Work Text:
Tamara gave herself a final once-over before initiating the Zoom chat, adjusting the camera angle and the dimmer settings on both the background and Ring lights until the image framed by the screen of her laptop was picture-perfect. Lush dark-brown curls swept in a side part that nearly concealed an entire half of her face (very mysterious), pale skin set off by a single beauty mark she’d accentuated with a bit of eyebrow pencil, an emerald-green peasant top with long flowy sleeves but plenty of neckline and shoulder cutouts to show off her signature silver snake jewelry. Everything the promo image on her storefront page promised—only better, because the customer would be getting it live and one-on-one.
If she was actually wearing nothing but underwear and fuzzy socks under the cover of her scarf-draped card table and had a stack of takeout containers teetering in the corner…well, that was just one of the many benefits of not plying her trade in person.
When she’d turned 18 and left (been ejected from) Mrs. Cole’s Home for Girls like a bat out of a hellhole, the eponymous frowning matron had lectured that she’d never make anything of herself, that lying and stealing and constantly scheming wasn’t the kind of thing that either made a girl self-sufficient or attracted a nice man to take care of her. Yeah, well, Tamara Riddle had no interest in any man, and so far her business as a full-time Etsy witch had been more than sufficient to fund her lifestyle, thanks very much.
Her landing page on the arts-and-crafts entrepreneurship website, done in the same sophisticated color palette of black, silver and green, featured the aforementioned glamour shot of her face and upper body, plus a slideshow of the other wares on offer and all the necessary information in elegant font:
TAMARA M. RIDDLE—WITCH, SEER, AND PRACTICIONER OF THE ARCANE ARTS
TAROT AND RUNIC READINGS, LOVE SPELLS, HANDMADE CHARMS AND AMULETS FOR PROTECTION, SPECIALLY BLENDED POTIONS AND TEAS
UNRAVEL THE RIDDLE OF YOUR FATE…
*rates start at £29.99 per hour over Zoom call. All payment methods accepted!
Bookings had gone like hotcakes from the jump, surprising even her a little. Turned out there was no shortage of dowdy, lonely women (weren’t these the kind of nice girls that were supposed to be married and fulfilled by now?) living in the suburbs or—shudder—the Midlands who were all too happy to pour out their woes to a beautiful, cosmopolitan-sounding “witch” for whole afternoons at a stretch, requiring nothing but some cursory prop acting and vague mumbo-jumbo (backed up by Tamara’s well-honed skills at cold reading people) to go away happy and ready to recommend her services to all their similarly pathetic friends, usually after laying out even more cash on one of the “handmade” trinkets she sourced in bulk from a supplier back in the East End. Life was grand.
Today, she had an appointment with a new client, someone going by the rather melodramatic username Mistress_ofDeath. Typical; wannabe-Goth teenagers with their mums’ stolen credit cards were another big demographic for Tamara Riddle, online seeress.
Seeing that the customer had also logged in and satisfied that all her divination tools were visible and arranged to her liking, she turned on her camera and microphone and clicked to start.
Mistress_ofDeath was a petite, shrouded figure on her side of the splitscreen, her body and face obscured almost completely by a shimmering cloak with its hood pulled down low over her forehead. The only thing she couldn’t hide was her hair—wild and black where it stuck out from beneath the fabric, a hopeless tangle even worse than some of the half-feral girls at Mrs. Cole’s—and the occasional glint of eyes some bright color; green, perhaps, or a very deep blue.
Great. Cosplayers always showed up mostly bought-in to the premise from the start; Tamara would barely have to try with them. “Welcome to your mystic consultation, Miss—ah, what should I call you?” she intoned in her most melodious voice, the one that could charm a banker out of his wallet and Swiss watch and leave him completely unaware of the loss until Tamara was halfway across the city.
The woman—girl? She was so small—shrugged one shoulder, making her cloak ripple like liquid silver. Expensive fabric…could I have a new whale on my hands? “Just ‘Mistress’ is okay, thanks,” she said in an incongruously plain accent, sounding almost bored.
