Chapter Text
127 days.
That’s all that’s left.
Hecate closes her eyes, feels the sting of the salt air on her cheeks and listens to the sea roll in. She doesn’t dare approach it, stays rooted to the shoreline several meters back, but it calls to her. Whispers. Shouts. Begs.
Come home.
It’s torture, but she can’t stay away. Every night she stands, barefoot in the sand, listens to the waves and the soft song of the ocean: whale-song drifting in and out on the breeze, the starfish clinging to the rocks further out; she hears the laughter of the others, though she thinks they’ve forgotten her, after all this time.
The ocean has not.
It beckons her, misses her. She hears the call in her dreams every night, and wakes up with tears on her cheeks and the taste of salt in her mouth.
Part of her wishes she couldn’t remember. What it was like when she was whole.
The sun sets and the air cools and she can hear the others, far out, safe.
127 days.
She opens her eyes, and turns away.
--
The club is the same as it is every night. Tourists and locals packed into the small, dark crevices, ripped velvet upholstery and stained barstools, but no one cares. The drinks are watered down and the lights are hot, but people aren’t there to mingle—they’re there to listen. To hear music. To hear her.
“Something upbeat tonight,” he tells her, restocking the cabinets below the bar. “You’ll put everyone to sleep with that maudlin drivel.”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
It’s most of what she says, these days. Yes, Grandfather. No, Grandfather. Grandfather, please— but he never listens. Hasn’t listened in years, and after a while, she stopped speaking. Forgot how. The anger is always there—simmering under her skin, making her itch, her hands curled into fists against her thighs, but she’s learned: her emotions are irrelevant. They have no place here, they never have. Not on land. Not with him. All he cares about is the end of the night, when he empties the till, gives her just enough to buy food and other necessities. On a good night, he ignores her—grins at the stacks of bills and tells her when he has enough, when it’s all enough, he’ll let her go. On a good night, he doesn’t pay attention when she slips away, down to the sea, settles on a dark corner of sand and passes the moonlit hours, wishing.
On bad nights, when her voice is hoarse or the crowd is thin, he points to the wall behind the stage and says Never.
Those are the nights she believes the most.
--
They come from all across the UK, some internationally, to sit in the dingy club every night after 10pm. They pack themselves in with a drink, and the band starts up they begin to quiet, waiting. They’ve heard the stories: the woman in the little coastal town who sings so beautifully, you forget: all your sorrows, all your tears. You forget your name, sometimes, and the names of the people you love. You forget what you want, and what you don’t have. All you know is the song, the lull of her voice, sweet and unearthly, and for a little while, for those moments, you are free. This is what they’re told. What they come for.
They are never disappointed.
Tonight, she heeds her grandfather’s words and sings Fly Me To The Moon and Can’t We Be Friends. Non Je Ne Regrette Rien makes people cheer, and her version of Summertime makes them weep, though when the song is over, they cannot remember why.
When the night is over, her grandfather ushers her off stage and into the back, the small greenroom where she stares at her reflection in the mirror and never quite recognizes the woman staring back. It’s part of the allure—no one ever speaks to her, no one ever gets close. All they get are her songs, and it makes them hungry for more, to come back.
The people in town know her, but barely—they ring up her items at the grocery store, they see her standing by the water’s edge, but they never get to know her, never really speak to her beyond complimenting her voice, asking where she learned to sing like that, if she ever intends to leave, to sing professionally elsewhere.
She doesn’t, and she can’t, and she wouldn’t regardless. The further she is from the ocean, the more it hurts.
Her grandfather tried that, in the beginning. Tried to take her on tour, around the UK, back when she was young, just after her father died. Tried to parade her around nightclubs in London. But she was too weak, her voice strained, tired and pale and unable to make the same magic she could near the ocean. Useless, he’d called her. Blamed her for all of it, instead of blaming himself.
She stares at her reflection, at the pocket watch she wears, her father’s, his last gift to her on his deathbed. He’d tried, her father—tried to get her away. To let her go. Tried to convince her to leave before he died, but she couldn’t abandon him, despite everything.
She paid for it, in the end.
--
Hecate rarely notices who’s in the club. If they’re people from town, people she knows. If they’re tourists. They all look the same to her, all blend together, her eyes unfocused under the stage lights.
She has 111 days left when there’s a flash of pink out of the corner of her eye. It’s reflecting off a glass, and she can’t quite tell where it’s coming from, but it’s bright and distracting and she tries not to grimace on stage. It stays for her entire set, just out of view, and by the time she’s done, off stage, back in the dark of the greenroom, when she closes her eyes she still sees flashes of color.
