Witching Hour

by Skylar Finn

  Peter was quiet, not saying anything. I looked up at his reflection in the window across from us, concerned. Was he pissed at me or something? I racked my memory for something I could have done. I ate his last avocado this morning, but only after he’d already left for the day. I had a replacement in my bag. Peter never ate avocado at night.

  In the window’s reflection, his eyes were closed, and he was still. “Peter?” I said uncertainly. He didn’t answer. He slumped in the chair, unmoving. As I watched in horror, he slumped forward over the table.

  10

  The Witching Hour

  I shook his shoulder frantically. He nearly landed in the fettuccine in front of him. “Peter!” I cried.

  Peter was unresponsive. He made a terrible gasping sound. I leaned over him. What should I do? Check his pulse? Clear his airway? His breath gushed out in a noisy rattle.

  He snored into his pasta. He was asleep.

  I straightened up, feeling like an idiot. I lifted the plate from the table and set it on the kitchen counter. I wasn’t really sure what to do with him. Peter once carried me down the hallway and tucked me gently into his bed, where I woke up the next morning next to him. It was after a minor bender when he first moved to the city and we went out for Taco Tuesday at Manny’s Margaritas. I’d gotten a little carried away and wound up passed out on the couch. On this particular evening, I didn’t delude myself that I was capable of carrying Peter anywhere.

  I took the tablecloth off the table and wrapped it around his prone form like a blanket. I turned the thermostat up to seventy-eight so he wouldn’t get cold in the night. I thought about going home, but the thought of my empty, too-large, cold house was less than appealing. I borrowed one of Peter’s t-shirts, flung my uncomfortable bra across the room like a slingshot, and burrowed under his duvet.

  When I woke up, Peter was beside me, his arms wrapped loosely around my waist. I checked my breath to see if it still smelled like gin. I was still a little drunk from the previous evening. I replayed the night in my head, contemplating what I’d seen of Cristo being weird. Admittedly, he was charming, handsome, and worldly. His talents were questionable at best, but what did I know about art? Nothing, really. Maybe he could make Tamsin happy. Who was I to judge?

  I watched the fan spin lazily overhead. I jumped a little when I felt Peter’s breath in my ear. “Did you cover me with the tablecloth?” he asked, sounding curious.

  “Yes,” I admitted, embarrassed. “I didn’t want you to get cold.”

  “That’s adorable.” The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. He tugged at the hem of the t-shirt I wore. “I see you’ve raided my closet again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sheepish. “Your shirts are so much softer than mine.”

  “No, I like it when you wear my clothes,” he said. “I just don’t get why you refuse to keep anything of yours here. I keep telling you, I don’t use my bureau. You could just stick some in a drawer or something. And how do you brush your teeth?”

  “I have a toothbrush.” I paused. “It’s folded up in my bag.”

  “I’m aware that you’re here.” He tucked my hair behind my ear. “I’m not sure why you keep trying to conceal it from me.”

  “I just don’t want to crowd you.” I buried my face in the pillow.

  “Crowd me?” He lifted the pillow from my face and looked at me, concerned. “Why would I give you a key to my apartment if I felt like you were crowding me? Or hang out with you every day of the week? If anything, I feel like you’re always about to run away if you hear a loud noise. You’re like a deer.”

  “I just don’t want you to think that I…” I trailed off. I didn’t want to bring up Les Rodney. I didn’t want Peter to think I had baggage. I kept my previous relationship in a filing cabinet I never opened in his presence.

  “Think that you what?” He nudged me in the ribs. “That you enjoy my company and want to spend time with me?”

  “That I care about you more than you care about me,” I said finally. “I guess.”

  Peter studied me briefly. Realization dawned on his face. He’d met Les once and loathed him. I could see his internal struggle to address the subject of a man he hated unequivocally for being unethical and manipulative—everything he despised, everything that went against the Peter Code of Conduct—against the impulse to let sleeping dogs lie.

  “That’s dumb,” he said finally and left it at that. He wrapped a hand around the arch of my foot. “You do have a decision to make, however.”

  “Peter, don’t.” My eyes widened with horror. “Please.”

  “You have to decide,” he continued, his thumb hovering menacingly above my heel. “Whether we go to brunch or the farmer’s market. Neither of which I actually like doing, but do to humor you. So the least you can do is pick one out quickly, rather than prolonging my suffering with your waffling and indecision.” He poked my heel with his thumb.

  “You can’t!” I gasped. He knew that I was horrendously, excruciatingly ticklish and often used it against me. He was ruthless. He ferreted out my weakest points in a matter of days and stored them in his memory for future use, yielding his power over me in negotiations, fights. Et cetera.

  “Which…one? Which. One,” he tapped his thumb against my foot with each word.

  “Neither! Neither,” I said immediately. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m kind of hung over, to be honest with you.”

  “Good.” He collapsed back against the pillows and rummaged in the bedside table for the remote to his smart TV. “There’s a new documentary on Netflix about the lifespan of the sea tortoise that I really want to watch.”

  “What?” I pulled the pillow over my face again. “You’re so weird.”

  “What do you mean?” I could hear his voice, muffled, somewhere above me. “Who doesn’t like sea tortoises?”

