Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
“Phee!” Mateo shouts, tossing his ruined sweater onto the ancient moss-green couch that’s always existed in the living room.
It’s pitch black in the house, so he flips switches as he goes down the narrow hall toward Ophelia’s bedroom.
He’s halted by the sound of running water as he passes the bathroom.
No crack of light visible under the door. Shit.
They’ve lived in close quarters for half of their lives, his tween years made up of sleepovers in each other’s beds. When his mom bounced, and Ophelia’s family died, it just made sense that she’d move in. No discussion. They’d packed her up the night of the funerals.
Which is why he shoves the door open without warning. “Ophelia? Are you—shit, you’re not here.” Metaphysically speaking, at least.
Her body is right there, standing motionless in the shower, face tipped up toward the water.
No reaction from his intrusion, even when he shoves the pebbled plastic curtain aside and reaches in to turn the frigid spray off.
The water heater went to shit a few months ago, so he’s not sure if the thing’s acting up again or if she’s been gone long enough for the hot water to run out.
This would be real horror movie vibes, as she’s unresponsive, dead-eyed, staring up at nothing, but he knows exactly what this is.
Accidental astral projection again. Traveling.
He spends the next few minutes maneuvering her slippery body out of the tub when he isn’t strong enough to lift her.
It isn’t pretty. They end up in a pile on the bathroom floor, Mateo’s pants soaked as he pats her cold cheek a few times, repeating the chant they agreed upon: “Ophelia De La Garza, come back to me, or I’ll throw away your disgusting chips. ”
The third pat makes her close her milky-whited-over eyes.
The fourth pat gets those same eyes twitching beneath lids.
“Don’t you dare,” she mumbles through barely functioning lips.
Eyes, now unreasonably pale blue, slide open.
Dark lashes flutter as she blinks a few times, the transition back to her body always groggy and difficult.
He has a million things to tell her, but all he can do is cradle her, trying to rub warmth into freezing skin, as if that’ll melt the brick of ice that forms in his chest whenever he finds her like this.
“Feels like I shouldn’t have to point out that leaving your body while standing in a running shower feels like a super bad idea, bu-u-u-t.” Defaulting to disapproving is the only way he knows how to deal with this as he reaches for her towel hanging from a hook beside the shower.
Ophelia only has two kinds of smiles. The nice one comes out for puppies and a variety of snacks with the word flax on the package.
The shitty one has too many teeth and zero mirth and can wilt a man from thirty yards.
She graces him with the shittiest one yet.
“I don’t come into your shower and tell you how to be a functioning member of society. ”
Mateo’s chest thaws a little, pressing dark lips to her forehead briefly. One of her frozen hands finds his arm. Squeezes. It’s all either of them will allow after one of these incidents.
The topic of Ophelia’s condition, much like Mateo’s, is rife with uncertainty.
What they do know is that Ophelia and her whole family were astral projecting—common enough for a family of Travelers.
They’d been exploring a plane Ophelia had never visited before, led there by her older sister, Juliet. And something found them.
Most witches have to use tokens to communicate with the powerful things that live in other planes of reality.
Something imbued with intention and crafted specifically for that entity.
Using a token is a lot like talking to someone with bad cell reception.
But Travelers can send their spirits to those other planes.
It gives them direct contact with these extradimensional beings; which means it also gives them direct contact to very real danger.
The details of what had happened are unclear, lost to the trauma of being trapped out of her body for an extended period of time. But they’d all died. Juliet. Their parents. Ophelia.
Three days later, Ophelia woke up.
The rest did not.
And ever since, Ophelia sometimes floats away, like a critical part connecting spirit and body was severed. Each time Mateo finds her empty body, he manages to coax her back. So far. But he’s terrified that it’s like the shitty water heater. It’ll work until it doesn’t.
There’s no point in talking about it. They don’t know how to fix it. One of the totally emotionally healthy reasons they’re such good friends is because they’re both so undeniably fucked that it feels right that they go down together.
She extracts herself from his arms, stepping gingerly around his legs, and starts to towel off. She fully doesn’t get out of his way, drying herself nearly on top of him, so he has to crawl on hands and knees out of the bathroom to avoid having her butt in his face.
“Did you get my drink?” she asks, wringing out her hip-length, bad-bleach-job hair into the sink—not an insult. She loves her dark roots showing.
“No, I didn’t go to the store, but shut up,” Mateo says, getting to his feet. He’s sopping wet, so he starts undressing in the hall. “I got knifed and made fifteen hundred tonight.”
“At work? Are we criminals now?” she asks, stepping out of the bathroom towel-less with her hair in a vast, messy bun. She won’t express concern or excitement until she understands, so he follows, stripping off his soggy pants and tossing them at their tasteful hallway floor hamper.
“This new guy showed up at work—” he starts and has to wait for her to finish making the universally recognized bow-chika-wow-wow insinuating sex as she disappears into her room.
It doesn’t even make sense, but he tells her to shut up again and then shouts everything through the paper-thin wall between their rooms as they get dressed.
No detail is spared. Topher’s startled-bird-like weirdness, the headache, how shit Topher was at working, the well-dressed Dagger Lady looking for his mom, the knifing, and Topher’s stalkery tracking Mateo down.
They end up at the kitchen table, Ophelia pressing cold fingers to the pink line that’s the only thing left of the knifing.
She releases his arm, considering him. “Add me as a consultant. Get double the pay.”
“Ophelia De La Garza,” Mateo says slowly, scandalized. “You’re a fucking genius.”