”Yes, alright then, Mistress,” Tamara continued smoothly, keeping up her own performative facade. Sometimes these people liked to test you, make you work for their respect. “Mistress, I’m so glad the Fates have brought you here today to seek my assistance. Where would you like to begin on your arcane journey? The cards, perhaps? Or maybe a particular rune or crystal among my collection is already calling to you—“
”Nah, I don’t think that’s likely,” Mistress said, almost certainly suppressing an actual snort of amusement. “Seeing as half those runes are drawn inaccurately, and your ‘crystals’ are all made of glass and plastic.” She leaned forward a little in her seat, peering at the screen. “The cards look real at least…damn, I feel kinda sorry for them, having to get handled every day by a baldfaced liar.”
Tamara pressed her well-glossed pink lips into a moue of confusion and distress. Okay, she could handle this. She’d been here before—not often, mind you, there weren’t many people with thirty quid to spare just to smart off at her, but there was always some smug internet arsehole who fancied themself the next James Randi. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you mean,” she said, raising one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Like any witch with an affinity for the Art, I did not choose the instruments with which I practice—they found me. My expertise is not in rare minerals or ancient languages; these are simply the objects through which my magic best channels itself. If you would only allow me to—“
”Okay, Tamara—if that’s even your real name—I’m gonna have to ask you to please stop with that fake-mystical posh person accent you’ve got going,” Mistress interrupted her with a hint of real impatience. “Even if I didn’t have the actual Gift, I’d be able to hear the Cockney in your vowels through a tin can and a string. I’ve got things I need to say to you, and I’d prefer to do it without hearing a bunch of rubbish spewed back.”
What? She might as well have just been slapped upside the head. Tamara pushed one socked foot into the carpet under the table, hard, to keep herself from reeling back and showing any weakness. “Fine,” she said flatly, folding her arms over her chest—this bint didn’t deserve a glimpse of her cleavage—and dropping her ‘work’ voice in favor of a generic London accent. Not Cockney, she’d sanded the last of that off back when she was twelve. “What do you want, then, if not a reading or a spell? Money? My customers are loyal and I have a five-star rating, no one’s gonna be swayed by some rando with an embarrassing username review-bombing me.“
Mistress shrugged again. “This account is just a throwaway, and I’ve got better things to do with my time than spam a crafts website. I’m just here to give you one chance—one—to stop scamming people and move into an honest line of work—or at the very least, a grift that isn’t offensive to the actual Lady Magic. Sell crypto or something; then you’ll just be bleeding wankers who have it coming anyway. Or do OnlyFans—you’ve got the body for it and a lot of those crowd are into witchy stuff.”
”How dare you,” Tamara hissed. She would be damned if she let someone compare her to some cheap trollop, when she’d worked hard to avoid that too-common fate for orphaned girls like her. “I am providing people with a service—I mean, an entertainment”—it was crucial to always refer to online witchcraft as “entertainment” to avoid pesky regulations that could get your account deactivated in a heartbeat—“that they find beneficial to them. My work is harming no one—“
”Really?” The hooded face angled down and to the left a little, as if she was looking at something on her own screen. “‘Cause these ‘specially blended teas’ look awfully dodgy to me—if you got them from the same blokes who sold you the amulets, I wouldn’t rule out them containing at least a couple toxins—“
”This conversation is over.” She reached out and turned off her camera with a single keystroke—not to keep this woman from seeing her rattled face, she told herself, but to create a more distant and forbidding affect. “All my products are handcrafted with magic and intent in my personal workspace under the light of an auspicious astrological sign, as is clearly stated on my profile page; you have no proof otherwise. If you continue to slander me on this or other platforms, I will report you to Etsy and pursue legal action.”
