“But that jerkface, power-trippin’ megalomaniac got his, didn’t he, Stevie!” Belfry cried.
Closing my eyes to ward off the visions I’d created in my head about that night, I shivered. “Through an ironic turn of events, Peyton’s father dragged him out of the closet and started down the steps with him. But in his rage, a rage so real and so terrifying I heard it clear through the phone, he tripped and fell down the steps and broke his neck.”
We sat silently for a moment; me, reliving little Peyton Westfield’s screams of horror, Win, clearly absorbing my words.
“How—how could this coven of yours have possibly blamed you for the death of a monster, Stevie? Is there no justice even in the paranormal world?” he bellowed into my ear, making me jump and wince.
I shrugged. It was the only way to express how utterly defeated and boggled by the event I still was. “It wasn’t so much his death as it was the fact that Peyton’s mother denied all of it. She denied her husband ever laid a hand on her. Even though I heard her screaming to stop. Despite the fact that I sat with Peyton for those terrifying three minutes while he begged me not to hang up and I heard every single threat that pig made.”
“But wasn’t there a phone record of what he’d done? How could one deny the physical proof of his brutality? Surely there were marks on her? Bruises?” Win spat.
“You forget, we’re witches, Win. We can heal plenty of things with just a spell. It just takes a flick of the wrist. As to a record of the call? Yes, there’s the first thirty or forty seconds of the official 9-1-1 call Peyton made to me. But the threats his father was making weren’t clear. There was a lot of fuzzy yelling, and Peyton’s mother claimed they were just having a heated discussion about football.”
And that had been my downfall, the beginning of the end. Ann Westfield’s staunch denial that her husband, the esteemed, Adam Westfield, council member extraordinaire, was anything but a good, kind husband who’d slipped and fallen down the stairs, and her insistence that little Peyton had just misunderstood the situation.
What hurt worse was the fact that Peyton’s mother didn’t address his trauma. She’d swept the whole mess right under the rug, as if the first seven years of his life had all been a figment of his imagination. She’d gaslighted Peyton to save her own dang hide—to avoid the retribution of the coven for not taking little Peyton far away from his father. For not protecting him. She was the very definition of battered-wife syndrome.
Yep. That happens in the witch world just as often as it does in the human.
“So the bloody bastard ended up dead. Good on him,” Win growled. “But I still don’t understand how that’s enough cause for your witch powers to be taken away. Were they taken from you because you disobeyed an order from a superior?”
And here’s the most ironic part yet of my return to the human world. “No. I knew I’d be punished for disobeying, but nothing so severe as what happened next.”
“Because that’s when pow!” Belfry yelped for effect.
“Pow?” Win asked.
Squeezing my temples with two fingers, I sighed. “Peyton’s father wasn’t just a council member—he was a very powerful warlock. One of the most powerful. And obviously he was angry about me comforting his abused son. So angry, he had another soul contact me once he’d arrived in the afterlife. This soul, no doubt held hostage by Peyton’s father, was forced to fool me into believing he needed my help.”
The wind whistled as Spy Guy digested. “You helped, I gather?”
I squirmed on the bus shelter’s hard seat, locking my cold fingers together. “Of course I did. It’s what I do.”
“And the powerful warlock stole your powers.”
“Slapped ’em right out of me straight from the afterlife.”
Literally, he’d taken his hand, palm open, wound his arm up, and laid one on me. Adam Westfield hit me so hard, he’d stripped me bare of every last power I’d ever cultivated.
He left me naked. He took my home, my job, my life, in just the way he claimed I’d taken his. My throat tightened as I tugged on my scarf to stave off my helplessness. I would not cry. Not today.
“I’m sorry, Stevie. What an abominable way to lose something so integral to you.”
I heard the remorse in Win’s apology. I even felt the warmth of his aura surrounding me, and for some reason, it was important that he believed me.
“May I ask why you left your hometown and the people you love?”