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She had one chance.
Moira stuffed half her closet into a suitcase as she watched her uncle get into a car on the street below her second-story walk-up. Her coven had quietly started “protecting her“ with round-the-clock guards after she’d managed to get on a plane to Bermuda the day before her intended and his entire family descended on Boston to formalize their engagement.
She thought she was in the clear, but Bermuda had not been far enough. This time, she had a different plan to run to the one place the witches would never follow.
Her aunt Cecilia knocked on her door a minute later, and Moira opened it with a suitcase in hand. The older, taller woman had red hair a shade lighter than hers and far more freckles half-hidden by an old spray tan.
“Girls trip?” Cecilia asked calmly.
Moira put the suitcase down and walked back to the living room. Cecilia followed and shut the door behind her.
“How long can you give me?” Moira asked.
“Mo, you said you weren’t trying again. You said you would give him a shot.”
Moira started stuffing all the really important documents into a backpack with a water bottle and snacks. “I did give him a shot. We’ve been talking for a month.”
Cecilia eyed the huge glass enclosure that took up half the wall where a TV normally stood and chose a seat on a barstool in the kitchen that served as her dining room table.
“To translate that,” Cecelia said, “you’ve had three phone calls with him.”
“We did not agree on the size of the shot I was giving him. And it was four phone calls. You know humans make snap judgments about people in the first two seconds of meeting them?”
Cecilia stood up and put a hand on Moira’s elbow. “Mo, stop.”
Moira paused. “What?”
“You are serious. You don’t want him. You don’t want anyone else. You aren’t going to let the aunts choose anyone for you. Which means this is it.”
Power was waning in every coven. Every generation was born with fewer and fewer witches. To combat that, the aunts hatched an elaborate scheme to pair off the sons of witches with women from other covens in an attempt to keep magic alive a little longer. Most of the time they arranged awkward dances and blind dates; the couple in question was still free to decline.
But Moira was a unicorn with two strong talents instead of one. Unicorns were not allowed to wander free or choose their partner in life.
“This is it. How long can you give me?”
“I am on shift until tomorrow morning, so twelve hours.”
She nodded as she began stuffing a remnant of her childhood blanket amongst the granola bars. “That’s great.” It wasn’t enough, but she would have to make it work.
“And if I tell them we’ve gone off somewhere, that will buy you until the end of tomorrow before they get suspicious.”
Impulsively, she hugged the taller woman. “Thank you.”
She had some allies amongst her cousins, but every time the aunts ferreted out a connection, they were taken off guard duty. Cecilia was technically an aunt, but they were only eight years apart in age. They had been close during the All Hallows Eve debacle a few years before, but Moira deliberately hadn’t kept in touch on the off chance this day came and they trusted the weaker witch with guard duty.
“So are we going to the airport?” Cecilia asked. “Where could you go that they can’t follow?”
Moira shook her head. “It can’t be another country.” Still, she stuffed her passport with her driver’s license and her birth certificate. “Like you said, if this is it, I’ve got to stay where I can work.”
“And somehow they’re not going to find you if they don’t even have to cross a border?”
Moira zipped up the backpack and heaved it on. “Oh, they’re going to cross a border. Just not an international one.”
“Where are you going, girl?”
“Do you remember the story of that witch who disappeared from one of the big covens down south? There was a rumor—”
“You’re fleeing to the wolves?”
“They took her in.”
“Some witch with third-hand information told you a pack of shifters didn’t kill one witch ten years ago. It could have been twenty.”
“Close enough.” Moira dug her phone out of her back pocket and left it on the table.
“What is wrong with that dude that you would flee to the werewolves before just getting married and popping out some kids?”
“You didn’t accept your match.”
Cecelia crossed her arms. “I can make a dinky charm that might protect you from burnt toast on a good day. Everyone’s kind of happy I didn’t reproduce.”
Moira paused. “Did you want kids? Did they take that from you?”
Cecilia shook her head. “I’m happy. And I want you to be happy. Which is why I’m not going to stop you when you walk out that door and go searching for shifters. But I am going to ask if you are sure this is a better, safer choice. You sound insane. Remember the part about them taking your magic or, you know, eating people?”
“Surely if they were eating that many people, it would make the news occasionally.”
