Witchlore

Chapter Eighteen

“Hey, I wanted to ask you something.” Bastian sits back down beside me, his hand in a big bag of almonds and putting a packet of Oreos between us. Despite still feeling gross from the shift, I rip the packet open and go to town on the Oreos. With my mouth full of chocolate, I sigh. It helps a bit.

“Okay,” I say through crumbs.

“This thing with you and Carl,” he says.

“Such a wanker.” I roll my eyes while pulling apart an Oreo to lick out the middle.

“That’s … so nasty.” Bastian stares at me with reluctant fascination. “Why don’t you just eat it?”

“I like it this way.” I shrug. “What do you want to ask about Carl? If you want to know what terrible thing made him such a bully, I don’t know, I think he probably came out of the womb twisted.”

“What’s the deal with the two of you?” Bastian frowns. “He seems to really hate you and it’s not that he’s a homophobe—”

“No, he is definitely not a homophobe,” I mutter. Bastian looks at me sharply and I know I’ve said the wrong thing. He’s frowning. He’s working it out. I stuff a biscuit in my mouth.

“Did he … try something with you?” Bastian asks.

I’d always thought that if someone asked me about this, they’d sound incredulous, they’d be mocking, they’d instantly dismiss the notion that someone like Carl Lord would try to hit on me and I wouldn’t want it.

Bastian doesn’t sound like that. He sounds concerned.

When I look at his face, it’s intent, he’s concentrating on me very carefully.

I just know that he’s not going to judge me.

I brush oily chocolate residue off my lips and nod.

“We were friends at the beginning of college. He … well, he kept trying to kiss me.”

“What?” Bastian’s voice is dangerous suddenly.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I say hastily. “It was just … like, he would find a way for us to be alone and then he would, you know, push me against walls and stuff.…”

My tongue feels heavy. I’ve never put so many words to this. With Elizabeth, I gave her a pretty standard explanation and her response was to roll her eyes and say, “Ugh, yeah, he’s so vile!” I felt justified but also, perhaps, a little dismissed. Maybe I should have explained, like I’m doing now.

“That sounds really bad,” Bastian says, clenching his fists on his blanket. “Did you tell anyone? Get him to stop?”

“No.” I feel the curdling edges of rebuke against myself and urge myself to explain why.

“He would always make it a joke. He made me feel like I had misread the situation and he didn’t want me so much after all.

It was a special kind of hell, being his friend, but I’d never had a proper friend before so I didn’t know. ”

“Yeah.” Bastian’s voice is short, like he’s holding all his anger back. “That is not what friends do.”

“I got that when I shifted into a female form in the spring of first year. Suddenly, he didn’t want to know me, and that’s when the teasing started, the jokes about me being a shifter, all of that.”

I don’t want to use the word “bullying,” but it is the only accurate one.

Although it’s so embarrassing to be bullied at my age.

Surely all of this was supposed to be left behind with secondary school?

Was I just an idiot for hoping that the one upside of being homeschooled was that I skipped that particular ritual humiliation?

“When I was in a female form, he completely lost interest, thank god,” I say with a wry smirk. “Carl doesn’t like boobs.”

“This is why he called you—”

“A cocktease? Yeah,” I admit, feeling revulsion inside me. Toward him but also, a little bit, toward myself. “I would always push him off or squirm away and he’d say I was playing hard to get and then when I shifted—”

“He thought you’d cockblocked him?” Bastian sounds incredulous. “How is this guy still allowed at college?”

“I didn’t tell anyone, except Elizabeth,” I say painfully, wondering if it’s my fault. “And he’s a bully. People expect him to be a dick to me, especially because I’m a shifter.”

“Surely they don’t expect him to sexually harass you.” Bastian scowls. Those words give me pause. Is that what happened? I wonder. There’s a little voice inside of me that answers firmly, Yes, it is.

“Witches think shifters are naturally duplicitous,” I say, thinking back to my parents, how they hid me from the world.

It wasn’t just because they were ashamed of me, they didn’t trust the world to treat me fairly.

“He never bullies me about anything but being a shapeshifter. He plays into everyone’s prejudice and they don’t even realize it’s about something else.

Besides, he’s not some rapey incel guy. He’s gay.

