Archive of Our Own

It’s not that Katherine’s never seen a body before. It’s just that it’s the first mundane dead body, the first one that has nothing to do with magic or monsters, and it belongs to Shelby’s grandma.

Shelby takes her after school to the house buried in leaves, the house Shelby once joked was a witch house before she winced and apologized. Katherine remembers shrugging; people talk about witches sometimes. They have to learn to live with it. It’s a shady street, but Shelby’s grandma’s house is the only one so covered in ivy you can hardly see the bricks.

Inside, they are greeted first by the stench.

“Oh my god,” says Katherine, clamping her hand to her mouth. And it’s a joke, at first, pure instinct, but instinct proves right. Each breath draws in more of the smell. The other first for Katherine is that this body’s been locked away in a house with all the windows shut.

“I’ve been—” Shelby’s hair has fallen out of its ponytail again; she’s tucking it behind her ears and tugging a rumpled face mask out of her pocket. “I’ve been wearing this. There’s more but they’re—” she gestures, mouth pinched, down the hall “—down there. In the kitchen.”

“How—” Katherine starts. She’s fine with a little blood and guts, has to be, but not like this. This house with the welcome mat bordered in a pattern of dancing leaves. This house with the faded floorboards and the memory of the smell of drying plants. This house is supposed to have the sound of the kettle whistling down the hall, the muffled, detached chatter of the TV. “Never mind. Different question: Where is it?”

“This way,” Shelby says, stepping past her. It occurs to Katherine suddenly that this is why she’s been coming to school smelling like perfume.

She follows Shelby to the living room. She’s been in this house before. Shelby’s grandma kept a little plastic container of assorted hard candies that she would bring out from a cabinet and shake at them, before asking them each to choose.

The body is on the couch in the living room, not facing them. Katherine can see its stillness, the thin silver sheen of hair. Shelby’s quiet, putting her bag down by the kitchen counter. It’s almost normal. Her grandma would tell her to get it out of the way, someone’s going to trip. Nothing moves in the house except for Katherine and Shelby. The back wall has glass sliding doors leading into the backyard, and there, a garden in full bloom.

Katherine has seen bodies before. It’s the smell that gets her. The kitchen and the living room are separated by nothing but a change in flooring, so she steps over to the kitchen sink and vomits into it. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and meets Shelby’s wide-eyed stare.

“Forgot where the bathroom was,” Katherine mumbles. “Sorry.”

Shelby’s gaze darts from Katherine to the body to the sink. Katherine tries to breathe but the smell is physical now, dripping down her face, her spine, ballooning in the back of her mouth. She can’t seem to look away from the top of the thing’s head. It’s meat.

Katherine leans back over the sink to retch, spitting up bile. Her eyes are watering. Any humanity that thing had is putrefying in Katherine’s lungs now. Katherine thought once about calling her grandma.

“It’s—” Shelby’s face is scrunched like she’s about to start crying when Katherine looks at her again. “It’s fine, I’ll clean that up. I just need—” She gestures at the couch. Then, fast, all at once: “Katherine I don’t know what to do.”

“How long has—” Katherine wipes her mouth again, harder. This is ridiculous. She’s a magical girl. She can handle this. “You’ve just been living here? With that?”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go!” Shelby hisses. “It’s— I’ve been okay, I can use magic to keep her from, like, totally decomposing, I just don’t have enough.”

“You need grief seeds,” Katherine says, with a vague relief. She can do grief seeds. She can do witch-killing. She can handle witches, even if her own stash is getting low. Even if her magic isn’t flowing like it used to. Even if, even if.

Shelby’s talking. “It’s not just her, Katherine, I don’t know what to do if people knock, I don’t know if anyone’s gonna come looking for her, I thought it was just me and her but there’s bills and things and I don’t know! I don’t know. You said you would help, Katherine, please.”

Katherine shuts her eyes, just for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s— Okay, I can’t think in here. Let’s go outside. We’ll make a plan.”

They first see each other like this: Shelby’s the new girl in town, and no one seems to think she’s supposed to be here. She comes to class in a worn coat that’s too big for her and her uniform is secondhand and her hair falls untied over her shoulders, disobedient waves. When she makes eye contact with Katherine, like everyone else, Katherine looks the other way. In class, Shelby hunkers down like waiting for a bomb to go off and her pencil hardly ever seems to move across a page. Katherine sneaks glances at her when lunch rolls around, trying to see where she goes, who she goes to, and when it turns out it’s nowhere, no one, Katherine thinks: Maybe she’s lonely.

She doesn’t say anything to her yet though.

“Have you talked to the new girl?” Katherine asks Gem at lunch. Gem’s a real— What does her dad love to say? A social butterfly. Always happy to talk to Katherine, always just as happy to withdraw her favour for a day or a week and spend her lunches somewhere else. And to be fair, Gem dressed up as a monarch butterfly one Halloween, a few years ago. It’s a pun, she explained, exasperated, to everyone who asked. Katherine feels a little supercilious thinking about it now.

“Who, Shelby?” Gem murmurs. “No. Have you?”

“No. That’s why I was asking.”

Gem makes a bit of a face. “No one knows anything about her. Not even, like, oh yeah my dad’s friend’s brother-in-law met her uncle once or whatever. Who let her in?”

“She seems okay,” Katherine says. “Her eyes look weird?”

Gem hums, gives a little twitch of her shoulders. She never really commits to shrugging, as if there’s something depending on her posture and she’ll dislodge it by moving too much. “Yeah. I mean, I don’t think she’s bad. Just— What’s her deal, y’know?”

So Katherine goes to school, and after, she takes the expected turns toward home until there aren’t any other students around, and then she sends her copy the rest of the way to her house to have dinner with her parents. She patrols; she does homework by flashlight. She thinks maybe she should talk to Shelby, because someone probably should, and Shelby would probably like the company. And the witches— There aren’t a lot of them, not more than she can handle, but winter is on its way, nipping at her heels on long patrol nights, and there are always more witches in winter.

A week goes by. Another. Katherine learns Shelby’s schedule, her walk home. She lives on the other side of town. That’s convenient too; Katherine remembers that visiting girl who hurled spears and invectives at her as if she wasn’t the one encroaching on Katherine’s territory. It’ll be good to make sure they both have some space.

