They say all witches have weird eyes. Guess that meant you weren't a proper witch yet, because the face you saw in the mirror as you brushed your teeth that morning still had two standard human eyes, colored a dirty hazel.
The woman in the coffee shop looked like every other woman in the midtown coffee shop: bottle blonde, soft grey crop sweater, inoffensive light-wash straight-leg denim, chunky platform sandals, big brown leather purse with a little charm dangling from one end. But her eyes were the crisp yellow-brown of dry straw.
"I need your help," you blurted out.
"I know you. Sit. You're Sarah's little sister, aren't you? Rachel? Royal? Raleigh? Something like that?"
"Rowan. And yeah. She told me you might be here."
"So, Rowan. Nice to meet you again, I guess. I'm kind of in the middle of a jumbo iced caramel banana cinnamon streusel toffee crunch latte here, and then I get to go back to three contiguous hours of meetings, because nobody I work with knows how to do their god damn job. Why not ask Sarah about whatever your little problem is?"
You put your phone down on the table, tap the video file, readying it to play.
"I showed her this. She said that it was out of her league. She said I needed an expert and that you were the closest thing to one this side of ascension. And she said I'd better catch you in person or you'd blow me off."
She pressed play. Five seconds later, her eyebrows went up, and stayed there.
"Hmmm. She's right about all three of those things. This looks… interesting. Well, Rowan, I should probably leave you to your own devices. You'll either learn fast or die. Classic witch development process. Separates the quick from the thick. If you land on the thick side of that split, the vortex's maximum extent will be only a few blocks, nothing I need to worry about, because if you had the power to cause more of a mess, you wouldn't be asking for help."
"What if I made it worth your while?" you asked.
"What does a little witchling have that I might want?"
Sarah had mentioned a rumor about the witch, almost in passing. "Obviously I don't have any personal experience, it's just what I've heard." she'd added, innocently. "I never thought I'd have to tell my little sister something like that, but on the other hand, I'd feel terrible if I left something useful out."
You met her eyes. The striations in her straw-colored irises were curiously vertical. If she took you up on what you were about to put out there, you figured you'd have more opportunities to see those witch eyes up close. An educational experience. Right.
"Girlcock," you said.
She blushed. "I'm not a chaser."
"Wasn't implying that."
She snapped her fingers, and a cylinder of hazy yellow light enclosed both of you, right in the middle of the coffee shop. The world outside it swam and blurred, the coffee-shop chatter dying down to whispers.
"I'm not having this conversation in public. They can't see us or hear us now. And I don't know what you've heard, but I'm not a chaser, I swear."
You'd flustered her. The balance of power in the conversation had shifted. And all it took was preparing to barter with a part of yourself that you weren't all that thrilled about. But when you thought about the slow but inexorable erosion around the edges of the thing back home, the increasing drain on your abilities, and Sarah's worried face when she told you that what you'd created was beyond her, it was easier to say:
"At this point, in this situation, I wouldn't care if you were."
She didn't seem to hear you. "Look, I just like it, that's all. I love to suck dick but I'm not so much into the people it's usually attached to. Is that so weird? And sometimes, you know, with ice cream, you get in the mood for an oddball flavor like pistachio, and there's nothing else that really does it for you…"
Ice cream. You sighed. There was a lot to unpack there and you weren't going to be the one to unpack it for her.
"I have a bottom surgery date early next year. Help me deal with this thing and you can use me as much as you want until then, provided you don't kill me or do anything else that'd make me miss that date."
"Is this going to be weird for you?"
"Huh? Not weirder than what might happen if I can't fix this. And would you care if it was?"
"Probably not." She bit her lip, considering. Then she asked, "What about afterwards?"
"Afterwards?"
"After your bottom surgery."
"Are you even gonna be interested in my junk after that?"
"I don't know. Never had the opportunity. I'm curious."
You weren't expecting that. But it wasn't like you had plans with anyone.
"Fine. How about once. Only after I'm fully healed. And you can't break it. Or me."
Those straw-colored eyes flicked up and down your body.
"Okay. Deal."
You closed your eyes to summon a bit of power, and then opened them, and your hand. A swirling blob of navy ink sat in it.
"We should shake on it."
"Ah, so you're not completely untrained in the standards. Did Sarah teach you that one?"
"Yeah."
"Figured. She always said navy looked better on her than the usual black."
You clasped hands over the blob, and the arbiter tattoo sliced into the skin of your palm like a knife. You grimaced, trying not to cry out, as you felt half of it crawl into the slit and burn its way up your arm to coil around your bicep, at which point the burn died down to an ache as it settled in.
There was a little blood afterwards. You healed quickly, and it only stung a bit when you licked the last of the blood off your palm.
The other half of the arbiter tattoo was in the witch. Going by her face, she didn't seem to feel it. Maybe she was used to it. You decided right then and there that you'd be happy not knowing how she knew what color of ink your sister used to mark a contract.
You slipped the arm partway out of your jacket to show her. The arbiter tattoo had coalesced into a botanical motif of intertwined branches bearing fruit: peaches and rowan berries.
She slid the sleeve of her sweater up a few inches. "Samesies. Terribly literal, but not badly rendered."
"So…"
"So?"
"When do we get started? Kind of a ticking clock situation here."
"Oh, right now's fine. Give me a sec."
The witch your sister had sent you to see stripped out of her clothes in front of you, down to her underwear. Of course she noticed you looking, because how the hell could you not, with a half-naked woman right in front of you and no warning whatsoever?
"The love that dare not speak its name runs in your family, huh," was mercifully all she had to say about that. Then, addressed apparently to her purse, "Lily. Hey. Wake up."
The charm on her purse raised tiny hands and rubbed them against tiny eyes. Not a charm, in fact. A tiny doll.
"Yes, Miss?"
"You're going to need to be me for a bit. Full size, let's go."
The tiny doll reached up to unclip herself from the witch's purse hardware. Then she trotted over to the edge of the table and slid herself off into empty space and was person-height before she hit the ground.
"Good trick," you said.
"I'm very well made," the doll replied. "Hold this," she said, stepping out of her neat red gingham dress and passing it to you. This doll wasn't wearing any underwear. No point to bras when you're perfectly shaped porcelain, you supposed. Lucky. She slipped on the witch's clothes and fussed with her own hair, looking remarkably like the witch in short order.
"Can I finish your latte, Miss?"
The witch stuck out her tongue.
"Gods. No. They're eleven dollars, off-menu, and the barista hates making them. I'm surprised mine isn't mostly spit. Get your own."
"She can be you that easily, and you still go to meetings ever?" you blurt out.
"She's a doll. They're very detail-oriented, not exactly brilliant at project management and other big-picture tasks. However, my Lily takes excellent notes, has a charming smile, and I'm sure she can disassociate through a few hours of meaningless interdepartmental alignment sessions as well as I would."
"But why go to work at all? Why pay for anything? Why pretend to be…"
She took the doll's dress from you.
"Human? Normal? A mere splotch of paint on the canvas of the world instead of a knife slicing through it from underneath?"
"Yeah."
The witch pulled the red gingham dress up, tugged the zipper tight behind herself.
"You don't know me well enough for the answer to that question."
The snap of her fingers broke the spell.