Page 80 of Werewolves and Witches AU

I turn to face her this time. The sea breeze whips the longer strands of her brown hair, that have escaped her bonnet, across her face, but her gaze remains fixed on the far side of the lake. “But that’s okay. I had a suspicion that getting out of our predicament might not be so easy. Especially after the first fifty years had lapsed.”

I bring my other hand to cover hers where it rests in the crook of my arm. “No, Sarah. I’m not giving up! What happened to you… it’s unfair. It shouldn’t have happened, and Janus shouldn’t be able to get away with it.”

She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“I’d imagine,” she begins, wistfully. “That the world I once knew has long passed.”

Damp brown eyes drift my way. She looks over Rowan’s scratched and soiled black T-shirt that’s three sizes too big on me and still knotted about my waist, my ripped grey jeans, and my facial piercings.

Reluctantly, I nod. I must look so odd to her.

But then… no. I shake my head. “In some ways it has, but people are still people, you know?”

Sarah’s small smile begets an equally small nod.

“Tell me, Milo,” she says, loosening her grip on me to sit among the tall reeds that line the bank. “Who were you practicing such advanced magic for in the first instance?”

Plonking myself down beside her, I pick at the sedges nearby.

And after a long exhale, I tell her all about Ethel.

“And when she’d rounded up all the geese, she marched them through the centre of the crowded park. Terrified families scattered, their screaming children chased away by the giant birds. And that’s how Ethel secured our front-row picnic seats to watch the open-air concert.”

Sarah wipes the tears from her eyes, and between bouts of loud laughter, she splutters. “She’s ace-high, Milo. Oh, I haven’t laughed like this in so long—thank you for that. I can see why you’d want to protect her.”

She dabs her eyes with her cotton overskirt.

“Family doesn’t always mean the one we’re born into. You told me several times how Ethel’s not really your grandma, but she is, in all the ways that count. That’s why witches established covens, did you know that? Many of us had lost the families we were born to for various reasons: whether we left them behind in Europe, or they didn’t survive the journey, or through illness or disease. Covens are the families we choose for ourselves. But Milo…”

She sits up straighter.

“Regardless of how we come by our families, there’ll always be an end. We’re mortals, and that’s what makes us so special. It’s our mortality that gives us that fierce love of life, that burning desire to protect it—to better it.”

I nod in understanding, and pull up a bullrush by the roots.

“I know,” I say quietly, fighting back my tears. “But it sucks so much.”

Defiant tears fall anyway.

Sarah leans over and squeezes my hand where it crushes the stem.

“The injustice of others’ plights is often harder to bear than our own. In fact…” She retracts her hand, and I wipe my cheeks. “You have reminded me why I kept trying to reach out all these years.”

“I have?”

“Mhm, because while I might have accepted my fate for myself, I refuse to accept it for another. And if Janus could do that to us like—” She snaps her fingers.

I huff a little chuckle. “If he Thanos’d you.”

She tilts her head, a puzzled expression wrinkling her nose, and then she nods.

“Right.” She snaps her fingers again. “If he Thanos’d us, and the only thing that’s stopping him from doing it again is this enchantment…”

“Which it is.” I sober at the reminder. Images of Rowan’s crinkled hazel eyes as he smiles indulgently at me fill my vision, and my lips settle into a grim line. “People like Janus need to be stopped.”

“Indeed.”

“But how, Sarah? He’s a god. Or a former god—I’m not really sure how that all works. And without knowing how to use this enchantment…”