Chapter Text
Claire can hear faint laughter filtering through the walls as she and Jody pad down a hallway. It sounds like there are at least four different witches in a room somewhere to her left. Jody’s been tracking their kidnappings with relative ease, and Donna picked one off a few days earlier, so they don’t seem that hard to catch. Still, there are three college students somewhere in this mansion, and getting them all out safely while catching and killing the witches is going to be difficult. Claire is confident that it would have been easier if Jody had listened to her suggestion and let Claire go with Alex instead. At least Claire had spat, Alex tells her when things happen. When people aren’t dead. Jody had left the room, hurt, but stood her ground and went along with Claire on the hunt.
Jody had stood her ground when Claire confronted her about Kaia too. She acted like it was an okay thing to hide, like seeing Kaia sooner wouldn’t have flipped Claire’s world in the best way. Like she hadn’t seen Claire plunge herself into hunts, or lose sleep over research, or get drunk and drive in circles around the town more than once a week. All of that, in the hope she could find who killed Kaia. And while Jody had looked in Claire’s eyes when she got back from a hunt with her face bloody, as she put Claire to sleep when she had been awake for days, picked Claire up from the middle of the road and held her hair back as she threw up in bushes, Jody said nothing.
Claire had yelled at her, told her she was an awful parent, that Claire would rather have been left dead in a ditch than anywhere near Jody, but Jody had said Claire wasn’t ready to handle seeing Kaia. She kept saying Kaia “wasn’t the same”, like Claire would believe anything Jody said.
Jody beckons Claire forward, pulling her from her thoughts. After Claire makes it abundantly clear that she’s only following because she wants to go in that direction, too, Claire turns a corner. The laughter grows louder, and they can see five young-looking witches playing some sort of card game. It's mesmerizing, the way they make the cards swirl around the room, and Claire is distracted by how gorgeous the house is. Plants adorn each window, and everything is lit by soft, floating candles. She smiles and makes to walk in and greet the witches when she feels a tug at the back of her sweatshirt.
“Don’t.” Jody reminds her, and Claire curses herself. The coven must have cast some sort of Stockholm syndrome happiness spell. Jody’s moved her hand now but it still rests on her back, a comforting weight. The kind of motherly gesture a parent who isn't a liar would make. Claire scowls at her and jerks herself away.
Jody’s eyes cloud over before they harden, and she cuts in front of Claire to barge into the room without a warning or backward glance. “Everybody in the middle of the room, now. Hands up.”
Claire follows, gun cocked and loaded with the special bullets Dean taught her how to make. She walks past Jody and towards one of the witches, raising her gun to his head.
“Where are they,” Claire growls. Before she can get anything out of him -- he’s smiling now but Claire can be pretty intimidating, so she’s not deterred -- Jody grabs the collar of her shirt.
“Claire.”
“I’m sorry, what was your plan?” Claire mutters angrily.
“Not… that, god,” Jody responds.
“What the hell? We aren’t here to hurt them, now? Are you on some kind of pacifist kick --”
One of the witches snickers, and Claire’s face burns with the realization that the witches are watching them argue in the middle of what was supposed to be a clean operation.
The witch who’s laughing looks to be in her thirties, with puffy teal hair, and she’s standing in front of the rest of her coven as if to protect them. “You two having a domestic? Better sort out your mummy issues before you take on five of us, don't you think? Shall we put you downstairs with the others, let the drama ruminate?” She speaks with an English accent turned up to its most patronizing degree.
“We’re fine. You, on the other hand --” Jody fires -- also, what the fuck, apparently Jody’s allowed to shoot anybody but Claire can’t even raise her gun? -- but the teal-haired witch throws her hand out and the bullet melts in the air. A jerk of the witch's neck and Jody’s gun is lying on one side of the room and Jody is crumpled on the other.
Claire forces herself to look unfazed by this and glares at the witch. Her gun is still cocked, and she toys with the trigger for a moment.
The witch looks at her with the sort of appreciation she’d give a particularly nice gun. “I think you’re interesting,” she says. “More so than her, anyway.” She motions to Jody’s body on the floor. “She’s boring. Do you want to dance?”
Claire glances at Jody before she turns, steely, to the witch. “Sure. Let’s dance.” She fires directly at the witch’s heart, and this time the bullet turns into a balloon, which the witch pops, laughing, with her fingernail. It seems to hurt her, though, because she winces a bit and drops her hand to her side. Claire fires again, pointedly not looking at Jody, who is slowly edging towards her own gun. The witch transforms the bullet into a glass of water, which falls and shatters on the floor.
