“Do you believe in fate?”
He licked those amazing lips of his. “I suppose I’d like to, but I fought in Afghanistan.”
“And?”
“And it seems a first world luxury.”
Sarah took her fingers off his tat and ran one across her lips, gazing into his eyes. “Do you understand physics?”
“To a community college level maybe.”
“Mmm. Well, you mentioned right and wrong, could you sum that up as light and dark?”
“As long as it’s still politically correct to do so.”
“I’m a witch.”
Paul’s expression remained blank. “As in Wiccan or devil worship?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. Neither.”
His gaze swept her face as though searching for signs of imbalance he’d previously missed, but he gamely asked, “Harry Potter?”
A whisper of a laugh escaped her. “Oddly enough, you’re getting warmer if you’re thinking Voldemort. I’m a dark witch by birth. It’s passed down in blood, and we do tend to stick together. The reason I asked you about physics is because scientifically that’s what witchcraft boils down to. It’s easier to keep religion out of it, but it has to do with right and wrong or light and dark. Dark witches have a genetic predisposition to manipulate dark matter for our personal benefit. Are you familiar with dark matter or dark energy?”
“Are you going to tell me that dark matter did that to your arm in the attic? Because if you are, I’m going to suggest we head for the emergency room and an MRI.”
Sarah sighed. And this is one reason we don’t tell. Nobody wants to hear it. She rubbed her hand over the bruised and shredded skin of her arm. It didn’t hurt because she chose not to let it. “Nobody hurt me, Paul. I saw something that brought back a very bad memory, so bad that dark matter flowed through me. Because I didn’t manipulate it or cast it back out into the world, it hurt me like this.” She could very well have pulled it deeper inside, into her heart. That’s what her mother and Aunt Lily had done. The pond they’d ended their lives in had probably been to make it easier for her when the outside world looked for cause of death. We did it for you. Sarah shuddered.
“So dark matter has a hand and fingernails? Because I know a handprint when I see one.”
“It can take any form.” Sarah held her hands toward him, palms up, and opened a channel from her core to them. Two handfuls of red and orange fire took form as though her hands were the logs of a campfire. Against bare skin some of the flames leapt close to a foot into the air.
Paul shot off the bed, backpedaling straight to the floor and onto his backside. “Holy cow!”
Sarah pressed her hands together and extinguished the flames.
“That’s dangerous! I don’t know if you used chemicals or what, but that is downright stupid in this old house! You could burn the whole place down.”
“Like this?” she asked. She held her palms outward for the briefest second, and half the room burst into flames around them. Flames licked the curtains and canopy above the bed, smoldered against the floral wallpaper, and then vanished. Not even the smell of smoke remained.
Paul had crab-walked backward a few more feet, and dropped to his backside on the floor, his long legs outstretched. Opening his mouth his lips formed the word “How,” but no sound came out and he closed it again, staring at her.
“It’s as easy for me as it is for you to make a fist, but it comes from here.” Sarah pointed at the area of her heart. “It’s a limited capability, like strength or energy is to you.” She gestured toward the wooden wardrobe. “You know you can push that armoire over, but not a car. We have no real limitations like that thanks to dark matter. Dark matter itself is unlimited, and witches can access it for additional power, but, let’s just say it’s very expensive to use. There is always a cost for casting with dark matter.”
“I don’t know why, but I half believe you,” he managed in a thick voice.
“It’s true. The night I met you in the Target parking lot, that bomb was me.”
Again his mouth opened and closed.
“I try not to do that. I had PMS.”
A faint huff of laughter shot out of Paul’s mouth.
“I guess it sounds kind of funny, but really it’s not. When dark matter flows through a witch, it increases in volume. Causing dark matter to expand in the universe is a very bad thing, and there are consequences.”
“Like with gravity or anti-matter?”
That must have been a really good community college. “Even more immediate problems. There’s always a backlash for casting. That woman in the pickup was rude to me, so I did something to her. The cost for it came due. We call it an aftershock. I tried to pay it myself—that’s why you found me flat on my back on the pavement—but I’m afraid it got you too.”
