rule #1: don't ask questions you can't handle processing while drunk. audrey hadn't meant to blurt the question out, so this was one she could blame on the alcohol. since that pool party, she'd pretty much drawn a line in the sand and stopped flirting with raven — intentionally, anyway. the other woman still had to follow her around, and she was throwing herself head first into entertaining other people, so anything she did that got under raven's skin wasn't entirely her fault. but she had been aware of it, as if the eyes lingering on her every time she was using her charm on someone else hadn't been all the evidence she needed, raven verbally owning up to being jealous definitely sealed the deal.
"how, or why, does it mess with your head?" audrey asked before she could stop herself, or before she could consider whether or not raven would keep up this honesty thing. "are you sure it's me doing that to your head? it could be the mixed signals you're sending, you know?" she suggested, because they sure as hell were doing a number on her own head, but she couldn't be sure the same was happening for the other woman.
✗ — [sender] and [receiver] attend a nye black tie gala [For Raven and Audrey]
if there were ever one event that audrey tolerated for the sake of her parents, it was the annual nye gala they forced her to be in attendance for. in her opinion, it was just an excuse for them and all their equally vapid friends to drink, talk a little shop, discuss their disappointment in their children that weren't aligned with whatever bullshit they had mapped out for them, sing the praises of the ones who complied, and probably to do a little swinging by midnight. okay, she couldn't fully prove the last one, but she had seen things that alluded to such, so she was running with it. the other downside was that she showed up single every year, and her mom made a point to try and introduce her to every available suitor she spotted. usually she'd get drunk as soon as they walked in so she could scare most of them off, but the second they'd walked in, she was being pulled in one direction or another, forced to engage with the eligible bachelors & bachelorettes while her father insisted that raven stay on her tail, subjecting her to having a front row seat to this shit show. that alone made this ten times more awkward, but there wasn't anything audrey could do except grin and bear it.
audrey completely lost track of time as mrs. grant spent every minute pre-midnight trying to essentially sell her off, curating conversations with one person and the next to see if any of them hit it off with the blonde. and while not all of them seemed like bad people, this humiliating display unfolding in front of the one person she'd been throwing herself at was killing any odds the suitors had. once they were down to the two minute mark before the ball dropped, her mom taking off to find her dad was the perfect time for audrey to escape, so she wasted no time grabbing raven's hand. "just trust me." she commanded before the other woman could try and put space between them, and she started trying to weed her way through the crowd that was now pairing off and paying attention to the projector at the front of the room. with not much time to spare, audrey ducked into a dark corner, pressing her back against it before she was yanking raven closer. "after the hell you just watched me go through, i think i've more than earned this." as the clock officially struck midnight and everyone else started cheering, audrey surged forward and crashed her lips into raven's, taking full advantage of finally getting what she wanted, even if just for tonight. normally she probably would have tried to contain herself a little more, but after yearning for even the simplest touch, she couldn't help the way she sloppily kissed raven, savoring every moment of feeling the other woman's lips on hers. it was definitely one hell of a way to kick off a new year!
''This, us, was a fucking mistake and I should have known the second things went further than planned.'' [Raven to Audrey]
having woken up with raven in her bed, audrey had been on cloud nine, at least for a short time. how they'd ended up finally crossing the line was still a blur: she'd dragged raven out with her friends again, gotten hammered and stripped down to her underwear on top of a bar, and then went right back to throwing herself at her security because...it was entertaining? she liked the idea of getting the other woman to cave and give in to her? by now, even she wasn't clear on the why, just on the fact that she'd wanted raven since the day she met her — and after what felt like forever, she'd finally worn her down. but as always, that bliss faded away in the blink of an eye, and now raven was regretting it, leaving her confused and more upset than she'd even expected to be. "you don't mean that." she muttered. "you're just running away, like you always do. you're supposed to be some bad ass, tough, former agent or some shit...yet all you do is tuck and run when you feel something." audrey knew she had no place calling the other woman out, but emotions were clearly high, and someone had to. "we both know this wasn't a mistake. you wanted it just as much as i did, but you're a fucking coward, raven."
Who: Raven Nifircadu
What: a novel of character; growing up, or not.
It goes like this:
The first time she uses her magic, it’s an accident. It’s a prickling sensation on her fingertips, a tingling sensation against her lips like the colour that is starting to be popular in the upper echelons of society, and her whispered intent brings the horse that might have trampled the neighbours beloved cat to a complete standstill. The hose looks startled, and so does the rider, blinking at her as she scoops the cat off of the dirt track.
