Page 19 of Outlaw Witch

She gives a single head nod. “Fuckers were doing the usual, talking shit and throwing stuff. Then they started throwing spells around, so I put up the barrier.” She glares at the unconscious witches as I smooth her dark hair away from her sweaty forehead. “There were kids around and they didn’t care. Then they were trying to mess with the barrier. One of them kept fanning the flames, and another was doing something with the pressure so it would blow. Nasty bitches.”

“Sounds like it,” an impossibly deep male voice says from behind us.

I spin us around, eyes squinting against the pouring rain. My arm is still wrapped firmly around Hanna’s shoulder, and I can feel her shivering against me.

The crowd has disappeared entirely, and it appears the cavalry has arrived. Rook and Ember are both glaring at everything in sight and Luna is tucked under an umbrella with Una and Mona either side of her.

My eyes skim over them, though, my attention drawn to the scowling man in front of me.

Zeph touches his wrist and mutters something, and the rain dials down from a downpour to drizzle.

I blink a few times, trying to clear my vision. “The rain was you?” The suddenness of its onset suddenly makes sense.

He scoffs. “Of course it was.”

“Who is this guy?” Hanna mutters.

“He’s a storm mage,” I murmur back.

“Thought it’d disperse the rubberneckers.” He shrugs.

“Well, thanks.”

I wonder briefly how he knew to come down here. But Luna’s expression is this mixture of smugness and guilt, like how she looks when she’s tried a previously untested potion on one of us and it hasn’t turned us into a frog or killed us. Yet.

“We better get home,” I say.

And hope like hell we didn’t draw too much attention.

“What about them?” Hanna elbows me in the ribs and gestures to the unconscious girls. She’s still clinging to my shoulder. Since she’s normally pretty stoic, to the point where you can’t tell what she’s thinking, this display of neediness shows this whole thing must have messed her up pretty bad.

“We can handle them,” Roscoe says, appearing from out of nowhere and giving me a wink as I shriek in surprise.

“You... can?” Hanna looks so confused, I just squeeze her shoulder. “They won’t let this go,” she hisses in dismay.

“We can make sure they do,” Zeph says with a level of confidence I wish I could bottle for whenever I’m having a crappy day.

“Don’t worry, they’re not helping us out of the goodness of their hearts,” I joke.

They’re showing off how useful they can be to us all.

Although, I can’t say I’m not grateful for the help. If anyone comes across the unconscious bodies of three Archarcan witch offspring, it’s going to be a whole thing.

If anyone links Hanna to them, then she won’t exactly just get a slap on the wrist.

And the last thing any of us needs is for the magistrates’ attention to be focused our way. We get away with existing as we do because we slink around in the shadows. We live on the outskirts of society and don’t make a fuss and after a while, people forget we exist.

That’s how things are and how they have to remain.

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