Chapter Six #2
Katherine took a deep breath. She looked at the girl sitting next to her and tried not to see herself.
In person, Lily didn’t look as identical to the real Katherine as she’d thought.
Her nose was smaller, her chin pointier.
But did it matter, when her eyes were clouded by the same fear Katherine’s had been?
She’d been this girl once, desperate for answers, ready to burst at the seams, considering ending it all rather than living another moment with a power she couldn’t explain, let alone control.
No matter how many times she told this story, it never got easier. She was still an open wound, as much as she wanted to pretend she was healed. But Lily had to hear this and know that one day, she could move on too.
No matter how much it still hurt.
“I was born in Colorado,” Katherine started.
“I had ordinary parents, and like you, I didn’t think magic was real.
But when I was sixteen, I started to have these moments where I felt strange.
There were just a few at first, but then they started to get more and more frequent. Until one day, when I was at school.”
Cheez-It walked away from his dinner and flopped down on Katherine’s lap.
She dug her hand into his fur. “This guy was being a dick to me. Brandon Rhimes. He was always like that—he’d pick a girl to single out for a few weeks, follow her around calling her a slut and telling her how much everyone hated her.
I’d managed to tune him out, but that day …
it just got to me. And I started to get mad at him, and he knew he was getting to me.
So he started saying things that were even worse, and then I got madder, and madder, and then all of a sudden, something came out of me. Something I couldn’t stop.”
She remembered the terror in Brandon’s eyes as the lockers around them crunched in on themselves, as the floor split, as the ceiling shook.
She remembered the other students in the hallway, some running, some stuck in place as they tried to figure out what was going on.
Remembered the screams, the helplessness as she felt her body overtaken by something that she couldn’t even begin to fathom.
It was like she was drowning in a sea of lava, lava that she knew was burning down everything around her, but all she could focus on was finding a way to get herself up to the surface.
Her senses were overwhelmed, her ears ringing with the screech of metal collapsing in on itself, the crash of the ceiling tiles falling, the feeling that she had to protect herself, the power building a safe space around her as its destruction kept coming, and coming, and coming …
“Anyway,” she said. “I snapped. Collapsed a full wing of the school.”
Twenty-six kids had been hurt. Three had died. Their names were tattooed on Katherine’s mind, popping into her head at random. Whenever she thought she found a moment of peace, there they were again: Tommy Higgins. Lorelei Buxton. Finn McCormack.
Brandon had walked away with a couple of bruises.
Katherine struggled to swallow around the knot in her throat. Lily was staring at her expectantly—waiting for the story to get better. Waiting for the hopeful end that Katherine had promised.
“I was terrified,” she continued. “Of hurting someone else. Of getting arrested. No one knew what happened, but everyone saw that I was at the center of it.”
Katherine’s skin pebbled as she remembered the sheer panic that had gripped her as she came back to her body in the destroyed hallway. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard shrieks, cries, and questions. About an attack. About a bomb. About what could have done this.
And she saw eyes turning toward her. Toward the perfectly unmarred circle where she stood, the only part of the hallway left intact. The epicenter of the destruction.
It didn’t matter that there was no physical evidence tying the crime to her. Didn’t matter that she herself couldn’t explain what happened.
She knew it was her fault. And she was sure that if she stuck around, everyone else would figure that out too.
“So I left,” she said. “I ran out of the school, got in my car, and just drove as fast as I could. And then when I realized that they would be able to track my license plate, I ditched the car and took off on foot. I was on the run for about a month, making my way across the country, hitchhiking, hiding in trucks, trying to get to LA. I thought if I got to a big city I could hide. But luckily, I made it to a big city where I could be found.”
Katherine had taken a bus in from Phoenix, a long, arduous ride where she kept a scarf pulled over her face the whole way, despite the increasing heat.
She didn’t trust the hasty sink dye job to hide her from prying eyes.
