Brandon had walked away with a couple of bruises.
Katherine struggled to swallow around the knot in her throat. Lily was staring at her expectantly—waiting for the story to get better. Waiting for the hopeful end that Katherine had promised.
“I was terrified,” she continued. “Of hurting someone else. Of getting arrested. No one knew what happened, but everyone saw that I was at the center of it.”
Katherine’s skin pebbled as she remembered the sheer panic that had gripped her as she came back to her body in the destroyed hallway. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard shrieks, cries, and questions. About an attack. About a bomb. About what could have done this.
And she saw eyes turning toward her. Toward the perfectly unmarred circle where she stood, the only part of the hallway left intact. The epicenter of the destruction.
It didn’t matter that there was no physical evidence tying the crime to her. Didn’t matter that she herself couldn’t explain what happened.
She knew it was her fault. And she was sure that if she stuck around, everyone else would figure that out too.
“So I left,” she said. “I ran out of the school, got in my car, and just drove as fast as I could. And then when I realized that they would be able to track my license plate, I ditched the car and took off on foot. Iwas on the run for about a month, making my way across the country, hitchhiking, hiding in trucks, trying to get to LA. I thought if I got to a big city I could hide. But luckily, I made it to a big city where I could be found.”
Katherine had taken a bus in from Phoenix, a long, arduous ride where she kept a scarf pulled over her face the whole way, despite the increasing heat. She didn’t trust the hasty sink dye job to hide her from prying eyes. Her yearbook picture had been plastered over the news, her disappearance after the explosion solidifying her guilt in the eyes of the public, even though the police had officially labeled what happened a freak accident, with no evidence showing that there had been a bomb of any type. The most tenacious of the local news reporters had practically turned her family’s front yard into a vacation home, camping out at all hours of the day in hopes of accosting them for details of how their monstrous departed kin had managed to pull this off. She had never been able to shake the image of her younger brother Zac bolting toward the school bus, covering his face with his Transformers backpack as a man with a microphone screamed questions at him. That was on replay the whole ride, the reminder of the hurt she had left behind. The promise that she’d never be forgiven if she returned.
The bus had dropped her off at Union Station, late at night in a neighborhood with streets covered in broken glass and cigarette butts. Katherine had long since stopped worrying for her own safety. She had managed to put a tenuous lid on the roiling rage running through her veins, but all it took was one tiny push for her to let it out again. It had come out a few times since she’d fled, in moments where her frustration and loneliness had peaked, but her avoidance of people had paid off—she’d destroyed trees, cacti, one SUV in a gas station parking lot, but she was pretty sure no one was inside. She had to be pretty sure—she couldn’t think of the alternative.
LA was a calculated risk—so many people, all crammed together. But she’d had so many near misses in small towns that she knew she needed to get somewhere crowded, somewhere she’d be just another invisible girl. And then there was the other part of her, the part that wasgetting hollowed out by the weeks on the road, the part that needed the strange sense of community that she felt emanating from LA. Even if that community was one she had to watch from afar.
She’d rushed away from the bus as soon as it parked, overwhelmed by the noises and smells of downtown. She ran until she found an alley where she could be alone, and then she sat down and did the only thing she could think to do: She cried.
“That’s when Cheezy found me.” Cheez-It started purring as soon as she said his name, and Katherine smiled as she scratched his head. “He was this tiny, underweight kitten, but he had a meow like a megaphone. I thought he was going to wake the neighbors.”
Cheez-It yawned, then laid his head on his paws and closed his eyes. “Having him around… it didn’t make the magic go away, obviously, but he calmed me down. Gave me something to think about other than the power. Helped me focus on living, not just surviving.”
They’d tooled around the city for a few days, stealing food, sleeping in alleys, making their way from downtown to East Hollywood to K-Town. And then one night, asleep on a bus bench with Cheez-It resting on her chest, Katherine was awoken by a blond-haired woman with a gentle smile and curious eyes.
“Sylvia was shocked that she’d found me,” Katherine said. “She suspected what had happened when she saw me on the news, so she set up a beacon—that feeling of community I felt, calling me to LA. She’d been trying tracking spells, but they didn’t work when I was so far away. But that night, she had a feeling that she should do a locator spell. And there I was.”
Katherine thought back to that moment, to Sylvia reaching out her hand to her and telling her that it would all be okay. She hadn’t believed Sylvia either. Back then, there was no Oak Grove training camp, no instruction manual for how to help an unsettled witch. There was just Sylvia, who had once been unsettled too, who was trying her best to help others like her, who had a coven and a mission. And Katherine was her first step toward achieving it.
She’d taken Katherine back to Aestas. Cleaned her up. Given her her first real meal in weeks. When she saw Katherine flinch at the sound ofa distant police siren, she told her she’d take care of it, and she’d used weeks’ worth of magic to permanently change Katherine’s dirty blond hair to a deep brunette, her pale skin from freckled to unmarked.
The only thing Katherine wouldn’t let her change was her eyes. She had her mother’s eyes. Eyes she’d only get to see again if she looked in the mirror, because going home was no longer an option.
Sylvia didn’t question, didn’t push. Katherine had never had someone take her anxiety at face value before. Sylvia didn’t try to force her to calm down, didn’t ramble on about how the police weren’t actually after her. She simply saw Katherine’s fear and found a way to make her feel safe.
“She taught me how to manage my power,” Katherine continued. “She taught me how to control it, instead of letting it control me. And when I settled, Sylvia taught me how to use that magic too. And together we started finding teens like you—unsettled witches who didn’t know what was happening to them, who needed someone to help them.”
Katherine thought of all the witches who she and Sylvia had managed to help. Nowhere near enough. Unsettled witches were extremely rare—they estimated less than a dozen cropped up in the country per year. Noctis’ official guidance on the topic was to stay the hell away from them, which meant that many ended up homeless, institutionalized, in jail, or dead. Aestas was the sole coven brave enough to ignore Noctis’ directive and the only place providing a home for those vulnerable teens in the States. As in many things, the US was behind the curve—most other countries had official programs set up to help unsettled witches, or at least provided resources and guidance for covens to do so on their own. Katherine had had the chance to visit an official training camp for unsettled witches in Brazil a few years earlier and had been overwhelmed with happiness at seeing how well taken care of they all were. Then she’d punched a wall out of frustration that they couldn’t get it together to manage that here.
Lily looked up at Katherine. “So you’ve done this before?”
Katherine dug her hand tightly into Cheez-It’s fur, stopping herself from saying what she wanted to say—I’m sorry you have to think about thisat all. I’m sorry this happened to you, and that it keeps happening to kids all over the world. I’m sorry no one has figured out a way to help people like you and me before we reach the point of no return. I’m sorry no one cares enough.
“Eighteen witches over the past twelve years. We’re going to get through this, Lily. You’re in the best place you could be.”
Lily gave Katherine a small smile. Katherine looked at her open, trusting face. All of these kids were so young. Young like she’d been young. Young like the future was narrowed down to a month or two away, all of these wide-open hopes and dreams because the whole world was out there, and you had nothing but time to go see it but you wanted to do it allright now.
All of that was gone, and there was no going back. The world had shrunk to just one path—figure out how to control the power before it controlled you. To stray was to die.
Unsettled witches didn’t get to have dreams.
Katherine let out a quiet sigh as she softly closed the door to her room. She and Lily had bingedNew Girlfor hours until the young girl had finally passed out. Katherine had seen the tension in her face even in sleep, her eyes flitting back and forth underneath her eyelids.
The nightmares were starting already. They wouldn’t stop.
