Page 10 of A Witchy Spell Ride
“You don’t ask. You handle it.”
I nod once. “Understood.”
Leaving the clubhouse feels like stepping out of safety into a weather I can’t predict. The night has its own rules: heat that wears the city like a coat, alleys that swallow sound, voices that slur the truth and lie in equal measure. The city smells like gumbo, gasoline and rain that might come or might not. I let the noise of Bourbon Street die behind me and walk the quiet blocks toward The Witch’s Garden.
I sit in the shadows near the back alley behind The Witch’s Garden. It's an ugly spot to be stationary, concrete at my back, crates to my side, an overturned dumpster that smells like yesterday’s mistakes, but it offers sightlines. I can watch thestorefronts without being obvious; I can see the whole block but still disappear into the dark if anything came shoved into the light.
The place is closed, the sign swinging with a soft creak. An upstairs light is on. Selene’s place. I’ve watched that window enough nights to know the way it throws her silhouette, a cigarette sometimes, a slow stretch, the way she paces when whatever she is feeling chews at her. Tonight, she moves inside, slow, and deliberate, like someone who wants to be careful with the way they breathe.
I lean back against the wall and listen to the city breathe. Somewhere down the block, jazz drifts from an open door, a saxophone wonders what to say. Sirens push and pull in the distance like the city’s veins. A rat scurries across the alley and disappears under a trash bin. The mundane play against the odd, the way people carry themselves tells you more than any words ever could.
And then movement. Just a flicker. Two buildings down. Not close. Not threatening. Not yet. Just enough to keep the drumbeat going in my chest.
Banks.
I clocked him earlier in the night, helping clear glasses, nodding when someone barked an order, that eager thing about him that never learned to read the room. But walking the beat at midnight two blocks from a girl he barely knew and didn’t belong to? That was something else. He didn’t say a word when I passed him earlier, just nodded and kept moving. Nothing strange about that. Except it was close to midnight. He isn’t on an errand. No bike. No jacket. And he ain’t heading toward the clubhouse.
He’s just drifting. Watching the street. Watching her street.
I don’t follow. Not tonight. No proof. Not yet. Following risks a dozen things, exposing myself, spooking him, tipping off whatever played the long game. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was hold position and gather. Collect patterns. Build a map in your head.
So, I stay where I am, half in shadow, one hand on the knife tucked behind my back. Watching the window. Waiting for a reason.
Knowing I’d find one soon enough.
Banks moves with a kind of quiet that bothers me. He walks like someone calculating distance. Like someone who thought he could close the gap between observation and ownership without anyone noticing. He lingers near corners, never getting close enough to be obvious, but close enough that a man with sense could read it. He pauses outside a liquor store, thumbing the strap of his pack. He checks his phone like he expects a message that would tell him where to go next. When he moves, it’s always toward the line of sight into the shop, the angle that allows him to see shadows moving behind the curtain.
I watch him trace a path that told me he’d done this before. The last time I’d let things like this slip by had ended in a convoy of dead men and the kind of noise that sat under your ribs for years. I wasn’t going to give that up again.
My mind ran through practical things like a checklist on autopilot, how many exits could he use? Which alleys would he take if he wanted to go unnoticed? Did he have backup? Was he alone because he wanted to be seen as alone? A lot of peoplemisread the difference between alone and lonely. Predators come in both stripes.
Selene moves inside the shop. She keeps her back turned to the window for a minute, then she comes to the glass and lets her hand rest near the frame. She doesn’t look out; just rests her palm like she could feel the city. The line of her jaw set, and my chest tightens. She has a way of carrying things that asks you not to touch them. I resent that. I also like it more than what is healthy.
Banks walks on. He doubles back once, like a second pass, and that is when I move. Not to follow him, I don’t want to show my hand, but to cover another angle. I shift one building over, walk a block down, and take up a position where the streetlight will cut him off if he tries to vanish into the alleys. I want to be close enough to see the way his shoulders pull, but far enough to be a shadow if he turns his head.
He passes a couple arguing on a stoop, a dog barks at his heel. He walks past the corner where the old man sells bootleg CDs. When he does a second pass, he stops longer outside Selene’s shop. He has a scrap of paper in his hand, and he presses it to the glass like he is trying to make sure the shape fits. For a second, the light glints off it, and I see the curve of letters, handwriting too neat for my taste.
If I’d been one of the boys in the club, I would have walked up to him, told him in words he’d understand that New Orleans didn’t hand out possessions like free samples. But I wasn’t in the business of drawing lines when I could watch a man give himself away. What worries me was not that he stood there. It was how comfortable he was with it. Comfortable means time. Time means opportunity.
A cab slices through the street and the sound blurres the moment. When the noise passes, he’s gone. Not vanished, moved on. But the pattern was there, and patterns were how threats announced themselves before they struck.
I think of walking up the stairs to Selene’s door right then, knocking once and telling her to leave, to move, to run. I think of how she’d roll her eyes and fight and drag her hip against my chest until we argued. I think of the last time I’d been that close and how I’d swallowed silence like a medicine and let people get hurt because I didn’t speak.
Instead, I stay, and I watch, and I catalogue: Banks, scrap of paper, second pass, comfortable. No bike. No jacket. No cover. Maybe alone. Maybe not. Maybe a sign that he didn’t need anyone else to do the work he planned.
My phone buzzes once, a quiet vibration in my pocket. Vex. Short message. “You still sulking in alleys or coming to the shop for a beer?” Typical Vex. Less text, more tone. I type back: “Watching.” He replies with a string of emojis I don’t bother parsing. He knows enough.
There is a tiredness to the city that makes my eyes gritty. I’ve been on the road long enough to forget how to be unguarded. In the quiet between jazz and sirens I let my guard down for a second and think of things like normal dinners and sunlight on a porch. Ghosting the nomad life wasn’t in my nature, but sometimes I let myself imagine it as a possibility someone else had missed. Then I see Banks again, rounding the corner two blocks away and pausing to check something in his jacket pocket, and the war drum starts up again, like a metronome I couldn’t reset.
I don’t follow him. I watch him walk until he dips into a shadow that swallows his outline and then I let the darkness have him. I sit with the window, with the silhouette of Selene moving behind the curtains, and with the knowledge that tonight I’ve gotten a read. Not proof. Not enough to start a firefight. But a read, nonetheless.
Sometimes reads are the best kind of armor. They let you plan. They let you wait for the moment when you can do more than posture. They let you line up the pieces like an ambush and wait for the right click.
I wipe my thumb along the knife at my back and taste the metallic tang of promise on my tongue. I wasn’t a saint. I didn’t want to be. I just want her safe. Quietly. Without the world knowing the edges we’d shoveled close.
I stay until the sky begins to smooth into pre-dawn gray, until the city loosens its hold and the night gives up its secrets, at least for now. I leave before anyone notices the silhouette in the alley and walk away like a ghost should, seen and not seen.
Something was coming. I could feel it not as a thought but as a set of small, inevitable movements. It would take time, patience and the kind of cold calculation that sits in your bones like a second skin.
