"Yeah, but only because everything is clear."
"What do you mean everything is clear?" Ace asked, glancing over at him.
"I mean I was driving for over an hour. It's only raining here."
"In this town?" Drex clarified.
"On this street," Seven told him, shaking his head.
Ace slowly turned from the window, looking over at me, brows pinched.
"Do you think it's her?" he asked me.
"Her who?" Seven asked, having been out of town when the shipment came in.
"The new witch," Drex said, having been the one to pick her up several days before.
"It's that time again?" Seven asked, shrugging.
"The other one has been gone for years," Ace reminded him.
"Years, days, it's hard to keep track," Seven said, moving over to get himself a drink. "How would it be her?"
"Remember the one, what, three generations ago? When she got pissed, she set shit on fire," Drex recalled, likely because his very own jacket was once set on fire. While he wore it.
"So, what?" I asked. "This one is sad?" I asked, rolling my eyes.
"You know how they are," Ace said, and I wasn't sure if he meant witches, women, or humans in general. In all cases, I figured he had a point.
"Someone should go talk to her. Has anyone even let her out?" Seven asked.
"Minos has been feeding her," Ace said, shrugging.
"For how long?" Seven pressed.
"I don't know. A week? Something like that," Drex said, waving it off.
"Maybe someone should go talk to her," Seven suggested.
"What?" I asked when Ace's gaze fell once again on me. "Me? You want me to go talk to her? Why the fuck me?"
I couldn't be considered the softest touch of all of us. If anything, I was probably the worst with human interactions in general.
"Send Minos. Even Seven would be a better choice." Drex always needed to be left out of interactions with humans if it required anything resembling diplomacy.
"I need her to stop making it fucking rain," Ace snapped, "not assure her everything is going to be alright."
"So you want me to scare her?" I clarified.
"Whatever it takes. I don't give a shit. Just make it stop," Ace demanded, storming out of the room.
Once upon a time, Ace had been in charge of all of us. Which was why, when we decided to create the MC a hundred or so years before, Ace had stepped into the role of president without any of us questioning it.
So when he issued an order, he expected it followed through.
"You're going to want a drink first," Drex insisted, holding out a glass toward me.
He was right.
I did.
So I took it.
Threw it back.
Then moved to stand.
We always kept the witches in the basement. At least at first. We'd learned early on that giving them too much freedom at the beginning only created minor disasters. Things being broken. Spells being cast. Jackets lit on fire.
We took them from the van and into the basement, leaving them there for a few months or a few years until their spirits broke enough to allow for them to do what was needed.
There wasn't much to be said about the space. It was a massive, cold part of the house where the damo seeped in through the cinderblock walls, chilling you through to the bone if you stayed for more than a few moments.
We'd thrown shit down there to keep the witches from losing their minds. A bed with a passably comfortable mattress, a couple lights, extra blankets.
Ace, a lover of books, a collector of new editions, tossed all the old ones into boxes and put them in the basement for the witches to read. There was a sink and a toilet. Though I was pretty sure we forgot to add in a shower. Someone suggested it—likely Seven or Minos—but then no one had ever called someone in to work on it between the new arrivals.
It had been at least three witches since I stepped foot in the basement.
I guess I hadn't been prepared to find it any different.
What I found, instead, was that the witches had slowly but surely over time started to make the space more like a home.
Dried flowers were strung and hung from the ceiling. If I remembered correctly, the witches always did some ridiculous ceremony for their 'Sacrifice' in which they filled their hair with flowers. From the looks of things, these flowers had donned the heads of at least six witches. I wondered which one found them all and set to making the place more their own.
The walls, which I remember being painted white after there was some mold issue or another that fucked with the lungs of one of the witches, were suddenly stained in intricate murals. Flowers and trees and woodland creatures. Then, in a break in the woods, a massive pentacle and a couple of rune symbols that I recognized, but didn't know the meanings of.
In front of that pentacle image, someone had set up what appeared to be a makeshift altar.
There was an old broken stoneware bowl that I remembered from one of the many remodels over the years set with various rocks, some worn soft from the river bed that skirted the inside of the woods around the property, and a bushel of dried herbs from the yard, bound with twine. There were feathers gathered in a drinking glass—bright red Cardinal, massive brown and white hawk, a shining black raven. There was even a collection of animal bones stacked in a neat pile, likely remnants of dinner from one of the owls around the property.
We had taken them away from their coven, but clearly not their practice.
Which was why I was here in the first place, I reminded myself, forcing my gaze away from the altar, stepping over the tray of food left at the bottom of the steps to be taken back up. Everything was gone save for the slivers of chicken.
Fucking witches and their refusal to eat meat.
"Hey, where are you?" I called, moving through the mostly-dark space, the only light inside from the minuscule barred windows. "Witch?" I called, squinting into the darkness.
She wasn't on the bed or in the bathroom area.
"Witch!" I roared, blood starting to pump, wondering if she was like that red-headed one who'd tried to escape, slowly tunneling through the wall. Or like that one with the cat-like eyes who'd hanged herself by her sheets.
I didn't care so much about the witches as a whole, but they'd made an agreement; they'd signed a treaty.
One witch each generation.
To come to us.
They didn't get to run away.
They didn't get to kill themselves.
And it pissed me off when one of them thought they could find a way around the rules.
Anger always started the Change.
As my pulse pounded harder, I could feel my fingers elongating, talons poking out through the tips. My teeth got more pointed, my tongue forked. There was a telltale burning in my shoulder blades, flesh separating, making room for the black wings to start protruding out. The crushing ache in the top of my hairline was the small, blunted horns making their way out of my skull.
The fire burned through me, chasing off the cold that had set in from the endless rain. If you touched my skin, it could nearly burn you.
On a roar, I made my way back to the bed, hand grabbing the bottom, flipping it and flinging it across the room, barely even noticing the sound of the wood cracking and splintering all around.