  When I woke up several hours later, my mouth tasted like a sock and I had a headache from dehydration or caffeine withdrawal, possibly both. I glanced at Peter, who had the covers drawn up to his chin. At first, I thought he’d gone back to sleep, too, but then I saw he was watching the screen, riveted, as the mighty sea tortoise made its way across the ocean floor.

  I rolled out of bed and walked to the bathroom door, ducking as I passed under the screen. In the shower, I turned the hot water on full blast and steamed out the remainder of my hangover. I wrapped myself in a fluffy white towel Peter took from a hotel while on assignment and wiped the steam from the mirror. I saw my reflection and choked back a scream.

  Instead of my own face, my mother’s looked back at me. It was similar to the incident with my bathwater, but somehow even more unnerving to see her face when I expected to see my own looking back at me. Like when you go to drink your boyfriend’s Coke at a restaurant and it turns out to be Pepsi.

  She looked back at me, then craned her neck and peered curiously over my shoulder. “Peter certainly is clean,” she remarked. “I tried your mirror at home, but you’re never there. At first, I wasn’t going to do this at all—it just seemed so cliché, you know, talking in front of a mirror, like poisoning an apple—but it really is surprisingly easy to do.”

  “Please stop doing this, Mother,” I whispered through clenched teeth. “I’m in a new relationship with a man I’d very much like to think that I’m not insane and you’re really making this difficult for me.”

  “He can’t hear us,” she said dismissively. “I can hear his TV from in here.”

  “Why can’t you just use FaceTime?” I asked in despair. “Like the other mothers?”

  “You never know who’s monitoring those things, Samantha,” she said. “You’re too trusting. I hope you and Tamsin aren’t texting about witchcraft all day, or posting about it on social media.”

  “No, we are not,” I said indignantly. “Do you know why? Because I don’t want anybody to think that I’m insane.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got to tell you something and you’re never
not at Peter’s. It’s like you live there—”

  “We don’t live together,” I squeaked indignantly, glancing over my shoulder.

  “You need to calm down. I was just making an observation. If anyone has commitment issues in this situation, it’s obviously you. You look like you’re about to jump out of a window rather than address it. And that’s not even what I want to talk to you about. We made some further observations about the magic near you, and I need to keep you updated.”

  “We’ll be there tonight,” I whined. “Can’t it wait?”

  “No, no it cannot. We know how close you’ve come to the source of it. We tracked it again last night, and it seems you and Tamsin came within inches of it. We could see your souls pass by it when we performed the spell. Whatever it is, it’s close.”

  “We were near it?” I said, puzzled. “When?”

  “Sometime early in the evening,” she said. “A quarter of the witching hour.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked. “What did you call it?”

  “A quarter of the witching hour. It just means six o’clock,” she explained. “The witching hour is midnight.”

  “That’s a real thing?” I asked. “What does it mean?”

  “Well, over time it’s become more a figure of speech,” she said. “Performing magic at midnight is really more something you do in your younger days, but there is an element of truth to it, like most tradition. The most powerful magic occurs at midnight: when the moon is high, and the ordinary world is asleep.”

  “Um, okay,” I said. I found myself wishing desperately that I had gone to brunch.

  “We’ll explain it better when you get here,” she said. “You didn’t notice anything?”

  I thought of the light in Cameron’s shop. I thought of the darkness in Cristo’s eyes. I thought of Lindy and her cards.

  “Maybe?” I ventured.

  “Never mind, we’ll ask Tamsin,” she said dismissively. I was insulted. I knew about magical stuff, too.

  “I know about magical stuff, too—” I started to say petulantly when a knock at the door caused me to jump.

  “Sam? Are you in the shower?” Peter asked through the door.

  I looked back at the mirror. The only reflection in it was my own.

  11

  Homecoming

  I met up with Tamsin after I went out to eat with Peter. It was one o’clock on a Saturday, which everyone knows is still brunch, but Peter insisted on pretending it was lunch so he could maintain the illusion that he thought brunch was beneath him. It was pretty thin; Peter drank more bottomless mimosas at “lunch” than any of my friends combined, but I didn’t press the issue.

  Tamsin was extremely gloomy about going home for the weekend. She was in love with her newfound freedom and remiss at the prospect of spending the night in the house that she grew up in. I found it novel, having only recently reconnected with my mom’s side of the family. My parents went through such an acrimonious divorce that my dad had all but brainwashed me against them. I guess most people would have rebelled before the age of thirty, but I had always been obedient to the point of stasis.

  It was why witchcraft was so new to me. Up until six months ago, I thought it was something made up, like Santa Claus or ghosts. Upon going back to Mount Hazel to find my mother, I learned that not only was magic real—so, for that matter, were ghosts. (The jury was still out on Santa Claus.)

  I was excited to see my mom, Aunt Minerva, and my grandmother, Aurora. For one thing, I hoped it might curb my mother’s recent habit of appearing in Peter’s bathroom, which was getting awkward. For another, I wanted to ask them about Lindy: how dangerous was she? Was she the powerful presence they’d sensed nearby?

