Lily was having the weirdest day of her life. She’d had some very weird days, like when Rose stole her first boyfriend to prove that she could. Or when her mom had been forced to reveal that Lily and her siblings were all from different fathers. Or when she’d found Amy’s body, though that was more horrifying than weird.
But not many days beat finding out that that the psychopath who killed Amy was actually a magic monster, her new friend was a fucking wizard, and then being thrown directly into that wizard’s troubled relationship with her impossibly beautiful ex-girlfriend, who naturally was also a wizard.
There was some important stuff between those two points of ‘Claire is a fucking wizard’ and ‘how can a human physically be this hot’ but Lily had firmly shoved those thoughts into a corner marked ‘later’. For now, she was still waiting to wake up from this wild dream.
The three of them were walking down the street, only a few minutes away from the Charming Magicks shop. Claire was leading and seemed to know where to go. Lily followed on Claire’s left and Felicity on her right.
As always, Claire was much more tense when she was outside. It was such a sharp contrast, noticeable even over her agitation towards Felicity. Lily knew there had to be a cause. She was so pale, was she a vampire? Were those real too? Claire had said they needed a monster hunter, which implied monsters.
They were sharing the street with too many people to ask Claire. Inquisitors or something like that. But without being able to talk about that, the only thing left was the tension in the air. It was practically choking Lily.
Felicity seemed unaffected. She was still distractingly attractive, with literally flawless tan skin, long brown hair, and a short-cut, flashy dress that looked like it belonged in a nightclub rather than walking down the street in the afternoon.
Lily couldn’t stop herself from glancing every few seconds, as if to check again that such a person could really exist. It was just so much, so much that she’d embarrassed herself in front of Claire over it earlier.
There was an undercurrent of resentment to Lily’s thoughts as well. Felicity looked barely old enough to drink, but she carried herself in a way that said Lily was a girl while Felicity was a woman. Claire said her appearance was fake though, so how old was she?
Felicity seemed to catch Lily staring and her chocolate brown eyes gave Lily a wink. Lily quickly looked away, face flushed. It wasn’t fair.
They stopped at a crosswalk. Claire took the opportunity to breathe, which Lily tried not to react to.
Finally, the silence became too much for Lily to bear.
“So,” Lily said to Felicity. “Claire says you’re part of a…”
Lily floundered, trying to decide between calling them a cult or a movement. Felicity called them a movement, so not calling them that could upset her. Lily didn’t know much about them and mostly trusted Claire, but she also felt sure that much of Claire’s opinion was bitterness over their relationship. Though Claire might also be upset if Lily seemed to take the side of her ex-girlfriend...
Mercifully, Felicity decided to save her by answering.
“The Moonrise movement isn’t one thing,” she explained. “We have a name because we need one, but it’s merely a group of people who know each other. If clubs and cliques are forming regardless, why not a community based on helping one another? That’s what Moonrise is, building a network of friendships people can rely on.”
Felicity spoke like she was giving a political speech about her passion project, with large and sweeping gestures. Claire decided to chime in, turning back to face them.
“Felicity, if you kill her I will never forgive you.” Claire’s voice was calm, but it had a clear note of warning.
She said this like it was a severe threat, which from what Lily understood about their relationship, it was. Felicity needed something from Claire badly enough that Claire trusted her to protect them even through her bitterness, and Claire was holding that leverage hostage for Lily.
It was an odd mix of emotions for Lily, learning that her new friend, who couldn’t lie, really cared that much about her at the same moment she realized she was probably in serious danger.
A few people around them were staring, but most seemed to write it off as a joke thankfully. Seeing people turn and notice Felicity for the first time was a bit funny. It made Lily feel a bit better about her reaction, at least.
Felicity turned to Claire in surprise.
“Already?” she asked incredulously. Claire nodded and Felicity turned back to Lily with an appraising look that deepened Lily’s blush. “Oh my, you work fast.”
The light changed and the three of them kept walking, Claire’s break over. The poor girl pushed herself way too hard.
“Very well,” Felicity said after a moment. “I’ll leave her alone.”
“If she dies due to your lack of intervention, I will be absolutely furious,” Claire added almost nonchalantly.
Felicity gave an exaggerated sigh.
“You’re putting a lot on me here princess, bullying me into protecting a rival.”
Claire responded with biting sarcasm.
“Oh how awful it must be to have someone play with your heart like that.”
Felicity and Lily both winced. The tension was back, stronger than ever. Lily could only bear another minute before she had to speak again.
“So…” Lily was desperate to move away from the grenade Claire had just dropped into the conversation. “Don’t go to one of your clubs then?”
