by Jenica Saren
When the times started to change, so did many people's views of us. When history became warped and disfigured into something horrible and twisted, something that people blindly called religion, many of my people were either shunned or enslaved. Many worked for nobles in exchange for their safety, but it left their spirits at risk and would typically kill them anyway, doing so much magick at another's behest. Those that were shunned tried to live normal, simple lives with their families, many succeeded in hiding away, but many did not.
All because of a goddess damned book.
Rage filled me as I took in the varying expressions of loathing, distrust, and scepticism before me. I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't live like this. Apologising profusely as I went, I reached into Gavyn's mind and grabbed onto everything I could reach.
"Do you know what I was before I became this... This thing?" I demanded of the others, using Gavyn's mouth. Apparently, it amused him, as that's what I felt from my position in, essentially, his brain. He was either highly masochistic or very sadistic. I was getting very conflicting vibes, but this guy was a lot less chill than I had given him credit for.
Speaking past his shock, even as the others stared at Gavyn and I in shock, Jadwin leaned forward. "A murderer, perhaps? Or a murderer in training?" He never hesitated, he never broke eye contact, and he never blinked.
Shaking Gavyn's head, I leaned toward Jadwin in turn. "Nope," I replied, popping the P at the end. "I was a college student. Studying graphic design and thinking of how to tell my mom I didn't want to have kids. I had a best friend named Whitney. I sucked at walking without falling, I was doing great in all my classes. I daydreamed about what it would be like to fall in love one day, even though there are never any men or marriages in my coven."
If these dangerous men had appeared shocked before, it was nothing compared to how they looked now, especially the brute who's face was mere inches from my own. Or Gavyn's own.
Since no one said anything, I continued. "I had a life. A life I wanted to change slightly, but not because my people are horrible or murderers, but because I'm selfish and want all of the things I can't have. I was a person, and apparently, a better person than any of you, since I've never harmed an innocent person in my life," I said, keeping my tone level, despite the tears that were threatening to spill out of my eyes. "So tell me now, Mystery Guy: who's the murderer here?"
I wasn't sure what came over me, why I did it, but I did. I closed the short distance and pressed my - Gavyn's - lips to Jadwin's for a brief second before letting go of the reins and retreating back into the corner of my current host's mind.
The two of them jumped back, and for a second everyone was silent as a grave. Then three out of the four guys, including Gavyn, erupted into highly contagious laughter, all while Jadwin stared on in horror. His expression quickly morphed into one of borderline outrage.
"What the fuck was that shit?" Mystery Guy demanded.
"In some cultures," Zeph commented breathlessly between bursts of laughter. "They call that a kiss."
Everyone except Jadwin laughed some more.
The angry guy pinned Gavyn with a glare. "Aren't you going to eject her already?" he huffed indignantly. "She just made you kiss me!"
Gavyn, however, was entirely too amused for his own good. "But wasn't it a good kiss?" he asked with a fake pout. "Or are you saying I'm a bad kisser?"
"Oh, don't ask him that," Hansen warned mockingly. "The answer could ruin your friendship if he wants more!"
Howls of laughter rose up from the table as Jadwin rose angrily from his seat. "Get the location of that body and get rid of her. We don't work with witches," he spat. Like, actually spat.
He's spitting mad. I thought as Gavyn repeated and Jadwin turned a bright red colour, sending everyone into further laughing fits that had almost everyone clutching their ribs.
Without so much as a backwards glance, he turned on his heel and stormed out of the room, down the hallway towards his own bedroom, if I had to guess.
Once everyone had calmed down a bit and were no longer wiping tears from their eyes, a sense of exhaustion rolled over me. Wow. I'd forgotten what it was like to actually have fun in such a short period of time. The last time I'd had so much fun was sneaking into our old high school with Whitney and rearranging everything in the principle's office. Now that was fun.