--
She wraps up a set and disappears backstage the way she does every night. She listens to the crowd beg for an encore, something her grandfather never allows. She listens to the band continue to play on without her, waits for talk to die down before she slips out the back and makes her way toward the beach. She takes off her shoes and lets her feet curl into the sand. She listens for the others, to the gulls’ soft cries, to the ocean, whimpering.
She listens for a singular voice, but it never comes.
It’s almost cold tonight, winter steadily approaching, and she dreads it. The crowds dwindle in the cooler months, and her grandfather is always angry. As if it’s her fault he spends the money they make in the summer instead of saving it. As if it is her fault people don’t come as often, or stay as long. As if it’s her fault the sea is too cold to swim in for mortals, for ordinary folks and witches alike.
The town is a strange place, always has been. Full of those with and without magic, visited by those with and without magic. It’s a place for those with magic to keep a low profile, to hide away from the witching world; a place for ordinary people to get just a taste of what they think might be real, might not be true.
She’s always been able to feel it, the magic, though she doesn’t possess any herself. Her grandfather has it, her father had it, but magic is always passed down through the mother, and her mother wasn’t a witch. Her magic was singular. Different.
A waste, her grandfather always said, still says, shaking his head and glaring at her. You’re a waste.
Hecate stares out at the ocean and remembers when she wasn’t, when she was more: long summers swimming so far out into the ocean with her mother. Nights spent on the deck of their little cabin by the sea, while her father played guitar and her mother sang, her voice so sweet, carried on the wind.
She has her mother’s voice, she knows.
Her mother’s temperament. Her mother’s pain.
She thinks of her often, and how much she loved her. How she couldn’t love her quite enough to stay.
--
She’s at the farmer’s market buying apples, 97 days left, when she turns and collides with something soft and warm and pink.
The woman gasps as Hecate’s bag falls from her arms, produce rolling across the small aisle, a jar of honey cracking open against the pavement, and her voice is vaguely familiar, like a long lost friend.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, scrambling on the ground for the fallen food. “I wasn’t even paying attention—are you alright?”
Hecate looks her over: she’s in a bright pink coat, a white scarf tied around her neck. The woman has magic, she knows. She can feel it, but it isn’t like her grandfather’s magic—isn’t dark and snappish or grey. Hers is light, feels like yellow, reminds her, somehow, of pearls—when she was young, and her mother was with her, and they swam far out together and brought back shells from the ocean floor, when they sat on the shore and cracked them open against rocks, filled clear glass jars with the pearls and used them to decorate the mantel, their iridescent colors shining when the sun came through the window.
She blinks away the memory, stares at the woman currently staring at her, a bit anxious, a bit confused. Her hair is blonde and her eyes are kind and Hecate forgets, for a moment, how to speak. What words she should say or how she should say them.
Hecate clears her throat. “I—it’s fine,” she says stiffly.
The woman looks down into the paper bag at the mangled fruits and vegetables. “Let me buy you a new batch.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Hecate says, but there’s something else, something inside her that says, stay.
“I feel terrible,” the woman insists, “The honey, at least.”
She says it so decisively, already moving down the aisle, toward the shop at the very end, and Hecate has no choice but to follow her, her produce still clutched in the woman’s arms. When she falls in step with her, the woman glances at her and smiles.
“I’m Pippa, by the way.”
Hecate isn’t certain why her name is relevant, but she has enough social grace to respond in kind.
“Hecate.”
Pippa smiles. “I know. I saw you at the club a few weeks ago. You sing beautifully.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
Hecate blinks. People compliment her all the time, ask how long she’s been singing, where she learned, what her tricks are. They ask her if she’s trained, if she plans to leave town and make it big, they tell her she could, she should. No one’s ever asked if she likes it. If it matters to her.
She should, she knows, say yes. The most artificial answer, the least personal. But Pippa stops at the end of the line for the honey, a few people in front of them, and looks up at her with genuine interest—she isn’t curious or nosey or secretly hoping for some drama or other, and it’s the open expression on her face, those soft eyes, that make her say,
“Sometimes.”
Pippa nods like she knows, though she can’t know.
She buys her a new jar of honey.
When she passes it to Hecate, their fingers brush, and for the first time in a long time, Hecate feels warm.
—
She sees the flash of pink again when she’s on stage, and this time, focuses in on it, sees Pippa sitting at the bar, nursing a drink, staring. She tries not to, but her gaze keeps drifting, like she knows her. She can’t quite make out her features, not until the end of the set, when she steps out of the lights and her vision clears.
Pippa is crying. Silently, a few stray tears on her cheeks that she wipes quickly away.
She’s there by herself, but doesn’t get up to leave. Instead, she orders another drink, looks at Hecate, and waves.
She hesitates.
