Page 4 of The Cauldronball Run
Chapter Two
Farrah
Farrah Moonbeam stared at the overdraft notice on her phone screen and felt the familiar burn of humiliation creep up her neck.Her bank account balance was in the negative.She was a trained paramedic with five years of experience who could literally heal people with her bare hands, and she couldn't even keep her checking account above zero.
Derek would be laughing his ass off,she thought bitterly, shoving the phone into her locker.Her ex-husband had always taken perverse pleasure in her failures, collecting them like trophies to prove his point that she was fundamentally broken.The divorce had cleaned out what little savings she'd had, leaving her with nothing but debt and the crushing certainty that maybe he'd been right about her all along.
The specific moment played in her mind like a broken record.Derek stood in their kitchen, holding her bank statement like evidence in a prosecution."You're a grown woman who believes in fairy tales, Farrah.Magic doesn't pay bills.Your little healing tricks don't make you special, they make you delusional.No wonder you can't hold down a decent job."
She'd tried to explain that her abilities had saved lives, that patients recovered faster under her care, that she could ease pain in ways modern medicine couldn't match.His response had been to laugh—not the kind of laughter that shared joy, but the cruel sound someone makes when they're proving a point.
"If you're so magical, why are we broke?If you're such a gifted healer, why won't any of the good hospitals hire you?"
The worst part was that he'd been right about the money, even if he'd been wrong about everything else.Hospitals didn’t like relying on magic unless there wasn’t any other choice. It made the mundane humans twitchy. They preferred the old-fashioned methods of healing.Magic scared them.
Grabbing her uniform shirt from the locker, she made a face at the rough fabric rough.She had run out of laundry detergent last week and had been washing everything by hand with dish soap.The shirt smelled faintly of Dawn and depression.
Another glamorous day saving lives for minimum wage, she thought, pulling her hair back into a tight ponytail.
The ambulance bay at County General was already buzzing with pre-shift chaos.Farrah checked the schedule and groaned audibly.Another twelve-hour shift with Pendejo Martinez, whose idea of a good day’s work involved hitting on nurses and finding new ways to make her life miserable.
Working with Pendejo meant hiding the best parts of herself for twelve straight hours.She'd learned the hard way, not to mention when her healing magic helped stabilize a patient.The last time she'd tried to explain how her touch had eased a heart attack victim's pain, Pendejo had stared at her like she'd announced she was personally responsible for crop circles.
"Just keep the freak show to yourself, Moonbeam," he'd said, not even looking up from his phone."Nobody wants to hear about your hippie witch crap."
The casual dismissal had stung worse than Derek's deliberate cruelty.At least her ex-husband had known what she was when he married her, had hoped she could turn lead into gold or some other magical way to make money.Pendejo just saw another paramedic to torment during his shifts, completely oblivious to the fact that her "hippie witch crap" had probably saved three lives that week alone.
Her healing magic was strongest, but she had other small talents—weak telepathy that only worked with people she had strong emotional connections to, basic protective wards, enhanced intuition that helped her read patients' conditions before the monitors caught up.
The morning crawled by in a blur of routine calls that could have been so much easier if magic was a standard medical procedure.An elderly man with chest pains had visibly relaxed when she took his hand, his erratic heartbeat settling under her touch.She'd watched his blood pressure drop on the monitor, felt his panic ease through her fingertips, and said nothing.If she told him she was a witch, it would have undone all the good things her magic had helped.Then there was the construction worker with a dislocated shoulder who'd stopped screaming the moment she'd placed her hands on his arm, the inflammation reducing under her healing magic.Again, she'd stayed silent while Pendejo took credit for his excellent wrapping of the injury.
The construction worker had grabbed her wrist as they loaded him into the hospital."What did you do?"he'd whispered."The pain just vanished.I've never felt anything like that."
"It was the bandage," she'd lied, because admitting the truth would get her fired faster than Derek could say "I told you so."
This is my life, she thought during lunch break, sitting alone in her beat-up Honda that made ominous rattling sounds whenever she turned left.Hiding who I am so I can keep a job that barely pays my rent.
She scrolled through job listings, already knowing what she'd find.The same minimum-wage positions requiring certifications she couldn't afford, or "competitive salary" postings that turned out to pay exactly what she was already making.Her divorce lawyer had cleaned out her savings account, and Derek had somehow convinced the judge that her magical talents meant she deserved nothing from their shared assets. That she had an unstable work history because she had wanted Derek to take care of her.
Which was horse shit.
Her unstable work history was not her fault.Her supervisors kept treating her like a liability instead of recognizing her as someone who could literally perform miracles.
Three jobs in two years, all ended the same way.Her supervisors who started out impressed with her patient outcomes, then grew suspicious when the healing seemed too quick to be natural.What followed were questions about her methods, accusations of falsifying reports when her patients consistently healed faster than expected, and then the final straw was always the same.Some administrator decided she was "not a good cultural fit" because she made everyone else look bad by comparison.
Farrah was about to close the browser and go back to her sad bologna sandwich when an ad caught her eye:
Medical transport driver needed - urgent.Fifteen thousand gold for five days' work.
Farrah read the amount three times, certain she was hallucinating.Fifteen thousand gold was more than she made in four months at her current job.It was enough to catch up on her bills, put a security deposit on a decent apartment, maybe even take a weekend off without calculating how much she'd lose in wages.
It was also completely ridiculous.Nobody paid that kind of money for legitimate medical transport, which meant this was either an elaborate scam or something so illegal it required that level of compensation to overcome common sense.
She should finish her pathetic lunch and go back to eight more hours of hiding her abilities while Pendejo made jokes about her personal life.