Claire, locking eyes with the witch, advances forward. “You said you’d dance with me, didn’t you? Wouldn’t have pegged you for a follower. Come on, show me what you can do. Unless you learned to make balloons and sort of thought that would be enough?” She grins, stooping in a vaguely misplaced mock bow. She snakes her arm out, as if to let the witch kiss it, and grabs a glass shard quickly as she pulls her arm back and stands up. She looks at her teal-haired adversary, heart in her throat, but it doesn’t seem like anybody saw her pick up the glass. Out of the corner of her eye, Jody has pulled herself just a bit closer to the gun, but nowhere near close enough to grab it, not yet. Claire might have to finish this herself.
The mockery was, apparently, a bad idea. The witch’s lips tilt upwards -- she’s amused, but definitely not deterred, and as she pushes her palm forward, the plants from the windows shoot tendrils forward, throwing Claire into a sturdy cage of vines against the windowed wall.
The four other witches haven’t been Claire’s main focus, but they’re right in her line of sight as she looks out on the room from her cage. A slightly older but still young witch in a floral dress and with a full sleeve of tattoos has returned to her lounging position on the couch from the card game. Two of them, of equal heights and similar face structures (though they are distinguished in that one of them is wearing a ballgown and the other an incredibly sheer bikini), seem to be controlling the plants with the English accented one. The final witch, a boy, maybe in his late twenties, with large strawberry earrings and a pair of headphones dangling off his neck, is gathering bottles and herbs from one of the antique looking glass cabinets. Claire thinks that if they hadn’t killed two people and held another three hostage, she would want to be friends with them. That would be a fun sleepover -- Teal Hair, Couch Potato, Ballroom, Bikini, Strawberry, and Claire, one soul among them not owned by a demon. Another glance at Jody, though it’s harder to see her when Claire’s pinned to a wall, proves that she’s near the gun now.
The teal witch stalks towards Claire. “You’ll be a nice addition to our group, I think. You’ve got the same spunk the other Normals had.” She reaches the cage and threads her fingers through the plant-woven bars, pressing her face against them conspiratorially. “Maybe you’ll have more sense than they did.”
“You know,” Claire smiles. “I was actually thinking the same thing.” She darts one hand out to grab the witch’s wrists, ignoring the split-second smirk that spreads across her face, and with her other hand digs the broken glass into the witch’s palm. Somehow, the transformation into a water glass didn't change the ‘witch killing’ aspect of the bullet, and the witch cries out in pain.
Jody’s hand clamps onto the gun and she shifts herself so its angled at Teal Hair. Claire sees her smile in triumph before she pulls the trigger, and Teal Hair, still facing Claire, doesn't notice in time to transform the bullet. She sinks to the ground, and some of the tendrils of Claire's cage loosen up before Ballroom and Bikini regain their bearings, pushing the plants closer to Claire with an angrily shouted spell. Couch Potato lunges at Jody, and Jody shoots her, too.
“Your friend isn’t as good at making balloons as the dead one, is she?” Jody smiles at Claire's jailers. “That’s okay, maybe I’ll let you try.”
Bikini snarls, but Ballroom places a hand on her arm and points a finger towards Jody, looping it up and down. More of the tendrils around Claire come loose, and she tries to wriggle herself out, but she soon realizes why her cage is being neglected. Jody’s head mirrors the movement of Ballroom’s finger, tipping back dangerously and snapping back around quickly. Before Ballroom can do anything too dangerous, though, Jody shoots Bikini, who deflects the bullet but relinquishes her grip on Claire’s cage.
Claire doesn’t hesitate. She runs towards the fight and stabs Ballroom in the neck. His hand falls, an angry expression frozen on his face as blood drips onto the dress. Jody looks at her proudly, and for a moment Claire forgets she’s supposed to be mad at her and lets the relief that she’s saved Jody wash over her. Only for an instant, though.
Bikini grabs Claire’s hair, and Jody pulls the trigger of her gun, but it’s out of bullets. Claire somersaults out of the witch’s grip, glancing towards the glass cabinets to check on Strawberry, who’s been oddly silent. There’s nobody over there, just a bunch of bottles and some vines.