Mistress—god, Tamara hated thinking of her that way, she didn’t deserve any sort of title or honorific—full-on guffawed, throwing her head back and almost letting her hood slip before she tugged it back over her awful bramble-bush hair. “Okay, girlboss, have it your way. Like I said, I warned you once; keep this stuff up for even one more session, and you’ll find out real quick how a real practicioner of the arcane arts works her magic. Oh, and by the way…” She raised a golden-skinned hand—it was as tiny as the rest of her, Tamara noticed, and the short nails were painted with unoriginal black polish—to her mouth, suppressing more giggles. “Nice Kuromi undies.” Her end of the camera and microphone both abruptly went dead. Mistress_ofDeath has logged off, the screen unhelpfully supplied.
Tamara slammed the laptop cover down hard enough to make one of her ‘crystal’ (yeah, it was actually glass, sue her) fall off the edge of the table and break in half. She was breathing hard. How the fuck did this little chit know that she was wearing her lucky purple panties emblazoned with Hello Kitty’s way cooler, edgier, underrated sibling? Was ‘Mistress’ actually some long-ago dormmate from Mrs. Cole’s, come to seek revenge for dumb stolen clothes and trinkets from when they were nine?
No, she told herself, trying to calm down. None of those simpleminded girls had been clever enough to booby-trap their dresser drawers, let alone pursue a grudge for upward of a decade. It had to be just a lucky guess…or maybe cold-reading, like Tamara did on all her customers. Same with the East End thing. As far as her specialty brews went…well, of course they had a little ‘something extra’, why do you think everyone in her comments raved about the intensive psychic experiences they had after drinking them?
None of this mattered anyway. Mistress_ofDeath was nobody. Just some bored poser or aggrieved former client (Myrtle Warren, maybe? Tamara warned her that even the best Beauty Charms could only do so much), trying—unsuccessfully!—to throw her off her game. If anything, this all worked out to her benefit; Mistress paid in advance for the full hour but only used up about a quarter of that time, leaving her with an extra forty-five minutes to shower and do a face mask before her session with Slughorn, the sad old pervert whose hands remained perpetually below his own desk whenever they ‘consulted’. That hooded freak couldn’t touch her. She had nothing to worry about.
*
Three days later, Tamara was beginning—provisionally, on a trial basis—to consider that she might have something to worry about.
During that very shower she’d taken after logging off, a chunk of hair had fallen right out of her scalp, leaving nothing but a swathe of blank forehead and an ugly bald patch where she usually wore her lustrous side part. She’d had to wear an awkward scarf for her session with Slughorn; the old man had seemed out of sorts and ended the call early, without his usual generous Venmo’d tip. No takeout from the good Thai place for dinner that night, then.
The next day, during her standing appointment with Hepzibah Smith—an obscenely wealthy widow who requested love spells on at least different three young men per week—her ‘rose quartz’ (…okay, pinkish plastic) crystals had all shattered, melted, or in one case straight up exploded one by one without her even touching them, all while Ms. Smith looked on in horror and demanded to know if this would harm her chances with Messrs. Diggory, MacMillan, and Finch-Fletchley. When asked to confirm the same time for next week, the old twat only huffed that she’d “have to check her schedule”.
Finally, Tamara gave a tarot reading to a new client, Mr. Dumbledore, who’d been transparently desperate to hear that his sister was happy in the afterlife and didn’t blame him for anything. Some simple sleight of hand should’ve been enough to draw a string of soothing nonsense like the Queen of Cups, the Sun, and the Star—but she somehow kept turning over Judgement and the Devil and reversed Swords, even after she’d surreptitiously removed those cards from the deck.
After that, she rescheduled all her appointments for the rest of the week (with a complimentary crystal bracelet or tea sachet in sincerest apology!) and spent a full afternoon and evening going over her computer, tools, and studio flat for signs of tampering—including an extra-thorough search for spying devices in her underwear drawer.
Nothing, nothing, and nothing. At the end of the night, she sat fuming at her now-very-disorganized divination table, chomping her way through an entire bottle of healthy-hair-growth gummies to keep the tic in her jaw from acting up.
…The laptop pinged with the notification sound for a Zoom call. Fuck, what about rescheduled did these punters not comprehend—and didn’t she turn that thing off like an hour ago—
Mistress_ofDeath would like to chat.
