Page 53 of Witchlore
“Yeah.”
Bastian nods firmly and then opens his arms, stepping a bit closer and wrapping them briefly around me. I stand stiff, still, unsure what to do with my hands and weirdly cupping his elbows. He’s warm and solid and smells like salt and sand and, this close, eucalyptus, which makes me think of the balm he made for me. For a millisecond, I close my eyes and breathe out and something shifts. We’re closer, he’s warmer, his hip bones are pressing against mine and suddenly I feel like I want… more.No.I step back, coughing and unable to look him in the eye.
“B-bye, then,” I stutter out. I turn and run into the house, not caring how Bastian is leaning against the car with a slightly stunned expression, watching me go.
It’s a Sunday, so it’s pretty quiet. I can hear Beryl practicing her cello in the conservatory and can smell someone cooking a curry for lunch in the shared kitchen. I quickly move down to my bedroom, slipping inside. My room looks depressingly ordinary and the same, the way home always does when you’ve been away somewhere else for the night. I flop down on my bed, accidentally dislodging Mr. Pebbles, who hisses at me and leaps away to the windowsill to savage my spider plant. I pull a pillow over my faceand scream into it. Why did he have to hug me like that? To hold me just a fraction too long and then to soften, ever so slightly, so it didn’t feel like hugging anymore but felt like… holding.What would Elizabeth think if she could see me now?I don’t have an answer to that question, not yet, but if we resurrect Elizabeth, there she’ll be. Blond and smiling and asking questions:Who is he?I realize I won’t have an answer to that. I try to rehearse some options in my head.
This is Bastian, he’s my… companion?
This is Bastian, he’s my spell caster for this particular mission?
This is Bastian, he has nice eyes and warm arms and thinks I’m cute and adorable?
I scream some more when I think that. I’m probably just horny and desperate. My girlfriend’s been dead for months and everyone hates me. Of course the first person who touches me kindly I get a little squirmy over. He’s funny and charming and so very fit, after all; I shouldn’t be mad at myself for not being immune to that. It just makes me normal. It doesn’t mean anything. I sigh and get up from the bed, stripping off to stand in front of the mirror to do my ritual. Observing it from the outside in the cold light of a Sunday afternoon, there is something almost historical about this body. The hair is old-fashioned, the skin very pale, as if it’s from a photograph. It makes me think of my visions.
The first time it happened, I thought it was just a weird confluence of occurrences, that I’d been reading about the shifter’s story so it made sense that I’d had a dream or vision about it. That it’s happened a second time feels spooky, like a pattern, as if it can’t just be from reading the grimoire, and the additional dream still gives me a lump in my throat. The emotion had been so raw—the terror and sadness of the wounded soldier shapeshifter, facing their dying father—yet I haven’t read about that moment in the grimoire. Am I having visions about the shifter that include things from the past I couldn’t know? How am I doing that? Elizabeth would probably know a book I should read but I don’t have anyone else I trust enough to consult. Suddenly, I’m overwhelmed by the oddness of it all.
“You can’t do this,” I tell myself in the mirror. “You can’t get crazier. People already think you’re insane, you don’t need this, too.”
I open my wardrobe, looking for something to wear to college tomorrow. This body reads more masculine than the one I was in when term started. I sigh in heavy frustration and pull out the bag of clothes that Beryl says are “too feminine” for a boy to wear. Shifting is exhausting. As soon as I’ve got into a rhythm with one body, just when I’ve started to feel like myself, it changes. I’m tired of battling against people’s expectations of how a nonbinary person should dress; I’m tired of myself, endlessly catering for those people, so I pull out a frankly obnoxious pair of pink dungarees and hold them up to check the length.
Very briefly, a thought pops into my head:What will Bastian say?Bastian, who says I look like “me.” That I look cute. I push those confusing thoughts away and get dressed, before going to make myself a cup of tea (ignoring the sideways stares from the other witches using the kitchen to make their Sunday lunch) and then returning to my room to climb into bed withThe Witchlore of Bodies.
