing to be vulnerable to them.”

“I believed she’d betrayed the essence of who we are.” I pulledmy top over my head and dropped it on the ground beside the stones surrounding Red’s grave. “If Mom wasn’t a travel witch, maybe I wasn’t either. And if I wasn’t, who was I?”

“It means that it’s okay to be scared.”

I unhooked my bra and dropped it onto my top then unzipped my jeans. I was already barefoot, so that would save time.

Not that I was in a rush. No, this part was important. The talking, the naked communication. It was something I’d neglected to do except in anger or while bargaining, cajoling, or coddling.

“I know the truth now. She’d found, as my friend Joon said, ‘a stopping place.’” I shimmied out of my jeans and panties and dropped them on the pile.

“Will I still travel after this?” I stepped over the stones. “Yes. But not as often as before. And I will always, for as long as it’s within my power to do so, come home to you.”

Abuela Lulu took my hand, and we walked barefoot to a damp, spongy spot between two tall rows. “But you must show the soil that you’re willing to trust it—that your trust is stronger than your fear.”

I planted my feet, grounding myself as I had in the cotton field.

“I stand here as my ancestors before me once stood. Not on this small parcel of land, but above the soil everywhere, on every continent on this planet, from the time when we were one joined land, to our breaking apart into many lands, to now.”

She closed her eyes and bowed her head. “Gracias, Madre Tierra.”

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