"Kismet," Gavyn said, pulling my attention to him. "We really do need to stop this banshee. If you truly believe your people are innocent, we have to prevent them and countless others from being killed, tortured, or worse."
What could possibly be worse than those other two things?
It was a really big thing to have to think about, with a lot of pros and cons to weigh. On the one hand, they were my people, and I'd said it once already. I couldn't let the banshee that was my body make more banshees and I couldn't let magickless innocents be harmed either, according to our creed as witches that walked the path of righteous virtue. It was kind of a big deal.
But I also couldn't just lead these guys to my people and hope that asking them nicely would prevent more bloodshed. Unfortunately, life didn't work that way.
Internally taking a deep breath, I tried to steel myself.
I need to make a call.
The Phone Call That Changed Something, I Think
"Okay, so how do you want this to work?" Gavyn asked me for maybe the millionth time. I thought it was pretty self-explanatory after the last time I took charge of his mouth - in more than one way.
Obviously, I'm just gonna kinda talk through you, since she won't be able to hear me through the phone. I explained to him once more. Here I was thinking he was the smarty pants of the group.
He nodded his head and then seemed to remember I was in there. "Got it. Will it take long?" he asked. He was holding his phone. If I didn't know any better, I'd have thought he was stalling for whatever reason. "Just wondering."
Gavyn, are you scared of ghosts? I thought to him in the graveliest tone I could manage mentally. To be fair to him, I didn't think that was the case, I was just trying to lighten the mood. In reality, he most likely thought that I was staging some sort of coup and calling my best friend under the guise of needing help was part of some master plan to take out him and his clanmates.
He chuckled nervously and shook his head, lightly this time. "Okay, let's do this."
Diving into his mind was becoming more and more of a reflexive action and I wasn't sure that I cared for it at all. I had never wanted to violate someone's thoughts and personal boundaries by doing it, but since meeting this lot, it was becoming a lot more of a necessity than ever before. As I took control, the intensity of his worry hit me and I made a promise to myself to ease those concerns as much as I possibly could. So far, he and maybe Zeph were the only ones who didn't really want to see me dead.
Once I had the reins, I moved the fingers of the hand holding the phone, dialling Whitney's number from memory alone. It felt like it rang forever, even though the call timer said I'd only been on the line for five seconds. Still, I was nervous.
When she answered the phone, I was a little shocked. Hearing her voice almost made tears spring into... Gavyn's eyes. "Kismet? Is that you?" My best friend's voice was full of so much desperation and panic. It hit me like a tonne of bricks and made me want to launch myself through the phone to hug her tight.
"Yeah, Whit, it's me," I whispered, choking up a little bit.
A snort of laughter echoed from her end. "My, grandma, what a deep voice you have," she teased.
"How did you know it would be me? How do you even know it's me anyway? I could be some kind of predator or something."
"Do you want the easy answer or the hard one?" she asked, obviously struggling to keep her tone light. She was much better at staying positive than I was. She was the one who motivated me through every exam, every insanely long paper I had to write. She was, as she liked to say, my biggest cheerleader.
"Easy."
"A little bir
d flew into my window and said, 'Cinderelly is calling' before flying back off into the sunset," she replied. The best part of that whole thing was how seriously and deliberately she said the entire thing. Cinderelly was what she called me for a long time because of my white-blonde hair and my obsession with the colour blue throughout junior high.
I actually laughed out loud, with Gavyn's beautiful voice. Fortunately for me, I could also sense his amusement. "Okay, that was good. What's the hard answer?" Did I really want to know? She was trying to keep things light on her end, which meant that she already knew something I didn't.
On the other end, I heard her suck in a deep, shaky breath before slowly letting it out. "When they found your mom and gran, they went looking for you. Marcia even came to my house searching for you," she explained slowly, her voice ringing out crystal clear over the tiny phone speaker. One thing she said was sticking out to me, though, and it shot chills of sheer terror up and down my spine.