They don’t want to believe that about him. ”

“I believe you,” Bastian says fiercely. “Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he can’t also be a creep.”

My heart thumps quietly. He’s so sincere that it’s hard not to trust him, but all I can do is nod. Bastian crunches some more almonds and as I look at the orange flames licking the air, I wonder why it’s a complete stranger who’s the first person to tell me that what Carl did was so wrong.

“Can I ask you something else?” Bastian asks in between licking salt off his fingers.

“Okay,” I say warily. I really don’t want him to ask more about Carl, about the terrible crush of confusing emotions that lived inside of me that year, a ferocious need to protect the first friendship I ever had battling against a horrified growing urgency to reveal just how awful he truly was.

Always overshadowed by his snide voice in my head, scaring me into silence: Who’s going to believe you, shifter?

“Why aren’t you good at witchcraft? Really?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re full of magic,” Bastian says earnestly. “I’ve seen you shift your form twice; you clearly have more power inside you than I could ever dream of. I understand that you can’t control your shifts, but surely spells should work for you.”

The last person to be this interested in my shifting was Elizabeth. I wonder what she would think about me sitting in my parents’ living room with a guy in his boxers. Instantly, I feel guilty and eat another Oreo.

“Just born dysfunctional, I guess.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Bastian insists thoughtfully. “Something must be stopping it.”

“Yeah, me,” I say sharply. “Don’t you think my parents tried everything to get it out of me? Different routines and spells and … punishments.”

I take a deep breath and try to forget how it felt to be shut away inside this house, knowing I couldn’t go out unless I learned to do something I didn’t understand.

“That’s not what I mean,” Bastian says. “I think your parents were wrong, I don’t think it’s you. If they gave magic according to effort, you’d be Merlin.”

“Thanks.” I snort with laughter.

“So it can’t be you, can it?” he says emphatically. “You know spells, you’ve studied witchlore and witchcraft, you’re capable of shapeshifting, and you do it with seriously incredible amounts of power. It’s something else that’s stopping you.”

This is dangerously close to the train of thought that took me to the cave with Elizabeth. I won’t go there again.

“I don’t know,” I say, looking away from the beautiful sapphire ring on his finger. “I try, I really do. I can sense it in other people, I can smell magic in the air around me and sometimes taste it. I just … can’t do it.”

“Wait, you can smell witchcraft?” Bastian frowns.

“No, not spells, but a witch’s own magic, like yours smells like a bonfire and Elizabeth’s…”

I stop speaking, suddenly assaulted by the memory of the smell of almonds.

“That’s unusual. Is it a shapeshifter thing?” Bastian asks, frowning.

“No, I think it’s a me thing,” I say. “I just got really good at paying attention to magic since I can’t do it.”

The first magic I learned to sense this way was my parents.

’ Better than hearing creaks on the stairs, sniffing for whiffs of their magic on the air taught me how to scent them out, avoid them if I needed to, hide if necessary.

But I can’t explain that to Bastian, it makes me sound like a paranoid loser.

“Or you’re even more powerful than you realize,” Bastian says softly.

There’s a fervent glow in his brown eyes when he says that and I look away, uncomfortable.

Elizabeth looked at me that way, as if I would be able to do something amazing.

Then she died. I fumble under the coffee table for the TV controller.

“Want to watch something?”

“Sure.”

I turn on the TV and let the sudden burst of noise and color distract me from darker thoughts.

“Up here,” I say, leading the way along the corridor when it’s finally time to turn in. We’ve eaten all the snacks. My father has the snacking tastes of a twelve-year-old child from the sixties and I feel weirdly delighted that he will be deprived upon his return.

“Um, is this … okay?” Bastian asks, sounding nervous for the first time, and I wonder why. It can’t be sharing a bedroom with me, not someone like Bastian who looks like he goes to the kind of parties where people sleep on top of each other like a pile of drunk hamsters.

“It’s fine, it’s massive,” I say, opening the door.

The guest room is sparse: yellowing blue-and-white-striped wallpaper, a threadbare rug over cold floorboards, and a severe iron-framed king-sized bed.

I think I see Bastian’s shoulders droop in relief.

