Chapter 4 #3
Molly shrugged. “I don’t know, I thought you’d be in too deep to leave at that point. You are in too deep, right?”
Joan had joint custody of a magical fugitive, so yes, she was in way too fucking deep, but she wasn’t going to give Molly the satisfaction of admitting that.
“I’m off,” Nate said, leaning down to kiss Molly’s cheek. “Joan, I hope you come over for dinner sometime soon?”
Joan really could not be mean to Nate, who clearly was obsessed with her sister, as she felt the dynamic should be in a straight relationship. “Maybe,” she grumbled. “Probably. Yes.”
“Wonderful,” he said, and gave her a half hug on his way out the door. “And the party thing tonight, I’ll see you there? We can catch up.”
Joan made big, pitiful, questioning eyes at Molly.
“She’ll be there,” Molly answered. “Dad’s orders.”
Nate huffed a little laugh. “Sorry, Joan,” he said, and made his final exit.
Molly was still looking after him with a sappy expression on her face when Joan snapped her fingers. “I fucking hate people in love,” Joan grumbled.
“Of course your single ass does,” Molly said, rising to bring her cup to the sink. “Is everything okay? Normally you’re passed out until at least ten AM.”
“What’s this party?”
Molly’s back was turned and her wince subtle, but Joan still saw it.
“What, Molly?”
“There’s been another event.”
Joan groaned. “I can’t handle more events. We aren’t even finished with the first one.”
“News hit California,” Molly said, sitting back down and leaning forward, the charm necklace she always wore swinging from her neck. It was filled with luck magic, Molly’s specialty. “They’re sending someone to watch us.”
Joan levied another mighty groan, for the drama of it all, and sank into the chair across from her sister.
New York was the most powerful witch state in the US, but California was a close second.
The population density of magical creatures was high there, and a number of institutions, academic or otherwise, sported some very impressive witch thinkers.
The Wardwells, who ran California, hated the Greenwoods with a mutual passion.
Joan was pretty ambivalent on the topic, but it made everyone around her snippy, which she’d rather avoid.
“Who’re they sending? Poppy?” The High Witch of LA and Head Witch of California was, Joan would freely admit, a woman she didn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
Or a lit one. Or at all. California’s witch patrol system was everything Joan despised, a malignant evolution of human policing that fell victim to its same inequities.
“Astoria Wardwell,” Molly said. The daughter, then, heir to her mother’s empire. “It was Poppy, but we negotiated them down to Astoria last night while you were asleep. Official word is they’re here to help.”
Joan had absolutely not been sleeping, but she wasn’t going to reveal she’d been harboring precisely the person everyone was searching for instead. “And unofficially, they’re here to figure out the spell before we can.”
Aunt Val had said she didn’t intend to use it to turn humans, she wanted to understand it to stop it, but California had not and would not make any such promises.
Joan wasn’t sure what she wanted here—was it fair to wipe knowledge like this spell from existence?
Deny humans the chance to cast? It was making Mik horribly sick, but maybe another spell could cure that.
Or maybe humans wouldn’t care, and they’d kill themselves with magic poisoning in their quest for power.
Scores of untrained humans, suddenly casting—that was dangerous.
Who was Joan to decide all this? Whatever the moral implications, she would leave that to smarter people to puzzle out.
She could get an ethics lecture from Abel wearing his professor hat later; what she needed now was to focus specifically on helping Mik.
She could do that, she could conceptualize that—one innocent person in need of Joan’s help.
Molly blew out a breath. “I’ve been named Astoria’s babysitter, and in the interest of cordiality, we’re throwing a get-together tonight to welcome her to New York.”
“And try to intimidate her,” Joan muttered. Gods, now they were going to have New York and California after Mik. “I need Grace Collins’s phone number. If you don’t have it, I need you to secretly get it for me.”
Molly’s eyebrows rose inquisitively. “Why?”
Deny, deny, deny. “No reason.”
Molly’s eyes said, You can’t fool me, but Joan wasn’t the teenager she used to be. She’d grown at least a little bit of a backbone in college, so she kept her mouth shut.
“I’m not giving it to you without a reason,” Molly said, which was what Joan had been afraid of.
She flitted through her most compelling lies, ready to roll one out with all the fluent charm of a Greenwood: I want her to write me a spell, something innocent to help me figure out where I should be applying for jobs.
I think I can convince her to help us; she looks around my age, and I’m a bit of an outsider, so maybe she’ll trust me.
But she didn’t have to use any of them, because Molly, bless her heart, jumped to her own conclusions.
“If you think she’s hot, just say so,” Molly said. “I’m not entirely sure that’s a good enough reason for me to get her number for you—I mean, if you were a man, I’d definitely call it stalking—but I really want you to find someone.”
For once in Joan’s life, her gayness was working out deeply in her favor.
“Yes,” Joan said slowly, like a robot. “Grace Collins is a smoke show.”
This was true, but simultaneously, Joan didn’t actually feel attracted to the woman.
She was beautiful, but like a work of art, and Joan didn’t want to kiss art.
Well, not totally true—there was something beautiful about a Zaha Hadid architectural drawing or an Auguste Toulmouche painting that maybe she did want to kiss. With tongue. Respectfully.
Grace Collins was neither of those; she was a Kehinde Wiley—gorgeous, fascinating, a liiiittle too photorealistic for Joan’s tastes.
Molly was still talking about how Joan needed to open herself up to the world, date seriously, find love like what she and Nate had, all in a well-meaning though kind of patronizing manner.
When Joan had come out, Molly hadn’t even blinked, which maybe wasn’t a surprise considering Valeria’s lesbianism and the fact that most witches didn’t follow human religions.
Or any religion. Hard to worship other beings as gods when you had the power of one.
When you were reportedly descended from one.
Even among people who valued biological children to pass witch traits down to, witches followed power, and power set the structures of their world.
It mattered what you could do more than how you loved or who you were, so much so that even interspecies children who could cast were given access to training.
CZ had a couple of witch-vampires in his pack.
“Molly?” Joan interrupted. “The number?”
Molly sighed. “I’ll text you. I have to go to work. I’ll see you tonight? Find something to wear or let me know if you need help.”
Hmm, Joan was supposed to be babysitting Mik tonight, but she was likely going to attract Molly’s suspicion if she showed up abruptly, asked for a woman’s number, then cited vague plans she couldn’t reschedule, all after a single day back in the city.
Especially since Molly knew that Joan’s plan for her return was mainly to fall into a deep depression and lie in bed for weeks until she rotted away and died.
Which, perhaps, explained why Molly was so desperate to believe Joan was trying out dating.
This was also, unfortunately, probably what Merlin had been trying to tell Joan that morning when he’d said he wanted her to meet some people.
“Thanks, loves yah,” Joan said on her way out the door, skipping down the steps feeling much better about her prospects.
At least in terms of solving the Mik problem.
In all other, broader aspects, her issues had tripled, top of the list being California’s forthcoming presence.
Joan had sort of known Astoria, once. They’d gone to one or two summer camps together as children when they’d all been learning to cast, then again as teenagers when they’d all decided they hated themselves, as teenagers often did.
Astoria had been eternally silent, a rule follower Joan had never been able to provoke into laughter.
Fierce, but quietly gentle, and in the end, uninteresting to Joan.
While Joan hadn’t seen Astoria in nearly a decade, she’d heard plenty of rumors about how the other woman had changed. Astoria Wardwell was a highly trained machine now, her mother’s bloodhound.
Their timeline had just shortened.