She corners Shelby on a street that bends to accommodate a hill, the rise of it hiding them from other kids, going home a different way. “Hey, I’m Katherine! You’re—”

“New around here, yeah,” Shelby says. She has a floppy hat on, which she tugs over her ears a little as she talks. She blinks fast, taking Katherine in. “Um. Sorry. That’s just what everyone’s been saying to me. I’m kind of sick of it. Do you— I dunno, can I help you?”

“A name would be nice,” Katherine tries with a small smile.

Shelby, gratifyingly, smiles back. “Shelby! Hi. Sorry, I’m used to people knowing that already.”

“Okay, yeah, I kind of did,” Katherine admits. She grins sheepishly to soften the blow of that some. “We have some classes together. I kept meaning to say hi and do, like, proper introductions, but I couldn’t get to you in time! Do you walk home this way too?”

“Oh,” Shelby says, blinking a few times fast. “Yeah, I—” She points up the hill. “I’m kind of far. But I don’t mind the walk! It’s nice. Sometimes it’s sunny and the leaves are just— pretty. Really pretty.”

“Yeah?” Katherine says. She lets Shelby approach — it’s not a threat, Shelby’s the one who knows the way — and falls into step beside her. “Isn’t it kind of sad? They’re dying.”

Shelby sighs. “Well, when you say it like that. You know, I think that’s a design flaw. I think nature should be beautiful and immortal.”

They try the garden, with its thriving tulips and peonies. It’s cold out, and Shelby looks pale in the middle of all that incongruous colour. So Katherine takes her hand — it’s callused now; Shelby doesn’t bother to soften her hands with magic — and leads them both around to the front, where overgrown hanging plants let them hide on the front porch.

“What if we lured a witch here?” Katherine suggests. The wicker seats are creaky and uncomfortable, so she and Shelby are crouched in front of them, still holding hands. Shelby’s holding tight enough to hurt.

“It would destroy the house,” Shelby says miserably. “Wouldn’t it? Then where would I go?”

“You could—” Katherine hesitates. “I mean, you could just leave, right? Live off magic.” They don’t have the grief seeds for that. She knows they don’t have the grief seeds for that. Shelby pulls her hand away and that makes Katherine feel sicker.

“I’d be homeless,” she says, and Katherine winces. Lower, Shelby adds, “I can’t leave her. She—” Shelby puts her face in her hands, voice breaking. “My wish was for her! I was so stupid, why didn’t I think—?”

Katherine swallows, feeling helpless. “Shelby…”

She sits down — the planks are dirty, probably, but dry, so she tries really hard not to care — and reaches out. Shelby sobs and falls into Katherine’s arms. Katherine does her best to arrange them comfortably, to gather Shelby up and hold her tight. She tries to think of something comforting to murmur, and then she tries saying it, and then she feels stupid.

“You’re squeezing me,” Shelby mutters. Her body is littler and warmer than Katherine expected.

“Sorry,” Katherine says, loosening her grip. The moment Shelby starts drawing back, she wants to grab her wrist, yank her close. I’m sorry; let me try again.

Shelby shakes her head, wiping her eyes. “I’m— This is dumb. You don’t even— I mean, you’d be fine. No matter what happened.” It sounds a little bitter.

Katherine, instinctive like it’s a fight, says, “I wouldn’t! I’d be worried about you!”

Shelby laughs, and it’s a kind of laugh that’s like landing wrong after a fall: a yank in Katherine’s gut and then an ache that’s scary. “Maybe I should go get eaten by a witch. That would fix everything for everyone.”

Katherine wraps her arms around herself. She wore a skirt today, knee-length and in uniform grey, and it’s not warm enough for it at all. “Don’t say that,” she mutters. “You wouldn’t actually, right? Don’t.”

Shelby sniffs. She sounds so small. Katherine longs to be in her magical girl form, but it would be stupid to waste the magic now, when her soul gem hasn’t been completely clear in weeks. Shelby’s hair is in her face again, and Katherine offers her the hairtie on her wrist, automatic.

“Keep it,” Shelby mumbles. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?” Katherine asks softly.

Shelby scrubs her hands over her face. “I can— I mean. Is there anything we can do right now?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine says, too hopeless for anything but honesty.

“Fine. It’s fine. A few more days like this, I’ll survive. I can— I can do a few more days.”

Katherine takes a breath, ashamed at her own relief. Takes Shelby’s hands, squeezes gently. She almost misses when Shelby’s hands were softer, but only almost. “I’ll find you some grief seeds. Keep your strength up. There’s a familiar getting brave down by the docks; we can go after it. We’ll figure it out.”

In another two weeks, Shelby has her magic and a crystal-topped staff that she calls her weed whacker when she’s giggly with exhaustion at the end of a long day. Their nights together are blissful enough to float on; Katherine lets her copy go to bed for her and stays up too late with her shoulder pressed to Shelby’s, the two of them on a park bench, powerful and shining and eternal.

“I gotta go soon,” Shelby murmurs, her shoulder against Katherine’s. Katherine can hardly feel it — she has leather pauldrons on — but she presses back. She imagines this is like being drunk. “My grandma might check on me.”

“We gotta share the loot first!” Katherine takes Shelby’s hand and flips it over, exposing her palm. Let her grandma have the house she goes back to every night, let the cool night air keep stealing her body heat; Katherine has this. The park is deserted except the two of them, fuelled by magic and stupid delirium. “Come on, put your soul gem here.”

Shelby undoes her transformation in a flutter of gauzy fabric and light. Katherine feels it like something piercing her soul gem, but blunted, warm. Shelby catches her gem in her free hand and sets it down in the palm Katherine’s cradling. “Order up!” she says.

Katherine laughs. “You’re silly.”

“So are you.” Shelby grins right back. “Well? Why can’t I just do it myself?”

“That’s not as fun,” Katherine says. “You know that, Shelby.” She plucks tonight’s grief seed from her pocket and taps it to Shelby’s soul gem. It glitters, immaculately bright again, and Katherine says, before the inanity of the thought crosses her mind, “It looks like an egg. I wanna put it in my mouth.”

“Eww,” Shelby giggles, shoving Katherine. She takes her gem back, fingers closing over it, clutching it to her chest. “Don’t, that’s gross! You don’t know where that’s been!”