“Do not,” Felicity confirmed. She seemed to lose the discomfort quickly, but Lily couldn’t tell if it was a front. “You would find yourself in a hugbox meant to render you dependent enough to sacrifice parts of yourself in rituals.”
“Sacrifices don’t work if you don’t know what you’re giving up,” Claire explained. The street had cleared enough that she seemed to be taking the risk, though she still lowered her voice. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be manipulated into doing it or even have to be of sound mind. It’s an efficient solution for getting sacrifices at scale, which is why cults are so common. You can even get some people to sacrifice their own lives.”
“That’s much harder than you’d think,” Felicity added, “and too much of it gets unwanted attention.”
Claire and Felicity talked about this like it was mildly distasteful, the way you would discuss a boss keeping their workers just barely part-time to avoid paying benefits. Claire had said that she sacrificed her ability to lie to her god, so maybe that was just the kind of thing wizards did. It was more than Lily could stomach.
“Um...” Lily wanted to move the conversation away from this as well. She remembered her question from earlier. She could probably get away with asking what she needed to, Claire liked it when she was curious earlier. “I’m pretty new to all this, so can I just- is anything else real too?”
Claire looked at her confused but Felicity laughed softly.
“How new are you precisely?” Felicity asked.
“I learned about magic from Claire a few hours ago.” If either of them noticed the careful wording, they didn’t comment.
“Very new then,” Felicity nodded. “We could play twenty questions, running down the list, but the answer to almost all of them will be ‘yes but they are very peculiar’. Many of the things that go bump in the night existed in fiction first. Then some witch with more skill than sense decided to try and make them real. This means the monsters that do exist don’t usually work how you’d expect from movies. Except for werewolves, those aren’t real in any sense.”
“Actually,” Claire jumped in, “there’s a Witch of Claws down in Audra’s territory that turned herself into a wolf monster. She also has a dozen other creatures spliced in, but supposedly she looks enough like a werewolf that a hunter tried to go after her.”
“Does she do anything with the phases of the moon?” Felicity asked.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then that hardly counts.”
“One could even say that it doesn’t work how you’d expect.”
Felicity tutted but seemed to concede the point.
Lily couldn’t help but notice how well Claire and Felicity got along. Claire carried an incredible amount of resentment, but at the end of the day, Felicity was a wizard and Lily wasn’t. They lived in a different world to her.
Lily largely filtered out their conversation as she tried to understand where the feeling of trepidation was coming from.
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The Lunatic apartment complex was a fairly impressive-looking building. It was tall and better maintained than anything else around it. The logo on the front, with the name written inside a crescent moon, stood out among the drag and nondescript surroundings.
When they arrived they all silently agreed to give Claire a few minutes to catch her breath on the sidewalk outside. Every time they did this, Lily was overtaken by the urge to help Claire, although she couldn’t figure out how to protect Claire from her own lungs.
The lack of any way to help left Lily fretting to herself nervously. Claire almost certainly noticed, which if anything made Lily feel worse.
Reston did have buses, but Lily wasn’t sure if Claire didn’t have a bus pass or if she was just too prideful to use them, because she never even looked at the bus stops. Lily didn’t use them either, though she had far less of a good reason to.
Claire tried so hard to pretend that she was unaffected, but sometimes she needed to stop in the middle of long sentences. She gave a hacking cough, seeming to have pushed herself too far to get here. It was a cruel irony that this person so much more powerful than Lily was also so much weaker.
Felicity tried to rub Claire’s back to comfort her and Claire nearly jumped out of her skin. Felicity flinched back, not quite hiding the look of hurt.
A tiny, vicious part of Lily felt satisfaction, safe in the knowledge that Lily wouldn’t have caused that reaction. Another part of her pointed out that Lily had been too embarrassed by the situation to do it and Felicity hadn’t.
There was a soft thud behind them and Lily turned to see a dead bird lying on its side against the sidewalk across the street. Now that she looked for them, she could see a few other birds around the hotel that met the same mysterious fate.
“It’s in room 412,” Claire said suddenly. “We should stop wasting time.”
Claire led the way into the apartment complex. Lily and Felicity followed behind, a little surprised by the sudden start. Claire clearly knew the building, heading straight for the elevator. Because Felicity’s apartment was here too, Lily remembered.
Felicity sped up to get to the elevator button before Claire did. A moment passed between them before she hit it, calling an elevator down from the second floor.
When the elevator came, Felicity also hit the button for the fourth floor. Claire seemed resigned. Lily looked between them, trying and failing to deduce what this strange ritual was.