The cat purrs and rubs its’ head against her chin, and she laughs in delight, pleased to have saved the critter from suffering, and the rider the trauma of murdering an innocent animal. It happens, sometimes – has happened before, to the ducklings born last spring to the blonde family down the street, as she remembers with unfortunate clarity – but that doesn’t mean it is welcome.
So Raven saves the cat by accident, and the word stop tastes like something minty and powerful on her lips, and she thinks to herself, this is something I enjoy, the way she enjoys a story from the local teller or accounts of lore from anywhere but home.
This is something I can learn.
-
“Thank you!” she exclaims, a little too excited. The bookseller is a man with red hair and eyeglasses – or maybe it’s actually the woman with soft-looking brown skin, dressed in a servants attire on the seat at his side.
The woman smiles, and it is less soft than the mans, something sharp in it. “I only ask that you don’t struggle through it all on your own. Myself or her highness would be happy to help if necessary – or there are other experts. Other magically inclined individuals.”
Raven runs a hand through her dark hair, dragging it back towards the braid the breeze has freed it from. “There are others? I mean – of course there are others, there wouldn’t be a book, otherwise. But there are people who understand that are – accessible? To me?”
The womans smile sharpens, somehow. For a servant, she looks almost regal – if she is a servant of the queen as she claims, then perhaps, Raven thinks, perhaps she learned the expression from her majesty herself. “Come by the castle and see for yourself what we know,” she suggests.
Raven is perhaps too eager to do so.
-
The first ritual she completes is almost a failure. This other person – a woman with no colour to her at all aside from the raised scars Raven pretends she doesn’t see when she loans her a cloak – hums something when Raven goes over it all, and suggests that she ensure the blood at the corners is fresh on application.
And the woman – Lady Sarina, she was introduced as, though Raven privately doubts someone so subdued is nobility here – is right. Raven substitutes the days old blood from the calf draining done by the butcher for something freshly wrung from a chicken set for execution anyway. The bloodletting is quick, and with the blood painted into the right places and the incantation successfully invoked, Raven actually applauds the flaring light at each corner. There’s a gleam to the air after the fact, a blend of the four colours that had manifested: red and violet and blue and a vibrant orange, all twisted together in an enchanting, shimmering mess.
“It’s a protection spell,” she tells her mother with a grin, when she’s explaining it later that day. The aging woman shakes her head in bemusement, but for all her scepticism, she cannot contest the gleam in the corner of her eye whenever she’s home. “And fair health, for good measure. There is a spell for fortune, but it’s trickier. The money would have to come from somewhere,” Raven explains, and goes on and on and on.
The possibilities of magic don’t really have an end, she’s learning. The real magic is in the intent – and even before she learned of the magic in her words, she’d been told she was wilful. This is just using it.
-
It goes like this:
Raven had been discouraged from using summoning spells, despite the fact that everyone she spoke to knew them to be useful. Intella had had a host of warnings to offer about the dangerous nature of dealing with tricky immortals. December had said something about the fallibility of traps. Rikku had been the one to remind the group of the fact that demons themselves were physically dangerous, and should not be dealt with with magic alone, lest the spells lend them power.
“Not to mention,” Sarina had added, “it’s quite rude to drag them from their homes to answer some questions you could answer yourselves, were you willing to do the legwork.” She’d left not long after that, disappeared to wherever it is Sarina goes when she isn’t being mysterious and proud and generally pretty confusing.
(She both seems delighted that Raven is happy to talk magic, and annoyed as well. It is as though she doesn’t want to discuss the thing they have in common all the time – but Raven knows where to find others to talk about human things with, and Sarina simply isn’t on the list.)(This is at least in part because she knows Sarina doesn’t actually seem entirely at ease in their small city.)
So Raven has been discouraged from summoning spells, but apparently someone else wasn’t, because a thing called Dante is standing on the ashes of most of their homes and grinning like a lunatic, and December and Intella both have called the man a demon.
“That’s not very fair, is it,” Raven says. She’s fairly sure the horses got out; if they didn’t, she is going to have a Problem with this Dante person. “How come no one gave whoever summoned him the speech?”
Rikku doesn’t give her a look, because she is much too professional at this hunting business to do so, but Paimon does. Paimon, apparently, is a demon who walks the earth. Raven had thought for a long time he was nothing more than a particularly hot-headed neighbour, one with a tiny wisp of a wife fading away on a sick bed while he struggled and failed to raise their children.
(The wife died in the fires, perhaps ironically, she learns. Dante led to her death, but technically it was Paimon’s own flame that consumed her, used in a bid to get the invader out of their home, their city, their land. Dante left the city, and not much else.)