What. This time she knew she’d blocked that username and the whole IP address for good measure. As well as submitting a complaint ticket to the administrators of Etsy. How dare she—
Uncaring of how thoroughly it would ruin the aloof, unbothered front she’d carefully cultivated for ‘Mistress’—to say nothing of her uncovered bald spot and the magenta Kuromi bra she was wearing for her night in—Tamara flung the cover open and pounded the key for ‘accept call’. She was shouting before the familiar hooded figure even appeared on the screen, and okay, there might be a little Cockney in it now.
“What did you do!?” she demanded directly into the mic, only getting angrier at Mistress’s lack of response to her most threatening tone of voice; the other girl actually seemed to be listening to a podcast through a single dangling earbud. Something about socialist organizing. “Don’t try to deny it. You threatened me, and now I can’t fulfill a single order without some cock-up or another—I just found mold on all the teas I had ready for shipping—!”
”Oh, so now you’re ready to hear me talk, huh?” Mistress shook her fringe out of her face—wait, were those glasses peeking out from beneath her hood? Was she a nerd and a Goth? “Well, I already told you the gist of it when we last spoke. You wouldn’t stop invoking the name of Lady Magic for selfish and harmful ends, so me and my coven called on Her to punish you accordingly.” She tapped her chin with a well-chewed black fingernail, the polish already chipped. “If it’s already hitting you that hard, Tamara must really be your name after all. Curses work way better if they’re attached to someone’s true name.”
”What the bleeding fuck!” Forget school clique labels, Tamara was dealing with certifiable lunatic. “Your ‘coven’? You don’t actually believe witches are real, do you!?”
“Well, of course we are. My coven is known as the Lightning-Touched; we’re pretty new here in London, but I’d like to think we’re up-and-comers on the scene. Hermione, Veronica, Ginny, Luna, Neve, and…” She slipped her cloak fully back at last, revealing tanned skin, hair that was three times as wild unbound by the hood, and—yes—glasses, which didn’t at all dim her wild, sparkling green eyes. “Me, Harrie.” She smiled toothily.
On her forehead, just over her right eye and neatly carving a notch in the thick brow, was a jagged pink scar shaped like a lightning bolt. Tamara did not let herself think about how legitimately wicked that looked. Harrie’s whole aesthetic wasn’t just ‘lightning-touched’ but almost storm-tossed—and it seemed entirely natural, not deliberately crafted like Tamara’s snake-and-scarves vibe. She was not envious of this at all.
”Bold of you to just give all your names like that,” she shot back once she’d caught her breath. “If you really believe in this witchcraft bollocks, you just admitted that I can use that information to curse you—and even if you don’t, I sure as hell know people who can track you down from that and your IP.”
Harrie sighed. “That was a show of goodwill, Tamara,” she said patiently. “We’re taking the chance that you won’t spurn it—not that we can’t easily protect ourselves if you try. You see, we’re hoping the newest member of our coven will be…well, you.”
Tamara laughed at the sheer absurdity of this situation. “I’m not a bloody witch, you nutter. I’m just a girl from the East End with good acting skills and the hustle to separate fools and their money. You said as much yourself, the first time we spoke.”
”I never said you weren’t magical,” Harrie corrected. “I said you needed to stop scamming. I’ve been asking around about you, you know. You’re right, you do have a five-star reputation—and it’s not for nothing. Loads of people say that amazing things happened for them after you cast a spell, or that you knew things they’d never told anyone within seconds of meeting them…”
”It’s called the placebo effect.” Tamara rolled her eyes. “And I can read people very easily, I get intuitions—“
”’Intuitions’ that get whispered to you by your snake jewelry?” Harrie asked with an smirk.
