She understood that anxiety tried to cloak itself as fear, pretending it was serving its host with threats to protect it; but anxiety is just made-up threats.
And she knew that. Tilly had rebuilt her life around discerning the difference between the fear of real threats and the imaginations painted by anxiety hoping to hold her captive.
Anxiety was no friend; it was a living creature.
And she knew what she had to do. She thought back to that moment in the woods before fireworks and pie and Theo's beautiful strength. She'd touched Astra and something had happened. She could see Astra's mind and feel what was inside of her.
"Can you get up?" she whispered to Crystal, her words quick as her eyes were trained on Astra collecting enough power toprobably end one or a few of them in moments. But she couldn't reach her.
Astra got up from her knees, shaky, her eyes starting to go white in a glossy film. She was possessed by this darkness she had learned to harness.
She wasn't going to be able to get Crystal up. She barely got Crystal slumped against her legs, her eyes just slightly opened.
Astra looked the image of a powerful priestess, magic dark and wicked coursing through her. She could feel it building, the ink of it now writhing through her veins and showing like roots through her pale skin.
Jen cursed. They were going to die.
Tilly tried to push whatever magic they had all gathered together, but it felt like it was stuck inside of her, bottlenecked and she needed Crystal to get it out.
Just as Astra laughed, lowering her hands outstretched toward them, the women froze.
Until something dropped heavily from the sky, knocking Astra in the head in a violent snap, making her falter and fall once again to her knees in a sickening crack of cartilage against the concrete with a scream.
A caw joined her scream of pain and black wings swooped down, claws outstretched toward her dark head that she batted at with one arm, the other trying to keep a hold on the dark magic still lightly trickling into her.
"Goddammit, get off of me!" she screeched.
Portia flew up and then swooped back down, her talons grabbing clumps of Astra's hair and pulling until they ripped from her scalp, wrenching another scream from her.
Without hesitation Tilly threw herself forward onto the pavement, keeping one hand linked in Crystals as her other wrapped around Astra's ankle. She kicked trying to dislodge herbut Tilly pulled all of Astra's emotions and fears now swelling and overtaking the feeling of power. And then she told it to grow.
She used words her own anxiety had mastered over the years.
You're not enough.
You can't do this.
Then the words morphed on their own, tailoring themselves to Astra's particular brand of fear.
You don't have any real power. Real power would never choose you.
That's why you choose dark magic, because the pure kind passed you by.
You're not strong enough.
You will never be a witch of any value.
She used anxiety against her until it was the only thing inside of Astra, choking out her other thoughts, and pushing out the dark magic.
Until it went from pouring into her, sparking inside of her, down to a trickle.
A drip drip drip.
And then nothing.
The faucet was shut off.
The cloud above her looked like a black hole, sparkling and catching bursts of electricity, but with nowhere to go.