Katherine stifles her giggles, takes a few deep breaths. Then: “Whoa. What have you been doing with your soul gem, Shelby?”

“Oh, shut up,” Shelby snickers, shoving her again. Breath hitching, she turns her soul gem back into a ring.

With a bit of shifted attention, Katherine copies her. She holds her hand out, fingers spread, to stop Shelby getting up. Just another minute here. Just one more. “Look,” she says. “We match!”

That’s how nights like that go. Then Katherine returns home and slips into bed with her copy. She can never quite get the same lingering hug out of it as she can from Shelby, but she always holds it, its hair silvered ink, until it dissolves. Memories of dinner seep into her, cool light and the soft give of cow. Interruptions in the language of temperature and emotion. When she presses, she gets a flash of knowing: her mother’s voice, her most dismissive tone, says, It’s a sickness, that’s what it is.

No need to press any further on that; Katherine tastes her own saliva until she’s breathing and aware in the darkness of her bedroom. She falls asleep, one hand curled inside the cradle of the other, both held close to her chest.

“It’s how we find each other,” Pearl told her once, back when she was still here. She had a way of smiling that made Katherine feel like she was being winked at. “Can you feel me through it?”

She could. Katherine could feel Pearl. Could feel her magic, the weight of her curved and brilliant against reality like the arch of a ready bow. A rounded insistence, like stepping on a worn stone. A feeling like the sun on her skin, all gathered up in a beam and aimed at her heart.

She remembers a smile breaking across Pearl’s face, one long evening in the summer, and Pearl glowing with the last light of day. “Now,” Pearl said, “we play a game! I’m going to get a five minute start. See if you can hunt me down, eh?”

Pearl vanished in the end. Disappeared first from Katherine’s view and then from her awareness, even though Katherine imagined stretching her mind’s eye out and out and out, to another city, another country, another world. Katherine had been living with a quiet hollowness, all witches’ magic and familiars’ games, until Shelby arrived. Until she became Shelby’s and Shelby became hers.

So maybe part of the problem is that Katherine’s never been great at math. Back when she wasn’t falling asleep in class or missing her tutoring sessions, she still knew that queasy, choking feeling of being in the middle of test day forgetting which way the inequality goes in the quadratic formula. Now though, when she’s called on in class, the numbers that fall out of her mouth are real, and no one knows it.

Two, which is the number of half-used grief seeds she and Shelby still have between them, stashed one each in the bottom of their bags for emergencies. Five, which is the number of witches they’ve run across in the past month, and three, which is the number of new seeds they’ve collected.

Some nights, Katherine thinks about going singing in her brightest dress down side streets, calling monsters to her like a mother swan. It’s better than the alternative: counting how many seeds they have, how many more they’ll need to keep going if they’re going to burn through magic like this, how many they’ve survived on before and whether she can let her soul gem dip another shade darker before she uses this latest seed up.

She didn’t used to run numbers in her head like this. She didn’t used to get that shivery important-test fear in her spine, her throat, her whole body all the time like this. Pearl— Katherine kind of chokes on the thought now, but Pearl must have counted, right? Or was it so easy for her, witches falling like plucked clovers under the sweep of her scythe, that it didn’t matter? That reaching into a pocket, there was no need to brace for the hollow touch of fabric, always a seed waiting for her searching fingers?

Way back when Katherine was first getting started, Pearl held the grief seed up to Katherine’s mouth like it was a piece of candy. It was one of those nights where she looked like a split second’s hesitation might pull her apart, and Katherine wanted to splay the whole town under her fingers, point them both in the right direction.

“That doesn’t look edible,” Katherine said.

“It’s not,” Pearl agreed, giggling. “It’s for your soul gem to gobble up. Show me?”

Katherine tipped her head back, giving Pearl easy access to her soul gem settled just below the hollow of her throat. A quick, resonant tap, and Katherine shuddered. It was like something humming along her teeth, something opening up and gasping, to feel Pearl’s fingertips so close to the bones and ribs and heart of herself.

“I thought it was getting a bit dark,” Pearl said. Her hair, wild with blonde streaks, fell loose, framing her gem, in just the same place as Katherine’s.

“Can I have one more?” Katherine asked. She tried to look down at her own gem, tucking her chin in gracelessly. “It’s— not as clear as I remember it being. I think.”

Pearl tossed one from a pocket, effortless and, in its way, a little bit stinging. “You better earn that back.” She said it with a smile.

“Of course I will!” Katherine exclaimed, and Pearl laughed as if somewhere in there, there had been a joke. There was always one more. Always one more. Katherine remembers saying, “I think we can get another before we stop, don’t you?”

Pearl’s smile went wolfish. “It’s like you read my mind, Katherine. Race ya?”

Pearl made it feel like all that magic was earned. Like she needed Katherine there. For what, Katherine never found out.

And the worst part is that thinking about it probably makes it worse. Counting piles on the despair, putrefying in her throat. Katherine spends some time in her dayclothes when she patrols, even though she’s not sure it does much. Civvies, Pearl called them once, and laughed when Katherine said, Doesn’t that mean underwear? Sometimes her magic is bottomless and easy. Sometimes thinking of the dark seed still in her bag is all that glosses the sharp edge of her arrows, lets her draw her bow.

Katherine, in ruffled skirts, letting herself feel the early winter chill, finds the gap in the familiar’s kaleidoscopic anatomy and kills it. She lets her transformation go. She counts again: one fresh seed on her, plus the half-used one. She’s managed to kill a witch on this much before; it’s fine. She takes a breath of the cold air.

If she used one up now, instead of later, that’d be a waste, wouldn’t it? Or would it make her magic dance under her skin, wild with wanting, the way it used to?

Shelby’s gone home for the night. Katherine didn’t argue it. Almost smelled the rotten horror of that body again and needed out. She’s been wandering town, looking for familiars. She holds that goal in her mind like a north star. Hunt, hurt, go again. She’s good at this. She’s good at this, and she’s terrible at counting, so it’s a good thing this is what she’s doing. Hunt, hurt, go again.

“Can we split it?” Katherine asked once, prying a grief seed out of Pearl’s fingers. Pearl’s hand stayed in that position for a few seconds longer, as if clutching the ghost of the seed.

“Kind of,” Pearl said. “But it works better if you just take it all.”

