The Witch's Bargain

The Witch of Hallow Creek The bread seller's hands shook when she handed me my change, the way they always did. Not from age. Not from the cold, though October in Hallow Creek had teeth in it this year. She trembled because I was standing on the other side of her cart, and to her, that meant something was standing there that shouldn't be. "Thank you," I said, because I always said it, because if I stopped being polite they'd have one more thing to point at. She didn't answer. She never did. She just took my money like it might burn her and dropped my change into my palm from an inch too high, so our fingers wouldn't touch. I'd watched her do the same thing for the woman in line ahead of me press the coins directly into her open hand, warm and easy, the way you'd hand something to a person you weren't afraid of. I'd stood there and watched the difference in her hands like I always did, cataloguing it the way you catalogue a bruise you already know is there, just to confirm it still hurts the same. I was twenty-four years old and I had never once, in my whole life, had someone hand me anything the normal way. I tucked the bread into my bag and kept walking through the market, past the fish stalls where old Mr. Ferris called out prices in the same booming voice he'd used since I was small enough to be carried on my mother's hip, past the flower cart where the ranunculus were finally in season, past the old men playing chess outside Marta's café, their pieces frozen mid-game while they argued about something that had nothing to do with the board. I loved this market. That was the strange, aching truth of it I loved the particular gold light that came through the awnings in the late morning, loved the smell of Marta's coffee mixing with the cold outdoor air, loved this town in the reflexive, helpless way you love a thing that has never once loved you back. I'd tried, over the years, to stop loving it. I'd never managed it. I felt it the way I always felt it that particular quality of silence that trails a person people have decided isn't quite a person. Conversations didn't stop when I passed. That would have required them to be talking at me in the first place. They just quieted, the way a room quiets when a draft comes through a cracked window. Something cold moving past. Nothing to look at directly. A little girl, maybe six, tugged her mother's sleeve and pointed at me with the guileless cruelty only children have. "Is that her? The witch?" Her mother yanked her hand down so fast the girl stumbled. "Don't point. Don't look at her." Loud enough for me to hear. They always wanted me to hear. I used to flinch at that word. Witch. I don't anymore, not on the outside anyway. I've had twenty-four years of practice turning my face into something smooth and unbothered, a lake with no wind on it, while underneath the water does whatever it wants. Today what it wanted to do was ache. Because here's the thing nobody in Hallow Creek would ever say to my face, not even the ones who weren't afraid of me, not even the priest who blessed the church twice after I walked past it: I never asked for this. I didn't choose to be born the only person in the entire world who could call fire to my palm without a match, who could feel a storm three days before the sky knew it was coming, who could put my hand flat against a wilting plant and watch it remember how to be alive. Nobody teaches you how to have magic when you are the only one who has ever had it. There's no lineage. No coven. No grandmother to tell you this is normal, this is yours, this doesn't make you a monster. There was just me, seven years old, watching a boy's broken arm knit itself straight under my hands because I was scared and didn't know what else to do and then watching that same boy's mother scream and grab him away from me like I was the thing that had hurt him. I still remember his name. Tobias Reed. He's thirty-one now, married, runs the hardware store two streets over, and he has never once, in seventeen years, looked me in the eye. I didn't do anything wrong. I have never once used what I have to hurt anyone. Doesn't matter. Different is its own accusation in a town like this. Near the chess players, old Pieter looked up from the board just long enough to give me the smallest nod not warm, not exactly friendly, but not afraid either, which was its own kind of rare currency around here. I'd take it. I'd learned to take whatever small, grudging scraps of ordinary treatment came my way, hoarding them like a person hoards warmth in a cold house. I turned onto Rowan Street, the long way home, because the short way went past the church and I wasn't in the mood today not for the low murmur of the congregation filing out, not for the way Father Osei always found some reason to trail off mid-sentence when he saw me coming, like the conversation itself might curdle in my presence. Rowan Street was quieter. Older houses, gardens gone a little wild with the season, the kind of street that didn't have much reason to notice me one way or the other. I was thinking about nothing in particular the bread, the cold, whether I had enough firewood split for the week when the car pulled up alongside me. Black, low, quiet in the way that only very expensive things are quiet. I didn't stop walking. Hallow Creek got the occasional lost tourist, and I'd long since stopped being surprised by anything with wheels. The window came down. "You're going to want to slow down," said a voice I recognized before I let myself admit I recognized it. "Marta's is about to close and you look like you could use a coffee that isn't made by someone flinching." I stopped. Turned. Eric Hale was leaning across the passenger seat of a car that probably cost more than every building on this street combined, looking at me the way he always looked at me like I was just a woman he knew, standing on a sidewalk, having an ordinary day. No flicker in his eyes. No half-step back. No hand moving toward a pocket for a coin, a charm, anything to ward off the witch. I'd spent eighteen months waiting for that look to change, some quiet, cynical part of me still braced for the day it would, and it never had. Not once. "You drove two hours for coffee," I said. "I drove two hours because you didn't answer my texts and I got bored." He pushed the door open from the inside. "Get in before Marta locks up. I already promised her we'd take the last of the almond croissants off her hands." I looked back down Rowan Street, though there was nothing behind me but empty pavement and gardens going to seed. I looked anyway. Old habit always checking who was watching, who would carry the story forward, sharpened and unkind, by tomorrow's market. "They're going to talk," I said. "They already talk." He glanced over at me, and there it was again that same steady thing in his face that had been there the very first time we met, when I'd healed a stranger's collapsed lung on a sidewalk in the city and everyone else had backed away and he'd walked closer. "Let them talk about something true for once. I like you. I'm not hiding that from anyone, least of all a town that's decided you're something to be scared of." I got in the car. "You didn't have to come all this way," I said, once the door shut and the market noise fell away behind glass, replaced by the low hum of the engine and something warm playing quietly on the radio. "I know." Eric pulled back onto the road, easy, unhurried, like Hallow Creek was just any town and not the place that had spent two decades making sure I understood exactly what I was. "I wanted to." "Careful, Mr. Hale," I said, because if I said anything softer than that I thought I might actually let something crack open in his very nice car, something I'd been holding shut since I was seven years old. "People are going to start saying you're the one who's bewitched." Eric smiled, eyes still on the road, and reached over without looking to find my hand exactly where it always was. "Good," he said. "Let them." We drove in comfortable silence for a while, the town shrinking in the side mirror, and I let myself have the small, dangerous luxury of not bracing for anything. No flinching hands. No quieted rooms. Just Eric's thumb moving absently over my knuckles, and the bread going cold in the bag at my feet, and the particular gold light of a late October morning through the windshield. I didn't know it yet sitting there with his hand warm around mine, the whole ordinary shape of that afternoon folding out ahead of us like it might simply stay this easy but somewhere in a building with no name on the door, in a city I'd never been to, a file with my face on it had just been opened for the first time. They had a name for what I was. A designation, cold and clinical, nothing like witch, nothing like the word this town had spent my whole life wrapping around my throat but underneath the different language, it meant the same thing it always had. *Asset. Anomaly. Priority: monitor.* BICOM already knew exactly what I was. They just hadn't decided yet what they were going to do about it.