“This is a very delicate process,” Paimon says again, hammering the point home. Raven does not roll her eyes, because she is a grown woman and she can pretend to be the respectful person her mother wants her to be at least once before she passes. “And dangerous to you mortals. You will be reborn, of course, I can promise you will be reborn,” and Raven wonders what that faraway look in his angry, burning, viciously violet eyes means. “I cannot guarantee you will live.”
Intella agrees because she feels she is obligated; besides, her primary contribution has been finding the ritual itself, and bringing it to their attention. The others have less to risk, or so they feel; Rikku and December have responsibilities, and Paimon was never going to back out if his bride was in danger or gone. Dante is too powerful for their usual measures of containment, but an old demon rite can lock anyone in the pit, and it takes five to complete it. Someone of demonic descent, celestial blood, immortal blood, mortal, and magical: Paimon, Rikku (for reasons Raven has not gotten a chance to ask, either, not without getting a capital-L-Look from the foreign sword master), Queen December, Intella, and Raven herself.
“Your part is the most dangerous,” Intella had said to Raven. It was between hours, between the peak of the full moon and the fall of dusk, long after Paimon checked yet again that everyone involved was in agreement, but only shortly before they had to begin the arrangements for the ritual itself. They need to lead Dante to a specific place in the city, a nexus along the old ley lines Paimon had shown them maps for without citing his sources, and the ritual will serve two purposes. It will draw the demon to a place where the five of them can be sure the magic will do what they want it to, and it will serve as a demon’s trap.
“I know,” Raven had said, and smiled, perhaps a little grimly, but mostly in excitement. She’d only been fairly young, after all, perhaps thirty years old. She was still excited about the possibilities of magic, and what it could do for her, and for the world.
-
She should never have been alone at any point, but she is, the others caught up in sentiment and the chaos of their own plan falling apart.
Except, Raven knows doesn’t know her own limits. She hasn’t learned them, not from Intella’s input or Sarina’s, and she never will. Not in this lifetime. She knows what her role is, and she sets her will to completing it.
And she does – but the final act is synchronous with Dante burning her alive from the inside out, and her soul is dragged down through the nexus she was not able to escape.
-
It goes like this:
Falling, plunging, spiralling darkness streaked with flame and ash and soot and burning –
Screaming, high and sharp, constant, never ending; where the fall ends, the pain begins, and it does not stop, won’t stop, not for anybody, not for –
Pain, no, agony – boredom makes even the kindest people dangerous, and Dante was never kind and she is stuck, trapped, imprisoned –
I can promise you will be reborn, the King without a crown had sworn, and yet she is here for an eternity of stabbing and burning and fear and torment and misery and loneliness broken only by him and his glittering golden skin and his high, cutting laughter –
The magic had tingled, once, breaking her out of a reverie of almost. Now, the tingling starts in her bones.
If she holds her breath and tries to enjoy it, to chase the feeling of her magic staying with her when everything else fell apart, it burns.
-
It goes like this:
Humans do not remember their past lives, not unless they are the toys or experiments of a bored divine entity. The gods are immortals, and they are bored.
Somewhere in Europe, the Industrial Revolution is remaking the world. Raven is lying awake in a bed in what will be the Middle East, terrified of the nightmares formed by her memories of the place between lives.
It’s a loophole, and not a pleasant one. She does not know if Dante has cursed her or tainted her in his decades of torment, because she cannot recall it without her body aching in all too familiar ways, cannot think of it objectively past the ghost of the pain as fresh as the original wound – she cannot remember for sure whether or not he did anything to make this last. Her magic simmers in her veins and for all she tries to figure it out, to determine exactly what has been done to her, none of the spells she tries produce the ring of a magical curse. So it is either demonic or not a curse, and she can do nothing either way.
Raven gets older, and the pains become – not easier to live with, because they are a reminder of something she should not remember, but something she is used to. They get worse when it is hot, and it is often hot, in the place she calls home for the first twenty-something years of her second life. She is grateful to leave it behind.
She is less grateful to find herself at deaths’ door less than a year after.
She fights off her would-be killer by spilling their blood herself, and she does not know what drives her to it, but she weaves a protection spell into the earth where she would camp using his blood. The air simmers in shades of red and violet, blue and orange, and she almost smiles to see it.
She doesn’t do much of that, this time around.
She gets older, and while she can look after herself and fend off attackers, there is a constant fear in the back of her mind. She can learn all the healing spells she likes, but the fact remains that if her body continues to wear, it will start to be less effective, less able to respond when she needs it.
At some point, she hears about Elizabeth Bathory, an old Hungarian noble who did the unthinkable to maintain her looks. It’s a fools legend, or at least that’s what Raven thinks, but she has the evidence that blood is powerful in the air around her more often than not, woven into the ground. And human blood – well. She drained some from her would-be-killer, and even when only mixed with something else, it produces a stronger ward than anything she has cast before.
