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Too late, I realize that my voice is cracking. Celeste gathers me into her arms.
After a moment, she says, “You remind me so much of myself when I first came to the city.”
I lift my head from her shoulder. “Except I never got to kill a bunch of mobsters to announce myself.”
I’d expected her to laugh, to tell me how cool she was, coming here guns ablaze. To my suprise, her body stiffens beneath mine. When I look up at her, she’s looking straight ahead, at something that’s not really there.
Her voice is flat. “I’d already been here for a while when I did that.”
She kisses my forehead and slips off the bed, leaving me craving her warmth. She doesn’t look at me while she speaks. “They were running a trafficking ring, picking up young witches, often girls who were disenfranchised and wouldn’t be missed. This was before they discovered bindweed, of course, so they had to find girls that were easy to manipulate or unaware of their power.” From one of the drawers of her dresser, she produces a small ziplock bag, dried blue Ghostshade flowers inside. “There’s always been huge money in witch blood. Some of the richest people in this city are vampires and they will do anything to get their hands on it.”
I watch her fingers work deftly as they spread the flowers across the paper. My stomach feels ominously heavy as I watch her roll it. “So you just… took them out?”
Celeste taps the finished blunt on the top of the dresser, then brings it to her lips. The lighter hisses and she inhales deeply, eyes closed. Immediately, I can see the tension in her forehead dissipate, her creased eyebrows straightening out.
It takes a few moments before she replies, “Actually, I was dating one of the guys running it.”
Unsure how to reply, I only watch her, waiting for her to tell me the rest of the story. For a while, it seems like maybe she won’t. She just leans against the dresser, smokes, and looks off into the distance.
“I’d run away from home and was waitressing at a truckstop diner up north. Having heard the horror stories of what happens to witches out in the world, I didn’t tell anyone.” She shrugs. “I thought meeting Dante there was fate, when he probably just sniffed me out from a hundred miles away.”
“Why did you run away?”
She flicks ashes into her glass ashtray. “I was raised by a single mom in a small coven of witches. After decades of persecution, there weren’t many left of us, so they were very protective. I was homeschooled, didn’t have any friends my age or even ever got to leave our small town. I was their prodigee and I hated it.” She laughs. “I didn’t want to be a witch. I wanted to get my license and go to high school, like a normal teenager.”
I try to imagine Celeste when she was younger but it seems impossible for her to ever have been anything but the person she is now. “So you left?”
“As soon as I turned eighteen. I completely underestimated how difficult it would be to make it on my own. But thenheshowed up and I didn’t have to. He was charming and funny and completely taken by me.” She grimaces. “Until he wasn’t.”
She takes another puff and sighs, a cloud of smoke billowing out from her nose. I scrunch up my face. It smells so sweet.
“He took me to the city, promising to show me the world. All he needed was a little blood. First only for himself, then later for his friends. He said we’d use the money to travel, to finally get out of here. Of course, there’s only so much your body can endure. I was always cold and started fainting all the time. Eventually, I told him I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“And he didn’t stop?”
She scoffs. “Not unless he thought I was going to die otherwise. It took me a long time before I tried to stand up for myself. To be honest, I didn’t think I could.” Her face is carefully blank as she twirls the joint in her fingers, watching the ash rain down. “He’d already made it very clear that I had very little say over my body.”
I swallow, pulling up my knees to my chin. “That’s horrible.”
“I loved him, so I made excuses for his behaviour. Besides, if I’d admitted to myself that he was hurting me, I’d also have had to admit to myself that running away was a mistake. If everything was fine, I didn’t have to feel like it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t.”
She shrugs. “No but it certainly feels that way when you let someone like that into your life, doesn’t it?”
I think of Casey and dying on my hallway floor. “Yeah.”
“Anyway, in the end I found out I wasn’t the only one. Him and his friends had been bringing other witches into the city and selling their blood for money. And unlike me, those girls hadn’t spent their whole life training in the arcane. Most of them didn’t even know they had the gift. They couldn’t defend themselves.
“I wasn’t really planning on killing them. It was a kind of magic I’d never used before and it turned out a lot more powerful than I expected.”
“So uh… you can just snap your fingers and a bunch of people drop dead?”
She laughs quietly. “No. It took a lot of preparation. And as soon as people find out how a spell works, it becomes easy to counter. That’s the problem with magic, it’s powerful only against the uninitiated.”
“Oh.” I rest my chin on my knees, thinking back on what I just learned. My stomach feels tight with anger at people I’ve never even met. “Sorry. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have brought it up.”
She waves her hand, the dead stump of the Ghostshade now sitting cold in the ashtray. “I’m fine, kitten. Water under the bridge.”