She should go backstage, should disappear. She never sticks around, and her grandfather doesn’t like her to, regardless. But Pippa is smiling at her, and her blouse is a loud magenta, stands out in the dark crowded room, and she reminds her of someone, though Hecate can’t quite remember who.
There isn’t a lot she remembers anymore, her memories frayed by the monotony of her day to day, the markings on her wall in her small flat: 92 days.
She looks to her grandfather, but he’s busy, making the rounds and talking to customers, so she moves quietly across the room and stands next to Pippa, who holds out the drink.
“I didn’t know what you liked,” she says, “So it’s just water. I thought you might be thirsty.”
Hecate accepts the drink and nods. She’s always parched after a set, but it’s always the ocean she longs for. She takes a sip, and the water is cool, but it doesn’t help the dryness in her mouth, her confusion.
“You were wonderful,” Pippa says, not seeming at all bothered by her silence.
“You’ve been here before,” Hecate remarks, and Pippa nods.
“A few weeks ago. I stopped by on my way up to Edinburgh. Decided to come back and stay a while.”
“What for?”
Pippa shrugs. “Just needed a getaway, you know? This town is lovely.”
She doesn’t know what possesses her, what makes her look Pippa in the eye. “I hate it here.”
Pippa tilts her head and takes a sip of her drink, whisky, by the looks of it. “How come?”
Hecate doesn’t answer. She can’t tell her the truth, can’t look back over her shoulder at the wall behind the stage, can’t explain about her grandfather or her tiny flat or the ocean.
Pippa doesn’t press. Instead, her eyes soften, and she looks away for a moment, then downs the rest of her drink, as if gathering her courage. “Want to get out of here?”
Hecate arches an eyebrow. She’s been propositioned a few times, usually by men, usually drunk, and she always declines. Has never once wanted to go back to someone’s rental or apartment or little beach house. Has never once been curious about a man and his desires.
But Pippa flushes, almost as pink as her blouse, and shakes her head. “Not like that. I just meant—I like to walk on the beach at night. I’m here by myself, and I could use the company?”
Hecate studies her. The slight lines around her eyes. The way she holds her hands in her lap, and fiddles with her ring.
“Why me?”
Pippa bites her lip, and it’s endearing.
“The normal answer, or the real one?” she asks, and Hecate blinks in surprise. She should turn around. Walk away. Go home. She can feel the static of her grandfather’s magic, getting closer.
“The real one.”
Pippa looks down at her hands for a moment, then back up, and for the first time, the light in her eyes has dimmed. She’s smiling, but it’s a bit haphazard, a bit broken.
“Because you look as sad as I am,” she says.
Hecate doesn’t move. For a long moment, they stare at one another, and for some reason, she hears the echo of childish laughter, feels the imprint of a hand on her spine.
“I’ll get my coat.”
—
They walk along the pier, slowly, lights from the small town like a pointillist backdrop, everything slightly blurred. Pippa tells her she’s on winter holiday, that she runs her own school outside London, that her father recently passed away and that she’d needed a break, an escape.
“Why here?”
Pippa shrugs. “My parents have a beach house. We used to come here for vacation when I was a child. It reminds me of them, in a good way.”
Hecate nods.
“Have you lived here long?” Pippa asks.
“My whole life.”
“It must be nice,” Pippa says, looking out at the ocean. “To be this close to the sea.”
There’s a lump in her throat she can’t quite swallow. Beyond the pier, she hears the others, laughing, the splashes as they roam the waves. The ocean croons, but she knows Pippa can’t hear it, not the way she can. Not with all its longing, all its sorrow.
Hecate doesn’t answer, and Pippa doesn’t press her. They spend a while at the edge of the pier, staring out into the inky blackness of the horizon line, and Hecate wonders if Pippa is searching for something out there, too. Something she can’t quite name.
—
Every morning, Hecate works in the club, restocking and cleaning and making sure the equipment is set up properly for the band. There are a few others who work there, but they give her a wide berth—her grandfather doesn’t like her to interact with the staff, and she knows why. Knows, especially, why he keeps her away from witches and wizards, lest they develop a bond. Lest someone care about her enough.
She wipes down tables and cleans glasses behind the bar, her profile to the stage. She never looks directly at it. Never wants to see:
Her pelt, tacked firmly to the wall.
She can feel the spell even now, the one that keeps it in place, keeps anyone from touching it, keeps anyone from properly seeing it.
Everyone except her.
It’s her reminder every day.
But she can hear it, calling to her. Hears when she stands too close to it, when she’s on stage, a quiet crying, like it misses her as much as she misses it, as if it knows what she’s been through.
Her mother always said their skins were like a room where they could feel safe and loved. As long as you have it, you’ll never be alone.