She strode down sidewalks and across streets at a brisk, modulated pace. There was no need to hurry, but she wanted to get proper exercise out of it. Besides, the slower she walked, the easier it was for random dudes to try to strike up a conversation because they wanted to “just talk.”
Strange, how often “just talking” turned to the subject of phone numbers.
Nine minutes of trotting past mural-adorned buildings and through busy intersections later, Kera arrived at J’s Peking Kitchen. The place was popular enough to do a steady business, but fortunately, the trend-chasing hipster types hadn’t latched onto it.
Yet.
Within, she stood in line behind two couples before reaching the counter and giving her information to the young woman, who promptly fetched her order. Kera admired the understated traditional Chinese decor while she fished in her pockets for her card. The aesthetics of the place matched its food: not gimmicky, but pretty damned good regardless.
Smelling it once she’d paid and received her bag, her stomach positively thundered with need, and she resolved to walk faster on the return trip than she had on the way there.
It almost worked.
Halfway home, she had to stop at a crosswalk to wait for the electronic signal to hold up traffic on her behalf, and a small cluster of people formed around her.
Including two young men, whose eyes locked onto her immediately and stayed there.
Well, shit, she thought.
One of the guys, the shorter and thinner of the two, led the way, with his friend following. He stopped right at the edge of her personal bubble and put himself in front of her face.
“Hey, girl,” he opened. “What you doing carrying all that heavy-ass food by yourself? You want someone to walk you home? Or maybe you need a drink...”
Kera turned to stone. “No, thank you,” she stated. “I’m busy and really not in the mood.”
Her shoulders and back were starting to sting again.
“Oh!” The lead guy grinned, not fazed or deterred by her standoffishness. “So, you sayin’ you free tomorrow night? ‘Cuz I got some time off myself, and I know this new place out on Alvarado Street that you’d love. Have a real good time, meet some of my friends.”
Kera sighed. “No, that isn’t what I’m saying. I’m not interested at all. Leave me alone and find someone else, please and thanks.”
The larger dude frowned, but in a way that suggested he got the point. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and tried to turn him away. “She ain’t going out with you, man. Come on.”
The lead guy shrugged his buddy’s hand off with a sharp motion and glared at Kera.
“See,” he began, “now you pissing me off, ‘cuz you assuming things I ain’t never said. All I wanted to do was talk to you, see, and maybe get a drink. You jumping to all kinds of conclusions...”
The signal changed, and Kera was the first person in the group to begin moving over the crosswalk to the other side of the street. Much to her chagrin, the stubborn young man followed close behind her, rambling a stream of aggravated nonsense while his friend occasionally tried to dissuade him.
They tailed her for almost a full block before she finally spun around and confronted him.
“Leave me alone now. I won’t ask you again.” Though her stomach had tightened and her skin prickled with tension, she wasn’t afraid of the guy, and her lack of fear gave him pause.
He stopped in his tracks, recognizing that the situation had escalated but refusing to back down. Instead, he took a step forward and stuck his face in hers.
“Bullshit.” He scoffed. “You ain’t got no reason to give me that kind of attitude. I think you owe me and my friend here an apology. We ain’t leaving until you say you’re sorry for wasting our time. And when you said ‘leave me alone,’ you forgot something. You didn’t answer what I’m about to ask, which is, ‘Or else what?’”
Kera stood her ground and stared back at him. She’d been carrying her brown paper bag of food with both hands, but for the moment, she supported it with one, leaving the other free to act but hidden from the guy’s sight.
“You don’t want to mess with a witch,” she told him. It might have sounded ridiculous under other circumstances, she realized, but she said it with full conviction.
So much for not telling anyone else that magic was real, and this guy wouldn’t have been her first choice if she’d been thinking about it.
The young man burst out laughing, but she thought she could detect an undercurrent of anxiety in him. Possibly he thought she was crazy.
It didn’t matter what he thought, though.
“Oh,” he jeered, “so you one of those little Wiccan bitches with the purple stars on their profiles and shit, and you gonna use that to try and get out of apologizing. Well, you ain’t scaring me and my boy here. We staying until you—”
While he blathered, eyes focused on her face, Kera’s free hand performed a rapid sequence of gestures. A second later, a tiny, barely perceptible flash of light appeared at waist level, then a curl of smoke rose from the crotch of the young man’s pants.
His eyes shot downwards abruptly, and as his bigger friend moved around from the back to see what had happened, the guy screamed. Flames were starting to curl from the juncture of his legs.
Kera nodded. “I suggest you slap that out right away. It doesn’t go out easily. Trust me, I know.”
Both the lead guy’s hands and those of his big friend were furiously smacking and swatting at his groin, but the flames refused to die. Kera turned away as the dude fell to the ground in a panic, then pulled his pants off and kicked them away while a crowd formed around the pair to watch. Many pulled out their cell phones to record the incident.
Kera crossed the next street, hoping the delay wouldn’t mean her food was cold by the time she got home. She found herself smirking as she walked, and the ache in her shoulders didn’t bother her as much as it had a few minutes ago.