Elizabeth Bathroy bathed in the blood of virgins to stay beautiful. Raven doesn’t give a damn about her beauty, natural though it is. What she cares about is longevity and immortality, anything she can do to avoid experiencing that in-between place again.
-
It goes like this:
Experimentation can take a lifetime to bear results. Raven just needs a night and a sickly child, slated for death regardless of her interference, to learn enough to know she won’t be sharing this ritual with anyone else.
The things we do to avoid our personal demons, to avoid whatever we are afraid of, indeed.
Prompt: “I can’t wait to post our selfie!” “What part of ‘I’m an international fugitive’ did you not understand?”
Magic is real.
Of course, very few people can successfully wield it. Oh, anyone can grasp the theory, but it takes a naturally talented witch or warlock to properly perform spells; any other attempts could prove dangerous to the performer and to others.
This means, among other things, that quite a few wix choose to sell their labour. It’s more profitable than traditional sources of income, of course it is, it’s a unique and highly marketable skill and essentially everyone knows that.
But it’s still a crime to deliberately use weapons against others, as in assault, and since magic is little more than a highly specialised weapon, well – one misstep means that a punishment is on the horizon. That’s just a side effect of putting others at risk.
So, predictably, that’s exactly what kind of situation Raven ends up trapped in the middle of.
“I can’t wait to post our selfie!”
Raven lurches off the couch and scrambles for the phone immediately, long brown fingers stretching. Her magic senses her intent and extends her reach, grabbing for it. It’s out of Sarina’s pale grasp within an instant. “What port of ‘I am an international fugitive’ did you not understand?” Raven sounds absolutely exasperated.
Sarina rolls her eyes, gestures with her hands – the orb on the edge of the coffee table between them. Ravens’ mouth is visible in the crystal, murmuring everything that happened. Detailing making the mistake of accidentally hexing the First Lady of Israel, ruining her ability to bear children, of unintentionally causing the death of a British security official whom had been sent to detain her – well, if not for witchcraft, she would never have made it to America, to rooming with Sarina, infamous in witching circles for protecting those who needed it.
Even standing there, glaring at her, Raven remembered that she’d thought it unusual when Sarina had offered up the spare room.
The obvious use of love potions had put Raven on guard, made her not want to trust the albino witch. That changed, of course, the first time a Tracer showed up at the door. Sarina’s enchantments won him over without too much effort – much less effort than Raven had put into covering up her magic ever since touching on American soil. They could Trace her magic, if they wanted to. She thought her complacency and lowered guard was probably what had lured them in. She was already packed a bag to bolt by the time Sarina had come to tell her the coast was clear.
Raven insisted she couldn’t be there; Sarina informed her in the most matter-of-fact tone Raven had ever heard fall from those pale lips that she was safest there. Raven called bullshit, though she used less crass language. Sarina rolled her eyes. “Kiss me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Kiss me,” Sarina repeated, “and our magic intertwines for forty-eight hours. It becomes so much harder to Trace, and the chance of that happening drop.” Seeing Raven’s reluctance, she threw her hands up in exasperation. “Or die at their hands when they execute you for unfair use of magic on unarmed non-wix, your choice!”
Well, when it was phrased like that...
Practicality started the kissing, common sense had Raven trying to convince herself to enjoy it. Then of course, it hadn’t required convincing, catching her off guard. Even her psyche was caving to Sarina’s insistence. And she didn’t care.
Sarina was an acquired taste, of course, Raven was too – something about being a brooding witch who was neck-deep in research for immortality made her seem unapproachable. It took a couple of months, but by the end of it, seemingly without Raven’s notice or actual agreement, the two were a couple. There was no other word for it.
They still argued, though.
“You are not posting a selfie of us! Not without removing my face!”
“This paranoia is riduclous, Rae. Tracer’s don’t look at photos.”
“But the FBI, MI-6, Mossad – they do! They don’t stop doing that just because their targets happen to be magical, Sarina, if you think they do than you’re naive.”
Sarina snorted. “Alright, compromise. I crop out everything above the nose, then I post it. And you make dinner.”
“I was making dinner anyway!”
“Make it now,” she whined, “I’m starving.”
Raven snorted, but agreed. They couldn’t ID her from her jawline, she supposed, or her lips – not conclusively. It was a good thing she operated under an alias for work, or she’d have been caught by now. “I’m making the spiciest curry possible,” she warned.
Sarina hummed cheerfully, taking no issue with this, and pecked her on the cheek before fiddling with her phone some more. “I’m hoping you do.”