Katherine finds Shelby after school, standing under the sagging tree that Katherine’s parents have been saying for ages needs to be cut down before it falls on some poor kid.

“Hey,” Katherine says, already smiling.

“Hey.” She’s looking up at the tree and Katherine follows her gaze. All the leaves have come off; it’s black spindly lines like cracks across the cold blue sky. The sun, in the corner of her eye, sends spears of light at them both, at the tree, at the wisps that are left of the clouds.

Katherine feels the smile fade from her face by degrees. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing!” Shelby still smells like perfume as she turns around. Katherine’s started wearing her own to match, from the bottle her aunt — winking, talking about boys — got her on her birthday last year. Shelby’s smile is uneasy but Shelby never smiles easy while they’re still this close to school. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Katherine giggles. “Hey. Do you wanna go witch hunting?”

“Oh,” Shelby says, like it’s a surprise, like this isn’t the routine. She smiles, nervous looking. “How many seeds do we have left?”

Katherine’s so sick of counting. She’s not going to say that. The numbers are all blurred in her head. “I dunno, like, three? I used one yesterday. When you weren’t there.” Katherine reaches for Shelby’s floppy hat, meaning to tug it playful like Pearl might’ve, and Shelby flinches, ducking away. “Sorry,” Katherine says automatically. She feels bad. Like always, she remembers after the fact that saying it doesn’t help.

Shelby makes that rounded little noise again. “No, no, that’s fine. You needed it. I, um.” She shifts on her feet, swaying a little. All her nervous ticks are familiar to Katherine by now. Katherine likes this fact so fiercely it hurts.

And then it becomes a burst of terror, because Katherine was meant to think about what to do about Shelby’s grandma at school today. She clasped Shelby’s fingers this morning, cold between her own, and promised, and there she was at lunchtime, talking to Gem instead. Laughing, almost dropping her sandwich. And here she is now, back in front of Shelby, with no answers.

“I saw a familiar?” Shelby says. “Kind of. I sensed it close by.”

Katherine almost laughs, dizzy at how quickly patrol talk settles her. “Let’s go then!”

Shelby half-turns as if she’s going to agree, lead the way while pulling on her transformation like a warm outer layer, and then halts. “Katherine?”

“Yeah?” Katherine says, stopping a beat behind.

“I was thinking.”

“What?” Katherine asks. She could stomp her foot with impatience, she’s so ready to bound down the streets. Lately, she’s been aching to feel untouchable, unsettled from the moment she lowers her bow after a kill to the moment her arrow pierces another monster.

“Did— Did Pearl ever talk about why we have to kill familiars right away?”

Shelby doesn’t ask about Pearl much. Katherine’s pretty sure she never knew Pearl. Pearl had a kind of belonging in this world that just isn’t there with Shelby; Katherine feels guilty thinking it but it’s not a bad thing. They just— don’t talk about Pearl. And why should they? Pearl’s gone.

“‘Cause they’re evil,” Katherine says. “I mean, they just— They hurt people. And they become witches. You know that, Shelby, come on.”

Shelby’s hands come up the way they do when she’s about to say something mean or scary, as if by hiding her mouth her words won’t matter so much.

“Let’s go!” Katherine exclaims, abruptly afraid of what she’ll say. “We can’t just leave it around terrorizing people!”

Shelby takes a step back, away from Katherine, and that’s new. Katherine doesn’t think about needles or dance lessons or how Shelby’s hair looks tangled, undone by the wind.

“What if we did, though?” she asks. “Like, what if we just let it become a witch. Then we’d have a chance of getting a grief seed from it.” Her breath comes out in a visible puff. The sun is going down. “Did Pearl— I mean, did she ever even talk about that?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine says, tone uneven on her tongue. “I dunno, I don’t remember. She just taught me all the important stuff and then she left.”

Pearl never put her hand on Katherine’s shoulder like an overbearing parent. But sometimes she’d look Katherine over with amused approval at the end of a long patrol, and ask if she wanted to sneak back to Pearl’s place for ice cream. You look like you’re going to fall over, she’d laugh. Ice cream will help.

“Pearl didn’t mention anything like that.” Katherine admits this with a tug in her gut and a shrug. “That’s— We should go kill it. We should just go, before it gets too dark.” They’ve fought in darker conditions before. It doesn’t make any sense to say. “Or before— You know. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Shelby says. Her hair is fluttering in her face, escaping the confines of her hat, and she takes a moment to push a floral clip into brown strands, letting it stick there all loose and clumsy-looking. Katherine is too warm; Shelby had started wearing that clip after making her wish, and Katherine had been so proud.

“Yeah,” Katherine agrees.

Shelby nods. Little blinking smile. “Yeah! Okay. Let’s do it.” She plucks Katherine’s sleeve, oddly. “It’ll be fine, right?”

Katherine knocks into her as they set off again, crunching over dried grass to cross the field and head for the eastern edge of town. “It’ll be fine! We’ll be fine.”

Shelby nudges her back as if stumbling. “Pushy,” she giggles, sounding exactly like herself.

Her name’s Oli. She doesn’t answer to any other name, which causes trouble with substitutes. She’s quick, always grinning, forever talking in class to the teacher as much as to her friends. Katherine wouldn’t have singled her out as especially good at secret-keeping, but…

Something must’ve happened recently. Her usual connections don’t seem to hang around her anymore, and she keeps drifting over to join Gem and Katherine at lunch.

“We were kind of friends,” Oli explains to Katherine, the two of them waiting together one day to see if Gem will show up. (Another day of Shelby disappearing at lunch.) Her blonde hair is done up with an incongrous neatness, and the strands of hair that do escape her braided bun just add to the look, sharpen her to an appealing imperfection. “Years and years ago.”

“I didn’t even know she knew you,” Katherine says, drawn into conversation despite herself.

“That’s Gem for you,” Oli sighs, and the familiar way she says Gem’s name is so— Katherine tries to imagine saying it herself and feels silly. “When did you meet her?”

Oli’s nice. Maybe a little dramatic, but always down to jump in on a joke, and with a perfect sense for when to do it. Sometimes Gem reaches over and clasps Katherine’s hands and says something warm about inviting her to a party, which didn’t used to happen, so Katherine thinks Oli being around has changed something.

