Page 43 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
It’s a bizarre sensation, freaking out while refusing to admit you’re freaking out.
He’s okay.
He almost died but he’s okay.
But then why is he crying?
And why can’t he stop thinking about the impact, convinced he heard his own skull crack on stone, or the fleeting consciousness, choking, the way swallowing had felt like forcing glass through a twisted and bent straw, how his mouth still tastes of blood and his nose still smells of copper and he will never get the formless sensation of his arm minced and twisted up out of his brain?
It’s not like the movies where there’s this amazing healing factor that makes the hero able to fight anything no matter the damage. He’d been absolutely fucked up and then very slowly unfucked—still slowly unfucking—and it’s the worst miracle in the world that he’ll never be able to complain about to anyone because at least he didn’t die. Except he doesn’t know what he’s doing to his body. Or soul. It’s not good, for sure. He’s known from go that every bit of magic he uses is a risk, adding to an unknowable bucket of bad that could overflow at any moment. And he has no idea what happens when the bucket fills. There’s no way to know how much of himself he’s just lost.
So, he cries quietly in the bathroom, turning on the faucet to obscure the second wave of ragged breathing when he realizes that his teeth are sharp again. It’s not like he’s looking for a deep sense of belonging to all mankind, but this classifies him as inhuman. He is twenty-three, and it’s ridiculous to cry about this very-not-new situation, but he still does it for a while.
Once he’s cried himself out, he takes a shower.
Just as he starts to pull his battered clothes back on, the world’s softest knock sounds on the door. Topher. He doesn’t want to talk, but the part before he broke his neck was Topher seeing a room splattered with his mom’s blood, so Mateo cracks the door.
“Quincy found you stuff to sleep in,” Topher whispers, pressing fabric at him.
“Thanks.” Mateo takes the sweatpants, closes the door, and drags them on with the measured motions of the very old. Quincy’s close to his height but with more girth—also known as muscle—so they’re big but fit well enough with the drawstring.
Another glance in the mirror, but he can only assume he looks better after washing up because his reflection has a swathof darkness where his face should be. Just the shadow silhouette. Luckily, he’s well beyond his emotional limit so he can’t get upset again and instead wanders back to the living room.
“I made tea. I mean, I made enough for two. Like, in two cups. I mean, I made two cups of tea, and if you want one, you can have one. But if you don’t, I can just put it in the sink. Or drink two. It’s just tea. I mean it’s Quincy’s tea so I don’t want to waste it, so I’ll probably drink it, but I can drink two teas,” Topher rapid-fires from the kitchen, caught in a quantum state of picking up and putting down the mugs to accommodate whatever Mateo decides. This guy’s mom is probably dead—or maybe wants to kill him—and he’s fretting over tea.
“I’ll take a tea,” Mateo says just to free him, joining Topher in the kitchen.
Topher presses the mug to him. Chamomile. Too hot to drink, but they’re both standing there staring at each other, so they both try to take a tongue-melting sip because burning your mouth is better than this awkward silence.
“Can’t sleep?” Mateo tries, because he’s bad at small talk not about a purchase or getting something free, but it feels like he should say something to Topher after the day they’ve had.
Topher shakes his head, tries to sip his tea again, but it’s still too hot, and he puts it down. “We were taking shifts,” he says, but has to expand when Mateo stares at him blankly. “For when you woke up. Ophelia went first, then Quincy.”
Oh. That was … something.Niceis probably the word he wants. But instead of letting it form fully, he becomes aware of how weak his legs feel. “I gotta sit.”
He means it as an invitation to join him, but suddenly Topher’s at his side, taking his mug with one hand and elbow with the other, helping him hobble to the couch. Topher retreatsbriefly to get his own tea, but then surprises Mateo by sitting right next to him.
“I got you tickets back to Seattle for tomorrow evening,” Topher says, slowly spinning his too hot mug between his hands.
“Thanks,” Mateo says automatically, pretending he didn’t already know. The idea of leaving makes it feel like he’s talking to a soon-to-be-dead guy. The demon reacts in a distressingly subdued way by making Mateo feel like a cowardly shithead about it.
Think of something encouraging. Even a hollow assurance will work. All Mateo’s done is take thousands from Topher and is about to leave him with a murdered or murderous loved one to deal with alone. The tea is finally cool enough to sip, so Mateo uses it to search for nice-person words.
“Do you thinkyourmom’s dead?” Topher asks, and it blasts away any feeble platitudes forming in Mateo’s brain. Topher realizes how it sounds and gives Mateo an even more startled look than Mateo’s giving him. They’re not a pair of deer in headlights. They’re both the headlights. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I was just thinking, because they’re both missing, and there was blood, so I was thinking. Not that you were ever thinking. I mean, about yours. Not that you have a reason to think that yours—”
He keeps going and Mateo can only stare. Topher is trying to have a scared-about-my-possibly-dead-mom conversation and he’s fantastically bad at it and so concerned he’s going to upset Mateo that he can’t get a coherent sentence out. There’s no need for the alarm, though. Mateo’s an empty husk of exhausted existential dread. Which is why it’s so impressive when Topher peters out and Mateo excavates what he hopes is a smile and says, “Have you seen your mom in a dream since she went missing?”
“A dream?” Topher repeats, some of the tension releasing from his panic-face. “No.”
“So, this isn’t a promise or anything, but there’s this belief. When a loved one dies, they come to you in a dream. It might take a few months for their spirit to gather enough energy for the manifestation, but once they have it, they let the people they love, who love them, see them dressed in white in a dream. It’s to let their loved ones know that they’re at peace.”
The softest gasp from Topher, like he’d desperately wanted a salve for his mom’s terminal situation but hadn’t expected Mateo to have one.
And now Mateo’s profoundly uncomfortable, not sure why he said it. False hope is so much heavier than no hope at all. It’s a kind of weight that increases exponentially the longer you hold it, and at some point, you have to put it down or be crushed.
He wants to retract it, to remind Topher that the likely outcome of seeing blood in a house where, moments later, an attempted murderer showed up, is probably death. That an abusive dad and a missing mom almost always means a murder. But Topher asks, “Did you ever dream about your mother?”
“No.” It sounds like a positive so that baby deer smile creeps onto Topher’s lips in response and Mateo can’t say that he only dreams about eating people and Ophelia dying. Never anything else. Also, Mateo’s not sure he counts as a loved one to Ignacia.
