The concrete porch held many flowers, so many that it overflowed and obscured the front of the house. Kit shoulderedhis way past the plants to get to the white door. Recognizing him, the plants’ vines, stems, and trunks shifted to make more room for him, but the space limited their generosity and snagged at his clothing.
He entered the house, the inside of the house as littered with plants as the porch had been. More lush, deciduous trees curled their leaves in the living room, because not even Visha’s magic could stop the dry heat from browning these plants outside. She planned one day to plant these trees around the encampment, to send her magic on a mission to make a forest out of the desert, but Kit wasn’t sure if she would succeed. Even magic had its limits.
“Visha,” he called, knowing the woman was likely at the cauldron and unable to hear him fighting through her plants, “we need to talk.”
A stray flowered hibiscus caressed his cheek as he waited for the response that never came. He batted it away and marched forward to the kitchen.
Noxious yellow smoke that smelled like a mix of chlorine and cinnamon drifted in a halo above a simmering cauldron on the stove. To his surprise, Visha wasn’t there.
“Oh, so you’re back,” a feminine, very drunken voice lisped.
Kit turned around to see Visha sitting at her kitchen table, the rich dark wood littered with plants and bills and everything else it took to run a witch coven. It looked overwhelming.
Her blue-black curls a riotous halo around her head, his ex looked beautiful and thoroughly stressed out. With shadows underneath her eyes and her brow furrowed, she appeared dejected and small, her cheekbones far more prominent than Kit liked. A happy Visha had meat on her bones and laugh lines around her eyes.
She hadn’t looked this way when they’d fought last night. Or perhaps he’d been too pissed to see it. “What’s wrong?” The dumb question left his mouth before he could stop it.
“I thought you were leaving,” she said sullenly, “and I’m trying to see how we’ll make ends meet with you jumping ship. We were barely making ends meet as is.”
Still weak on his feet, Kit leaned against the kitchen entrance’s frame for support and closed his eyes.Here we go again.They were already falling back into old patterns. “There’s never enough money for you. We could be swimming in it and you’d still say we need more. Samar said the numbers were looking up last month, last he checked.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Visha slapped her palms on the table and stood up, her dark eyes bright. “Oh, so you know the state of the coven, do you? Last week we lost an entire shipment of illusion bombs. I budgeted them in, some investments didn’t pan out, and now we’ll be lucky to make tithe this month. We’ll be kicked out of the camp. Just more humiliation for this coven after years of taking shit and scrounging to make up for what was stolen from us. Not that you care. My father died for you and now you’re skipping town like what we had wasnothing.”
Kit flinched as an old wave of pain washed over him. She was right; the Jumpers had taken him in after he’d fallen out with his siblings. Back then, the Jumpers had lived in the city as a mid-sized, relatively successful coven. He’d fallen in love with Visha thoroughly, and had enjoyed a good relationship with her father, Raja. He’d been fascinated with the pair’s biological relationship — it wasn’t often that a witch’s child was also a witch. They’d seemed so close, so harmonious compared to his tumultuous relationship within the witch orphanage he’d grown up in. Their love didn’t stop as soon as one turned a certain age. Raja had never abandoned Visha.
He hadn’t abandoned Kit either, not when the Redbacks had attacked. The old witch had fought back to back with Kit for several days. Their hideout had been under siege for a week.
But then the tough old man had taken a curse straight to the chest which had been meant for Kit.
“You know I never stop thinking about your father,” he rasped, unable to keep his voice steady. “I fought for years to avenge him. Now there isn’t a single Redback left alive for what they did to him.”
Visha’s beautiful face softened. “You did what you thought was best, Kit. But now it’s time for us to fill in the hole left by the Redbacks in the city. There’s room for us to return now. We are so close.”
“I thought we were close to not making tithe? It’s even more expensive in the city,” he said, frowning, his guard going up at the open hope on her face. This was why he’d been avoiding her the last week. She had a way of slicing open his old wounds with her poisonous whispers, encouraging him to crawl through a path of glass and stone for a cure that never existed.
Kit wanted to let his scars fester at this point. Go nomad. Perhaps in a few years he could reach out to his adopted brothers and sisters from the orphanage, see if they’d talk to him after years of silence.
“I made a deal before you returned from your last trip. It has enough money in it to either make or break us, Kit. We need you to pull it off.” The curly-headed witch walked to him and held his hands with her smaller ones.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up when he saw the excitement on Visha’s face. She wasn’t the type of woman to be impressed with a small amount of cash. It had to be a fearsome amount of money, the kind a nun would burn her church down to get her hands on. “Vish,” he said slowly, “who did you make the deal with? Which group?”
She smiled brilliantly at him before pointing at the kitchen window which showcased a beautiful view of Skadra. An undeniable answer to his question.The Weavers.It sent a thrill through his magic-less, weak body. If the Weavers made a deal, it wasn’t for loose change. No matter Visha’s budgeting, there would be no paying them out of a deal like she thought they could.
The Weavers wouldn’t let their puny coven walk away from an already agreed upon deal. No, the powerful coven that ran Skadra through blood would raze their camp, destroy all life. It’d only take a fleet of about three of their blooded members. They were that powerful.
Kit knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he was no match for a single Weaver, and he far outmatched any other Jumper in terms of combat ability.
“Who do I have to kill?” Because he knew the price had to be blood, and the Jumpers were his family. So was Visha, in a fucked-up way. He couldn’t let her die, no matter her manipulations and poisonous nature.
Visha’s smile dimmed but didn’t disappear when she saw his expression. “I’m not sure. It didn’t sound terribly difficult. Some magic-less person who pissed the Weavers off, is what I gathered. Kit, this is really for the best. If we do the job, then we could purchase an entire shipping container of raw potion ingredients from that witch doctor in Tunsa. Rare stuff. I tripled our revenue this year when they gave us a taste of it last year. Imagine what I can do with more of it. ”
A timer went off with a ding. The potion on the stove then made a low, guttural hissing sound. Kissing his cheek, she released his hands and raced over to sprinkle thorns of rotten cactus over the golden broth. The scent changed to a fragrant vanilla, more like cupcakes rather than the poison it was.
Dazed, Kit sat down at the kitchen table filled with Visha’s plans. He put his head in his hands, which cooled his burning forehead from being magic-less. God, but he was tired of killing and that was for the folks who’d deserved it.
He desperately hoped his next target deserved what was coming next.
three
