Chapter 16 Between Worlds #2
Rita’s eyes flicked to the door and back. She reached into her purse and fished out a lighter. Then, she clicked her tongue twice, muttered something under her breath, and the flame ignited three inches above the metal.
The air left my lungs. “What the hell?”
She shrugged, but there was a smugness in it. “Family trick. My Mamaw did candles at the Church for years, said it kept the saints on their toes.” She extinguished the lighter with a snap. “You’re not the only one with a weird past.”
“You’re a…” I stammered, unsure which word was right. “…witch?”
She made a face. “Sorcerer. Witch is for pagans and cartoon characters. My folks have been in the country since the Dutch founded New Amsterdam and the French staked their claim in Louisiana. I don’t do curses, don’t turn people into frogs.
Mostly I light things and sometimes heal hangovers.
But yeah, I know about the rest.” She looked me dead in the eye.
“You’re not crazy. You’re just unlucky.”
I sat there, the room tilting.
I tried to find something, anything, to say, but my brain was busy running a new set of calculations: if Rita was magic, who else was? Was the whole staff enchanted?
Rita watched the gears turning and smiled. “Relax. If I wanted to hex you, you’d know.”
I barked a laugh because the alternative was crying. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re a single mom in Manhattan, Josie. That’s hard enough. Besides, the rule is, if you can see through the bullshit, you probably belong here.”
“Does Ulysses know?”
She shrugged. “Everybody knows about him. He’s ancient, but not like Dracula-ancient. More like a relic from the Russian Revolution, when fortunes were lost, and power shifted overnight. Think of him as Upper West Side old money with a backstory steeped in blood and betrayal.”
The janitor ambled past us, nodded at Rita, and kept going. Rita waited until he was gone, then said, “Here’s what you need to know. The world is layered.”
I crossed my arms. “Layered how?”
“On top, you’ve got humans. Bills. Traffic. Reality TV. Under that?” She tapped the wall. “Power.”
She glanced down the hall and lowered her voice.
“Sorcerers run the Council, but they’re not the only ones at the table.
Vampires want control. Werewolves police their own.
They don’t trust the Council, but they tolerate it.
Barely. And people like me just try not to get eaten.
If you’re lucky, you find a crew. If you’re not, you end up a cautionary tale… Like Ava.”
The name hit like glass scraped across my ribcage.
Ava.
I could conjure her instantly: honey-blonde hair in a messy beehive, lipstick always a shade too bright, every laugh a dare to the world to do its worst.
“What happened to her, really?” I asked, swallowing the gravel in my voice.
“She got herself tangled up with the wrong bloodsucker,” Rita said, her tone measured.
“Thought she could play both sides. You know how Ava was, a chaos engine with a death wish and a punchlist of bad decisions.” She poured another shot for herself, then for me, and the bottle clinked against the chipped glass like a two-gun salute.
“They made an example out of her,” she continued.
“To remind everyone what happens when you forget the pecking order.”
I tried to process it, but the details were conflicting.
The official story had always been half-whispered.
Ava’s death had cast a long shadow since that cold December nearly nine years ago.
Some stories claimed she’d succumbed to an overdose, while others whispered of a sugar daddy with mafia ties who had turned against her.
Yet those mundane tales felt inadequate to capture the vibrant spirit she had been.
She hadn’t been reckless; she had danced on the edge of danger, always with her daughter, Hazel, at the center of her world.
“Who?” I asked. Not who killed her, but who she’d crossed.
Rita hesitated, biting down on her lower lip.
She glanced around the empty bar, then leaned in.
“It was someone from the old country. Not local. Nobody knew the clan, but they had cash, muscle, and a taste for theatrics. Ava got mixed up with them because she thought she was invincible. Turns out she wasn’t. ”
“She wasn’t even a shifter,” I said, confused. “She was just…Ava.”
Rita shook her head. “That’s the thing, Josie. She wasn’t just anything. Ava always had secrets. None of us knew the half of it.” She lowered her voice, each word deliberate. “I heard that Ava had fae heritage. That’s why she got noticed.”
I blinked, the information tumbling through my head like loose change in a dryer. “Fae,” I repeated, half-skeptical, half-terrified.
“Fae,” Rita affirmed. “Not the pretty Tinkerbell kind. The old kind. She thought she could play them off the vampires, maybe buy herself a little leverage. Instead, she painted a target on her back.”
Something cold trickled down my spine. The world felt instantly wider, darker than it had the day before. “So what, they killed her for being…mixed?”
“She was a risk,” Rita said simply. “To both sides. The council wanted to keep things neat. Ava was messy. She didn’t know her place, and that makes people nervous. Nervous people do ugly things.”
Rita’s hand covered mine. “Look, I know you cared about her. So did I. But you’re not her.”
I wanted to believe her, but the room was spinning with new rules and invisible lines. “Who else knows?” I asked.
Rita pondered for a moment. “A few people. If you work here long enough, you learn to keep your mouth shut. That’s how you make it to Christmas.” She eyed the janitor, and I realized that Rita never underestimated anyone, not even herself.
I sat there, the silence between us heavy. My thoughts pinged wildly.
“So Neon is just a club,” I said, “but it’s also a…” I trailed off, searching for a word that wasn’t cliché or hysterical.
“It’s a crossroads,” Rita supplied. “For the living and the not-quite-living. New York’s full of places like this, but here…” she tapped the bar, “…the veil’s thin.”
I looked around at the battered booths, the ghosts of parties past. Neon was just a club, but also, apparently, a nexus of the supernatural, a liminal space where secrets wore sequin dresses and truth was measured in shots.
“What do I do now?” I asked, voice small.
Rita reached across the bar and squeezed my hand. “You keep dancing, honey. And if anything comes for you again, you call me.” She let go. “But know this: once you see the world, you can’t unsee it. That’s the real magic.”
I left the club in a daze, sunlight stabbing at my retinas as if to remind me that life kept spinning, even when your axis shifted. On the way home, I tried to remember how to walk like my world hadn’t just expanded to include ancient blood feuds and candle-lighting rituals.
That night, after Mateo fell asleep watching TV, I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the lighter Rita had slipped into my bag. I clicked it once. A thin blue flame danced in the air, just above the metal.
I watched it burn, and for the first time in days, I didn’t feel like a victim or a pawn. I felt like maybe, just maybe, I was starting to get the hang of this.