Chapter 32 - Hannah
Hannah
Riley is in Elizabeth’s kitchen, washing teacups like it’s a normal morning and she wasn’t nearly killed in a feeding ritual a few hours ago. She’s scrubbing each cup with unnecessary force, the porcelain clinking against the sink basin.
“Can’t you use magic to do that?” I ask from the doorway.
She doesn’t turn around. “Aunt Rebecca says it’s character building to do it manually.”
I step into the kitchen, hyperaware of how different everything feels without the binding spell. My chest feels empty, and after what we did, my body is a map of evidence. The bites, bruises, and scrapes might as well be fluorescent.
I’m marked, inside and out.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’d feel better if I could blast that bitch with a jet of fire, but Elizabeth wouldn’t let…” Riley turns, and her words die as she takes in my state.
The cup in her hand shatters.
Tiny fires crackle around her fingers as the porcelain shards scatter across the floor.
She stares down at her hands like they’ve betrayed her, then huffs and clenches her fists, looking up at me. “Hannah, what did she do to you?”
“What I wanted her to do,” I say, steady and certain.
Riley flinches like I’ve slapped her. “You don’t mean that. It’s the binding spell talking, or sanguine magic—”
“The spell broke at dawn.” I move closer, stepping through the broken porcelain. “I’m here because I want to be. Everything that happened between Julia and me, I chose.”
I’m close enough to catch her familiar lilac scent beneath the dish soap. It smells like something from the distant past, no longer my source of comfort but a memory of the life I used to have.
Riley’s eyes search mine, probably looking for the girl she knew, who read poetry and blushed at compliments and cried during movies. That girl would never have begged a dangerous witch to claim her on a forest floor, and would never have offered her life force repeatedly.
But that girl also got abandoned over and over, and always wondered what was wrong with her that made people leave.
“You’ve changed,” Riley whispers, and it’s not quite an accusation but close.
“Yes. Haven’t you?”
She looks down at her hands, where little flames dance between her fingers, and which bear the scars of her magical awakening.
“I spent twenty years trying to be normal. Good at sports, good grades, good daughter. But I was so desperate to fit in that I never asked if normal was what I wanted. Then I woke up and my life was literally on fire, and I had to choose between trying to suppress it or accepting that I’m different, and being different is what makes me special. ”
My eyes sting, and my throat is too tight to speak, so I just nod.
“I chose the fire, Hannah. I chose power and danger and a lineage of women who don’t apologize. And it meant losing you, but—” Her voice finally breaks. “But I’m not sorry for becoming who I was meant to be. I’m only sorry I couldn’t bring you with me.”
“You didn’t even try,” I say, barely audible.
“Because bringing you would have meant watching you burn.” She lifts her hands, and the fires blaze hotter, the heat stinging my face even from a distance. “I can’t protect you from this.”
“I know I don’t understand what it’s like to discover you’re a witch,” I say, “but I know what it’s like to have everything change overnight, and to realize the world is completely different from what you thought. I know what it’s like to have everything you thought was real turn out to be a lie.”
Riley looks away, blinking back tears. “I never wanted to lie to you.”
“What we had was beautiful.” I reach out and take her hand, feeling the buzz of magic beneath her skin that was never there before. “I’ll always love you. But things are different now, and neither of us can go back to who we were.”
“She will destroy you, eventually,” Riley says quietly.
“This isn’t about her.”
She lets out a cold laugh and pulls her hand away. “Keep telling yourself that.”
I bite my lip. In truth, I don’t know where Julia and I stand. We might never see each other again after this. Or maybe…
Well, this isn’t the moment for hopes and wishes. I don’t have to explain this to Riley.
So I back up, ready to go. “Bye, Riley. I want you to be happy. With your magic, with your coven, with whoever you become. You deserve that.”
“So do you,” she says softly. “Even if your happiness looks like something I don’t understand.”
I nod. This goodbye is both better and worse than her text message. Both easier and harder.
As I return to the foyer, I catch my reflection in one of the mirrors. I’m a mess of tangled hair and bruises, with shadows under my eyes that weren’t there before. But instead of defeat, I see courage. I see a new version of myself, bold and unafraid.
Rebecca passes me going the other way, and she scans me up and down with a cold, mistrustful look. I stare right back.
As she enters the kitchen, I hear Riley say to her, “Teach me the binding spell. I want to know how to trap monsters.”
Rebecca laughs. “The best way to trap a monster is to become one they fear.”
I leave them behind to go find Julia, my stomach twisting at the idea of my ex learning spells from a woman who imprisoned someone in a journal for 118 years.
But that’s none of my business.
Whatever Riley’s future in the coven entails, I know she’ll be good at it. She was always good at everything she tried. Soccer star, honor student, girlfriend.
Now she’ll be good at magic too.
I just won’t be there to watch.
Julia is gone.
I realize it as I travel from room to room, the house’s emptiness slowly settling over me. The air doesn’t hum with her presence anymore.
But I call anyway. “Julia?”
My voice echoes through the vast house, bouncing off high ceilings and antique furniture, getting swallowed by velvet drapes and Persian rugs. The answering silence mocks me.
“Julia!” Louder this time, more desperate.
Nothing.
I move through the rooms like I’m searching for a ghost. The parlor, the sanctum, the upstairs bedrooms.