It’s not terribly long before Oli starts bumping into Katherine after school. I’m this way, she said once, nodding up a street. At least, I think I am. I’m not very good with directions. Katherine laughed and walked with her a while because it didn’t matter; Katherine’s copy always makes it home on time.

“You should come,” Oli is saying. Their boots stick in puddles of slush from an early snow that lost its fervor and resigned itself to collecting limply, coolly, on the sidewalks. “I never see you outside school! And Gem is making me perform again and I need moral support. You tell her about one hobby you have…”

“I mean…” Katherine gestures at the keyboard Oli’s carrying. “If you don’t want to be known for something, maybe you should try doing something else?”

Oli snorts inelegantly, and Katherine loves her. Or— something like that. It’s so good to have company for these after-school walks again. (Shelby shows up less and less to everything these days.) “I have been trying. No one’s noticed, of course. It’s always like, Ohh, are you sure you want to do music for the rest of your life? And it’s like, no! For the rest of my life? I’m not growing up to be a musician, I’m just having fun.”

“That’s… reasonable,” Katherine says. They’re out of her depth now; the concept of a future, much less dreams for that future, has become foreign. She doesn’t know what she would do if not this.

“Exactly,” Oli says, mock-imperious. “I’m very reasonable.” Then: “I’ve been giving sports a try.”

Katherine, blinking away thoughts of moonlight and heroism, says, “Sports? What, like, all of them?”

“A few.” Oli affects disinterest, looking at her nails. “I’m a real jock now. I play basketball, baseball…” Gives Katherine a side-eye. “Soccer…ball…”

Katherine snickers. “You could’ve said football.”

Oli snaps her fingers. “See! See, you’re smart. You’d be a hit at this thing, I’m telling you, Katherine.”

You’d be a hit. The other thing about Oli: she says ridiculous things Katherine’s only ever heard in the mouths of her parents, or her parents’ friends. It makes Katherine want to stay when she’s invited places, instead of making her excuses and ducking out before the two-hour mark.

Oli’s hand finds Katherine’s forearm and pulls her in so they collide with each other, and the firmness of Oli’s grip is a shock. Katherine laughs, bubbling with something too close to hysteria. She can’t. She’s out of seeds; gave her last one to Shelby the last time they saw each other.

“I have a better idea,” Katherine blurts out. “Can I show you something?”

Oli makes an exaggeratedly doubtful expression. “As long as you’re not taking me down an alleyway to kill me,” she says.

It’s that easy. Katherine, after her copy dissolves into her that night, holds the moment in her hands. Anything in the world? Oli asked with huge eyes, once the evidence was piled on a plate in front of her.

Yeah, Katherine replied. Anything. Even if it should be impossible. You can have it. I bet you’d be amazing, Oli. Even better than me.

Oli said she’d have to think about it, and Katherine swore her to secrecy, lungs heavy with hope.

It’s no time at all until there’s another magical girl on the streets of Katherine’s city, wild with blue and red ribbons, sashes, all fluttering in her wake like tiny rivers. For a week, Shelby misses school, and Katherine thinks about visiting, but she can sense her out in the world, moving, so it can’t be that bad. And anyway, Oli needs to be taught, because she’s brand-new to all this, and she doesn’t even know how to kill a familiar yet.

“Squeamish?” Pearl asked not too long after Katherine’s first kill, standing so close that they could’ve touched. They didn’t. Katherine remembers that they didn’t, even though she should’ve felt Pearl’s presence there. Her body was busy vibrating with magic, blooming and spilling over with it.

“No— No. I’m fine. I can do it.” It didn’t even leave anything behind, any blood, any corpse. It was just gone.

Katherine wraps her arms around Oli, squeezing her in a hug. Oli lets out a hysterical little giggle, then calms. Then they go back to hunting.

On the last free-dress day of the last year Pearl was still around, Katherine showed up in new skirts, full of ruffles and black lace. Pearl looked at her, raised her eyebrows, and said with a smile, “Got some magic spare, huh?”

“What?” Katherine said. Pearl never showed up to these in anything fancier than shorts and a worn black hoodie, but Katherine liked dressing up a little. It made her feel lighter, seeing herself in the mirror like she could be magic all the time. “This isn’t magic! I got these from the mall!”

“Oh, really!” Pearl said. They were around the side of the school, and it was still early, no one around yet. Pearl was bold when no one was watching; she beckoned, and when Katherine stepped close, Pearl pulled her into a spin. “Well, look at you!”

Pearl in her normal clothes never looked like herself in her magical girl form.

“Do you like it?” Katherine asked, smoothing her skirts down. “I added the ribbon myself.” She plucked at it, knotted neatly right below where her soul gem would be. “And the lace trim here. I’ve been practicing sewing.”

Pearl nodded wisely. Katherine was pretty sure even then it was one of her jokes. “That’s an important skill.” Then she gave herself away by giggling. “You did all that yourself? That’s impressive. My mom would love it if I just picked up a needle and thread one day.”

“Huh,” said Katherine, who hadn’t thought about her parents in days, who had been tracking them around the house by the sound of their footsteps when she crept back into her room at night and remembered their faces in the watercolour blur of memory. She focused, and the memory sharpened. Her mother at the head of the table — some kind of joke she and her father shared, that she was there and not him — and her father commenting about the warm weather, the sorts of people hanging around downtown in the evenings. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Pearl sighed expansively. She let her hair grow long, usually, but tied it up at school in a high ponytail. Sometimes, a friend-or-maybe-boyfriend of hers that Katherine didn’t know well gave her flowers and she’d thread them in, letting them scatter their petals and crush themselves against her scalp over the course of a day.

The silence went long, which happened sometimes. Katherine told herself it was comfortable. She busied herself fixing her own ponytail. It was forever getting into her face, all the way up until she transformed and it fixed itself.

“Must be nice,” Pearl said, taking Katherine’s hand, starting to lead her somewhere. “Your copying ability. Sometimes I think it would be fun if we could trade for a day.”

“Hey, wait, where—?” Pearl’s hands were so soft. She kept them that way with magic, had shown Katherine how to do it and Katherine kept quiet about not sticking to it because she liked the idea of having calluses. Of being the kind of girl who got into whatever trouble brought you around the side of the school past the dumpsters and the little parking lot at the back.