“I warned him,” she murmured.
Chapter Seventeen
Kera jerked awake to the sound of her phone going off. A bleary look at the clock showed that it was 11:02AM, early enough that it probably wasn’t Cevin. He knew she was a night owl; her job required it, after all.
She picked up the phone and sighed when she saw who it was. She had no desire for another motherly lecture at this hour, especially when she was bone-tired from doing magic.
Which, of course, she couldn’t explain to her parent.
“What did I ever do to deserve this?” she asked no one in particular. Then she swiped a finger to answer the call. “Hello, Mom.”
“Hello, Kera, dear.”
Kera flopped back on the bed and closed her eyes. “Uh-huh.”
“I just wanted to say hello and check how you were doing,” her mother continued. “Since we live so far away, we can’t see you every week.”
Yeah, that’s terrible. “Uh-huh. Um, I was asleep, so…give me a moment to get my bearings here, okay?”
Her mother sighed loudly. “It’s after eleven in California. Is it really necessary for you to sleep in so late? Kera, if you’re hoping to get a job in an office, how are you going to answer calls about interviews? How are you going to present a professional image?”
Kera stared blankly at the ceiling. “I…don’t…” I want to go back to sleep.
“For example, have you made any progress toward what we talked about last week?” her mother asked.
Kera wracked her brain, trying not to succumb to her rising confused low-level panic.
The magical forces of thaumaturgic memory bleach seemed to have struck again. She had no recollection of having spoken to her mom on the phone last week. She could not say with any certainty what they’d discussed.
“Dear?”
The answer came with a shaft of sunlight and a choir of angels. Her mom was more or less a broken record, which meant…
A boyfriend—a boring boyfriend—or job things.
“I’
m making progress, Mom. I’m just doing it at my own pace. There’s plenty of time.”
“Kera, you don’t understand how quickly time can go by.” Her mother sighed. “At this rate, you’ll still be working at the bar when you’re thirty and the tips won’t have gotten any better, and all of the people from your class will have gone far beyond you. It doesn’t need to be that way. Someone of your intelligence and potential can go on to much bigger things.”
“Yes, I know.” Kera stifled a groan.
“I was heartened when you said you were trying to develop a product,” her mother told her.
What product? Crap. “Uh…”
“I can’t imagine how you’d make ‘mind bleach’ work, but I’d certainly like to try it if you invent it.”
Her mother was clearly joking, but Kera started to smile.
“Actually, I’ve made some good progress on that.”
“Oh.” Her mother didn’t seem to know what to say. “Well, why didn’t you say so, dear?”
“I just woke up and was getting my bearings,” Kera reminded her.
“I see.” Her mother didn’t sound convinced. “Now, what about a boyfriend, hmm?”
The woman was relentless. “If you must know,” Kera said, “I spoke to a guy who was in one of my college study groups, and we might see each other again, so who knows. It’s something, right?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake.
“Kera! How wonderful. Tell me all about him.” Her mother’s voice was climbing steadily in both volume and tone.
Kera held the phone away from her ear with a grimace. “Um…”
It was useless. There was no going back now. She sent a mental apology to the universe at large for whatever she had done to deserve this and described Christian to her mother. Between her description and her mother’s questions, the whole thing took close to ten minutes. Kera had never been asked to describe so many things about a person before.
“Okay,” she said finally, “it’s been nice talking to you, but I need to run some errands.”
Her mom let out another sigh. “I understand, dear, but take everything I said seriously. I know I sound like a nag, but remember, it’s your life and happiness on the line, and that’s all I care about. Goodbye.”
“Bye, Mom.” Kera hung up and stared at the phone, annoyed. “How does she always get the last word in?”
She downed the glass of water on her nightstand and wandered into the bathroom. She was up now, so she might as well shower and get on with her day. The only problem was…
“Son of a bitch!” She stared into the mirror, jaw hanging open.
Her hair now resembled a mostly-mature wheat field on the fifth of July after a crew of dumbasses had launched a battery of illegal commercial-grade fireworks.
Kera strode to the table and began flipping through notebooks and looking at post-its. It took her time to piece together what had happened, but it looked as if she had started the night with a memory spell to check how bad the “bleed” effect would be over time.
The answer appeared to have gone past “bad enough not to do it again” and fully into the realm of “really fucking bad.”
“Goddammit.” Not only could she not remember which it was, but she also couldn’t remember which fire spell had made her hair look like this.
She sighed and opened the table of contents on her phone, scrolling through spells for one that might repair the damage. Unfortunately, nothing stood out. There were a lot of spells one could use to keep things from breaking, but none that she could see for fixing them after they had broken. The only thing she could see that might work was a healing spell, but given that hair was not live tissue, she wasn’t sure it would work.
Five minutes later, she could say two things with certainty: first, that the healing spell did not work on hair, and second, that she was ravenously hungry.
She downed a handful of trail mix before getting dressed and stuffing her ruined hair under a baseball cap. She didn’t consider herself overly vain, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to go out with that train wreck showing.
