“In the house?” Her voice rises with the words. “He got past the wards? Why the hell are you just now mentioning this?”
“I didn’t want to freak you out. Only one of us can be freaked out at a time.”
Flora makes a noise low in her throat but waves a hand for me to continue. “We are going to recast the wards as soon as you’re done telling me everything,” she says.
I nod. “I already re-warded the house. Twice… You asked where I would start if I wanted to speak up about all of this. I guess I could start with the Warlock.”
“Mm. But we don’t know shit about him… Is there anyone we can trust in the Coven?”
We simultaneously snort at this. Like all of the other witches in the Philadelphia area, we are automatically considered part of the Philly Coven, which maintains two strongholds in the city; Center City (of which Old City is a part) and Hazelnut Hill.
This made up around fifteen hundred witches in all, putting us second in size on the East Coast, behind the New York Coven. Like any other organization of people, being part of the Coven meant following certain rules.
The Philly Coven had been one of the first to pass the new mandates when the existence of supernaturals had been brought to the attention of the human world. The laws had been practically passed overnight.
Witches were to lay low, to continue living among the humans in secret, to wait and see how the reaction to the rest of the supernatural races played out. To hide, because we still could, because we were not as scary to the humans as the wolves or the vamps.
Never mind that it had been a pair of witches that had spilled the beans about the existence of supernaturals to the public in the first place. One could see how this did not put magic users in a favorable light as far as other supes were concerned.
This also meant the Sisters Superior—the HBIC’s as far as witches were concerned—restricting the use of magic that might be recognizable to humans in public, telling humans about our powers, or anything else of the sort.
At the time, these orders had not seemed like that big of a deal to me; we had been hiding among the humans forever. In reality, our lifestyles as witches in the world had not changed much, while we’d watched the lives of other supes change entirely.
Now, these restrictions seemed so much more…
Fucked.
That was the only word I could think of for it.
The question was, if these rules were broken, what would be the punishment?
What would the Coven do if I spoke out about what I’d witnessed? With how quickly they’d sent someone to the police station to get me to sign that paper, I would guess they would not be happy.
But what if I spoke out and didn’t reveal I was a witch?
Flora sighs. She’s doing a lot of that today. “I mean… I just don’t know, man. I don’t know what they would do. From what you’ve said, and what we know about the Coven, I don’t think they would let it go.”
“Witches look out for other witches first,” I grumble, feeling no better for this conversation at all.
“People look out for their own first,” Flora says. “Witches are not the only ones. Everyone does it.”
I snort. “Since when does everyone doing a thing make it right?”
To this, Flora says nothing, because there is nothing to say.
9 7:30 p.m.
This time, I would take the long way around.
And Flora would come with me.
We sit on the train, side by side, watching the city flash by through the windows. Subtle magic surrounds us, making us unworthy of a second glance to anyone nearby, but also not a blatant enough use of magic to piss off the Coven.
We seem to be walking a fine line these days.
So fine, in fact, that Flora had not wanted me to go tonight, and when I’d insisted, she’d demanded she come along.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in what I was doing; it was that she was afraid for me, herself, and the girls.
And I couldn’t blame her. I was afraid, too.
But I’d promised Sasha that I’d come check on her and the baby today, and it’s a good deed I feel compelled to do, since I feel I’m failing in other moral regions.
I watch the buildings go by, the graffiti decorating the stones of the overpasses, the tall corporate skyscrapers with their glass faces, the overlapping highways and aggressive drivers. I have lived in Old City, Philadelphia all my life, over thirty years, and yet some of the immediate surrounding areas are utterly foreign to me. Many are places I dare not visit during certain hours, and others are those I have no business entering at all.
We reach Northeast Philly soon enough. Flora and I hop off the train and head down the boulevard, toward the row home I’d visited less than twenty-four hours ago.
Flora’s eyes flick around and she draws closer to me, no doubt uncomfortable with the fact that we are fully within werewolf territory. We pass by a couple of wolves in their human forms, sitting upon their porch, unrecognizable from humans save for the magical shifter energy that surrounds them. If not for the Goddess’s Blessing I’d received at birth, they would look like nothing more than very large men with dark eyes and rugged faces.
One of the males whistles at us, a wolf cat-calling. We hurry along down the street, and I breathe a sigh of relief as we reach Sasha’s house at last.
Jackie opens the door to the dark brown row home as we are climbing the porch steps, before we can even knock. Werewolves have the sharpest noses and ears. She no doubt heard us coming from down the street.
“Hey Mir,” she says, looking up and down the block over our shoulders. “Come in. Come in.”
She gives us both
