Chapter 4 #4
She rolled her eyes. “What? I thought he deserved the full alien experience to go with his inebriation.” She actually wasn’t entirely sure why she’d done the whole bit, except that it had been—
Oh. She’d done it because it had been something Seth would have done.
Something he would have dragged her into doing with him.
The expected pang of hurt slipped through her with the realization, but she did her best not to linger on it.
To just…accept it. To accept that things still hurt, and they were going to keep hurting for a long while, and maybe that was okay.
Humans weren’t designed to be in a state of perfect happiness or tranquility all the time.
What was that cliche saying she remembered?
It’s okay to not feel okay? Things were cliches for a reason.
They sounded trite because they’d been said so many times, but they always held a truth that, at some point in a person’s life, they needed to be reminded of.
She accepted that she felt like shit and got back to work. It took popping in and out of several other pockets of Between—many of them no larger than a small apartment and likely on their way to vanishing altogether—before she settled on what she thought was the nearest option.
She crossed the boundary to hug Griff again and reassure Temerex, and then she and her party walked through the portal into—where else?
—Salem, Massachusetts. The portal had opened onto a street near several businesses, necessitating she Hide them as they came through.
The transition into Dead Earth while actively working magic hit her like a double sucker-punch to the gut, and she almost lost the net covering them all.
The threads from which it was woven were slippery in her magical grip, wanting to curl back inside her, where the protective covering that was Nyx would keep them safe from the deadness that surrounded them.
Nyx was accustomed to the pain of having her magic feel as if it were being ripped away when she crossed the boundary to Dead Earth, but she’d never tried to actively work magic while making the crossing.
The experience was one she wouldn’t care to repeat.
Bitterly, it occurred to her that if her mother hadn’t been living off-world, she would never have managed to maintain the Hiding that had kept Nyx Hidden from everyone—including herself—for so long.
Teeth gritted, Nyx led them all somewhere out of the way, then let her Hiding go with a sigh of relief.
The only ones she couldn’t let go of were the ones that covered Alihana and the Harvester.
She didn’t think any amount of strategic use of the word “LARPing” would get around the fact that she was carrying an actual sharpened sword around, and she couldn’t risk, even in Dead Earth, that the Harvester’s signature might attract unwanted attention.
But those two, at least, were far easier to manage than the one that had covered her and her friends.
Most people in Dead Earth expected to see other people, so covering them took a fair bit of magic.
Most people in Dead Earth did not expect to see magical swords and talismans, so the Hiding of them was minor in comparison.
“I do not like this place.” The statement came from Evra, whose hand went to where her sword hilt should have been, only for her fingers to close on thin air. She let out a snarl. “And I do not like being weaponless.”
Convincing the others that they could only carry weapons they could conceal by traditional means had not gone over well.
It wasn’t that they didn’t understand why—Kaden had lived in Dead Earth for two years, and Evra and Morgen had bounced around it for a few months on “vacation”, so they all understood they couldn’t just walk around with weapons strapped to their persons—but they all got what Nyx would colloquially call the heebie-jeebies at the idea of going after a known magic user without proper weaponry.
“You have a dagger in each boot, a bracelet full of poisoned needles, a stiletto in your hair, and a long knife concealed in your jacket,” Nyx reminded Evra.
Kaliaris had made the jacket especially for her, with a reinforced sheath in the lining that would allow Evra to draw at a moment’s notice.
At least it was still cool enough in this part of the country that a light jacket made sense. “I would hardly call you weaponless.”
Evra made a noncommittal sound. “I still do not like this place.”
“I don’t either,” Morgen said, stepping a little closer to Evra. “It feels…wrong. Like something terrible has happened here.”
Kaden didn’t say anything, but there was a tightness around his mouth that said he shared the other two’s feelings.
Nyx wondered if her own lack of discomfort came from how long she’d lived in Dead Earth, or if it was because she already knew the history of what she suspected they were picking up on.
“In the late 1600s, several people suspected of being witches were killed here.” She knew the basics, because she’d spent a lot of time in Dead Earth looking up places with any known ties to magic or the supernatural, hoping to find anything that might be able to explain her amnesia.
“Why?” Morgen asked, his voice tight.
“Some people got sick, and the doctor didn’t know how to fix it, so he blamed witchcraft.
And if you blame witchcraft, you have to go looking for witches.
” After a few too many beats of silence she added, “If you want to know more, this place is a tourist destination, now. I’m sure there’s a museum… well, right in front of us, actually.”
The circular yellow sign on the building before them, featuring a woman riding a broomstick, proclaimed it to be the Witch History Museum. Morgen looked like he was considering it for a moment, but then he shook his head. “We have places to be.”
That they did. A maps search that made her feel old and out of touch with technology as she navigated the screen and its many choices, showed a rental car place a little over a mile away, so they started walking, passing several more witchy and occult themed shops, plus another museum on Essex Street before turning onto another.
Morgen had a look of deep concentration on his face, and they were halfway to the rental place before he finally asked: “They executed people here for witchcraft, but this town seems to peddle a great amount of magic-related wares.”
Nyx didn’t know how to explain that the tourist side of it had little to do with the original deaths, but she did her best. “While there are still sects of religion that think witchcraft is evil, most people these days don’t.
People here…they need something to believe in.
This is something. The Salem Witch Trials are probably one of the most well-known historical events to people in the US.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone brought up in the US education system who doesn’t at least have a vague idea of what they were.
“The town capitalizes on that, I guess you could say. It gives them a way to attract tourists and provide business for the residents with the ‘fun’ side of witchiness, but it also lets them bring more attention and knowledge to the historical side of it as well. So it’s not quite the contradiction it seems at first glance. ”
Morgen made a noncommittal sound, and they walked the rest of the way without much conversation.
After looking through the available car options and signing half her life away, Nyx received the keys to a sedan that got reasonable gas mileage.
Predictably, Evra and Morgen chose to complain about the size of the vehicle, and then to argue over who got the front seat.
Morgen claimed he deserved it, on grounds of being “the reasonable one”, while Evra claimed she deserved it on grounds of being “the best friend”.