"But no one was able to find you. I got desperate, so I called a few friends from the veil to check on you and they told me you tried to get through, but some sort of black shadow pushed you out as you were halfway in."
Wait.
What?
I'd been getting through? I was powerful enough to do the ritual on my own? And something stopped me?
Now that was some total bullshit right there.
Inside, I could feel Gavyn's agreement with my sentiment. That was nice, at least. Maybe they weren't all as anti-witch as they made themselves out to be.
"Whit, this is important," I said, trying my damnedest to focus on the primary issue at hand. Well, my primary issue. "They found mom and gran?" Hope soared high inside me, making me feel lighter than I had in what felt like an eternity. They were okay. They were really okay.
Whitney cleared her voice and I heard her moving around. Why did it sound like she was moving to sit down? Whitney preferred standing when she was on the phone. "Kissy, they're not doing so great. But don't worry about that right now, I just need you to come home, okay?"
"What do you mean they're not doing so great? What's wrong with them?" My best friend was silent on the other end. "Whitney Marie Laveau! What the fuck do you mean?"
She hated it when anyone called her by her last name since she wasn't exactly her ancestor's biggest fan, but it was the easiest way to get her to speak up sometimes. "They're both in comas. Magickal ones. The idea I have is that whatever knocked you out of the veil got to them first," she told me hesitantly.
Comas? My two only blood relatives I had were in comas?
It was hard to wrap my head around the entire situation and my heart was thumping heavily in my chest. Well, Gavyn's heart and Gavyn's chest. But I was commandeering them for a little while. My heartache needed a heart to ache at the moment. "But they're alive?" I whispered after a time.
"They're alive, Kissy. So come home, okay?" Whitney replied softly.
"That's what I needed to talk to you about, Whit..." I went on to explain everything from the beginning to her. From starting the ritual to how I had to stay in one piece by hopping into other people's bodies, to accidentally landing in witch hunters, to the whole banshee situation that I could do absolutely nothing about until I could get home and get back into my body. I had been expected a sense of disapproval from Gavyn, since the idea as that they were going to kill my body and not let me back into it, but I was pleasantly surprised when he made no objection to the statement.
"Whit, are you still there?" She'd been quiet for a long time, a lot longer than it normally took her to process things. Then again, I had just said...
"Banshees are real?" she whispered in shock finally. "Like, really real? And you're one?"
"My body is one," I corrected. "So I need to get back to my house and hope that my body is still there so I can get back to it. That way, the excess magick will have somewhere to go."
Whitney made a series of thoughtful sounds and I thought I could hear her flipping through the pages of a book. I swear, if she was reading one of her mangas again while I was trying to tell her about this life or death thing, I was going to hop into her body next. "There are two issues with that, honey," she eventually told me. Issues? Issues were bad. "First of all, remember I told you they looked everywhere for you? That includes your house. They obviously didn't find 'you' there."
Shit.
She was right. That was a pretty damn big issue. "If you can locate something of mine, like the hair left on the brush I keep at your house, you should be able to locate my physical body with no issues," I supplied. Sometimes it was hard to remember that both of us were still technically in training, neither of us fully schooled in our magick nor matured.
My best friend made a humming sound of approval. "You right," she agreed. So, we could check that issue off. "But here's the second issue: I remembered reading about accidentally severed souls in my grandmama's grimoire just a couple of days ago, so I went to find it."
"Okay, and what does it say?"
"Kissy..." I fucking hated it when she trailed off like that.
"Just give it to me, daddy." Inside, I felt and heard Gavyn snort out a laugh.
Before she responded, she took another deep breath, this one with resolve rather than nervousness. "You need a necromancer to put it back."
Oh. Oh!
"Shit," I hissed. "I need to go over this with my would-be killers. Can I call you another time, babe?"
She let out a nervous laugh. "Only if you call me 'babe' with that voice again," she joked.
"Love you, babe, I'll talk to you again soon." I had to fight the urge to laugh with what felt like every single ounce of my willpower.