That hollow feeling expands in my chest until I might collapse inward.
At last, Elizabeth pokes her head out of her bedroom, dressed for the day in jeans and a T-shirt. “She left, dear.”
The words land like a punch.
“When?” My voice sounds thin and fragile, nothing like the person who stood in the kitchen just now telling Riley I’d made my choice.
“A few minutes ago. I saw her out the window, crossing the yard.”
The breath leaves my lungs in a rush.
I whirl around, thunder down the steps, and burst out the front door.
“Julia!”
The morning air is cold against my skin, raising goosebumps on my bare arms.
I head for the forest where I surrendered to her. That’s where I left her cloak, so maybe she went to get it. Branches catch at my clothes and hair as I run, but I don’t care. I need to find her. I need to see her one more time and—
What? What do I need?
I don’t know. But this ache in my chest is unbearable.
The oak tree looms ahead, ancient and indifferent to my pain. The memory of what we did here crashes over me—her fingers inside me, her body pressing me against the tree and into the earth, the exquisite edge between pleasure and pain and something darker.
Her cloak is gone. She’s already collected it and left.
“Julia!” I scream it this time, my voice ragged.
The trees absorb the sound, giving nothing back. Even the birds are silent.
She’s really gone.
I sink to my knees. The ground is still disturbed from what we did here.
I press my hands against the cold dirt, feeling for some trace of her magic, some lingering warmth, some proof that tonight was real.
There’s nothing.
My chest heaves. What did I expect? A formal goodbye? A tender morning after? An exchange of phone numbers like this was a normal hookup?
The laugh that escapes me is half hysterical. Julia doesn’t do normal. Julia is a century-old witch who just broke free from a curse that bound her to me, and of course she ran.
Just because she showed vulnerability doesn’t mean she’s changed her fundamental nature, and just because she made me feel seen doesn’t mean she wanted to keep looking.
I should be relieved. This is for the best, and deep down, I know that.
I have to go back to real life now: go to work, where I’ll shelve books and recommend cozy mysteries to cheerful customers, and pay bills I can barely keep up with, and set up coffee dates with friends who will surely notice I’ve changed.
In time, my body will recover, and the marks will fade, and…
Well, I know the memory of her never will. The feeling of surrendering to her, of craving that dangerous edge between pleasure and destruction, is carved into my soul now.
I touch the tender bruises on my throat where she grabbed me early in the night. Beyond these marks, she’s changed something in me that I can’t reverse.
And then she left.
Like everyone in my life seems to do.
It’s time to accept that this brief and intense part of my life is over. Julia is gone, and I have to live with that.
It’s time to go home.
My house looks the same as when I left it. Same overgrown grass, same empty driveway, same firepit with disturbed ash blown across the backyard. But I’m not the same person who lit that bonfire yesterday.
God, was it really just yesterday?
I let myself in through the back door and kick off my shoes. The house is deafeningly silent. No TV left on, no signs of life, just emptiness waiting to swallow me whole.
The floorboards creak under my feet as I shuffle like a zombie toward the couch, where I summon my very last drop of energy to call in sick to my 10 a.m. shift at Book Nook.
I pass out before I even put the phone back down.
It’s mid-afternoon by the time I wake up, groggy and aching, and try to go through the motions of normal life. I shower off the dirt and sweat and evidence of the night, avoiding looking at the marks all over my body. I make coffee with shaking hands. Sit at my kitchen table and stare at nothing.
There’s no binding spell squeezing my chest, no magical presence making the air electric. Just me and the quiet.
This is what I wanted, isn’t it? Freedom. My life back. University next year, a chance to start my life for real.
So why does it feel so awful?
I try to eat toast and nearly choke on it. Try to watch TV but can’t focus. Crawl into bed to try and sleep more, but every time I close my eyes, I see her face as she admitted she was afraid of hurting me.
This is for the best. We’re too different. She’s a century-old sanguine witch who feeds on life to survive; I’m an ordinary twenty-year-old who just wanted to get over a breakup and start a career. We make no sense.
But my fingers keep tracing the marks she gave me. My body keeps remembering the weight of her on top of me, the sound of her coming apart, and the way she looked at me when the binding broke—surprised, uncertain, almost hopeful.
So why did she leave?
I keep reminding myself that I’m better off without her, but it’s increasingly hard to convince myself that what we had was forced there by magic and spells.
If that were true, shouldn’t these feelings have gone away? Why do I miss her so much?
Maybe I don’t want to be normal anymore. Maybe I liked the danger and darkness and Julia’s terrible, wicked beauty.
The temperature drops as the sun begins to set, casting the house into amber and shadows.
I should eat, and call Dean, and do anything except sit here wishing last night ended differently.
I force myself to stand, my legs stiff from sitting too long. The house is freezing because I forgot to turn the heat up when I got home.
I kneel in front of the hearth to light the fire, which also reminds me of her since this is the first place she fed from me. God dammit.
As I reach for the kindling, something moves in my periphery.
My heart jumps.
I leap to my feet, peering out the window into the backyard.
Past the dead grass, past the ash and debris strewn across the lawn from last night, a shadow moves in the forest.
And there, standing among the skeletal trees and the carpet of orange leaves, is Julia.