“This way. You can get on the roof from here. Did you know that?”

“Oh. You can?” Pearl wasn’t letting go, leading the way. Katherine yanked hard, pulling herself forward until she could be side-by-side with Pearl. Pearl huffed, almost laughing as she caught Katherine’s eye. “I don’t— come back here much.”

“I do,” Pearl said easily. “All the time.”

“Really?”

“Nah, not really,” Pearl laughed and winked. “A few times, though! Haven’t been caught yet.”

Pearl grabbed hold of the rickety-looking ladder attached to the side of the building and hoisted herself up, her hair swinging. It never stayed bound by its elastic when Pearl transformed, like there was too much for even magic to keep contained. Katherine remembers it like this: the pale streaks of Pearl’s hair catching the early morning sun, set against her sky-bright eyes and white teeth. That smile. Maybe in the memory, her gaze was fixed on something just a little past Katherine and she was looking the way she looked on hunts, as if by staring hard enough she could drag her quarry closer.

Pearl helped her up, and then they were on the roof, a futile breeze fluttering past them. “Look at this view!” Pearl exclaimed, stretching her arms out. She grinned like she was going to tell a joke and said, “Almost enough to believe we’re doing the right thing, eh?”

“What?” Katherine said, stupid. Sometimes she recalls this instant and regret lodges in her throat.

“Don’t tell me you think I’m wrong, Katherine,” Pearl said, voice a little lower. Teasing, right? She never called Katherine by a nickname. She said Katherine’s name like every syllable mattered to her.

“Well,” Katherine said. “If we’re not doing the right thing, that’s your fault. You dragged me up here.”

Pearl laughed, and they must’ve talked of other things, because Katherine’s memory of this moment stretches long, blue and wild. She doesn’t know what she said.

What Katherine does know is that she didn’t get to mention how she would’ve loved to trade for a day too. Pearl was forever moving, so fast she left images of herself in her wake. She was the kind of girl with powers meant for hitting hard and getting hit harder, leaving her own shadow as an afterimage, unforgettable and brilliant and imploding.

They don’t have a signal. They didn’t need it, when it was just the two of them, and then Oli was there, so there was no time to make a signal. So Katherine stumbles out into the cold air with Oli griping about some classmate at her side, and Shelby has to grab her, by the wrist, and say out loud, “Hey. Can we talk?”

Katherine grins. “That sounds scary. Right now?”

Shelby’s dressed in—overalls. It’s cute, Katherine’s thought before. She wears them at home, sometimes on free-dress days. No flower hairclips though, and Katherine gets a little colder. (They were gifts from Katherine, just for Shelby, to celebrate.)

She says, blinking once, “Would you want it to be a different time?”

“Later?” Katherine says. “I was going to walk home with Oli. But I think it’s on the way to your place, we could all go—”

“When,” Shelby says, abruptly venomous. “When, Katherine? It’s always we can do that another time. You’ve always got more time. I don’t.”

“Whoa,” Oli mutters, and Katherine is hyper-aware of how close she is. How close Shelby is. The three of them all have the same kind of soul.

“No,” Katherine says automatically. “I mean, not here. Right? We can’t—”

“Why not?” Shelby says, grip on Katherine’s wrist going tight. Katherine hurts, distantly.

“Hey now, let’s not fight—” Oli starts.

“Do you know about me?” Shelby asks abruptly, turning to Oli.

They’re barely out of the way of the door. People are sneaking them looks as they pass. Katherine takes a breath and wars with herself. She doesn’t think any of this is supposed to hurt. She’s still in her uniform, her bulky coat on top because it’s a grey, freezing day.

“Come on,” Katherine says, lowering her voice. Shelby— Shelby doesn’t grab people, Shelby is nervous and bright and prone to trailing off into inaudible mumbling. So why is Katherine afraid to reach for her? “We don’t have to do this here. We shouldn’t.” She can’t glance at the school, but Shelby knows, right? It’s secret. All of this is supposed to be secret.

“Know about you?” Oli asks, too loud.

“You’re right,” Shelby says disdainfully. “Let’s walk home together.”

Someone laughs nearby and Katherine’s heart seizes and she hates herself a little bit for it. They walk home together. Oli does her best to explain, something about Katherine’s talked about you, and Shelby keeps pace with her, nodding every now and then, so there’s Katherine left drifting, helpless, behind. She can’t read Shelby’s expression at all. They drop Oli off and Shelby watches Oli walk away.

“She’s kind of loud,” Shelby comments, unmoved from her spot in front of Oli’s house. It stops Katherine in her tracks where she’s started taking tentative steps away, toward Shelby’s house, some semblance of routine.

“Yeah,” Katherine agrees. There’s a feeling in her throat, or lower than that.

“I’m going home,” Shelby says. Laughs bitterly, the sound falling out of her like little knives. “You’re not going to follow me, right?”

“You seem distracted,” Oli says. Katherine doesn’t take her to that park, those benches. After a kill, they just kind of walk. Oli hasn’t asked not to. “Correction: you’ve seemed distracted. How long are you going to mope for?”

“I’m not moping,” Katherine argues.

A smile twitches at the corner of Oli’s mouth.

“She hasn’t wanted anything with you, right?” Katherine asks. “Shelby? I’m just— I’m worried about her.”

“Yeah?” Oli says, her expression faintly nonplussed. “I saw her at school today. You could’ve talked to her.”

Katherine blinks down at her hands, gloved. “She was there?”

“I saw her by the field. She didn’t stick around to say hi to me though. Maybe if you were there.” Oli fights with long lengths of chains, weighted at the ends with lovely tassel shapes. She spins one end in big, lazy circles and it makes a sound as it whips through the air. “Hey, how come you didn’t tell me more about her, before? I thought we could’ve worked with her.”

Katherine has no answer, just a dark, yawning fear. Katherine, says the memory of Pearl in Katherine’s head. We can’t just go around telling people about us. You have to learn to keep a secret, yeah?

“Sure, but… She was busy.” Katherine glances over. “We’re not really supposed to— to have this many of us in one place.”

Oli swings one last circle then catches the weighted end. “If you say so. We’re doing fine though, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Katherine allows. “But we also— Like, it’s okay if we stick together. We’ll help each other. Shelby—” Any day now, Katherine could go home when she’s supposed to and see if her parents notice. Which is different from going home to that smell. That flash of silvery hair and that garden all in green. “I think she doesn’t have that.”

