Chapter 8
Pippa bundled her jacket tightly around her shoulders and inspected the office building from her place by one of the maple trees in the parking lot.
Evening sun scattered through the fiery leaves and danced on the concrete.
Caution tape fluttered in the breeze, tickling the boots of construction workers who stomped through the office building’s doors.
She had worried herself into a mostly sleepless night at the thought of returning to her job only to learn that her worry had been unfounded.
This morning, she’d awoken to several missed calls from her mother and a text from Jules that had arrived sometime in the small hours of the night.
She had glared at her phone screen over a bowl of cereal.
If she called her mother back, she’d have to tell her about losing her magic, so she sent a brief text instead.
I’m alive, everything’s fine.
Whether her mother believed her or not, that was a problem for another day.
Mary Beverly possessed no power of compulsion other than the motherly sort, yet Pippa knew the moment that Mary heard the fatigue in Pippa’s voice she would want to talk about what had happened.
And Pippa was not nearly comfortable enough with that yet.
The knowledge that she could lose her magic meant that she could also lose her potential to become part of the Ash Coven, which meant losing . . .
It meant losing everything.
Before she could tumble back into those awful, spiraling thoughts, Pippa had punched Jules’s number in.
Upon picking up, Jules’s first reaction had been an extended, “What the fuuuuuuck.”
“Hey, sorry. I should have—”
“You left your purse and your keys after you said you were going downstairs, and then a few minutes later we were all evacuated and if not for that fucking poop emoji, which, really? Philippa I would have thought you died.”
“Kinda wish I had.”
“You—” Jules’s lecture had lost its inertia. “What do you mean?”
“Got a stomach bug. Like, the kind you can’t really . . . go back from?”
“Ohmygod did you shit yourself?”
“Almost. I happened to be staggering out of the bathroom right as Maxim passed, and he offered to give me a ride home.”
“That’s good of him. I guess. Did you shit in his car?”
“Ew, no, Jules. No one deserves that.”
“Some people deserve that. Anyway. Guess the email last night was a welcome surprise, huh?”
“Email?”
Jules had groaned loud enough to hurt Pippa’s ear. “How are you so bad at keeping up? I swear. The elevator fucking exploded!”
“What?” Pippa had said. “R-really?”
“Yeah. The whole building was shut down the rest of the day, and the bomb squad was called in. The bomb squad. It was so exciting.”
Pippa’s stomach had dropped. “Did they find anything?”
“Oooh yeah.”
At the ensuing conspiratorial chuckle, Pippa felt a cold sweat break out in her armpits.
“Turns out it was a malfunctioning brake line.” Jules chuckled again. “Gonna be a huge settlement. Doris Ivanov is so pumped. You know the worst building to install defective safety equipment in?”
“A building full of lawyers?”
“A motherfucking building full of lawyers. Everyone’s still working on the paperwork though, and there have to be some other inspections, so the whole place is closed until Monday. Your li’l tum-tum will have plenty of time to get better. You feeling okay now?”
“Mostly.” Not a lie.
“Okay. Don’t get up to too much trouble this weekend. I’d have you over if you weren’t allergic to Bilbo so you could pass out on my couch and I could pamper you.”
“Aw, thanks.”
“Try and take it easy. Want me to bring you anything? Soup? Porn? Porny soup?”
Pippa had wrinkled her nose. “I hesitate to ask.”
“It’s just chicken and potato with all the potatoes carved into little boobs. You leave the skin on in tiny circles and that’s what makes the nipples.”
“Oh, that actually sounds really cute, Jules.”
“I’ll make some for you. I’ll spend all afternoon with a stack of spuds and a paring knife if that’ll make you feel better. If I’m feeling creative, I might try and sculpt a few vulvas.”
“Ooh, tempting.”
“They make the soup extra creamy.”
At that, Pippa had snorted so forcefully her sinuses stung for almost a minute afterward.
Upon finishing the conversation, she had decided to go into work anyway and establish the wards she should have put up years ago, yet when she stepped off the bus, the complex had been swarming with day-glo vests and hard hats.