I guess my parents are partly using the room as storage, judging by the paintings and photographs leaning against the walls, waiting to be hung properly, and the stacked piles of vintage hatboxes.

“Hey, who did this one?” he asks, pointing at a small canvas leaning against the bottom of the wardrobe. I recognize it from my younger years, a painting I did of myself as a selkie. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t sent it to the charity shop.

“Oh, yeah, me, when I was about fourteen and a right goth.” I can’t help smiling at the drastic use of black paint and wild brushstrokes. “I wanted to be a selkie.”

“Really? That’s adorable.” Bastian grins. Something flutters inside me. I wonder if he’s being sarcastic but it doesn’t sound like it. Could he genuinely find me adorable?

“Here.” I open the wardrobe, reaching into the wicker basket inside that I know holds spare pajamas. I hand him a soft baggy blue T-shirt. “Don’t sleep in your dirty T-shirt.”

“Okay.” Bastian pulls off his damp T-shirt and I look away.

No one needs to see all that perfectly sculpted skin, but I can’t help noticing, out of the corner of my eye, a broad scar, a mangled mess of puckered skin across his chest and shoulder, climbing up to his neck.

It looks like it would feel textured and bumpy under my fingers.

Don’t think about touching Bastian’s chest!

I tell myself firmly. Once I’m assured that he’s climbed into the other side of the bed, I turn around. He’s on his phone, frowning.

“Do you have a spare charger?” he asks. “I’m on two percent.”

“Use mine, I’m on eighty.” I pull it out of my bag before plugging it in. “Give me your phone.”

I ignore how warm his hands are as I plug his phone in.

I can see the photo on his home screen. It’s him and a man who looks a lot like a young Eric Chevret, but with glasses and longer, curlier hair.

It must be his brother, Shasta. Bastian’s smile in the photo is so broad, so genuine, he looks like a totally different person.

It’s almost too personal, as if it’s something I shouldn’t see.

I set the phone down on the nightstand and climb into the bed, too nervous to take my hoodie off in front of him but too warm to sleep comfortably in it.

He turns out the small lamp on his side of the bed and we are plunged into mutual darkness, the only light the amber glow of the streetlamp through the wispy, veil-like curtains.

“’Night,” he whispers.

“’Night,” I whisper back. I lie in the dark as the bed moves and he rolls over onto his side.

I wait for his breath to even out before carefully stripping off my hoodie and dropping it out of the duvet, trying not to pull the edges or wake him.

I don’t have the privacy to do my postshift routine of looking at myself naked, so I just sort of awkwardly run my hands up and down my body, trying to learn its new shapes and textures.

“Are you okay?” Bastian whispers suddenly. “You’re fidgeting.”

“I’m fine.” I stop moving, flushing with embarrassment, wondering if he thought I was wanking or something awful.

I bury my red face in the pillow and instead concentrate on telling myself what I always tell myself.

I am more than my body, I am more than a label, I am Orlando, I am Orlando, I am Orlando. … Then my mind drifts into dreams.

“How is he?” I ask, pressing on the wheels of my wheelchair as my mother guides me to his bedside.

“Fading,” she whispers. I look down at him in the bed, his aged face.

Like most shifters, he has aged appropriately.

Unlike me, who lives my youth over and over again.

Now his time is coming and nothing has prepared me for this, not even seeing my friends lose their limbs and lives in the mud of Ypres.

“My dearest child,” he whispers, reaching for my hand.

The skin on his knuckles is so soft, so friable.

It has spent a century changing, stretching, and shrinking and now it is nearly over.

His cloudy eyes feast on my face and then drift to my wheelchair.

Dribbles of tears leak from the corners of his eyes, seeking the creases in the folded skin.

“My poor darling, my precious one,” he whispers. “Promise me you will not go back.”

I close my eyes, fighting back the grief inside me. On the inside of my eyelids, I see the stretchers, the miles of churned earth, the hollow-eyed men squatting in the mud. I cannot lie to him.

“If I can, if I am able, then I must.” I squeeze his hand, my tongue too heavy to ask for absolution, my heart screaming for it. He closes his tired eyes and turns his face away from me, for the first time in my life. A chasm of grief opens up inside me that nothing can fill.

“Then I hope you never walk again,” he whispers.