Beach Day

39: Moving Right Along

"Kill me, then."

"I'm not going to kill you, Tiff. Come on."

"Oh, you would. If Peepaw said so, you would."

He frowns, looks a little disgusted by the accusation. "Can we not?"

"Fine. Whatever." She locates a pew that isn't so rotted it might break under her weight and takes a seat. She holds out her arm to her cousin and looks away, toward the broken, painstakingly-made glass.

She has been to historical exhibits before. She went to the historical church in Lake Wonder with Aiden back in April, and she's been to Fort Christmas and Castillo de San Marcos before. Those places are maintained, though. This one hasn't been.

Matt shakes his head in a bit of exasperated disappointment and sits down opposite her. He pulls all sorts of supplies from his belt and starts cleaning and bandaging the wound in her arm. It isn't as deep as she thought it would be, but it's deep enough that she isn't sure about just leaving it.

As he works, Matt doesn't look up at her. "What do you mean when you say that I would kill you if Peepaw told me to?"

"I know about the witch hunting thing. You know I know about that. And you want to quit. And you could. But, Drew— I'm— I'm not that."

It takes him a second. "Not a witch hunter?"

"No. Matt, I love the supernatural more than anything. And I'm not going to stand by... And I can do it, too, I guess. Magic."

"Can you?" Skepticism and worry bleeds through.

"Yeah. That's the thing about our bloodline, I guess. Usually, we can't. Usually, we're... I guess I could theorize on it and say that, since our ancestors have been so opposed to it, we can't really connect with it. Can't draw on the world around us, can't make things or summon them or change them in the way others can." She winces. "Ow, Matt, that stings."

Matt doesn't stop swabbing her arm with a small alcohol wipe. "What the hell did you make a deal with, that you can do magic? If you can do magic?"

"I didn't make a deal. I... got promoted."

"To what?"

She hesitates, knows she can't lie, and stammers, "Minor deity. Demigod, really."

He scoffs. "Fat chance."

"Well, it's true! Two years ago, I met a guy named Greg Dealerman at a skate park while he and my friend Eliza did some... minor drugs together, and he turned out to be the Elder Guardian of the Cosmos, and then New Greg— an old forest guardian— retired in August and had me and a few other people take over his position. So the Time Gnome— the gnome who can control time, you know him— let me know I could do it now. Not because of my bloodline or some pseudo-narrative role I play— not like my friends, not like the people around me— but because of that thing I agreed to do and be. I didn't ask for it. I was content to find workarounds with machinery and... and dubious chemicals, but..."

She reaches over the pew and grabs the small pair of scissors she figures Matt intends to use to cut the gauze and medical tape. She regards them in her non-dominant hand. She could show him, she knows. She could do the one thing she knows how to do and cut a small portal in the lost chapel of Fort Reverence, in spite of this piece of her family's history. She could do this, right? She could sully this place's memory with the harmless thing to which it is so opposed. Isn't that the hallmark of societal change? Isn't that the scent of rebellion, like nontoxic permanent marker fumes? It would be the perfect blasphemy, wouldn't it? To do magic in the lost chapel?