Chapter Ten
Lily was very grateful for the hangnail on her left pointer finger.
Staring at the hangnail gave her something to look at other than the only city she’d ever known, streaming by her window again for what might well be the last time.
No matter what Katherine said, she didn’t believe that she’d ever be able to safely be around this many people again.
Not with this power banging on the walls of her mind, demanding to be let out.
Staring at the hangnail gave her something to occupy herself with other than thoughts of her brother, sitting in a hospital bed, hating her. Her whole family had to hate her now. She was violent. Unstable. Unlovable.
She pulled at the bit of skin, relishing the stinging pain as it ripped away.
Sylvia had the air-conditioning in her BMW blasting.
Lily’s parents would never run the A/C like this—her dad would call it a waste of money, and her mom would say they could use that money to run their A/C at home where there wasn’t a free fan right outside.
Lily wondered if Sylvia’s car even ran on gas.
It was probably another spell. Everything with these people was a spell.
None of it was necessary. And all of it came at such a high cost.
Lily decided in that moment that she hated magic. All of the books she’d read as a kid sold magic as a cure-all, something to make life easier, but all it seemed to do for these people was make things harder. She didn’t want to be someone who was willing to bleed to save a few bucks.
She hadn’t realized how much she valued her body, how unwilling she was to mutilate it at the service of this power.
So she hated her nose, and the fat that had appeared on her hips after she got her first period, and the way her shoulders looked in tank tops.
But none of that mattered, because it was hers.
She wished she’d realized that, before all of this. She wished she’d appreciated it more.
Even if she gave up her magic after she settled, she was stuck here for years, in this world where the morals were so skewed. She didn’t see how she could go through this and come out as herself on the other side. She would be some other Lily, a stranger from a different world.
With the hangnail gone, Lily couldn’t help but flick her gaze to the window. They were on Hollywood Boulevard, surrounded by people in Halloween costumes. Lily and her friends had planned on dressing up as the witches from Hocus Pocus. The irony of that was not lost on Lily.
That felt like another life. Now, she was trapped in this car, permanently separated from the people outside. Other, taken away from mainstream society and put into her own small box, where she’d never be able to be normal and free again.
“This must be hard for you.” It was the first time Sylvia had talked in the forty minutes it had taken them to get here. She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel as they waited in traffic.
Lily wasn’t inclined to engage in pointless small talk at the moment. “Must be.”
Sylvia laughed at that, a melodic chuckle. “Sorry. Empty platitudes aren’t what you need right now.”
Sylvia turned to Lily, the planes of her face shining red from the lights around them. “I know it’s hard to leave your family. I know this whole situation is … unsettling, for lack of a better word. But it’ll be okay.”
“People keep saying that.” Lily pulled out the string of beads from Katherine’s car and wrapped it around her fingers. She was not going to cry about this. Not again. “But I don’t see how. I don’t see how I’ll get to see my family ever again.”
“If you want to see them, you’ll find a way.”
“Katherine didn’t. That guy I met, Casey, he didn’t. Unsettled witches don’t get to see their families anymore. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Sylvia tapped a nail on the dashboard, apparently deciding whether or not to lie. “You’re not wrong. Being an unsettled witch, surviving as an unsettled witch … it changes you. Many find it hard to go back to the homes they left.”
“Exactly.” Lily buried her head in her hands, trying to focus on her breathing, to stop the hitching in her chest from getting worse.
“But they get a new home. They get a coven.”
Lily scoffed into the cradle of her palms. “Right. With dickheads who sell drugs and boring meetings that no one wants to go to. Sounds great.”
Lily stilled, worried that she’d offended Sylvia. She didn’t want her magic, but she also couldn’t afford to alienate one of the few people who was willing to help her right now. But Sylvia just laughed. Lily lifted her head to look at her, confused.
“God, you remind me of myself sometimes,” Sylvia said.
“You say what you think. And you’re right, we do have all of those things.
But there’s more to it. I had a bad relationship with my family.
My parents … They weren’t prepared to have a child, and they had no desire to become prepared once they got one. For me, magic was a way out.”
Lily jumped at a loud squeal. She looked out the window, where the culprit—a woman dressed as a ghost—was enthusiastically greeting a friend in a nurse costume.
“But even once I got out, I was still alone,” Sylvia continued.
“Just like I had been growing up in that house. Until I joined a coven. It was the first place where I found people who valued me. Who wanted to spend time with me, who wanted to understand and help me. Covens can be beautiful things. My coven matters to me more than anything else in my life. I would do anything to protect Aestas.”
The conviction in Sylvia’s voice was almost enough to sell her.
It was so close, that intangible dream of a place where she felt perfectly at home.
But Lily already had a place where she felt imperfectly at home, curled up on the couch watching TV with Noah, the sounds of her dad banging pots in the kitchen and her mom running the dryer in the background.
Her family was hers. She didn’t want a new one.
She wanted what she had.
“I don’t want a coven. I don’t want to go to some weird camp. I just want this power gone.”
Sylvia paused her tapping nail, turning to Lily again. It took her a moment to speak, like she was searching for the right words. “What if I could do that?” she finally said, her voice quiet.
Lily’s heart skipped. “You could take my power away right now? I wouldn’t have to wait until I settled?”
She jolted at the sound of the car’s blinker, the clicking loud and incongruous in the silence that had fallen after her question.
Sylvia turned into a line of cars pulling into the parking lot of the massive shopping center on the corner of Hollywood and Highland.
Lily had been here before—there was a Dave & Buster’s upstairs.
A few months ago, she and her friends had come here and played Dance Dance Revolution for two hours straight, until their parents dragged them away for pizza and soda.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Sylvia inched the car forward, keeping her gaze on the man in the Volvo in front of them as the machine vomited a parking ticket into his waiting hand. She didn’t say anything as they pulled up next to the machine. But then, finally, she turned and looked at Lily.
“There’s a spell I can try, but it’s going to be risky,” she said, her voice practically a whisper. “Very, very risky. My power is stronger around people, but I’m not even sure being here will be enough for me to pull this off. There’s a chance it could go wrong.”
“But there’s a chance that it could work?”
“Yes.”
Lily bit her lip. Katherine had said there was no way this power could be taken out of her, and Sylvia wasn’t even sure it would work. But if there was a way everything could go back to normal …
The car behind them honked loudly. Sylvia’s finger hovered over the button to pull a ticket. “Am I going inside or am I turning back?”
Lily couldn’t pass up this chance. No matter the risk.
“I’m not strong enough for this power,” Lily said. “Take it.”
Sylvia took the ticket and drove them into the parking lot.