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Felicity gave Lily a wink again, her blue eyes sparkling as she caught Lily. That… didn’t seem right, but Lily couldn’t place why. Was it just childish jealousy? Lily didn’t think she was that petty, but she couldn’t help but notice how quickly her thoughts had turned against the impossibly perfect woman.
They stepped off the elevator and turned left. Lily realized that they hadn’t gotten a key from anywhere. The doors all used an electronic keycard lock, which was hardly the most secure but the lockpicking tools Lily kept in her shoe certainly wouldn’t do it.
However, when they reached door 412, Felicity pulled out her wallet and swiped a card. The door clicked. It would not occur to Lily until much later that Felicity’s dress had nowhere to keep a wallet.
“How do you…”
Felicity grinned at her. She and Claire were in front of the door while Lily trailed behind them.
“The cult owns this building, so I have a master key.”
Before Lily could process the implications of that, Felicity opened the door and Claire hissed at whatever she saw inside. Literally hissed, like a cat. It would be cute if not for the look of horror that accompanied it.
Felicity’s eyes narrowed and she stepped into the room first. Claire walked in after her and Lily saw what had shocked Claire.
It was a magic circle drawn in black marker, like the ones Claire and her mother made, but far more complicated. It was a mess of tangled lines and had several smaller circles connected to it, as well as one triangular shape.
Claire looked at it like it was a live bomb.
“What… what fucking lunatic would make this?” Claire was pacing back and forth several feet away from the offending magic as if a different angle would change what she saw. “They’re using an eldritch ritual of this complexity with god damn fey subcomponents. That’s insane! You could kill half of Reston if you missed too many contradictions.”
Lily closed the door behind her, looking around the space. It looked more like a hotel suite than an apartment. It had a central living room area where all the furniture had been pushed back to make room for the circle. To her left was a small kitchenette area and in doors on the left and right side of her seemed to be bedrooms. All of the blinds in the apartment were closed.
Lily tried to parse what Claire was saying, but she could only get one thing from it.
“Wait, fey? Fairies are real?”
Claire looked at her, seeming to remember she existed. Felicity walked out of one of the bedrooms and Lily realized she was holding a pistol in one hand, pointed at the floor.
“Indeed,” Felicity said cheerfully. Her briefly focused demeanor had vanished again. “Though they are the sort that steal your name and your firstborn, not Tinkerbell. Some of them are even vampires.”
Felicity walked over to examine the triangular shape while Lily tried to figure out what the hell that meant.
“What does it do?” Claire asked. She seemed almost unsteady on her feet.
“Give me a minute, not all of us are savants like you Claire.” Felicity’s tone was teasing, which only seemed to agitate Claire more.
Claire rocked back and forth on the heels of her feet, tension clearly building. The combined pressures of Felicity and this magic circle were too much. Lily decided to intervene using an old trick.
“Can you tell me how it works?” Lily asked. “Your part of it, I mean.”
Claire seemed to deliberate for a moment. In the end, her desire to share her passion with Lily won.
“This is the ritual that brought the outsider here.” Claire’s tone shifted immediately to something more relaxed. Felicity stiffened somewhat, recognizing the shift, but didn’t comment.
“The outsider is the spider-thing?” Lily asked. Claire nodded eagerly.
“Right. So that glyph there-” she pointed at a jagged symbol towards the top of the circle, “-is manifestation. It’s actually going to be my third spell.”
“What does manifestation do as a spell?” Drawn magic seemed so complicated and boring that Lily doubted she’d ever want to do it, but spells were basically superpowers. Could that be what the gifts were?
Claire hesitated, glancing over her shoulder at Felicity.
“She doesn’t want me to know,” Felicity explained for her. She’d pulled out her phone and seemed to be referencing something to understand the triangle.
Claire gave Lily an apologetic look but didn’t contradict her. Lily waved the moment off. The point of this was just to get Claire talking, after all.
“It’s fine. Keep going about the summoning circle.”
The look on Claire’s face when she realized that Lily was still interested in the magic nearly broke Lily’s composure. The sheer joy that glittered in her vibrant blue eyes was breathtaking, but the implications of getting such a look for so little were heartwrenching.
Lily’s mind wanted to start analyzing, start putting together the puzzle of why her new friend was the way she was. Lily already had quite a lot of pieces, but she could see enough of the picture to know it would be too upsetting to assemble now. More for the ‘later’ corner then.
