“They’re dead and gone, and it’sall your fault—”
“No!”
She jolted upright in bed, panting.
A soft glow permeated the dark room. The luminous, pale light wavered gently in the darkness, like the sun shining through water. She looked down.
The origin of the light was her own body.
“Shit!” She looked like the ugly troll nightlight she’d had as a kid.
Not again.“Shit, shit, shit…” She scrambled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen, fighting back the panic. It had been so long since this happened, she’d started to think it wasn’t coming back.
Yanking open the freezer, she peered through the condensation clouds until she found what she was looking for: the bottle of whiskey. She despised the taste of hard alcohol and drinking it straight was the last thing she wanted to do.
And yet, she stood there in her kitchen, freezer door wide open, and chugged the burning liquor right out of the bottle like it was water.
Okay, not like it was water.
After two swallows, she choked and staggered to the counter, bent over the sink, and tried not to gag. Then she forced herself to drink more. Eventually, the alcohol hit and, mercifully, the glowing subsided.
The bottle was returned to the freezer, and a now decently drunk Lily staggered into the living room and collapsed on the sofa. The clock on the wall told her it was nearly two AM. The room spun, and she hated it.
But at least she wasn’t glowing anymore.
There were two types of witches in the world: blood-borns and practitioners. By far the most common, practitioners were regular humans that, for whatever insane reason, chose to study the supernatural. They trained to develop the Sight and studied Temporal magic, learning the art of sigil drawing and performing power-enhancing rituals.
Blood-born witches, on the other hand, were a rare, mostly extinct line of supernaturally gifted women, descended from bloodlines spanning back centuries. Longer than anyone could trace.
Lily and Iris were two such witches. Twins, actually, which was supposedly a wildly auspicious phenomenon that meant they were destined for greatness, blah, blah, blah.
Their mother had been a powerful blood-born and coven leader: beautiful, charismatic, a force to be reckoned with. She’d been young and yet so gifted that Lily had no doubt she could have extended her lifespan by centuries if she’d wanted. But she’d never gotten the chance before she’d been killed in a fire with Lily’s father, along with their entire coven.
All the power and ancient blood flowing in her veins hadn’t saved her. She and her husband and their coven had been trapped in the building and perished within.
The End.
As a result, Lily questioned the point of practicing witchcraft when life was still just as fleeting as it was for regular people. Knowledge of the supernatural world hadn’t saved her mother’s life, so why should Lily waste her time with it?
So she’d chosen to turn her back on it and live as a regular person. She and Iris had left Ireland and moved to Canada shortly after the funerals, and she hadn’t practiced magic since. In fact, she’d done everything she could to leave that part of herself behind.
They had both worked hard to adopt Canadian accents, though they still slipped occasionally, and tried to blend in. She called her winter hatstuques, and she owned a parka fit for Arctic exploration, which was what it felt like was happening when she walked to the metro station in winter.
She’d gone to university and gotten a ‘normal’ degree. She designed clothes and bought groceries and took walks in the park. And maybe one day, she would find a man to start a family with, and her children would be boys so she wouldn’t pass on her curse to them.
The End.
Except… here she was, awake in the middle of the night because she was glowing. Again. Her repressed powers didn’t give a damn what she wanted, and she worried the suppression of her abilities was turning her into some kind of magic battery.
She did not want to find out what that battery powered. She just wanted it to go away.
Worst of all, she hadn’t told a soul. Not even Iris knew of her mysterious affliction, and her head-in-the-sand policy of determined ignorance prevented her from researching her condition. She had no idea what was happening or why. She only knew that if she chugged whiskey, it went away. It probably had something to do with alcohol being a neurotoxin, murdering her precious witchy brain cells and keeping them from—
The familiar screech of her rusty mailbox opening made her jump.
She went stiff as a board on the sofa, heart pounding. Was someone delivering mail at two in the morning? That would be ridiculous. But then who was opening the mailbox? Was someone trying to steal her mail? Or searching for a spare house key?
Oh god, was someone trying to rob her? She almost regretted giving Grimalkin back to Iris the other day. Toss him at an intruder, and they’d run screaming as their face was clawed off.
