Some of them Witches

Chapter 24

Booking and packing had been the easy part. Sitting still in her small uncomfortable seat at approximately 35,000 feet with only her thoughts to keep her company for hours on end was proving to be the more difficult part of the journey. Every thought inevitably returned to her last failed attempt to follow Virginia.

The Marfa house wasn't even a house anymore, just a cordoned off pile of rubble that had been scavenged first by police and then by the more adventurous townspeople and animals of the area. Marianne knew even without magic that Virginia had come straight here when she left. She knelt before the ruin and laid out Virginia's well-worn copy of Peter Pan she'd kept since childhood, a twig from Hometree, and a framed photo of the two of them standing in front of what this place used to be. Three items were overkill when she only had two hands and her first utterance of "Reveal," showed her a crystal clear image of what she sought.

Virginia took a shaky breath as she approached what used to be their little oasis in all this desert. She touched the torched remains and asked, "Oh my darling, who did this to you?" A question that in Marianne's vision was only answered by silence. Virginia stood frozen, eyes closed for a long moment before she drew her hand away violently, gasping as though she felt the heat of the fire on her skin and inspected her hand briefly in a moment of panicked disbelief. She crouched down, raking her fingers savagely through her hair for a moment before getting back up, taking one last look around, and walking away.

"Vee," she called softly after the shadow of Virginia.

The shadow turned around. "Marianne."

The ghost of her name caused her to flinch, nearly taking her hands off the relics that held the spell together, but she stubbornly forced her hands to press onto them more firmly.

"If you've come--" Virginia broke off with a sniff and wiped her eyes indelicately with her forearm before kneeling in the sand, close enough that if they weren't separated by time Marianne could have reached over to wipe her tears. "Could you do something for me?" she asked the sand as she pressed her palm to it. "Forget me."

Marianne could feel the vision thinning, see Virginia's form fading. "No." She tried to hold it in her mind, tried to put her own hand over the same patch of sand where it sank through Virginia's translucent skin. "No, no, please no."

"Leave no trace for her to follow."

She was gone. Marianne tried every combination she could with the three items she brought, the debris of the house, the sand that covered their front yard, she crawled all over that patch of land, and then the empty road trying to find which direction she'd driven her car in. She used her necklace as a pendulum, tried to enchant her phone's navigation, even tried to divine her location using an old Texas road atlas the previous owner had left in the truck when they bought it. All it provided for Marianne was the memory of Virginia joking that they might end up needing "the moldy old thing" one day. The drive back to Austin had been a long one.

Despite her mounting anxiety, she could at least be thankful the flights to and from San Diego combined would be less than the drive time of a one way trip to Marfa, even with all the "random" selection she was typically subjected to at the airport. That thought combined with the number of tiny bottles of scotch the flight attendant provided her with on the journey made the transition from Texas to California slightly less painful than her previous outing of the sort.

Later, her uber driver took it upon himself to talk over anything her increasingly dark thoughts threw at her on the traffic-laden way to the hotel. For her part, she made no attempts to keep up the conversation but luckily found her input was not necessary for the driver to maintain a steady stream of chatter. Mingled with the effect of the drinks, the talk and traffic kept her frantic heart from voicing too many of its concerns by the time she reached her destination.