  Tamsin was nursing a red wine hangover from Cristo’s show and asked if I could stop at Sheetz on our way out of town. “Sheetz?” I said, revolted. “What are you talking about? We’re going to Wawa, obviously.”

  “Not everyone in Pennsylvania grows up with the luxury of having a Wawa on every corner, Sam,” she said defensively. “The rest of us go to Sheetz, okay?”

  “Don’t even talk to me about that,” I said. “We are not going to Sheetz. That’s gonna be a hard no. First of all, it’s Hoagie Fest. That in and of itself makes our Wawa side trip mandatory. Second of all, you need coffee. Maybe get you a lemonade iced tea or something. It will cure you of your hangover. Especially after your hoagie.”

  Tamsin was too tired to argue. She knew she would never win the Sheetz versus Wawa debate against a city dweller, not in the condition she was in. And let’s be honest: it was a losing argument in the first place.

  In addition to my coffee, iced tea, and hoagie, I also got a soft pretzel at the register and a Sizzli. My hangover was nearly gone, but I felt sure the grease would eradicate what little of it was left.

  Tamsin watched me, sickened, as I devoured the Sizzli in the front seat of the rental car. “How can you eat that?” she asked weakly. She’d barely sipped her coffee. “It’s from this morning. It’s like eight hours old.”

  “You need to stop being weak,” I said. “Your hangovers are not always going to be as easy as they are now.”

  “Easy?” She shuddered. “If this is only a preview, I’ll stop drinking now, I think.”

  “Wait till you turn twenty-one,” I said. I crumbled the Sizzli wrapper into a ball and tossed it into the center console. “I think your tune will change. Are you excited to go home?” I smiled brightly, messing with her. I knew she wasn’t.

  “Of course I’m not excited,” she said grouchily, breaking off a piece of my pretzel. “You know this.”

  “Maybe they can tell us what Lindy is,” I said. “In case she comes back. And we can find out what the presence is nearby, so we can be prepared.”

  “It’s probably not even that big a deal.” Tamsin frowned as she stared out the window. “They always do this. It’s always something with them. Every solstice, every equinox—‘this power is passing over us, that planet is in retrograde.’ Like…I don’t care. Maybe I will when I get older, and I’m into keeping track of every little thing. But if it doesn’t immediately affect me, why do I have to think about it?”

  “They’re just protecting us,” I said. “You know they all secretly wish we would live out our lives with them forever at home.”

  Tamsin shuddered. “Don’t even joke about that,” she said. “You just brought up my worst nightmare.”

  Mount Hazel was only a few hours away, but it felt like we were a world apart. It was like traveling back in time. It was one of those quaint towns where everything in sight is on the historic register, so it had remained unchanged for the last two hundred years. I felt the distance between it and my problems as we rolled over the covered bridge. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Tamsin woke up at the sound of the wheels on the wooden slats. To her, it signified the sound of home. She lowered her sunglasses and squinted through the window. Seeing it just as she’d left it, she shoved her sunglasses back up over her eyes and collapsed melodramatically against the seat.

  “Can you imagine the stew that’s going to be waiting for us?” I could already fantasize the large pot bubbling on the stove. Initially, I imagined it in a cauldron in the fireplace before I remembered they didn’t actually do that. Then I modified it to a pot on the stove, in my mind. Neither Peter nor I were what you would call excellent cooks and mostly ordered from Postmates every night. The thought of a home-cooked meal excited me tremendously.

  “Can you imagine the lecture that’s going to be waiting for us?” Tamsin responded. “Danger is near, let us tell you all about it.”

  “Man, this is really bothering you, huh?” I glanced over at her. I understood not wanting to go home after going away to school, but this was something more. Her angst was magnified in a way that I couldn’t recall feeling my first semester of college. “What do you think will be so terrible about it?”

  She shifted in her seat and sighed. I slowed down so it would take us
a little bit longer to get there.

  “All my life, I fantasized about getting away,” she said. “I felt so isolated: not going to school with the other kids, the normal ones without magic. I wondered what it was like in the world—the world outside of Mount Hazel. There were times when I resented them. I knew they were just trying to protect me, but I felt like a prisoner. There were times I wished I had no magic at all, so I could be like everyone else and take it for granted.”

  My heart hurt for her. When I found out the truth about my family, I sometimes felt robbed of my heritage, but other times—times like now, or even looking at the Could Be cards in Lindy’s fake apartment—I wondered if I hadn’t been better off, getting to experience both worlds.

  “Not that I think that it was easier for you,” she added, looking over at me. “I know that it was hard for you, too. Just in a different way.”

  “I wasn’t as isolated, though,” I said. “I could always go to school and distract myself from my family, when I got sick of them.” I pulled into a parking spot on Main Street and cut the engine. Tamsin looked confused.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  “We don’t have to go,” I said. “You’re an adult now. That’s what it means. You make your own decisions; you’re on your own. You don’t have to do anything.”

  I saw her register these words. Her expression changed. She looked relieved. To my surprise, she shook her head.

  “No, we should go,” she said. “Just in case we are in mortal danger, we should probably find out what it is.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “I think just knowing that I’m doing this voluntarily makes a difference. Thanks, cuz.”