A ward wouldn’t be too effective if it was interrupted halfway through by a construction worker asking why she was gesturing wildly around the caution tape.
So Pippa had returned home, taken the longest nap of her life, then returned to wait out the workers’ day.
The maple’s branches creaked above her and she looked up quickly.
Just a breeze; just old wood. She toyed with the handle of her spelled knife she’d stashed in her jacket pocket.
It had been nearly an hour, and the workers were still carrying beams and rolls of wires and pouring over blueprints laid out on folding tables.
She longed to pull out her phone and continue her search for cars. Public transportation was beginning to chafe after just a few days, though she knew that if she started browsing, she’d get drawn down a hole that ended with staring at vehicles she could hardly afford.
Yet again, Pippa found herself dreaming of a hefty Ash Coven paycheck.
There were other covens around the state that operated in a similar fashion to the Ash Coven, where members worked together to fight danger of the sort that would make the local police force shit themselves, but not all covens did so.
Her mother was part of a small one that included half a dozen witches and warlocks who branded themselves as master gardeners.
Instead of fertilizer and irrigation control, they modified fields with lightweight spells and a few well-placed charms. Growing up, Pippa had a childhood friend whose parents were in a small coven that focused on veterinary studies.
The group’s battles were with colicky horses and cats that had eaten shoestrings, and those battles were more than enough excitement.
The Ash Coven was old. Some of its members bragged about how some of the founders’ names were carved into Revolutionary War memorials.
Pippa personally doubted the veracity of some of those claims, but even if the dates were off by a few centuries, the Ash Coven would still be older than all the other covens in the state.
Those smaller covens typically functioned with their members acting as volunteers, but because of the Ash Coven’s age and its predilection for taking advantage of the seers who had joined over the decades, its coffers were well-filled.
Some might see it as cheating the stocks and illegal trading; Pippa saw it as a way to keep her apartment and avoid late-night bus trips while sleeping in every morning and not having to worry about whose turn it was to wash the dishes in the break room.
Maybe there were jobs outside of the Ash Coven like that, but in Pippa’s experience, most of those took one look at her single semester of college and gave her a spiel about how she should “look for something more entry-level.”
She’d tried in that single semester. Very hard.
Yet night after night, she still had to follow blood trails and track auras and read through obituary pages for suspicious deaths.
She would flip through flash cards as she rode the bus home, barely able to keep her eyes open after having fought for her life again.
One day, a professor had asked her to visit during office hours and given her a lecture on how it was time to pick what was most important to her.
He’d assumed she was out late doing normal college things, of course—drinking, partying, fucking—but his words stuck with her until the end of the semester, when she discovered how easy it really was to drop out.
She just had to learn to content herself with filing papers and sending emails and scrolling through used car websites as she tried to fall asleep.
As the sun flirted with the horizon, vehicles gradually began to filter out of the office complex. Finally, it was almost time.
The last of the construction workers ambled out of the building and locked the doors. He heaved himself into a truck, lit a cigarette, and drove off with music blaring out of his open windows. The blatant blue-collar stereotype was broken only by the boy band pop wafting down the street behind him.
Pippa waited another few minutes to make sure no one else emerged from the building, then hurried across the empty parking lot.
The north point would be the easiest ward to cast, so she did that one first, setting herself up in a patch of pea gravel beside an administrator’s window.
Magic leaped and flashed as she twisted it high to form a pillar.
Tendrils branched wide, spreading and dividing like they were bolts of slow-moving lightning visible only to her.
They rippled in the air and pulsed with a soft light.
Pippa let out her held breath. The magic stayed aloft, swaying gently as if it were affected by the same breeze as the caution tape.
She moved to the next spot, lifted her hands, and called the magic.
When it rose up and reached out, the tendrils curled around the first ones, knitting themselves together from their highest point all the way to the ground.
When that one was done, Pippa braced her hands on her knees and took several ragged gulps of air.