Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Ten: The Fights We Do Not Intend

Soreness was not a concept I'd ever truly understood until I woke the next morning and my back, shoulders, and neck were practically frozen. Apparently, falling off a waterfall and landing on a vampire wouldn't kill you, but it would seriously challenge your commitment to moving a muscle the next day.

So I traded bed for bath. After a significant soak in a vintage, claw-footed, cast-iron tub--the kind I had only ever dreamed of having in my modern bathroom--I was ready to tackle 1920's fashion.

The clothes in the suitcase, Minnie had explained, were a mix of her personal items and other outfits she had rummaged from the hotel's "abandoned luggage" room. I had cynically wondered if the luggage was truly abandoned or leftover from guests who had gotten on the wrong side of vampires, but it seemed in poor taste to ask.

Minnie had really done right by me. Four lightweight, dropped waist blouses, two pleated skirts, a very sweet white cotton sundress with beautiful eyelet work, and a pink silk day dress with intricate weighted silk appliques in a slightly darker shade of pink. Two evening dresses as well. One sleeveless, beige sheath dress with gold sequins in an art-deco pattern and tassels falling a few inches below the knee. The other was a black spaghetti strap gown with a fitted bodice and knee-length skirt. A sheer fabric topped its silk, and small silver beads were sewn all over the dress, some dispersed like singular like stars in the sky, more clustering in paisley patterns at the waist and hemline. They were both very beautiful and very revealing, but I doubted that I would have occasion to let loose my inner flapper while in Sanguine Springs.

After struggling with the more practical components of my new wardrobe—namely the garter belt to which my new-to-me silk stocking were affixed—I donned a very pretty lavender pleated skirt, and a blush drop-waist sweater whose three-quarter length sleeves managed to conceal my injuries. The shoes Minnie had tossed in were the wrong size, but I managed to fix that with a bit of magic. I did not have enough magical reserve to transform the leftover flatware on the cart into any jewelry. Inorganic transformation was much more challenging for me, and I didn't care enough about having any baubles to pay the cost for them in blood. I'd shed enough in the last twenty-four hours.

Minnie had thoughtfully added a small bag of cosmetics and a hairbrush and hairpins, and I managed to tuck and pin my long hair up in a fair imitation of the bobbed style of the times. I spent longer fussing over my makeup than I have since I was a teenager, but not for reasons of vanity. It was a procrastination technique. I was more than a little nervous to leave this room. In this room, my predicament wasn't quite so real. When I left it, I was entering the unchartered territory of flappers and their sheiks.

The moment I opened my door a handsome young man of familiar feature—good god, how many Livingstones were there?—leaped to his feet from a straight-backed chair that had been conspicuously placed directly across from my door. He was dressed in all white—pants, shirt, sweater vest, shoes. The only things dark about him were his eyes and the thick head of hair slicked with more hair product than I had probably ever owned.

His skin was on the pale side, but his aura let me know he was mundane. I wasn't a witch who specialized in reading auras, but I could see them if I tried, wavering slightly around mundanes like heat rising from a summer road. Vampires had auras as well, but theirs were still and tight, more a net than a radiance. Werewolves, always having energy to spare, had big fluffy auras that bristled like fur. It was a very convenient gift we witches had, seeing auras. We always knew the monsters from the mundane.

This mundane gave me an overly-confident smile and reached out a hand. "Good afternoon, Miss Celie Dunne. May I call you Celie? I am Thacker Livingstone." Emphasis on the I, I noted. "I'm to be your escort today." He gave me an appreciative looking over, which I did not appreciate at all, really. "You can consider me the man for whatever job you need doing."