death dealer (003) “You look absolutely terrible.”
Andy had known that Mollie’s girlfriend Aurelia was something of a hot head, which was saying something for wolves who were usually fairly hot blooded to begin with, but this was the first time she had come head to head with the young wolf after one of her… skirmishes. She was dirty, and covered in blood, but didn’t look as though she had any bruises or cuts or wounds of her own. It was a classic ‘you should see the other guy’ situation, though Andy was pretty confident that she didn’t want to see the other guy. Aurelia looked like a kid who just got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and a long silence lingered between them for a moment.
“You look absolutely terrible,” Andy said, breaking the silence to state the obvious.
Again, silence came back. Aurelia probably didn’t have anything good to say about any of this so she played it smart. She chose not to say anything at all. Andy let the moment stew. It was a thing some of her foster parents would do every now and then whenever a kid did something wrong and knew it was wrong right away. Stewing was a parent’s greatest weapon. Andy wasn’t Aurelia’s mother, but the kid didn’t have much in the way of parents these days so Andy stepped in however she could.
“Okay, let’s get you cleaned up and changed. You can tell me what you did in the morning and you can stay here tonight. I’m sure Mollie will be happy to have you.”
Boozyaunt (010) “Are you out of your f***ing alcoholic mind?”
Desperation bred the most difficult of conversations. Those conversations tended to be even more of a challenge if only one of the parties involved was desperate. Andy had come all the way to Greendale looking for help from a witch. She didn’t like coming to Zelda, she didn’t particularly like or trust Zelda, but it didn’t change the fact that Zelda had a good track record with this sort of stuff. And, well, desperation and all that.
What Andy needed was fairly simple. She had a very powerful teenage witch back home and she needed Zelda to whip together a potion of some sort that would help said teenage witch manage her powers. Despite coming with plenty of goodies that she thought Zelda would appreciate in exchange for her service, the old witch seemed more interested in giving Andy the work around and drinking than anything else. It wasn’t until Zelda sarcastically suggest arsenic as an appropriate potion-substitute for dealing with teenagers that Andy lost her patience and had a bit of an outburst.
“Are you out of your f***ing alcoholic mind!?”
A drawn out quiet followed. Zelda only sipped at the booze in her flute.
This was going to be a long night...
Claire (009) “I set the car on fire.”
Vicious orange flames licked at the night sky as the inferno consumed the Mini Coop in the middle of the long gravel driveway. Andy came marching out of the house, her Sumerian spellbook tucked under her arm. Avery, the teenage witch that Claire had rescued from an evil vampire queen, and a recent ward in the Stoddard-Barclay household, stood in front of the blaze, staring at it. Andy stood shoulder to shoulder, trying to process what she was looking at. She had been unpacking some things in the house when she heard all the ruckus.
“I set the car on fire,” Avery said matter-of-factly.
“I see that,” Andy replied with the same level of sardonic wisp to her voice.
She opened her book and flipped through to the page connected to the magicks of the Euphrates. The bottom of the book had a small but sharp pin prick sticking out of the spine. Andy pushed her thumb into it—enough to draw some blood—and she drew a symbol across the page and muttered a few words in ancient Sumerian. The page glowed, spilling golden light out into the dark night, and Andy tilted it, having the open pages face the flames. “You may want to stand back,” she told Avery, and a moment later there was a great rushing of water. Andy struggled to hold the book as rapids gushed out from a portal within the page, drenching the inflamed car with the cold waters of the Euphrates River. The fire went out quickly, but it took Andy a second to get the strength it took to close the book and break the spell to stop the water. When she did so, and everything was calm, she caught her breath and looked back to the trouble making witch.
“Alright,” she said. “Wanna tell me why you set the car on fire? Also… wanna tell me whose car it is?”
