Only Saints

« xix. »

I'm not a witch.

I'm barely a Chastain.

The real spellweaving, I try to comfort myself, happens in the dark of night. The day before is only ritual. Only exercise. Something to get blood flowing and to ease practitioners into working together.

Sitting out on the porch to take a breather, I clutch an orange ribbon that Florie handed to me. It twists tight around my hand, squeezing so hard I think I might dislocate something if I get any more anxious about this. The morning rain has passed, and now the only threat is the dark clouds of the tropical storm rolling over the horizon. It will be here in a couple of hours, just as nightfall hits.

Witch weather, Old Mère's voice hums in the back of my head.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't feel the pinch of magic under my skin any more. I can't feel the tug of it on my nerves, pulling me into the current of something else. It's like wind and like water and like neither of those things, and bolstered by my earth science class at Dresdenwood, I wonder if magic, too, suffers under the Coriolis Effect.

Maybe it's just not the season. Maybe it's a bad tide.

Maybe I just can't do it any more.

"Hey." Florie drags a chair out onto the porch and sits next to me. She's quick to pick my lighter up, to flip it around in her fingers, pressing skin to hard plastic to skin. If I close my eyes I can almost feel it in my own hands. "Are you doing okay?"

"I...I can't do it, Florie."

"Of course you can," she protests. Then her face drops into a frown and she asks, "You mean the magic?"

I lower my head in something between shame and a nod. "It doesn't feel the same."

She draws her legs up into the chair until they're crossed in front of her. It looks like the most uncomfortable way to sit, but Florie doesn't seem to mind. Instead she leans to the side, flipping my lighter between her fingers, and stares off at something in the distance. Maybe the storm rolling in. Maybe the trees waving in the wind. Maybe nothing.

"It didn't..." She stops and starts again with a laugh: "I sound fucking old. But, you know, there was a point where I couldn't, either. Because it didn't feel the same. I thought I was broken. Maybe you're just...unfamiliar with how it's supposed to feel?"

I don't like that thought. That thought means admitting that I've lost something—some part of me that I might not be able to get back. It means admitting that I've forgotten something that used to be so integral to my identity.

"I think I just can't," I say instead, because that thought is a little less terrifying. "Maybe it's like, you know, I haven't practiced enough. Use it or lose it."

"I think you're just trying to get out of the spellweaving," Florie teases me. She holds my lighter out, and I take it from her hands; the plastic is still warm with the memory of her. "I bet you can do more magic than you think."

"I bet I can't."

"Then prove me wrong." She casts her gaze around to the rest of the porch, looking for something, and eventually her eyes land on the railing. She reaches forward, nearly unbalancing her chair with how far she leans, and taps the peeling turquoise paint with the tips of her fingers. "You should try to fix the paint."

"It's not going to work."

Florie crosses her arms with a bright grin. "Show me."

She thinks she's going to get the better of me. I don't know what terrifies me more: the thought that I won't be able to do what Florie's asking of me, or the thought that I will. The thought that I can, that I've always been able to, and that I'm wasting my life trying to be anything besides the witch that I was born.