Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Forty-Five: Becoming A Livingstone

I could have cried for a day and slept a week, but I only allowed myself five minutes of crying as I stared at my foreign face in the bathroom mirror. Then I set the vintage, wind-up alarm clock with the single bell on top to wake me after five hours of sleep.

The first thing I did upon waking was return to the mirror, and I was startled to see that my "Celie" glamour had reset during my sleep. For one second, I had a surprising fear that it had permanently resettled, but I found that I could easily push the glamour from aura with a breath of magic. It was a bit like magnetism. If I pushed against the glamour, it would lose its attraction to me and simply disappear into the sacred magical space where every witch learns to bank her power. At the same time, if I concentrated on drawing upon it, it would click back into place.

While I brushed my teeth, I played a game with my appearance.

"Celie," I mumbled with a mouthful of spearmint and a finger snap, and I looked like my "normal" caramel-haired, moderately pretty self.

"Liadh," I countered with spit in the sink and another snap, and I straightened to see the wild, auburn-haired witch staring back at me in the mirror

Her—my?—eyes were bright blue-goldy-green—so "Fae-colored," that they were unnatural. Anyone would assume they were colored contacts in my own time. My—her?— features were more petite than my glamour—all except the mouth. My real lips were fuller than my Celie glamour, or at least they looked fuller in my more petite face. My eyebrows and eyelashes were the exact same shade as my red-brown hair. And so were my freckles.

Hundreds, thousands maybe, of very small auburn dots peppered my entire face. In fact, I bet I had millions on my body, but the ones on my face—they would take some getting used to. They were so finely patterned that I wouldn't call them blemishes, but at the same time, they contoured my face, defined my nose, contrasted with my lips and brows in a way that made the freckles my defining feature.

If the definition of beauty was a striking, yet pleasing, appearance, I supposed my true form probably qualified. Certainly, if I had seen another woman looking the way my reflection looked, I would say she was beautiful. But my reflection felt uncomfortable to me, and I was grateful that I could retreat inside my pretty but slightly more conventional glamour.

Not only was it more comfortable, but it was also certainly more convenient. How would Van explain the disappearance of the new fiancée that had been the talk of the resort, if I had been unable to restore my glamour? No, it was much better to remain Celie in public. I supposed Van might prefer my true face in private. After all, he fell in love with me when I looked like my true self. Not only for him, but also for myself, I would try to learn to be comfortable in my own skin. But it might take some time.

I wondered for the thousandth time what that life had been like. Or rather, what I had been like in that life. Did I truly not have my natural witch powers? Is that why I looked like Liadh—because I could no longer hold my glamour? Would it all happen like that again?

Or would it happen at all?

Cutter being dead dramatically changed my loosely cobbled theories of time travel. I had been assuming that I could affect the past that was currently my present, but that my past couldn't be changed. Yet Nick's past had definitely been changed now, hadn't it? Nick's past was the future, and now there would be no Cutter/Unger in his future to turn him into a werewolf. And yet werewolf he still was.

Or wait—did that just confirm my theory that our pasts couldn't be changed? Even though it couldn't happen like that again, it had happened to us in our past. Were we simply stuck with the consequences of the experiences we had lived through no matter how we affected others?