“Right, so the manifestation component is the primary circle, the large one in the center. That pulls the spider from the Beyond, which mostly just means another reality. That-” Claire pointed at one of the smaller circles attached to the main one, “-is the subcomponent that picks the correct creature. You don’t want to grab just anything, you might get something too weak or worse, too strong. So once you’ve got it here, those glyphs-” she pointed at another attached circle with a set of three very similar symbols, “-are interdictions, each with a different accent mark to make them bind the creature differently. Those are the rules that the spider has to follow. It can’t disobey them, but its own mind makes any judgments involved. That can run into issues when they don’t understand certain things about our reality.”
Claire was like a different person when talking about magic. She smiled easily and made animated gestures, almost dancing around the circle as she spoke. The effect was captivating. Lily was sure she’d listen to this girl talk about anything. That was a familiar thought.
Her joy was somewhat jarring given the subject matter, though Lily knew better than to blame Claire for that. Lily had assumed the monster was made by magic, but as Claire described it, it was a creature from another dimension that had been kidnapped and enslaved. It was arguably as much a victim in this as Amy was, twisted against its will by some evil wizard.
“Can you tell what the rules are?” Lily asked, trying to hide her agitation.
Claire looked embarrassed, shaking her head.
“No, that’ll take a long time to figure out. There are so many variations on interdiction, I’ll need to find books about it.”
“What rules would you make?” Felicity asked. She was still kneeling by her portion but seemed to have decided to take the opportunity while Claire was in a good mood. “If you were designing this ritual.”
Claire thought about it for a minute. It was a very specific gesture, her head tilted slightly and eyes unfocused. Claire did it often and Lily found it just as adorable each time.
Claire’s eyes were striking, deep blue whirlpools that stood out among the rest of her vampiric visage. Though hypnotic eyes also fit the vampire theme. Lily certainly felt drawn to them, enough that she had to remind herself that staring into the eyes of someone who wasn’t looking at her was probably weird. Definitely weird.
Eventually, Claire answered, speaking slowly.
“First is non-interaction, sort of an umbrella ‘no killing people I don’t tell you to and do your best to stay hidden’. One of them has to be the targeting mechanism, the thing that makes it go and kill the people I want. And then the last one… a kill switch. Something that forces it to kill itself on command, for emergencies or just when I’m done with it.”
“When you’re done with it?” Lily asked cautiously. “But it’s alive isn’t it?”
Claire blinked, focusing her eyes back on Lily.
“Alive is a complicated question,” she said. “Biology designed for alien physics translated through a god probably doesn’t meet any technical definition of life. But I think it is at least sentient. That’s why you can’t leave it around for too long, it could learn and plan. It’s safer just to kill it and summon a new one if you need it again.”
“You can’t send it back home?” Lily held her hands behind her back to hide the wringing.
Claire shook her head.
“You wouldn’t want to anyway,” Claire explained. “If it went home it could explain what was happening to the others. Then you have a whole planet of outsiders trying to resist you.”
Claire didn’t care. Of course she didn’t care, she was a wizard and the spiders were monsters. Wizards didn’t care about using evil magic, Claire was just upset that some wizard had used it recklessly. She stared at Lily like she was confused as to why Lily would care about these creatures. Lily had to look away, scared she would drown in those eyes.
“Never mind, stupid question,” Lily said. Claire frowned, seeing the lie, but Felicity spoke up before she could say anything.
“I believe I know what this is now.”
“Finally,” Claire said, diverting her attention. “It’s a sacrifice isn’t it?”
Felicity stood up, her dress flowing with her movement. She glared at Claire, though it was lacking any actual malice.
“How could you possibly know that? You cannot have learned fey ritualcraft better than me, I am a fey witch and even you aren’t that good.”
“No, it’s because the eldritch parts don’t have one and the circle is too small to sustain temporary bindings for four days, they’d have fallen off yesterday. Some kind of sacrifice was made to turn the bindings permanent and there’s only one part of the ritual I can’t read.”
“You can tell that?” Felicity asked incredulously. “You know how long this circle would sustain temporary bindings you haven’t seen before merely by looking at it?”
Claire blinked.
“Yes..?” she said hesitantly. “It’s just estimates so there are large error bars, but I’m very sure they’d be gone by the time it attacked Lily and me.”
“Princess, it’s very frustrating that you don’t know how amazing you are,” Felicity said bluntly. Claire rolled her eyes, though she didn’t seem as irritated by the praise as before. “Yes, this is a sacrifice. In particular, it’s a cherished memory. There’s no way to tell what memory was lost though.”
“That’s so stupid.” Claire sounded annoyed like the ritual had been made this way to spite her. “Cherished memories, that’s what counts as a sacrifice for you people? How do any of you still have those left in your heads? That’s basically free.”