Before she could stop herself, Tamara’s hand went to the tarnished locket at her throat—the last thing that had belonged to her mother, if Mrs. Cole was to be believed, and the first piece of her always-growing collection of serpent accessories. “How—“
“Educated guess.” The green-eyed girl looked entirely too pleased with herself now. “You’re probably a Parselmouth—snake-speaker, and good with reptiles in general. It’s one of the magical specialties, like how plants grow twice as fast if Neve asks nicely, or how I”—she held up her hand and rubbed her thumb and fingers together, creating a few tiny sparks (static, Tamara told herself firmly, that she built up rubbing her shirt under the table; classic illusionist’s trick, nothing special)—“have a way with electricity and stuff that’s powered by it. You’ve definitely at least got the Parsel talent for healing, since you haven’t accidentally poisoned anyone yet with the mad tea blends you’re mailing out…”
No. No, it’s not possible. The secrets her locket and Ouroboros bracelet and snake ear-cuff murmured to her were just her mind’s way of processing things she figured out subconsciously, like how the live garden snakes at Mrs. Cole’s used to warn her to hide when bullies were coming…But what if…
“Come to a coven circle,” Harrie urged. “Learn how to make real charms and potions, or to join with the rest of us in a big working—you’d be our seventh, that’s really powerful! The next meeting’s at mine, this Friday at midnight, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place—“
”I know Grimmauld,” Tamara snapped, her moment of naive optimism immediately reverting to suspicion. “There is no Number Twelve, it goes from eleven to thirteen.” She’d stared at the fancy number plates enough, waiting in the bushes for hours with some of the other enterprising street kids, waiting for the aristos to go to bed so they could nick trinkets to fence. The bathroom windows were always unlocked—nobody thought a burglar could fit through a space that small.
”No? I guess I’m mistaken about my own address, then. Oh well, forget I asked.” That insouciant shrug again; Tamara wanted to reach through the screen and grab those bony shoulders, hold them still and…just hold them still, that was all. Make Harrie stop wriggling about like a child. And god, she was still talking. “Or maybe—just maybe—things are a little different for someone who’s been invited in. Think about it between now and Friday, yeah?”
Tamara frowned and crossed her arms over her nearly-exposed chest again. Harrie, she noted smugly, had a body like an ironing board, nothing like her own shapely curves. She wasn’t quite sure why that mattered to her. “How do I know I won’t get jumped by your little gang of six the minute I show—hey!”
The round cheeks, sparkling eyes, and teasing smirk had disappeared again, leaving nothing but an empty black panel next to Tamara’s own affronted face on the screen. Mistress_ofDeath has logged off. She clicked on the username in search of a profile, only to get an error message insisting that this user does not exist. Letting out a long growl of frustration, she shoved her laptop away toward the edge of the table; yet another of the fake crystals tumbled off the edge. She heard a loud crack and winced in anticipation of more destruction from the cursed things—
Nothing. She waited a few more seconds, hesitant to move—the explosion during Hepzibah’s session had turned her face all grey and sooty like a cartoon character’s—but then gave in to curiosity and ducked under the table, peering at fallen object; it appeared unharmed. She stretched out and closed her fingers around it, brought it back up to the light…
Tamara had lied to Harrie in that first session; she did know a good deal about gems and minerals, from eyeing them longingly during all her poorly-paid shifts polishing silver in Mr. Burke’s pawnshop. And what she was holding in her hand now was no hunk of cheap green plastic; it was pure, solid prasiolite, cool to the touch and throwing prisms the exact color of Harrie’s eyes on the walls and table.
She set it down in front of her and sat there for several minutes, thinking.
It couldn’t hurt anything to just swing by Grimmauld Friday night and see what was what, she reasoned after a while. She didn’t have to go inside or even be seen at all; she could wear her all-black catsuit, the one that people never looked twice at her in until she wanted—but once they did, they couldn’t take their eyes off her assets. She’d easily show up Harrie in her silly shapeless cloak, and anything the rest of this so-called “coven” could bring to the table—sartorially or in the way of magic tricks. If they were lying, well, she was still flexible enough to fit through a window and could pick locks now too. Mr. Burke never turned down another pretty vase or statuette for his front window.
And on the insane, far-fetched, pie-in-the-sky off chance that Harrie was telling the truth…
Her lips stretched into a wicked grin, her pulse picking up just the slightest bit as she imagined what kind of devilry she might get up to with a real witch.