I love the smell of it, sort of sweet and vanilla, and the texture of the old paper under my fingers. I spend the afternoon reading. I learn the shapeshifter recovered enough to return to the front but before they could, their father died. So, to help their mother cope,they shifted into a female form to avoid going back. I realize how much that must have cost them to do, if I take what I saw in my vision to be real, their agony and fear over their need to go back to the front. When I read their grief over losing their father, I feel a lump in my throat for their seemingly endless sadness. When I read about them living with their mother and helping her with her grief, only for her to die suddenly from influenza, I feel their pain and loss at being alone and I wonder how it would be if I was so connected to my family that I felt empty without them. To have sacrificed so much of myself for them, only to lose them. I actually shed a few tears when I read about their guilt over their friends who died in the war and that their father died disappointed in them. If there are two things I understand, it’s losing people and parental disappointment. Then there’s a gap, between their mother’s death in 1934 and an entry in 1939. I read it eagerly, wondering what they were doing in those years in between:
I know I should be full of mourning and fear that another war has come. I will honor my father this time, even if he is not here to see it, and shift into a female form. I will not go to the front with the lads but I will do my bit from here. I have signed up to drive ambulances and I am pleased. It feels strange to say it, but I am content. I have met someone. B is the best person in the world I could know. She may be a witch, but I’m not afraid of prejudice, not from her. She is the first witch to treat me as a whole person. Is it wrong to be so happy when so many people are suffering? In a lifetime of being a shifter alone, a shifter set apart, she makes me feel seen.
I stare at the words and I feel an inexplicable satisfaction for this shifter who lived so long ago. They found someone to love,someone who made them feel complete. A witch. Instantly, I think of Elizabeth, of how her brightness filled my life and made me brighter, too. Then, without meaning to, the memory of Bastian smiling down at me in my hoodie, simply saying, “You look good,” pops into my head. Feeling anxious and confused, rattled by my own thoughts, I close the book and lie down, staring at the ceiling. Maybe I need a bit of distance from Bastian, just to think about things. Clearly, the smiles and the touches and the shared laughter are having an impact.
She makes me feel seen.
It’s the word, I realize, for what Bastian makes me feel. “Seen.”But if Bastian makes me feel seen, what does that make Elizabeth?It feels like all the questions are unanswered today, but they stay with me, little knots in my brain, waiting to be unpicked.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
I spend the week trying to keep a little bit of distance from Bastian. He’s looked into the moon timings for the hellhound and since we can’t do it before Sunday, our not-date still stands. Avoiding him is helped by the fact that he has an essay due that requires him to work with some texts that can’t leave the college library, where he knows I don’t want to be. I try to forget the hug that sent static electricity through my blood and focus instead on ducking Kira, who keeps sending me messages, wanting to meet for coffee. I don’t know how she got my number, but I have no intention of having another conversation with Kira Tavi, whatever Professor Wallace mandated.
By the time the second weekend of October blows in on Saturday, the weather is so appalling I almost think of calling in sick for work. It’s that kind of sideways Manchester rain where the sky presses against the chimney pots and tops of trees and the wind whips damp leaves in circles and gets up underneath my coat. Then Bastian messages, telling me to meet him at Barrio on the Beech Road after I finish work, so I wearily put on the shroud and get out of bed, at least thinking that the sweaty weight of it will keep me warm.
I’ve never been to Barrio, but as soon as I step inside I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. It’s a Mexican place, moody and dark, with raw-edged wooden tables, black paint on the walls, and an air of a place you go for strong drinks and spicy tacos on an intimate first date.Which this absolutely is not,I tell myself firmly, unwinding my scarf from my neck and looking around the steamy interior that smells like softening onions and rich, dark chocolate. I don’t see Bastian anywhere and check my phone. I’m surprised when I see a message telling me he’s in the garden. I frown and squeeze my way past the people drinking and laughing against the windows, fogged by the hot breath of customers, past the giant overworked coffee machine and the bartender salting margarita glasses to the rear door with the signSECRET GARDENon it.
I step out. The backyard is completely sheltered by an awning; black metal furniture is interspersed with oversized plants in pots, and strings of hanging Edison bulbs shine yellow light. The wind howls against the plastic above and Bastian is the only one sitting at a table under the directional red glow of a heat lamp, a blanket across his lap. It’s much less intimidating than the hustle and bustle of laughing people inside, but I’m suddenly awkward with the expectation of this lovely, secret space just for the two of us.Not a date,I remind myself.
“Come round this side, you get the best of the heat lamp,” he says, shuffling over and lifting the blanket so I can slide in next to him.
“Thanks,” I mumble, pulling off my peacoat and enjoying the warmth against the damp skin at the back of my neck. I look at the drink in front of me: it’s pale green with a wedge of lime on the rim.
“I got you a margarita, it was two-for-one.” He pushes it toward me. “I hope that’s okay.”
“I’ve never had one before,” I admit, taking a sip. It’s shockingly good, limey and salty and fiercely strong. “Wow!”
I lick my lips in delight and Bastian laughs.
“Go easy,” he warns. “You’re not much of a drinker?”
“I’ve not had much practice,” I say, dissolving a flake of salt on the tip of my tongue.
I’m the youngest in third year and I feel it, the weighty difference in age between me and my peers and how ahead of me in life they seem.
