And if you balked in the middle of the process because your rational brain said it was wrong, well. She learned the hard way what that meant. She tried not to add vinegar to a very sweet-seeming recipe for restoring energy—something she sorely needed, considering she hadn’t had much sleep for the past goodness knows how long—and the pot it was in didn’t just pop. It groaned, and creaked. Then rumbled, ominously.
Before finally letting out such an almighty bang the wholehouse seemed to shudder. Plates rattled in the cupboards; something somewhere smashed.Cassandra,she was sure she heard her grandmother say in disapproval. Then all she could hear was a deep ringing, and all she could smell was burning, and everything was suddenly hidden by a huge plume of smoke.
And once she had wafted it away, there it was.
A great black mark on the wall behind the burner the potion had been on, and nothing else. Like she’d broken some covenant, and so winked the whole thing out of existence. And it was scary. Terrifying, in fact, to think of the forces she was meddling with.
But in a way that seemed different from most things in her experience. Usually when she messed something up, it felt as if all her own instincts were at fault. She was fundamentally a fuckup, somehow. She had made a mess. However, there was simply no way to believe that here. It wasn’t the core of her that had gotten this wrong.
It was her rational, practical part.
The part that sounded like her parents.
You have to trust yourself, your true, clumsy, silly self,her brain whispered. And though her heart thumped too hard to hear it, she suspected it was right. All she had to do was listen, all she had to do was believe. She could be more, she knew she could.
Then she set about making money, with that in mind.
She used salt when sense told her to use sugar, warmed up things that she was sure would curdle, stopped stirring even as the stuff she had boiled started to catch. And when that was done, she sat, and she waited. Half of her sure it was going to work. Half of her sure it wasn’t. All of her scared as she stood, and went back to the pot.
But there it was.
The liquid had boiled away, leaving ten weird coins at the bottom of the pan. Copper, she knew, without checking. And she knew a lot of other things too. Like the fact that this money was worth precisely one hundred dollars, to someone who looked like a man, but wasn’t, living two towns over. And that this man would buy a kind of potent cleaner from her, too, if she could actually manage to make it.
Which she absolutely knew she could.
She was this person now.
She was a witch. And this witch could do anything.
Including make a better potion for Seth. Oh, she definitely knew how to make a better potion for Seth. The sense of it just shimmered through her, so brilliant now she didn’t hesitate. She scribbled in her new notebook, until she had three full pages of notes. Then she stuck her pencil behind her ear, and started chopping, stirring, fermenting. She boiled, bubbled and baked. Crushed things up, and remade them. Got her hands dirty, made them clean again with other potions.
And got so lost in it, she didn’t even hear someone come in.
She actually screamed the moment she turned and saw Seth standing there.
It was okay though—because he screamed too. He even put both hands over his mouth.
Though judging by the way his eyes were roaming all over everything, she suspected it wasn’t just the sound she’d made that did it.
It was also the absolute state the kitchen was in.
Because now that she saw it through someone else’s eyes, she could process that it looked like a bomb site. You had to actually wade through discarded containers and peelings and spills to get to anything. There were scorch marks on almost every surface and wall. A permanent fug hung in the air, like the room had developed its own weather system; she might have slightly turned one of the chairs into a giant toadstool without knowing exactly how she’d done it.
Oh, and the microwave was now almost certainly partly alive. Its timer no longer showed numbers, but words. Some of which might have been “feed” and “me.” And then when you did feed it, the door would suddenly fly open, and disgorge an almighty belch.
So, you know. It felt like she should possibly try to explain, somehow.
“Okay, I get that the mess in here is a lot,” she started. But before she could continue, she took in his expression. She graspedwhat he was staring at. And realized it wasn’t just the kitchen he was startled and then flabbergasted by.
It washer. It was howshelooked.
Because apparently she was a bomb site, too.
The blast that had winked the pot out of existence had blown half her hair straight upward. And it was exactly half, too, in a way that seemed impossible—but obviously wasn’t in this brave new witchy world. No, in this world she carved a better part into her hair than any hairdresser had ever managed, just by exploding something.
Which was kind of cool, in a way.
But the soot, on the other hand? Well, that was definitely less so.