“I cannot be certain if I’ve done it before,” Felicity said. “Giving up a memory to the fey also takes away memories that would let you reconstruct the details. I doubt I would, however.”
“Me either,” Lily said. It seemed insane that Claire was so dismissive about that. That wasn’t even a wizard thing because Felicity understood what that would mean.
Claire looked between them, clearly quite surprised. She looked like she was about to say something, but changed her mind.
“I need to record the interior angles,” Claire said instead. She took off her backpack, rummaging around inside it. “It’s going to take a while to figure out which god this ritual is pointing at, but figuring that out will tell us a lot about whoever made this ritual.”
Claire pulled out a shocking number of measuring tools and got to work reading and photographing the magic circle. Based on the complexity of it, Lily imagined it would take quite a while.
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Lily had expected it to take a while but after twenty minutes of measuring with no end in sight, she had to lie down in the bedroom. In keeping with the hotel vibe, the bed was large in the center of the room. The sheets were comfortable enough for Lily to settle in on top of them.
Alone with her thoughts was the last place Lily wanted to be right now, but she couldn’t bring herself to play the same old games on her phone.
The realization that Claire was still a wizard at heart had been put into the same corner as everything else today, marked firmly for later. Lily wasn’t sure exactly when this ‘later’ would be, but it was shaping up to be a miserable experience.
Soft footsteps told Lily that her rest had been interrupted. She sat up in the bed to see Felicity closing the door with a finger to her lips. She reminded Lily of a vampire, with long black hair and a dark dress tight against her figure. The memory that Claire had needed to force Felicity not to kill Lily was fresh in her mind.
“Let’s talk,” Felicity said softly. “As long as we aren’t too loud, I’m sure Claire won’t hear us.”
Lily shifted so that she sat on the side of the bed, her feet against the ground. Not aggressive, but prepared. She knew Felicity had a gun… somewhere. More importantly, Felicity was a wizard and they were always dangerous.
“Is this the part where you threaten to kill me unless I stop being friends with Claire?” Lily kept her voice as low as Felicity’s.
Felicity laughed softly. She hadn’t moved from her spot in front of the door, blocking the way out.
“No, nothing like that. You have a role in this now, I cannot merely get rid of you.” Felicity’s voice was gentle, but her eyes held a predatory glare.
“Then what do we have to talk about?”
“Have you met her yet?” Felicity asked. “The real Claire, the one underneath all that false pride and fear.”
Her tone was wistful. Lily could guess what this conversation was about and she almost wished it was threatening to kill her instead.
“I have,” Lily said. Each word was measured, painfully aware of how vulnerable she was. Yet she still needed to... what? Prove herself? “I gave her a hug and let her cry on my shoulder.”
Felicity nodded.
“Good, you’re doing better than I did.” That was so unexpected it threw Lily off balance. Felicity continued. “That real girl, she’s forced to be so strong. You likely know some of what she faces by now. Margaret tortures and torments her. Claire is the best fucking witch in a generation and she’s been convinced she’s awful at witchcraft.”
Lily could almost see the venom dripping from Felicity’s voice as she discussed Margaret’s abuse.
“Do you know about the curse?” Lily asked.
“She shared that with you?” Felicity tilted her head, seeming surprised and oddly hopeful.
Lily shook her head.
“I saw it. Margaret punished her for showing me their home.”
Claire had called Felicity a perfect liar, but Lily had a hard time accepting that the mixture of hatred, concern, and guilt that flashed across her face was fake. It was too raw to be a performance.
“How long was she…” Felicity seemed to hate herself for asking, but she had to.
“I’m not sure. Maybe five or six minutes.” Margaret had told Lily that if she touched Claire, she would kill Lily. So Lily just stood there uselessly, watching Claire’s body freeze like a corpse in a blizzard.
Felicity was silent for a moment, staring at the floor. Lily wondered if she was trying to calm herself from the revelation.
“I hurt her,” Felicity said finally. “Almost two years ago now. I was the one good thing in her life and I betrayed her. It’s taken her this long to recover enough to trust anyone again.” Felicity’s gaze met Lily’s, her eyes burning with fury. Lily couldn’t help but flinch at the sudden intensity. “She’s chosen you to be that person, a test to see if she can allow herself to be human. If you betray her too, I promise you that she will never find your rotten corpse.”
Felicity turned and opened the door.
“Wait, you can’t just-”
But Felicity was already gone, the door closing softly behind her.
Lily sat there for a minute incredulously. Eventually, she accepted her fate and laid back down on the bed. ‘Later’ was looking more and more like it needed to be very soon.