She wished she could pay someone to fix this mess for her, but she didn’t have the spare money right now for something so expensive. She knew she was lucky that Cevin had the decency to give her paid time off, but her hourly rate was a pittance compared to the tips she would have made.
Of course, if she were working, she also wouldn’t have done this to her hair. She shook her head and slipped out the door, heading for a salon nearby that also sold do-it-yourself products.
When she got home, she unloaded the contents onto the table and opened the instructions, which turned out to be an insanely thick packet of information with more steps than she would have imagined. Grousing, she turned on the TV for some background noise and began working her way through the mixing and prepping necessary to put the mix on her head.
Kera’s eyes wandered to the screen as the talking heads got past the opening pleasantries and began to focus on the main story of the day.
Namely, that the world was fucked.
“Throughout Los Angeles and its suburbs and satellite cities in Southern California,” the anchor on the left opened, “tensions have been on the rise due to a perceived increase in violent crime, particularly muggings and armed robbery. According to the LAPD, the uptick in robberies represents only a marginal increase compared to last year’s statistics. Nonetheless, Chief Alvarez has outlined a plan, working in tandem with community organizations and other city agencies, to put a stop to the worst of the crime wave and bring the numbers back down.”
Kera nodded, frowned, and looked back at her instructions sheet. She tried to clamp her mind down to keep from thinking of the incident in the Mermaid’s parking lot, but it was impossible. The prick’s voice and the cracking report of his gunshots rose again in her brain, momentarily blocking out the anchors’ spiel and the obligatory random commentary from eyewitnesses on the street.
She allowed herself to fantasize about what would have happened if the prick who’d shot up her bike had dropped his gun that fateful night and she’d had the opportunity to kick the living shit out of him. A girl could dream, couldn’t she?
Virtutis gloria merces, she thought and gave a chuckle. It was the MacDonagh family motto and meant, “Glory is the reward of valor.” She had seen it nearly every day of her life since it was printed on the banner at the top of the MacDonagh crest, and her parents kept a copy of that hanging in the living room.
Kera had always thought the idea of a family motto was insanely pretentious. This was America in the twenty-first-century; having aristocratic roots in Ireland or any other “old country” was of little relevance. In truth, nobody talked or cared about such things.
But right now, it made her wonder if she should have done something bolder in the parking lot. She knew the general self-defense advice was not to escalate situations, but that meant people like the man who’d shot Zee got away with things a lot of the time.
Him and all of the other people who were apparently part of this new crime wave.
The news had moved on from the story about the crime wave, but their other stories weren’t any happier. An insurance firm had been overcharging their customers, corrupt local officials were implicated in the unfolding scandal, and another drought was expected come summer. Unexplained phenomena had erupted here and there throughout the United States, with conspiracy theories rapidly popping up on the Internet to try to explain them. There was also the usual political claptrap in reference to the upcoming midterm elections.
Kera sighed. “Only news is bad news, it seems. Then again, I can’t be bothered to stick around for the heartwarming human-interest piece at the end. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
She looked down at the bottle in her hand and at the weirdly purplish goop within it, hoping she’d made the right choice and that her new hair wouldn’t look too fake, or that she wouldn’t accidentally stai
n her ears black or anything similarly stupid.
A few days ago, she wouldn’t have worried about that, but a few days ago, she hadn’t lit various parts of her body on fire and then wiped her memories of how she’d done it.
“Here goes,” she remarked, stepping into the bathroom and pulling on the plastic gloves.
An hour later, she was pleased to say that her hair had turned out well, or as well as it could. To her surprise, the shade of black she had picked—with brown undertones instead of blue, per the receptionist’s advice—didn’t seem jarring to her, nor did it make her look overly pale.
That was the good news. The bad news was that she was almost out of groceries. She downed the last of the trail mix and considered what to do. She couldn’t keep ordering food in, not without a proper paycheck.
She wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Kim again, especially to check if he was all right.
She changed out of her stained work shirt, now with hair dye stains to match the grease stains, and pulled on an unassuming shirt, slacks, and jacket and admired her new hair in the mirror. Dyeing it really had been a pain in the ass, but she’d pulled it off. No obvious blonde patches remained, and the roots weren’t noticeably lighter than the ends. There was some slight staining on the back of her neck, but it wasn’t really noticeable.
She savored the fresh air on the walk to the store—for one thing, the hair dye had stunk up her apartment—and was pleased to see the proprietor behind the counter. “Hello, Mr. Kim,” she called.
He gave her a smile, less distracted than he had been the day before. “Hi, Kera, how are you? Did you change your hair?”
“Yeah.” She shot him a smile. “I figured I could stand to look better.”
He chuckled as she gathered supplies: more eggs, a couple of salads, and cans of tea from the fridge, a package of toaster pastries, and more trail mix. She also threw in a couple of bars of dark chocolate. Normally, she didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but she was so hungry and tired that junk food of all sorts was appealing right now.
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