Paul looked at his forearm as though he expected to find it black and blue and shredded like hers.
“I wish,” she continued, “that what it did to you had been as simple as bruises. Dark matter is as intelligent as light, but it looks for weakness and takes advantage.”
“Are you telling me this dark matter stuff is evil?”
“Yes, and it wants me.”
He widened his eyes. “It doesn’t already have you? You’re not evil? Voldemort sure was.”
The comment hurt. She blinked, hoping her eyes wouldn’t water, and glanced away from his candid brown ones. “I’m trying not to be, but I am a dark witch.”
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”
She met his eyes. “Call it like it is, Paul. Don’t be polite to evil. It gets a good foothold because people don’t want to be rude.”
“Sarah, this is the oddest conversation. You’re not pulling my leg, are you?”
She bit her lip and considered how to respond. She settled with flicking two fingers at his black cowboy boots. A force slid Paul two feet closer to her. He shoved to stand immediately and backed up to the door.
“Believe me now?”
“Don’t do that again.”
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t.” He appeared to be taking it well, although it seemed his logical brain kept trying to protect him and convince him it wasn’t real. A lot of people did that, pretended what they saw wasn’t real. It made them more comfortable. It made them feel safer. That’s why there was so much dark matter.
Paul shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and kept a safe distance. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the dark side wants you too.”
He glanced around the room. “What do you mean?”
“That night in Target my spell reverberated onto both of us. It tried to bind us together. You made it worse with your poem, tightening the noose. I tried to loosen it with that icon of yours.” Sarah pointed at the pewter cross on his neck. “I left hoping distance would weaken it, but you keep coming back, Paul. And you touched me now. Several times.”
Turning his hands palm up, he looked at them. “Are you saying I’m going to start making fires?” He moved his fingers as though attempting it.
“No, I didn’t say you were a witch. Dark witches are always women and we’re born to a bloodline, not made. I’m saying you and I are bound to each other as a payment to dark matter. Collateral, if you will.”
Paul dropped his hands and tilted his head to the side, frowning. “Bound, like a love spell?”
“Bingo.”
“Now I know you’re playing.” He glanced around the room as though looking for hidden cameras. “How’d you do that pulling thing? I know! My boots are steel toed! It’s magnets, isn’t it?”
Sarah rolled her eyes heavenward. “Yeah, Paul.” She moved her hand as though lifting something and Paul rose two feet into the air, sliding up the wall. “It’s magnets.”
“Stop! Put me down!”
Sarah made sure he landed gently, but his brows drew together and he glared.
“You said you wouldn’t do it again!” he protested.
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry. But you won’t believe me for more than two minutes.”
“Maybe I don’t want to believe you.”
Sarah crossed her arms. “I only told you because I thought maybe it would help!”
“Help?”
“Yes, help you understand why you’ll spend the next twenty years making excuses not to go home so you can stay here and stalk me. You won’t be able to stop yourself.”
“Oh, wow, really? You basically hit and ran on me, and I needed to make an insurance claim. The body shop wouldn’t even file with your insurance because I didn’t have the right paperwork.”
“Why’d you come back today?”
“I was being nice returning your insurance card!”
“Yeah, right. Why were you being nice?”
“I don’t know, Sarah. Maybe because I’m from Oklahoma.”
“If you say so. But wait until you try to leave. You won’t be able to. You won’t be able to stop thinking about me. You’ll want to do anything to spend time with me.”
“Seriously?”
“You know it’s true! If right this minute I asked you to pluck my chin hairs, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“You have chin hairs?”
“That’s not the point. It was a gross example. My point was that you can’t bear to leave! Thoughts of me will consume your entire life. Anything that was important to you before will disappear. You’ll think only of me.”
“Okay, well, watch this.” Paul walked out the bedroom door and Sarah followed.
