1
Savvy
This is the most something day—weirdest, definitely the weirdest—of Savvy’s life, and it’s barely past noon.
“Do you think your flower crown should have more hemlock?” Savvy’s best friend Brie squints at her in the rearview mirror of the car she’s driving along the dirt-and-gravel road.
Savvy’s in the back seat with a garment bag holding The Dress, capital letters, and another with the pink dress Brie plans to wear in her role as maid of honor. There’s also a duffel her other best friend Elle, short for Louise, handed her as they piled in to leave for the venue.
“No, it will overpower the rue,” Elle says. Elle is in her chic suit already and has planned this entire day within an inch of its life.
Underlying their fussing is the actual question her best friends are not brave enough to ask her: Is Savvy hexing Wilde really about to get married? To a regular human man?
Savvy never indulged in fantasies about her wedding while growing up. There were some other little witches who swooned over the fairy tale of the pitiful frog who could be transformed back into a much-reformed prince by the right witch and then put a ring on it. Or the story of the witch who saved the father and his three stepdaughters by banishing bad fairies from their chimney and then married the oldest daughter and they all lived happily ever after. The girls might have gone to sleep afterward dreaming of the charmer who’d steal their heart.
Savvy took away a different moral from those stories.
She believed in witches saving the day. It was her entire job, and, until recently, her entire life. She figured she’d be fine on her own. Forever. Her mother always assured her that was the best, safest way to be. She never thought she’d need to marry a prince or princess, or, well, anyone, to keep saving the world in small and large ways every day. She has C.R.O.N.E.—Covert Responses to Occult Nightmares by Enchantresses—for that.
But here she is, being driven to the Atlanta C.R.O.N.E. chapter’s extensive property outside the city. They’re headed to the rustic barn venue on the outer edge, used for social occasions where outsiders are invited. The entire property, with its rambling houses, barns, other buildings, fields, and forests, is known to the witches as the Farmhouse. Its iron-clad, blood-bound protective spells will prevent any guests from getting lost or seeing any secrets they shouldn’t. On this, her wedding day. Because apparently it can happen to anyone. By which she means love.
Griffin changed her plans … and, after some major freaking out, she’s surprisingly okay with that. Savvy can be impulsive, which occasionally gets her in trouble. But usually also back out again. You have to think on your feet when you could accidentally release a magic plague into the sewers of London or need to keep an angry dragon from burning a town in the Balkans. At first, the idea of marrying Griffin a year after meeting him felt on the same level as those things. A catastrophe in the making.
Then she looked at him, across the dinner table at their favorite Mexican place, waiting for her answer. Patiently. Over tacos.
Her sweet, mild-mannered, bespectacled, and yet still sexy as hell antiquities professor Griffin. And in that moment, she knew. He’s worth the risk. He’s the thing she never let herself admit she wanted.
So she said yes. Surprising not only herself, but her nearest and dearest.
“My mother will meet us there?” Savvy asks.
While Elle and Brie are on board with the marriage—they actually like Griffin—her mother is decidedly not. Savvy figures once the ceremony is over, her mother will just have to get over it. Eventually.
“Uh-huh,” Brie says, evasively.
“She’ll be there.” Elle turns sideways so she can pat Savvy’s knee. “I’ve got this.”
“Shit!” Brie shouts suddenly, jamming on the brakes. “No! No! No!”
Savvy and Elle exchange a look. Savvy cranes her neck to see what’s in front of them to merit this reaction, but Brie shouts, “Blindfold!”
Savvy feels the energy of the spell and suddenly she can’t see anything. “Why?” Savvy asks, reaching up to adjust the cloth now covering her eyes.
Brie huffs. “I told Diego to make sure he got Griffin and the groomsmen here thirty minutes from now so we would not run into them. You can’t see each other before the ceremony.”
“Oh, come on, do we have to be that traditional?” Savvy asks.
“You can’t see the face she’s making right now, but I’m getting a big yes,” Elle says in her calm way.
“He can’t see her either!” Brie says, and Savvy hears her pound the steering wheel. “Why aren’t they going inside?”
Elle interrupts Brie’s dramatics. “I’ve conjured another blindfold. I’ll put it on him.”
Brie grumbles, but the car starts to move forward again.
Savvy guesses it’s a good sign there are invisible butterflies fluttering inside and around her like a Disney witch at the thought Griffin is up ahead. I’m going to marry him.
No one is more surprised than her. Marriages are rare among witchkin—especially with men, or outsiders—if not entirely unheard of.
The car stops. “Wait here!” Brie barks. Her door opens and then slams shut. Elle gets out too.
Savvy waits until the back door opens and Elle reaches in to guide her out of the car. She hears the low honey of Griffin’s voice protesting.
“Griffin?” she calls out.
“I take it you’re blindfolded too?” Griffin sounds amused.
“Yes.” Savvy laughs.
“You can thank me later, when you don’t have bad luck!” Brie inserts.
“Keep talking so I can find you,” Griffin says, closer now.
“I’m not sure—” Brie says.
Griffin’s friend and best man, Diego, says, “Let it be, woman.”
Savvy has to bite her lip to keep from laughing again. She can picture Brie with her hands on her hips, glaring at Diego, imagining hexing him.
“Marco,” Savvy says, “I’m right over—”
“Polo.” Griffin bumps into her.
She reaches out to find his hands with hers.
“There you are,” he says.
“Here I am.” Every nerve in her body sings at the contact between their fingers, at his nearness. He smells fresh out of the shower, one of her top three favorite Griffin states. Clean and woodsy.
“We’re really doing this, huh?” she murmurs.
“We are,” he murmurs back.
And then his lips find hers. There are cheers and also groans from their friends on either side, but Savvy blocks them out easily. Griffin fills her senses. His lips gently move against hers, teasing her lips open. He slides one hand around her back and she presses against him as close as she can without breaking contact. She deepens the kiss and …
“Okay, that’s enough,” Brie says right beside her. “Save something for later.”
“We should’ve eloped,” Savvy says, finishing the kiss with her palm on Griffin’s cheek before dropping both of her hands into his again.
“You shouldn’t be doing this at all,” a frosty, feminine voice she recognizes too well says.
“Hi, Claudia,” Griffin says as if he’s unbothered. He’s chosen to try to wear her mother down by simply being nice. He doesn’t understand, because of course he can’t. He doesn’t know the truth about Savvy. He has no idea she’s a witch.