"I'm swooning, Captain, I'm swooning!"
Laughing, I hung up the phone and deleted the number from Gavyn's call log. It probably wouldn't stop them from calling her if they wanted to, but it would make it that much harder on them. Call it realistic paranoia. After I did that, I let go of Gavyn's control panel, as I would never call it to anyone ever.
As he resurfaced as himself, he shuddered slightly. "You know, Kismet, I have a newfound respect for your resilience," he told me matter-of-factly.
Oh stop it, I'm blushing.
"Really," he said sincerely. "That short time being locked up in what felt like someone else's body, I don't know if I could have tolerated two weeks of intermittently doing that. Not to mention everything that seems to be going on back home for you."
Yeah, well, fate has a funny way of messing shit up all the time, right? I tried a light joke to see if it would brighten him up a little bit. He seemed unreasonably sad, and on my behalf at that. He almost sounded depressed in the way he spoke to me, which made me a little uneasy.
"Witch or not, Kismet, I want to help you make things right," he said reverently. It made my heart - if I'd had one - jump into my throat. "The truth is that most of us haven't experienced the way witches live firsthand, we're just following our orders and creed. But you have a family and a best friend who need you now more than they ever have or ever will again. And I'm not going to just watch you flounder about."
Can I borrow your eyes to cry? I can't cry like this, but I really want to right now.
Gavyn chuckled lightly and made a sniffling sound. "Sorry, it seems the server is currently busy, please try again later."
My snort seemed to echo around me, which was odd, since it was a thought and not a verbal sound. Come on. I'll take the left eye and you take the right, okay?
"Deal."
And there we stood together for who knows how long. With one of the big, bad witch hunters crying on behalf of my struggles, on behalf of what I'd lost and what I could potentially lose. It was beautiful, if I was honest, but it also made me realise just how dire my situation really was.
Will you guys kill the necromancer before he kills me? Again? Or reanimates me? I don't want to be a zombie.
Gavyn laughed and patted his own shoulder. It was a weird gesture, but I understood that it wa
s intended for me. "I don’t think he will, but sure thing, babe."
Oh hell no! That's Whitney's thing, not mine! I mentally shouted at him. I was laughing inside, but he totally didn't need to hear that part.
"Are you saying you don't like it, then?" he asked, feigning sounding hurt. I opened my mental mouth to retaliate, but he seemed to have already seen it coming. "No need to respond. I'm not sure my ego could take whatever bashing you were about to give it."
Internally, I puffed out my chest proudly. Yeah, because I'm badass and stuff.
Laughing, he turned away from the window we'd been standing by and started making his way toward the hallway. "Okay 'badass and stuff', what do you say to us getting you visible and stuff?"
Visible? Now he was speaking my love language. And stuff? Was he really trying to get in my pants over here? There was no way in hell, after two weeks of hellish purgatory, that I would pass up any opportunity to be seen again. While I was really enjoying speaking through someone else and it was fun to cause some mischief that way, I was really banking on getting to be actually seen.
Maybe that made me pathetic since I’d always been somewhat of a loner when I was physical, but two weeks of solitary confinement when I could see all of the lives being lived around me and being unable to participate in them was… It was torture.
Maybe it really was fate that caused me to tumble into that guy at the bar. Maybe it was fate that caused me to go into that particular bar in the first place. Maybe fate had been on my side all along and I was just being a jerk because I was lonely and pissed off.
Whatever the case, Gavyn took my silence as an answer and continued walking until he came to what I assumed was the front door.
“Let’s go get you figured out, okay?”
Hell yeah!
The Part with the Weird Alchemist and a Body
For about nine blocks of walking, I remained silent, not questioning Gavyn or his directional sense, nor the fact that I wasn't sure he knew where he was taking me to begin with. Eventually, we'd walked far enough out of the main city area and were approaching an area that had more trees than houses. Last time I'd been in a forest with witch hunters, it hadn't exactly gone buttery smooth.