Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
“You did what to me?!”
I roll my eyes. “Charlie, zip it.”
“You’re right. Maker is too vamp territory.”
“Drop the vampires and think clearly.” I swallow and take in a calming breath like everything is fine. “I need you to explain to me step-by-step how you made me a witch. How exactly does someone make a witch? You can’t do that.”
“It’s pretty easy actually, when you’re a god,” he says, flicking imaginary lint off his shirt.
I get to my feet and point at him. “If I am a witch, I’m going to levitate you through a wall if you keep messing around. This is serious.”
“Okay, I’m sorry, this is just so cool. I wasn’t kidding about the god thing, though.
I mean, Lethos was a god and he made Sunday.
I’m only human, but I am a human in possession of a magic book, so it wasn’t me that made you a witch.
It was the book. Or, maybe since I used the book, I conjured your magic situation? ”
“I’m a situation now?”
“Yeah, duh, you’re a witch now. Totally worth the book going haywire on me tonight.”
“I-I’m not a witch,” I insist but that feels wrong because I can feel something inside of me that wasn’t there before.
Pulsing, writhing, like something woke up in my bones and is too big for my body to hold.
My bones ache from the weight of it. It’s a relief.
It’s power. The grief at my world collapsing was getting too heavy to carry inside of me.
If I have power in me, there’s no room for the grief, it forces it out, pushes it to the edges of my body until I can hardly even feel it.
“Meadow. Come on. You were floating. Right up to the ceiling! That’s BWIT energy.”
“BWIT?”
“Big Witch In Town.”
“Charlie knock it off,” I groan. “Now is not the time for an acronym but… wait a sec.” I hold up a hand to stop him from talking when I realize what Charlie just said. “Two questions–when did you have time to cast a spell to make a witch and what do you mean the book went haywire? Define haywire.”
Charlie doesn’t answer me because he’s looking at the ceiling wistfully. “You were like a superhero up there, if superheroes didn’t move.”
“Charlie, the book.” I snap my fingers at him and he blinks in surprise, like I just threw a bucket of water on him. “Now look who needs to focus,” I say and he sticks his tongue out at me.
“Touché, but my book is more interesting than some mini-pigs.”
I cross my arms. “I beg to differ. You’ve never seen a purse pig, buddy.”
“I’m not here to compare bovines to books, Meadow.” He turns away from me and starts pacing now, he walks out of my room and down the hallway to the kitchen.
“I think you mean porcine.”
“Don’t Steve Irwin me right now, Meadow.”
I sigh and rub my forehead. “Who’s that?”
Charlie turns to give me a horrified look. “An angel. He was an angel.”
I walk past him and put on a kettle of tea. “I’ll make us tea. I feel like this is gonna be a long night.” I take a seat on the couch while Charlie paces and mutters to himself.
He points a finger at me. “How magical are you on a scale of 1-10?”
I freeze up at his question. How does someone even measure that? There’s no real metric for this, is there? It’s not like height or the ability to eat cheese.
“Uh…a four?” I say. Four seems good. I like four. Four is enough, when I’m not even supposed to be magical in the first place.
Charlie hums. “I thought you would be more magical but the book is jacked right now so maybe you're as good as it could do. Or maybe I’m a pretty shitty god. Why would I make you with so little power? That’s not what I wrote when I asked for magical backup for Buffy.”
I gasp at his words. “I’m plenty magical. Full of that mystical feminine or whatever, okay? You take that back right now or I’ll…I’ll…well, I don’t know what I’ll do but you’ll see how magical I am, and you are not my god, creator, or maker. You’re my roommate.”
“Potato, tomato.”
“Charlie. The. Book.” I say the last word through gritted teeth and it’s the closest I’ve come to not smiling when I’m mad since I’ve tried to break my smile. That fact alone cheers me some while Charlie launches into telling me all about the book.
“My book is bad. It’s…I don’t know, it’s broken.”
“Broken how?”
“Every time I used to write things they came out perfect. If I wanted anything, and I mean anything, all I had to do was be as detailed as I wanted it to be and I’d have it.
A double decker club sandwich with extra mayo?
Easy. An epic campaign the likes of which explorers have never seen and will never see again?
Light work. Hell, I even made Wrath a god, remember that? ”
I nod because of course I remember that.
Everyone in town remembers that, from the top to the bottom, we all know that a god walks among us.
Which is not much of a change when you think about it because we did actually worship Wrath as a god for centuries.
Maybe things are more normal than I thought.
“But then, things started to go wrong. Just little things at first. I wanted that sandwich toasted? It came out burnt. I asked for a sunny day for us to get some work done rebuilding last week and it snowed.”
“That was you?”
A week ago we had a freak snowstorm. We all just wrote it off as one of those things, or maybe even something connected to the mini-demons that were testing our boundaries.
Charlie nods. “Yeah, that was me. I thought I was going to help us get ahead and what did I do? I made a freaking blizzard in the middle of September, which just set us back from the timeline we were on to get the area by the greenhouses clean. On top of that, I had a complete psychotic break.”
“I’m sorry? A what?”
“A psychotic break. My brain went like this,” he says, bringing his hands together and pulling them away from each other with a ‘poof’ sound, “my brain felt like it was turned inside out and to be honest, I think I went somewhere else. Somewhere dark.”
“Oh my gods.”
“Don’t worry, it was just for a few hours.”
“Oh my gods!”
“I bet in the grand scheme it's the same as eating magic mushrooms, so what’s a little trip? Tonight was okay, the voices were only with me for a teeny tiny bit. You didn’t even notice.”
“Mushrooms are magic? Like in a potion?”
“Remind me to say less around you, I feel like I’m corrupting you and that’s really weighing on my conscience as of late.”
“Okay…” I lean forward in my seat and try to think of a moment when I felt different tonight. When me turning into a witch could have happened and I can’t think of a single moment that was off. “When did you do it? You said you did it tonight.”
“While you were boiling the water for the pasta. I was kind of testing it out to see if the voices came back. If they did, at least someone else would be around to hear them.”
“The voices? What kind of voices?”
“When I use the book it’s like there’s someone else on the line.”
“The line? Like a phone line?”
“Yeah, when I use the book it’s like… I don’t know, it’s like I’m making a call.
It’s not me that makes things happen, it’s the person or god, or whatever power is on the other end of the line that makes things happen.
When they pick up, it’s stable, it’s powerful, it makes me feel like I’m connected to everything around me but not anymore.
Now there’s someone else there, there’s static on the line and everything is hard to hear through them. ”
The power, the feeling, whatever it is that I felt earlier perks up. I can feel it coursing through me as it settles in my chest, right over my heart. I press a hand there to not freak out.
“What do you hear if it’s not the power you’re used to picking up the line?”
“Screams. I hear voices screaming they want me. I can’t understand what they’re saying but I know what they sound like. What they want. They’re not human.” Charlie looks out the living room window. “I think they’re demons, Meadow.”
I don’t get to reply or ask why he thinks they’re demon voices on account of the piercing shriek that rips through the house a second later.