“Such a vote of confidence. I feel better.”
“Aunt Bea told me about this pack, and she actually talked to someone from the woman’s coven. She holed up in the Appalachians and lived happily ever after.”
Cecilia pinched the bridge of her nose. “Good Lord, if you start hearing banjo music, run.”
“Look, I’m not planning on moving in with the cast from Deliverance. I just want the aunts to leave me the hell alone. If they have to pick between losing me altogether and not marrying me off, they’ll pick the right one, right?”
Cecelia didn’t say anything.
“Right?”
“You’ll certainly get their attention.”
“See, it’ll be fine.” Moira paused in front of the glass. “I just need you to do one more thing.”
“Anything.”
“I need you to check on Bowie.”
“Anything but that.”
Moira could see barely her prize boa constrictor in a plastic cave in the back of his enclosure. He was just a sliver of bright yellow scales. Her heart broke.
“You won’t need to do anything. It’s the middle of winter. He’s brumating.”
“He’s what?“
“He’s hibernating. He won’t eat again until March. I just need somebody to make sure that it stays cool in there until then.”
“And if you’re not back by March?”
Moira swallowed. She’d worked at a pet store in town for the last decade; they specialized in exotic pets, mostly lizards, birds, and snakes. They also ran a rescue out of the store, taking in other people’s abandoned pets.
She always acted entirely sympathetic when someone came to surrender their pet with a sob story of how they couldn’t keep them. Silently, she’d recite the usual litany: don’t buy a one-foot snake if you can’t take care of a ten-foot snake. Don’t buy a bird that lives to 75 if you’re 65. Don’t take on a life you can’t take care of.
But she literally couldn’t keep him. She couldn’t go on the run with a boa constrictor that weighed half what she did.
“I’m going to be back by March. It’s not gonna take that long to scare the hell out of the aunts.”
“On the off chance something goes wrong because, let’s face it, it’s you. What then?”
“I don’t have that much bad luck.”
“You flee to Bermuda and get in a taxi cab that belongs to the son of the leader of the biggest coven on the island.”
She’s spun around. “Considering that the coven runs all the taxi cabs on the island, my odds of that happening were actually extremely high.”
“Moira, I am not going to touch your snake. Everyone has a line in the sand. You’re not going to marry Doofus What’s-his-name. I’m not going to touch that snake.”
“Call the store in March and tell them—“ God, Larry would never forgive her. But he would be sincerely sympathetic. “Tell them I’m gone. He’ll have to rehome him.”
She turned back to the glass and resisted tapping on it. The only problem with keeping reptiles was that you couldn’t squeeze the life out of them when you wanted to say goodbye. Especially because that might provoke them to try and squeeze the life out of you in return.
“I’d add snakes to the list of dangers to look out for,” Cecelia said as she followed Moira into the hall, “but you’d probably just adopt one of them and then die of poison.”
“They don’t have poison. They have venom. And there are only two venomous snakes in Appalachia. The vast majority are harmless. And so cute.”
“I can’t help pointing out you have an unusual relationship with dangerous predators. You wouldn’t know a safe choice if it didn’t bite you in the ass.”
“Marriage to a complete stranger who can’t stop talking about how much he hopes black hair is a dominant trait so our babies will look like him is not the safe choice.”
Fire flared in Cecelia’s eyes. “Oh yeah, screw him.”
Moira handed her cousin the keys to her apartment and a stack of credit cards. She’d been withdrawing cash on every grocery run for a month. Just like time, she didn’t have as much as she wanted, but it would have to be enough. “Hide these somewhere.”
Wordlessly, Cecelia put them in her purse and handed her a wad of cash.
“Don’t.”
“It’s nothing, just $80. If I’d known I was abetting a fugitive, I would have stopped by an ATM.”
Moira pulled her aunt into a hug and pushed her suitcase to the door.
She paused on the threshold, calling herself ten kinds of crazy. Doofus What’s-his-name wasn’t that bad. He was just extremely dedicated to the rebuild-the-magic project and extremely deferential to her aunts.
“Plus, he didn’t like snakes.”
She looked back once at the glass in the corner, where one lump of a giant snake was all that was left of the most important relationship in her life.
Then she waved to her aunt as she floated her suitcase down the stairs with a blast of magic.