“I figured if you knew the truth, you’d understand what was happening to you, and maybe we’d be able to figure out what to do about it together.”
Paul hurried down the wide staircase. “If you stay here, and I get the hell out of Dodge, I’d say we’re off to a good start breaking this love spell of yours.”
“But you’re not listening, because it isn’t my love spell.” Sarah followed him to the front door. “It’s from the dark side and you won’t be able to resist.”
“You do realize I think you’re insane, right?”
“No, you don’t.”
Paul yanked the front door open. “Goodbye, Sarah. Watch me resist coming back, okay?”
“Just try calling instead of coming over next time the urge hits. Let’s see if distance helps. My number is all 7’s and 1’s, you know, 7-1-7, 1-7—”
“It’s been real.” Paul galloped across the front porch and down the steps as Sarah shouted her number after him.
Sarah called off work on Tuesday, in case Paul came by. It was her first sick day in two years of working for Mass Power and Light. They sent her flowers. For the first time in her life she received flowers that she hadn’t ordered herself. They came in a little yellow cup with a smiley face on it, all daisies and greenery. The coffee sucks without you. MP&L Billing Dept. For a brief moment Sarah was the happiest woman alive. She wondered if Paul was the kind of guy who’d send flowers, and checked her phone again for missed calls.
She hadn’t slept last night, preoccupied with watching her phone. Twice she’d called 611 and asked them to call her to make sure nothing was wrong with it. By four in the morning, she had looked up hotels in the area and called them looking for Paul. She hated her stupidity for not asking which one he was staying at. Two of the hotels had hung up on her when she’d asked for Paul Revere Longfellow.
She’d taken a bath instead of a shower that morning, because standing in the shower with water running in her ears might make her miss his phone call. Wet hair dripped down her back because she couldn’t risk the noise of a blow dryer. Sarah wandered aimlessly around her house, phone in one hand and flowers in the other.
Ugh! I have it so bad! She kissed the mug and slammed the arrangement onto an end table. Flipping open her laptop, she turned Sleepless in Seattle on with mute. Grabbing a copy of the novel Outlander, which she’d read approximately two hundred times, Sarah checked again she hadn’t muted her phone and that her phone ringer was still on high. She tucked it under her bra strap, and tried to read with the movie in her peripheral vision. Thoughts of Paul kept flashing through her mind; their conversation, his expressions, his comments. He was the first person she’d ever told. There was something thrilling about it. The scenario replayed in Sarah’s mind as it had over the past twenty-four hours and it occurred to her that:
A) Paul was staying away.
B) After the way she’d acted, he had to think she was either a needy lunatic or a needy lunatic witch, and really, what was the difference?
C) If he could put her out of his mind, and she could put him out of her mind, wouldn’t that in fact break the spell?
“I mean, duh!” she said to Tom Hanks on the screen. “I have to want to break it, right? I’m the one with the background to do it, and if he can put me out of his head I can put him out of mine! Right? Duh, duh, duh!” She thumped the laptop shut and marched upstairs to her mother’s room. Darting inside, Sarah snatched the pink leather book, slammed the still open window shut and followed it with the bedroom door seconds later. Sitting on the top step she opened to the first page of Aunt Lily’s old book and began to read.
Sometime after midnight Sarah shut it and leaned forward, resting her head on the book. Not one of the spells would stop a witch from wanting someone. If a witch wanted someone, she took them. The spells were all designed to make the other person go away. From wiping the witch’s address from a mind, to causing another person to forget how to walk, it was all about making certain the love-struck person didn’t bother the witch.
It made Sarah nauseous.
That’s why that guy still mows the grass. Aunt Lily never even tried to set him free.
Sarah wondered if her aunt had made him tend the yard on purpose. She opened the book again and reread one of the pages. The longer a spell went unchecked, the stronger it became. There was no way dark matter would allow her to set the guy free now. And I’m not half the witch Lily was.