“Right,” Oli says, looking away like she does when she’s about to say something unaccountably sweet. “Yeah. Okay. Well! You’re the one who told me she can look out for herself. She’ll be fine, right?”

Katherine nods slowly. She knows how to keep secrets. She has for a long time. “Of course. She’s— She’s strong.”

“She’s never here,” someone in class mutters during attendance.

Katherine puts her head down and tries to nap. Shelby is here, though. Katherine saw her long brown hair, shining under the fluorescent hallway lights, and she turned, golden eyes like an animal’s down the long stretch of corridor, and Katherine looked away. The teachers keep marking her absent.

“None again today!” Oli exclaims when they meet back up in the early hours of the morning. She yawns. “Hey, at least it’s an easy patrol, right?”

“You’re not actually tired,” Katherine says, inexplicably stung. “You can— fix that, I mean. And not be.”

Oli shrugs. “Yeah, but I don’t need to. Someone’s been doing our job for us. That’s nice of her, isn’t it?”

Katherine itches. She’s given up trying to keep out the cold. It just burrows into her.

“Let’s go home,” Oli says.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, there’s a party. Oli tells her Shelby will be going, and Gem mumbles something about how do the two of them know Shelby anyway, and Katherine thinks about asking Shelby to leave Oli alone but she can’t think of a reason why it matters. Katherine thinks about Oli taking her hand and squeezing and then letting go like it didn’t happen. When Katherine gets to the address Oli gave her, there’s music so loud she can hardly speak.

For a while she uses the fact of her novelty to make conversation, gets dragged into a card game and then gives up her seat for the boy that everyone else there clearly knows better. She sees Shelby, who waves, and Katherine waves back, relieved, and they don’t talk. Shelby vanishes again. Oli wanders off the impromptu little stage that was set up for her, really a line of fairy lights that props up some polite fiction of separation between the musician and her audience. Katherine finds herself in little pockets of silence surrounded by noise.

She doesn’t settle until she sees Oli return, all smiles, getting back to her keyboard. Oli loves an audience. Katherine has an irrational urge to— force her to transform, or something. To show everyone those wild dancing ribbons and the perfect coil of her imperfectly-dyed hair. The lights don’t feel real. Katherine listens to a few songs, and then she goes home.

“She’s nice,” Oli says, a few days later. “Shelby. We were talking at the party. She said we should patrol with her some time. See? I did tell you.”

“What?” Katherine says, too sharp in her own ears.

“About working together,” Oli says, not noticing or ignoring it. “I told her I dunno if we’d have any luck finding many witches, with the way they’ve been going, but we could hang out. That’d be fun.”

“Fun,” Katherine repeats.

Oli doesn’t say anything about that, just points out there’s a familiar nearby.

“Do you think we need to?” Katherine asks.

“What do you mean?” Oli asks, already glancing around as if to figure out the way.

Katherine is, stupidly, thinking about the history assignment she got back today. It wasn’t a failing grade or anything. It was fine. There was a comment scribbled in the corner: This isn’t like you, Katherine. She sat through the rest of the class and then she left with the rest of the shuffling students for lunch. She almost walked all the way out the front doors without intending to come back.

“It’s a crush,” Gem says, crunching on a slice of cucumber. “There’s no way she’s not into him.”

“Really?” Katherine says.

“Well, you can never tell anyway,” Gem says dismissively. “But why else would she be like that around him all the time? She’s obsessed with him, it’s so obvious.”

“Now we just have to get her to notice that,” Oli says, reaching for Gem’s lunch. Gem snatches it away. “What? I can’t have one little slice?”

“It’s my lunch,” Gem huffs. “Get your own.”

Katherine giggles, but she has nothing to add. It’s a day of being indoors, piled together by a window that shows thin clouds and thinner light. That’s the last lunch they have together, the three of them.

Katherine goes home empty-handed and soundless.

In the numb shock of aftermath, she discovers that she doesn’t have any tears to cry. She hasn’t been crying hardly at all lately, outside of when she crawls into bed and her copy dissolves in her arms. She doesn’t get into bed now. When her copy comes upstairs and mimics sleep, Katherine just watches her do it, sitting at her black-and-white desk with its drawers full of colour pencils and bobbins missing their threads.

She’s gotten used to the silence of her house. Her parents go to sleep — she hears them, for the first time in weeks — and then everything is so quiet behind its closed doors that Katherine could sit there and believe the whole place is hers, no one and nothing in all the dark for miles and miles around.

She skips school the next day because she can’t think of a reason not to. She stands, actually, for a while, across the street from the building, chasing courage through the inchoate rooms in the back of her head, but then she thinks about looking anyone in the eye and courage turns out to be a mirage. She goes to Shelby’s house and sits there on the porch in full gear, hidden from the street by the thin, starving branches of the hedges and shrubs.

Shelby must sense her; that’s why the front door creaks softly open, and she spills out, scent and shadow and greasy hair.

“How’s—” Katherine clears her throat. She reaches for her hair, but she’s transformed, and the transformation does all the work of keeping her hair out of her face. “How’s your grandma doing?”

Shelby doesn’t say anything. When Katherine looks up, a reassuring smile slipping into her mouth, Shelby glares.

But they had something, Katherine thinks stutteringly. They kept their mundane hurts separate from their lives together. Only let slip vague ideas in passing. Let themselves flinch and say nothing that would be too hard to say.

It’s so hard to say anything.

“Don’t say you just want to know why,” Shelby starts. “I— I’ll kill you.”

Would she? Katherine thinks about it. Shelby’s hands, the bones of her fingers, around her throat. Or she’d just use magic. Hit Katherine with her staff until she falls, until there’s no more fighting.

“We noticed you’ve been missing classes,” says Shelby, mocking and sharp. “Do you need help? This attendance record is unacceptable. We’re here for you if you can be here with us. It’s just words. You can just— leave.”

She crouches down next to Katherine, hiding herself next to her. She’s wearing rumpled pajamas.

“It’s all made up,” Shelby continues. “I could do anything. So here I am. Doing anything.”

“Oli—” Katherine starts. She regrets it instantly. It’s cold out, the air thin enough to let ghosts through.