“Don’t I know it.” She takes the seat in front of him.
In their boxy kitchen, she always looks unreal.
Five foot nothing, skin the tone of wet sand, and eyes the exact shade of the sky over the ocean at sunrise.
The point where the orange ends, but there’s a washed-out blue before the real color of the sky begins.
They used to be brown. Another facet they don’t understand.
Getting a few grand could change things.
They’re both in a bad way. The very real possibility of her drifting out of her body and being unable to find her way back again is a fear so many magnitudes larger than his fear of what’s happening to him.
But his demon problem puts a target on both of them because nobody likes demons.
If he’s found out by the wrong people, they’re both in danger.
Also, it stops him from being able to freely use magic.
If Topher’s money can buy him an exorcism, he can become a proper brujo and maybe learn the kinds of things that could help her.
For a second, they’re hopeful.
But then Ophelia asks, “What about Dagger Lady?”
Mateo grimaces, the pain in his arm gone but that problem persists. “Yeah, I dunno. She found me at work, which maybe means she knows where this house is and followed me.” It’s not like she pulled up employment records.
Ophelia sucks her teeth for a moment, squinting. “Yeah, probably that. I might have seen her. Couple of days ago. Some pant-suited lady was on the lawn when I came home.”
Mateo gapes at her. “Why is this the first time you’re mentioning her?”
“Oh right, because a random lady on the lawn for, like, two minutes, is an extremely notable occurrence in this house of magic and demons,” she says sardonically. Which, fair. “She didn’t try to stab me. She just stared when I pulled in, then walked off.”
“She can’t get in, so at least there’s that,” he says, extremely hating that this crazy lady had been so close to Ophelia. Moving houses so his mom’s criminal associates can’t find him would be ideal, but the house is warded all to hell, keeping him safe from wider demon-hating-people detection.
Not that he can hide away inside forever, either. He has to go to work. And if Ophelia leaves the house, she’d also be in danger, since Dagger Lady proved tonight that anyone Ignacia-adjacent will do for knife-based interrogation.
“Wild coincidence that a rich weirdo and Dagger Lady both found you at work today,” Ophelia points out, and they stare at each other.
It is a wild coincidence. Considering how earnest and upset Topher had seemed—and how bad he was at working—Mateo can’t imagine he was putting on an act. Or fathom a reason for one. Dagger Lady didn’t need help. She was doing a fine job of scaring the shit out of him.
“I think that’s what the curse does,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Makes unlikely, shitty situations happen to people around him.”
The first edge of concern enters her voice as she asks, “You had protection wards on?”
“Yeah. She didn’t know what I was,” he says. You’d probably bring more than a fancy dagger to a demon fight. “Just thought I knew where Ignacia was.”
He doesn’t want to get distracted from the possibility of a real payday by his mom’s residual bullshit, but he also can’t pretend he wasn’t knifed. Especially when it could happen to Ophelia. “Okay. As my newly appointed assistant—”
“Additional consultant. Sexist,” she interrupts with her shitty smile. They both let the appropriate level of seriousness slip away from the conversation.
“As my newly appointed unpaid intern,” he returns with his own shitty smile, “You have to help me brainstorm how the hell to uncurse this poor, wretched, extremely wealthy soul.”
“I’ll have a look at him, I assume.”
There goes the faint sheen of levity. “No. No way. Even if it mighta been my mom’s shit, I got stabbed being around Topher. And the headache? What the hell even was that?”
“Has the curse ever caused a medical emergency?” she says with raised eyebrows.
Genius. Maybe Topher’s curse was trying to give Mateo, like, an aneurysm or stroke or other bad brain thing, but his demonic healing wouldn’t let it.
“You’re getting a promotion,” he says, pulling out his phone, opening his notes app, and typing out the medical question for Topher.
There could be additional casualties Topher wasn’t attributing to his curse—which is grim.
“But that super makes me not want him near you even more.”
“What’s he gonna do? Kill me again?”
Mateo makes a pained sound deep in his throat. She won’t talk about it, but she’ll make horrible jokes all the goddamned time. “Now you’re fired.”
She leans back in her chair, the metal base like a pair of C’s connected at the top and bottom.
They’d found a set of them on a corner about a month ago and dragged them home.
They smelt unrelentingly of hairspray. “This is forty-five hundred. We can put protection wards straight up your ass if that’ll help.
I have to look at him. Dagger Lady, too, if she shows up again. ”
Another groan, but he starts a list on his phone. It feels professional to have a list, and they’re professionals now. “Fine. Protection wards up your ass. What else?”
They end up on the living room floor atop a forest green area rug Ophelia thrifted to stop them from tripping on the half-missing floorboard between the couch and the coffee table that has its own gravitational pull. The carpet is the nicest thing in the whole house.
Ophelia decides she’s their tech support because all the books are horrible to read unless you love dry academia in a language you’re not especially well versed in. A thing he doesn’t love either, but she called not it first.
Both hunching, Ophelia over her old laptop—from a deluded summer of their fifteenth year when either of them thought college was a possibility—and him over a wide array of books he can only sort of read, they brainstorm and research.
The Topher list ends up looking pretty good: search the Nystrom family online to see what dirt can be had; an exhaustive list of which protection wards to put on them; which cleanses, scrubs, and smudges they could try on Topher; have Ophelia look at Topher; and a tarot reading never hurts.
Easy and reasonably crafted to string Topher along effectively. While helping him. They’re not monsters.
Except on a technical level—where he’s got a demon in him and she’s an undead spirit walker or something.