Claire throws the balloon from the floor at Jody and shouts, “I’m going to look for strawberry earring guy!”
Jody nods and as Claire runs from the room, she sees Bikini yelp as Jody pushes the balloon against her skin.
Strawberry seems unassuming, but Claire remembers his cunning smile as he’d manipulated the cards through the air before he was under attack, and the ingredients he grabbed once he was. Probably not harmless. She jogs past the rooms in the hallway, pushing open doors as she passes and sweeping the rooms with her eyes, gun held in front of her. She only has one bullet left.
The third to last room on the left has its door closed, and she sees a sort of purple fog crawling out from the bottom of the door. She feigns walking past it, boots clomping loudly before she doubles back and kicks open the door. She points her gun in.
A clump of something sticky hits her face, a few pieces falling in her eyes. It smells floral and coppery. She blinks it away from her eyes and coughs a few times, some of it must have gotten in her throat. When she can see clearly again, Strawberry tosses her a wink and breaks his fist through the window. Claire shoots at him, but she only catches his shoulder as he jumps out. That was her last bullet.
He floats down the three stories to the grass almost tantalizingly slowly, and once he’s on the ground he turns back to her and calls, “I hear she’s dead.”
Claire’s blood runs cold. “What does that mean?” She shouts. “How do you know that -- you don’t know her!” She tries to shout at him again, but the room seems to warp in front of her, and she feels quite woozy. She’s still coughing as he runs away. There’s no way she could make that jump, even if she weren’t doubled over.
Behind her, Jody stumbles, bloody, into the room. She’s panting, and she’s holding the bloodstained, tattered remains of a balloon in her hands. She glances around the room, and her gaze lands on Claire. Claire’s still coughing, but it’s subsiding, and after the fight-adrenaline has worn off, Claire's as angry at Jody as she was before.
“He got away?” Jody asks. There’s no judgment in her voice, and Claire hates it.
“No, he’s tied up and waiting for you.” She coughs again, turning away darkly.
“Are you okay?” Jody’s face creases with concern and slight confusion. “Did he hurt you?”
“Fucking -- no. He startled me, and he got away. Don’t baby me.”
“I’m just saying, you can tell me --” Claire can see the exact moment when Jody realizes what she’s said, the regret that flashes across her face, but she really doesn’t care.
“I can tell you?”
“Claire.”
"Jody."
Jody glances away, letting out a breath before she speaks. “I meant about your face. There're petals, and maybe lavender, and blood all over you.”
“He threw it at me. That was how he got away. I got distracted, I looked away, I'm fine,” Claire glares at a spot over Jody’s shoulder. “There's supposed to be vics here, right?”
Jody swears. “Yeah.”
With the witches gone, they’ll be able to move a lot faster, especially since Claire's cough has subsided a little. She still has the petals all over her face, though, so she slips past Jody with a muttered promise to be back soon, and goes to find a bathroom.
Claire has to remind herself that it’s still the house of a coven and still filled with dangerous spells and objects to keep herself from checking out every room. The house seems to be a cross between a cottage and a mansion, with its pretty decor and color scheme, and the plants that (when they aren’t holding Claire hostage) look stunning and bright, but also gothic windows and tall ceilings with crystalline chandeliers.
Claire didn’t know Kaia’s taste in houses, or color schemes, or plants, but she thinks Kaia would have liked this house. She would have loved the windows, maybe made fun of how grand the chandeliers were. Claire sees a particular door, a blue one, that might be a bathroom judging by the tiles, but before she can get closer her cough comes back with a vengeance. She covers her mouth with her hand as she recovers, and when she pulls it back, she sees a few red specks. Blood.
Wiping her hand on her jeans, Claire walks over to the door. She pushes it gently, and upon walking in grimaces at her reflection. Her face is a mess, completely covered with the mixture Strawberry had thrown at her. Now that she can see it, it really is a strange combination -- there’s lavender, a few lilac petals, some other flowers she can’t quite name, and a ton of blood. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere inside her mouth, though. There’s a bit in her eye, but that wouldn’t cause her to cough.
She turns on the tap and splashes water across her face. It stings a bit, but she scrubs her face clean and watches the blood-red water run into the drain. Once there’s nothing left of the petals, she looks back at the mirror and jumps back in surprise as she sees Kaia there. She doubles over with coughs, surprised, but when she looks back up, there’s nobody there. No Kaia, nothing but her own tired face staring back at her. She pushes at the mirror half-heartedly and leaves the room.