“Are you mad?” Shelby drawls. “Are you gonna do something about it?”

Katherine tries to think of what else to say. How could you or she didn’t do anything wrong or she invited you to that party, I thought you liked her, I thought you liked me—

She reaches for Shelby and she doesn’t know what she wants until Shelby refuses her, grabs her with a brief cry like a fox and tries to slam her fists into Katherine’s face. Katherine tries to push, hide, block, but it’s all clumsy. She feels stupid and dulled and she wishes the bluntness of Shelby hitting her hurt like knives instead but she has armour on and Shelby doesn’t. They wrestle, and Katherine pleads for Shelby to stop, and once she does, Katherine doesn’t remember what she said to make that happen.

“Is that the best you can do?” Shelby demands. There’s something in her voice that feels dangerous. Not like a witch is dangerous but like something on the edge of a table, about to tip and shatter—

Katherine holds her hands out as if to catch shards of glass. “We don’t have to do this—”

“You don’t have to do this,” Shelby says. “You can just walk away like you always have. You would be happy to just die alone out there, but guess what? I’m not! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to get kicked out of this house! I don’t want to go home, I don’t want my grandma to be gone, I don’t want things to be like this forever!” Her voice is getting louder, rising outside this bubble of solitude on this porch, and Katherine grabs for her arms again, desperate and clueless.

“We can talk about it, we can figure it out,” Katherine pleads. “You didn’t have to— You didn’t have to do that!” She can’t help it, the anger flares out of her and she grabs Shelby’s wrist if only to make her stop for a second. “You didn’t have to do that, Oli never did anything to you, she was— She was nice!”

Oli, without magic, turned out to look fragile, the ribbons of her scattered like scared fish. Shelby stood over her, her familiar staff turned to a scythe all vivid and sleek, made unfamiliar with blood. Oli didn’t move. Katherine kept thinking she was going to move, and then it would be all right.

Maybe the next time she goes back there, Oli will have gotten up, dusted herself off. Maybe she’ll be there waiting. Couldn’t she be?

Katherine lets go of Shelby and realizes her fingers have left marks, digging into Shelby’s skin. Katherine shoves her back, scooting in the opposite direction, then crosses her arms, holding onto herself.

“She was nice,” Shelby says bitterly. “And she never showed you problems you didn’t want to solve. Yeah.”

“I did want to help,” Katherine says, sounding weak even to herself. “I do, I swear.” The ideas bouncing around half-formed in her head start falling from her lips. “I just— I could give you my magic. So you can keep her for longer. Or we could— find someone else who could make a wish to bring people back from the dead. Or I could witch and then you’d get the seed from me—”

“Would you?” Shelby asks. “Would you actually do that?”

Katherine’s hands are clammy in her gloves. She squeezes her eyes shut and catalogues the ways she’s been hurt before. She doesn’t let injuries linger when she has the magic to heal herself, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it. She wonders where and how dying will hurt.

Shelby says it so softly Katherine will think later that maybe she imagined it: “I really believed you, you know. All that stuff about doing good things. I thought it was just my bad luck. I thought one day you would help me for real.”

For a while, there’s just silence. She doesn’t die. She opens her eyes to see Shelby transforming, flash of shimmering colour resolving into her long dress and staff. The scythe blade is gone. She looks just like herself, except her face.

Then Shelby walks away, and Katherine can’t see her face anymore.

Gem has taken up sketching houses during lunch. She’s been having dreams of being an architect lately. Katherine watches her and doesn’t say much of anything. Gem mutters and grumbles over every misplaced line, erasing them. Katherine sees the lines appear and fade away, how even in the places Gem’s eraser has marked, something is left to contain the shape of the new building.

“So many people have been leaving this year,” Gem sighs. It’s a free-dress day and she looks pretty in her pink dress, the clean lines of it on display for everyone to admire since it’s too cold to go outside. “I wanna show this to someone. Other than you, I mean. You’ve seen the whole process, so it’s not as impressive.”

“Who else is gone?” Katherine asks.

Gem gestures at the empty space next to Katherine like it’s obvious. She stands up and dusts off her skirt. “I’m gonna go see who’s around. See ya.”

It turns out girls really can be witches. Katherine finds out because eventually, in the dark, in the cold, she finally makes herself check whether the front door is unlocked.

The crystalline chaos of battle: fractal on fragment, all bound to ideas of brick bark, steel tint, hound’s tooth. Moon slid not into the lock but past it, finding the soft spot, the shutter point, the place where the bulb cracks and light glows prismatic, infloresence. What a fight. Katherine staggers, lambent, porcelain cracking but not shattering around her, little angled angels lurid in Easter rabbit colours. That-which-is-not-Shelby grants her no cry, not even the old scream of animal laughter. There’s no backing music. It’s a fight.

Katherine tries to scream and the world goes anechoic. Fairy light, stutter-stop, kitchen knife gone hunger-side. Some blood. Mostly crying. A witch is relentless, you see. A girl could think she should stay here forever. A girl decides she must stay here forever. Eternity’s outline, smudged but held together in ballpoint pen. Body-rot. Oli died without even the grace of an ugly transformation. Bull roar with the snap and tear of sheets ripped, in the maze and the dark and the flowers, the flowers, they don’t ever stop growing. Katherine discovers she can’t live in this. Katherine fails. Katherine wins.

Katherine takes up— what? Guard? Vigil? She sits outside the house, is the point, and time passes. When she gets sick of breathing, she goes around the side, down the narrow, brick-covered path, into the back garden. She wonders what the neighbours think of the flowers, still blooming. The vines lingering like trailing breaths. The grass rustles verdantly under her feet, and the house, close-mouthed, cool, watches her back.

She walks back around to the front of the house, which is closer to the street and so occasionally permits her to hear the sound of a car passing. The height of the house. The weight of the house. The way the brick would hurt her if she punched it. It settles into her head. The day lingers longer and longer, but now the sun has ducked behind the houses, and the sky is all cerulean.

Her smiling copy is waiting for her at home. Katherine lets it sleep in her bed. She sends it to school in the mornings. She tells it not to talk to anyone, but she doesn’t know if anyone cares, or notices. She watches her soul gem get dark. A little darker than that. A little darker than that, still. A grief seed in her pocket, waiting to be used.