Page 8 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
This is a plane ticket to Puerto Rico amount. Extended stay in a bad hotel amount. Track down someone who might understand what his mother did and not automatically try to kill him for being an abomination amount.
“Cool. Very cool,” he says, which isn’t the pro response he’d hoped for but at least he hadn’t screamed it in primal joy.
Once outside, coffee cups tossed and a multitude of possibilities suddenly attainable, Mateo offers a goodbye handshake. A thing he’s never done in his life, but it feels like something a professional should do. “Give me a few days, and I’ll be in touch.”
Topher power walks out of sight, and the caféfront becomes uncomfortably devoid of life. Mateo checks up and down the street for Dagger Lady, wishing he’d borrowed Ophelia’s car. Long-term-fix might be brewing with this cursed rich guy, but that doesn’t do anything about his mom’s enemies showing up in the dark.
Keeping his head on a swivel, he hurries home.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Phee!” Mateo shouts, tossing his ruined sweater onto the ancient moss-green couch that’s always existed in the living room. It’s pitch black in the house, so he flips switches as he goes down the narrow hall toward Ophelia’s bedroom. He’s halted by the sound of running water as he passes the bathroom. No crack of light visible under the door. Shit.
They’ve lived in close quarters for half of their lives, his tween years made up of sleepovers in each other’s beds. When his mom bounced, and Ophelia’s family died, it just made sense that she’d move in. No discussion. They’d packed her up the night of the funerals.
Which is why he shoves the door open without warning. “Ophelia? Are you—shit, you’re not here.” Metaphysically speaking, at least.
Her body is right there, standing motionless in the shower, face tipped up toward the water. No reaction from his intrusion, even when he shoves the pebbled plastic curtain aside and reaches in to turn the frigid spray off. The water heater went to shit a few months ago, so he’s not sure if the thing’s acting upagain or if she’s been gone long enough for the hot water to run out.
This would be real horror movie vibes, as she’s unresponsive, dead-eyed, staring up at nothing, but he knows exactly what this is.
Accidental astral projection again. Traveling.
He spends the next few minutes maneuvering her slippery body out of the tub when he isn’t strong enough to lift her. It isn’t pretty. They end up in a pile on the bathroom floor, Mateo’s pants soaked as he pats her cold cheek a few times, repeating the chant they agreed upon: “Ophelia De La Garza, come back to me, or I’ll throw away your disgusting chips.”
The third pat makes her close her milky-whited-over eyes. The fourth pat gets those same eyes twitching beneath lids. “Don’t you dare,” she mumbles through barely functioning lips. Eyes, now unreasonably pale blue, slide open. Dark lashes flutter as she blinks a few times, the transition back to her body always groggy and difficult.
He has a million things to tell her, but all he can do is cradle her, trying to rub warmth into freezing skin, as if that’ll melt the brick of ice that forms in his chest whenever he finds her like this.
“Feels like I shouldn’t have to point out that leaving your body while standing in a running shower feels like a super bad idea, bu-u-u-t.” Defaulting to disapproving is the only way he knows how to deal with this as he reaches for her towel hanging from a hook beside the shower.
Ophelia only has two kinds of smiles. The nice one comes out for puppies and a variety of snacks with the wordflaxon the package. The shitty one has too many teeth and zero mirth and can wilt a man from thirty yards. She graces him with the shittiest one yet. “I don’t come into your shower and tell you how to be a functioning member of society.”
Mateo’s chest thaws a little, pressing dark lips to her forehead briefly. One of her frozen hands finds his arm. Squeezes. It’s all either of them will allow after one of these incidents.
The topic of Ophelia’s condition, much like Mateo’s, is rife with uncertainty. What they do know is that Ophelia and her whole family were astral projecting—common enough for a family of Travelers. They’d been exploring a plane Ophelia had never visited before, led there by her older sister, Juliet. And something found them.
Most witches have to use tokens to communicate with the powerful things that live in other planes of reality. Something imbued with intention and crafted specifically for that entity. Using a token is a lot like talking to someone with bad cell reception. But Travelers can send their spirits to those other planes. It gives them direct contact with these extradimensional beings; which means it also gives them direct contact to very real danger.
The details of what had happened are unclear, lost to the trauma of being trapped out of her body for an extended period of time. But they’d all died. Juliet. Their parents. Ophelia.
Three days later, Ophelia woke up.
The rest did not.
And ever since, Ophelia sometimes floats away, like a critical part connecting spirit and body was severed. Each time Mateo finds her empty body, he manages to coax her back. So far. But he’s terrified that it’s like the shitty water heater. It’ll work until it doesn’t.
There’s no point in talking about it. They don’t know how to fix it. One of the totally emotionally healthy reasons they’re such good friends is because they’re both so undeniably fucked that it feels right that they go down together.
She extracts herself from his arms, stepping gingerly around his legs, and starts to towel off. She fully doesn’t get out of hisway, drying herself nearly on top of him, so he has to crawl on hands and knees out of the bathroom to avoid having her butt in his face.
“Did you get my drink?” she asks, wringing out her hip-length, bad-bleach-job hair into the sink—not an insult. She loves her dark roots showing.
“No, I didn’t go to the store, but shut up,” Mateo says, getting to his feet. He’s sopping wet, so he starts undressing in the hall. “I got knifed and made fifteen hundred tonight.”
“At work? Are we criminals now?” she asks, stepping out of the bathroom towel-less with her hair in a vast, messy bun. She won’t express concern or excitement until she understands, so he follows, stripping off his soggy pants and tossing them at their tasteful hallway floor hamper.
“This new guy showed up at work—” he starts and has to wait for her to finish making the universally recognizedbow-chika-wow-wowinsinuating sex as she disappears into her room. It doesn’t even make sense, but he tells her to shut up again and then shouts everything through the paper-thin wall between their rooms as they get dressed. No detail is spared. Topher’s startled-bird-like weirdness, the headache, how shit Topher was at working, the well-dressed Dagger Lady looking for his mom, the knifing, and Topher’s stalkery tracking Mateo down.
