Page 14 of Witchlore
“Good thing this is a life-threatening spell we’re after, then!” He walks backward toward the door, arms spread wide in an annoying gesture of invitation that makes me want to slap him with my rolled-up apron.Smug dick,I think, but I follow him through the glass doors into the gift shop. Inside, he leans a hand on the desk and smiles flirtatiously at the student with glasses behind it. “Can you tell me where the origins of witchcraft exhibition is?”
“Upstairs,” she says, handing us both leaflets. “First floor before you go up to the main library.”
“Thanks so much.” Bastian winks at her and she actually simpers. I wonder where he got that kind of instinct from. How does he just know how to be charming, and whom to charm and when? I’ve had a male body multiple times in my life and sometimes it’s even been the kind of body that gets admiring looks, but I’ve never had this kind of confidence, to know without hesitation that because I’m handsome, I’ll be wanted.
“We’re here for an exhibition on witchcraft?” I ask, as weturn the corner and climb the white marble stairs up into the old building.
“Yes.” Bastian gives me a sidelong look. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing, it’s just a bit ironic,” I say as we reach the top of the stairs and turn down the dark corridor that is the start of the old library, a combination of beautiful heavy wood, carved gray stone, and strategically placed spotlights. “Don’t we know our origins?”
“I thought you were shitty at witchcraft,” he says dryly. “Maybe you can learn something.”
“Are you always such an arse or is it just for me?”
“Are you always so defensive or is it just for me?” he returns.
“I’m not defensive!”
“They said defensively.” Bastian turns left into a room that’s lined floor to ceiling with books, items in glass display cases running down the center of the room.
“At least you don’t misgender when you’re being insulting,” I mutter, staring at a rusted metal scold’s bridle in a display case.
“I would never.” He says it lightly, but I can tell he means it.
We walk unhurriedly around the exhibition. The first mounted informational panel has an illustration of Stonehenge on it and witches standing with their hands raised to the sky.EARLY PRE-ROMAN WITCHES PRACTICED PAGANISM AND WERE OFTEN VILLAGE LEADERS, HEALERS, AND EVEN HONORED BY COMMUNITIES FOR THEIR POWERS.I feel weirdly detached. Shapeshifters were there at the very beginning, too, before Christianity, when the world was wild and magical and humans lived under the protection of witches and shapeshifters. We even shared magic back then and lived in covens together, shapeshifters and witches, intermarrying and raising families. Nowadays it’s something witches will say about bad luck,Oh, you must have had a shapeshifter in your family onceupon a time,as if we are a lingering curse. There’s a reason Elizabeth was terrified to tell anyone about me and it’s not just because she was scared of coming out to her mother. I glance at Bastian and wonder if he might think the same things other people at college did:Who would date a shifter? Did she have a death wish?
“Learning anything?” Bastian says blandly. I shrug and move on. He follows me. We stare together at a painting of a witch burning. I’m suddenly uneasy. My mother’s voice from the past pops into my head:A witch will never trust a shifter. We used our skills to avoid their fate. They never forget it.This is the historical moment I’ve had to write at least three five-thousand-word essays on in college so far: the Great Cull, the seventeenth-century witch trials. Shifters avoided all the worst prejudice against witches in those terrible days in the past by disappearing into the background, and that’s where we have stayed. Witches refused to accept us back into covens, so now we live long lives in small families where children are rare, tolerated in society because of our value to the Merlin Foundation and the government, but the trust between us has never rekindled. When I look at Bastian, staring at the painting, I wonder if any of his ancestors died this way, on a pyre or under a pressing stone. It suddenly feels very weird for me to be here, with a witch, staring at this picture of all the reasons we should hate each other.
“You know, most witches wouldn’t want to look at this with a shifter,” I say, attempting a light, disinterested tone to test him. Bastian gives me a withering look.
“Please,” he mutters.
“Please what?”
“Look, I know most witches still carry prejudice from all this, but those witches are idiots.” His voice is shockingly matter-of-fact.“Witches and shapeshifters lived together on this island for hundreds of years before it happened.”
“But it did happen.” I look almost apologetically up at the screaming witch.
“Shifters used their skills to survive and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Besides, there are shapeshifters working at the Merlin Foundation. Or so I’ve heard. I’d have to get used to it.”
“So, what? You’re getting used to it now?”
He gives me a strange sideways look.
“I love how you just assume you’re the only shifter I’ve met,” he says.
It’s a declaration that shocks me more than it should. There’s no one else at college like me. I’m the only person who has to stare at their books and blush whenever a teacher mentions the witch trials, weathering the muttered snide comments of other students.Traitors.But Bastian isn’t like that. Bastian has met other shapeshifters; he doesn’t look at me and put all of history on my back. He might be insufferable, but at least he’s not prejudiced.
I nod and we move on. I can almost pretend we are just two friends walking through a museum, rather than two strangers looking for a grimoire. Then Bastian stops in front of the display case. “Here it is.”
I stare at the book. It’s old and open on two pages that are full of spells, pentagrams, and other symbols. The little sign on the glass says:THE WITCHLORE OF BODIES. THIS ANCIENT GRIMOIRE WAS LEFT IN THE CARE OF THE JOHN RYLANDS COLLECTION AS PART OF A LEGACY IN 1951.
“It’s inside the display case,” I say, my hands beginning to moisten with sweat.
“Yep.” Bastian is running his fingers around the edge of the display case, looking for something.
“Wait, you want tosteala book from the exhibition?” I stare at him.