Sarah studied the bruises and gashes on her arm and ran her hand over it. They vanished. Standing, she went directly upstairs to the attic and faced the trunk, still ajar from her earlier visit. Grabbing the white cloth off the floor she dropped it over the mirror where her mother and Aunt Lily still looked out at her.
“You didn’t do it for me,” she told them, knowing that they couldn’t hear her. They were long gone, part of dark matter now, but she needed to say it for herself. “You did it because you couldn’t have everything you always wanted anymore and you didn’t know how to cope with that life.”
Sarah had decided the day that she’d stood on the shore of the mill pond and watched the police search for their bodies that she wouldn’t end up like that. She was no longer so young and strong that casting came easy and without cost. Now she battled the temptation of dark matter every day. As a young witch with plenty of dark matter flowing through her, she’d rarely needed to pull dark matter from the universe around her, unless she was feeling particularly greedy. And even when she’d been greedy, Mother and Aunt Lily had so much power they’d taken care of most of her wants and needs before she recognized them. Aunt Lily had even taken care of the boy she’d cast the love spell on in high school.
Thinking of how that might have worked now made Sarah’s stomach drop. I was a stupid selfish brat. I still am, but I’m trying!
Sarah tossed the book inside and slammed the lid of the trunk shut. “I miss you both.”
She glanced around the attic. This was all that was left. A bunch of stuff. Her eyes fell on Aunt Lily’s dress box and she bit her lip as an idea hit her. It wouldn’t require a drop of casting, and if it worked, it would help break her draw to Paul. Sarah darted across the attic before her good sense could argue and grabbed the box. She raced toward the stairs, certain she could hear other items calling out to her: Look at this! You’re missing good stuff! Try me on! Did you see this box? You could have fun with this! You’d look great in this!
At the top of the stairs she real
ized she had the suit box too and flung it away. She hit the stairs at a run, ignoring imaginary voices. “Oh, fuck you all!”
THE NEXT MORNING Sarah brought muffins instead of donuts to the office, and made vanilla hazelnut coffee. Purists bitched whenever she did, but she loved it. This week’s flower arrangement had been delivered yesterday, and someone had put it on her desk for her. Yellow tea roses in a crystal vase sat next to last week’s wilted arrangement. She set that one in her trash. The new roses had no scent and didn’t compare to the gifted daises, even if they had come from an office fund. Someone had thought to send them. It cost her over three hundred dollars a month to send flowers to herself, and on her clerk salary that was a lot. Refusing to touch the Archer fortune wasn’t easy, but since she drove an old vehicle and lived rent free, she managed.
“Oh. My. Wow!” Mindy stared at her over the cubicle wall. “That dress is insane.”
Sarah smoothed the blue silk. According to the ladies room mirror it looked every bit as good as Sarah had assumed it would. The pale blue matched her eyes, and she’d crammed her feet into a pair of Aunt Lily’s ridiculous designer stilettos. The temptation to cast on those shoes and make them comfortable was fierce, but Sarah had worn flats in from the parking lot and knew breaking the love spell was more important than comfort.
“Tell me that is a hand-me-down and I’ll scratch your eyes out!” Mindy came through the cubicle entrance and put her hands on her hips. “I hate your guts.”
“Thanks,” said Sarah.
“I’d sell my soul to look like that,” said Mindy.
Sarah’s heart fell. Aunt Lily had.
“I was going to ask you out to lunch, but I’m not going anywhere with you looking like that. Go fuck yourself.” Mindy marched back out of the cubicle.
Encouraged by this response, Sarah played social butterfly instead of spending the morning hibernating in her office and pouring over forms. She helped the two newest clerks with the archaic computer system and delivered folders to Document Control. She spent one hour in her boss’s office filing his paperwork and genuinely listening as he talked to her about career path opportunities inside the company. From ten until noon Sarah attended a meeting in Personnel dubbed “New England Women Lighting the World.” She managed not to fall asleep, resisted the temptation to cast on a fly terrorizing the conference room, and felt saintly not giving the speaker the taste of a real buzz word.
Bitch Witch Page 5
