Ursula stifled a laugh in her bent elbow, hiding it as a cough.
Then the chief responded.
"I want to learn about her so that I can be intentional about how I fall in love with her so that she feels seen. And to settle with her here, because for too long I've not felt settled but when I'm with her my mind relaxes. I like seeing the world through her. She's odd and kind and too unsure of herself so I want to give her a world where she can feel sure of herself. She's beautiful but in that way that makes you want to sit with her beauty and experience it through more than sight. And I'm not thousands of years old. That's rude."
Both women stared at the police chief. A few clicks of the clock were the only sound until Ursula said, "Well, I think that was the right answer."
Bess nodded, agreeing. "Yeah, that was one hell of an answer. I think I'm being ruined by cursed and paranormal men," Bess grumbled.
"Good," was Ursula's reply. "I want your standards to require exertion on his part."
Bess thought of a certain guy who went out of his way to walk her to her summer classes, found her at work, or sitting on the porch at The Lost Souls just for a moment of her time. He gave her a cat.
But all of it was tainted because none of it was real.
"Yeah, but," she shrugged, "that's not really how regular guys are."
The chief looked at her, tilted his head at the young woman's struggle. He could see it sitting on her shoulders and the way that her eyes were harder than most her age.
Ursula finally drew their conversation to a close. "Alright, we need to get Jessica and head out. We have a town trying to run us out and a return villain."
"And The Sanderson sisters," Bess added.
Ursula made a face at that truth then smiled when Jessica made it out of where she was signing for her freedom. She didn't look worn. She looked ready for battle.
"All set?"
"Yes. Let's go. Chief," she said, nodding her head to him.
He nodded once back and handed her a folder telling her it would help her case before he watched the three women leave the station.
Bess popped back through the doorway, her upper half anyway, and made the sign with her fingers that she was watching him.
He smiled once the door closed behind them. But his smile slipped as he walked to his office thinking about Astra's meddling. The woman was a nuisance, that he knew, but could she have damaged what he had slowly built with Tilly?
The trees were a painting of gold, pumpkin orange, and red. The air had taken on the smell of crisp autumn, leaving everyone in Salem confused as they paused to sniff the air and place the out-of-place scent that had never visited this time of year before.
The women sat in the unseasonable autumn garden, surrounded by the sounds of birds singing their confusion, making last-minute plans to find warmer weather.
Bess sat next to Crystal, who ran her hand gently over the teen's back. Finally, the wood lit and the flames danced in the middle of the women as they sat silently, somberly.
What was there to say?
The feeling of being defeated and hopelessness was filling their pockets with a weight they all kept checking on with delicate hands.
Hopelessness was a living creature.
Perhaps one of the darkest.
There's a seduction there - because it feels like the bottom of something that had been deep, unexplored, fathomless. But you reach the bottom and the mystery is gone. So maybe you can settle here for a moment.
Or a lifetime.
Hope, on the other hand, is full of such colorful ambiguity that fear shoves itself in all of hope's crevices. This could turn out good, or it could all fall apart.
Tilly and Eloise drove from the women's prison back to Salem with a different aura than the women back home.
There was a flame lit.