When she gets back to Jody, Claire has flattened her expression, and although Jody still looks concerned, there’s no way she knows that Claire’s seeing things. A tiny piece of Claire mumbles that there’s a chance that Claire isn’t seeing things. Kaia isn't dead, after all. But there’s no way she’s in the house, and definitely, no way she’s Bloody-Mary-ing in mirrors, so Claire tells her brain to stop being an idiot.
“We should go together, this house isn’t big enough for us to split up,” Jody says. It isn’t exactly a command, but there’s no room for Claire to run away.
“Whatever you want.” Claire shines a sarcastic smile at Jody, who sighs and leads the way down the hall.
They check every room they can with no luck on floors two and three. Once they clear floor one and find nothing, Claire starts looking for trap doors, convinced that there’s some sort of torture room locked away. Teal Hair had said something about putting Jody and Claire ”downstairs”, and assuming that she wasn’t lying, the captives will be somewhere below the house.
“Found it!” Jody calls from the dining room.
Claire runs in to find Jody standing over a loose floorboard she’s just pried off the ground. A ladder stretches down from it, and Claire can hear distinct whimpers from below.
“You’re okay now, we’ve got you! We aren’t witches, we’re here to help.” Claire climbs onto the ladder and makes her way down as she talks, Jody a rung above her.
At the bottom, she sees two people huddled together in a corner, their wrists bloody and covered in rope burns. Their faces are covered in the same blood mixture that was thrown at Claire, which is strange. The captives look up at Claire and Jody, visibly frightened, and Claire runs over to untie them. Jody stays on the other side of the room, and within a few seconds Claire can see why. The body of a third victim lies near Jody’s feet. Curiously, there’s no blood around the body, although he looks to have died violently. With a shudder, Claire thinks that his blood might have been used to make the petal gore.
“I got you. Come on up. You're okay now.” Claire tries to seem soothing, which is a talent still in the making for her, but it works well enough to get a shaky breath out of the taller one.
“Who are you guys? Can we take you home?” Jody asks.
“I’m Matt,” the tall one says. “This is my sister, Rosalin. I can give you directions to my house, it's on Main Stree--” Matt falls onto his sister, coughing feebly, and she looks at Jody desperately.
“He’s been like this ever since that guy with the strawberries came in,” she says. Claire idly thinks that great minds remember the same cool earrings, but she’s quickly drawn back to Rosalin’s words. “I think he’s sick,” Rosalin tells Jody, worried.
“What did Strawberry do to him?” Claire asks.
“He put this stuff,” she gestures to her face, “On us. I don’t think that can be it, though, because I’m fine.”
Matt is still coughing into her shoulder. “Please, just take us home.”
“Of course, come here.” Jody assumes a comforting, motherly voice that she only uses with traumatized victims, and together she and Claire help the siblings up the ladder, out of the house, and into Jody’s car.
The car ride home from Matt and Rosalin’s house is brutal. Taking them there had been easy, Matt’s cough had gotten slightly better, and they stayed comfortably silent for most of the time. They’d handed the siblings off to incredibly grateful parents, from whom Claire had learned that Rosalin had been taken eight days ago, and Matt was abducted two days after. The mother called the cops, and Jody made it clear to the slightly confused father that she didn’t want any credit for her part in getting the kids back.
The car ride home, though? Claire has to fight to repress her desire to fling herself out the passenger door. She and Jody fight all the time. This is the worst one they’ve had, surpassing even their biggest disagreements about Claire’s hunting. In all their arguments, Claire pushes, and yells, and riots, and runs, and Jody remains calmly confident in her choice for a while, and eventually, Claire wins. Claire always gets what she asks for from Jody, because years in foster care taught her to only ask for what she needs.
This time is different because Claire wants something she doesn’t need. Claire doesn’t need Kaia. She wants her, badly, desperately, but this is something she’s asking for that she doesn’t need, and Jody knows it.
Still. Kaia consumes her every thought and emotion because Claire thought she couldn’t ever see her again, and now she knows she has a chance.
If she plays her cards right, she can get Kaia back. And Jody didn’t tell her she had a chance.
Jody reaches over to turn on the radio, and slightly distorted rock music filters into the car. Claire coughs and rests her head against the window to try and fall asleep.