My own face is wet with tears and Starcross bangs painfully against my hip – safe in an anonymous messenger bag layered with wards – as I run to Mom and gather her in my arms. The cameras will lap it up. I no longer care.
79
SELECTION OF NATIONAL HEADLINES
WITCH ‘ROYALTY’ SACRIFICES MAGIC
One witch’s desperate act turns tide of anti-magical sentiment
‘I watched a mom give up her magic and my heart is broken for America’s witches’
‘MARCH FOR MAGIC’ TAKES OVER CITIES
#NoMoreSalems outrage grows as Feds seek to calm public anger
80
BEA
And just like that, everything’s turned on its head. Frey’s grandstanding speech, Sarah Fenn’s jaw-dropping press conference, and suddenly Sandra is the bad guy.
Three days ago, witches were a danger to the nation. Today, those raising concerns about witches are bigots.
I’ma bigot, apparently. Comments have started appearing under my posts about working Sandra’s campaign this summer. Not complimentary ones, like when I first shared the candid pics, the carefully professional selfies, but new comments.
Shame on you. Take this down.
U work for a hatemonger.
Better a witch than a bitch.
And over and over, like I’m being spammed with it,#NoMoreSalems. I delete. Block. Report. Switch off the comments.
‘I’ll probably have to delete this profile,’ I tell the aide who spots me on my phone and asks what I’m doing. ‘I can’t have future employers checking me out online and seeing half my college and complete randoms calling me a bigot.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says airily. ‘Hate from the libtards is a badge of pride in certain circles. Wear it right, and it could fast-track you to staffer with some of the big guns.’
She reels off a few names. Party high-ups. Outspoken. Combative. But not people I could ever see myself working for. Some of them politicians whose views I’ve critiqued and picked apart in term papers and class debates. One or two with opinions – and worse, policies – I find downright distasteful.
Sandra isn’t like them. She’s moderate. Has the right position on issues close to my heart, like women’s rights and healthcare. I turn that wordlibtardover in my mouth and find it sour and unpleasant, a rotten cherry stone to be spat out.
Have I let my feelings about witchcraft carry me too far from myself? Has Sandra? Horror still prickles beneath my skin when I think of Luka’s desperate sobs as they wound his magic out of him like a tapeworm.
I think of Lachlan Frey’s shameless speech, the crass slogan that’s suddenly all over my timeline, and my blood boils that he’s being given a hearing. But then I recall every excruciating minute of Sarah Fenn’s press conference, the horror on her face when she couldn’t even light a candle, and unwanted pity trickles through me even though she messed up my dad with her holier-than-thou magic and nearly smashed my family into pieces.
Her magicsaved my lifethat night in Bittershore. Now it’s gone.
‘Come on,’ the aide says, impatiently. ‘Sandra needs us. We’ve got to figure out how we stop this ship sinking – or if it does, how we make sure Sandra’s career doesn’t go down with it.’
I feel as though I’m floating free as I listen to the debate around the table. Over the past couple years, Sandra’s built her entire political identity around her witchcraft campaign, and she’s talking even faster than usual as her team works through various scenarios.
‘We say the Redhaven Files documents are fabricated,’ says the aide. ‘Go on the attack not only on Frey but the Fenn woman, too, and that unstable-looking daughter. There’s plenty of shit slopping around them from the Sanctuary madness last year. Lay into the Moot. A basket-case outfit with no credibility. On its third leader in as many months – and that’s a Japanese trans woman. Wokeness gone mad. And then we make clear we’re not the guilty party here. Every single action we’ve taken has been to protect the American people.’
‘DARVO,’ Michael Whitman says, drily. ‘Deny. Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.’
‘Exactly.’ The aide beams, glad her clever strategy has been understood.
‘Yes,’ says Sandra, fingertips white where she’s pressing them against the tabletop. ‘Notorious as a perpetrator strategy, particularly for abusers and sex offenders. Gaslighting on steroids. I don’t think so. There are things in those files that can’t be denied. Emails with my name on them. We should reframe them aggressively, yes. But deny them? No, that’s a line I won’t cross.’