Her yearbook picture had been plastered over the news, her disappearance after the explosion solidifying her guilt in the eyes of the public, even though the police had officially labeled what happened a freak accident, with no evidence showing that there had been a bomb of any type.
The most tenacious of the local news reporters had practically turned her family’s front yard into a vacation home, camping out at all hours of the day in hopes of accosting them for details of how their monstrous departed kin had managed to pull this off.
She had never been able to shake the image of her younger brother Zac bolting toward the school bus, covering his face with his Transformers backpack as a man with a microphone screamed questions at him.
That was on replay the whole ride, the reminder of the hurt she had left behind.
The promise that she’d never be forgiven if she returned.
The bus had dropped her off at Union Station, late at night in a neighborhood with streets covered in broken glass and cigarette butts.
Katherine had long since stopped worrying for her own safety.
She had managed to put a tenuous lid on the roiling rage running through her veins, but all it took was one tiny push for her to let it out again.
It had come out a few times since she’d fled, in moments where her frustration and loneliness had peaked, but her avoidance of people had paid off—she’d destroyed trees, cacti, one SUV in a gas station parking lot, but she was pretty sure no one was inside.
She had to be pretty sure—she couldn’t think of the alternative.
LA was a calculated risk—so many people, all crammed together.
But she’d had so many near misses in small towns that she knew she needed to get somewhere crowded, somewhere she’d be just another invisible girl.
And then there was the other part of her, the part that was getting hollowed out by the weeks on the road, the part that needed the strange sense of community that she felt emanating from LA.
Even if that community was one she had to watch from afar.
She’d rushed away from the bus as soon as it parked, overwhelmed by the noises and smells of downtown. She ran until she found an alley where she could be alone, and then she sat down and did the only thing she could think to do: She cried.
“That’s when Cheezy found me.” Cheez-It started purring as soon as she said his name, and Katherine smiled as she scratched his head. “He was this tiny, underweight kitten, but he had a meow like a megaphone. I thought he was going to wake the neighbors.”
Cheez-It yawned, then laid his head on his paws and closed his eyes. “Having him around … it didn’t make the magic go away, obviously, but he calmed me down. Gave me something to think about other than the power. Helped me focus on living, not just surviving.”
They’d tooled around the city for a few days, stealing food, sleeping in alleys, making their way from downtown to East Hollywood to K-Town.
And then one night, asleep on a bus bench with Cheez-It resting on her chest, Katherine was awoken by a blond-haired woman with a gentle smile and curious eyes.
“Sylvia was shocked that she’d found me,” Katherine said.
“She suspected what had happened when she saw me on the news, so she set up a beacon—that feeling of community I felt, calling me to LA. She’d been trying tracking spells, but they didn’t work when I was so far away.
But that night, she had a feeling that she should do a locator spell. And there I was.”
Katherine thought back to that moment, to Sylvia reaching out her hand to her and telling her that it would all be okay.
She hadn’t believed Sylvia either. Back then, there was no Oak Grove training camp, no instruction manual for how to help an unsettled witch.
There was just Sylvia, who had once been unsettled too, who was trying her best to help others like her, who had a coven and a mission.
And Katherine was her first step toward achieving it.
She’d taken Katherine back to Aestas. Cleaned her up.
Given her her first real meal in weeks. When she saw Katherine flinch at the sound of a distant police siren, she told her she’d take care of it, and she’d used weeks’ worth of magic to permanently change Katherine’s dirty blond hair to a deep brunette, her pale skin from freckled to unmarked.
The only thing Katherine wouldn’t let her change was her eyes. She had her mother’s eyes. Eyes she’d only get to see again if she looked in the mirror, because going home was no longer an option.
Sylvia didn’t question, didn’t push. Katherine had never had someone take her anxiety at face value before. Sylvia didn’t try to force her to calm down, didn’t ramble on about how the police weren’t actually after her. She simply saw Katherine’s fear and found a way to make her feel safe.