The Bewitched Billion Dare

Beatrice’s POV.

“That’s a lovely locket.”

I startle and knock the mug at my elbow. The coffee sloshes dangerously high on the rim. My magic sparks. The coffee ripples, but doesn’t spill. My heart is slower to quiet. I feel its rapid tattoo beneath the palm I press to my breastbone.

The woman stands close—too close — to my table. How had she gotten this close without triggering the hum of my magic where I feel it most often: there in my breastbone? It’s the exact spot my hand instinctively reached for.

‘Because you’re hiding.’

The voice is my magic. It’s rare for a witch’s magic to take a form, even the incorporeal one of a voice inside my head, but ever since I started to wear the locket my magic has decided to speak up.

Of course. The locket beneath my hand, pressed against my breastbone, dulls my magic. That’s why I hadn’t noticed the woman. I wear it in that spot to make the token as effective as possible. I can’t quell my magic completely. But, I can dull it.

‘Or you could learn to control me.’

‘Go away.’ I will it silently. My magic chortles, but I can feel it recede.

It’s then that I make eye contact with the woman standing there, too close, to my table. She watches me with her head tipped. Whatever she’s thinking, I can feel her assessment like a hand drawn along my arm.

I push a smile onto my face. “Thank you.”

“It looks old,” the woman nods toward the locket, “is it something you inherited?”

Okay, that’s random.

“Um, yes.”

It’s not a lie. Technically. In a roundabout way the token, or rather my need for it, is an inheritance.

My answer placates the other woman. She sets a to-go box wrapped in baker's twine on the scant inches of empty space left on my table. My magic tracks her as she crosses the crowded coffee shop and rounds the long white marble counter that runs along the back wall.

Inside the box are the macaroons I ordered hours ago when I first arrived at Canaries. They are my reward for spending my Saturday holed up in a coffee shop working.

‘Lies. Beatrice, be honest with yourself.’

‘Fine.’ I grumble to my magic.

I’m spending my Saturday in a coffee shop working because I don’t want to be at home. Alone.

‘See that wasn’t hard, was it?’

The flash of annoyance ripples down my arms, and I curl my hands into fists as if I could punch a feeling like one would a wall. This causes the pages of my notebook to turn rapidly on their own. I slap my hand down on the pages to stop the very not-human action.

‘You wouldn’t have to hide me if you were where you belonged…’

I fill in the rest like a depressing Mad Lib: not here, not among humans.

Canaries is a thoroughly human-patronized coffee shop located in a central human district of New York: Wall Street. That is their power, after all, money. It’s something my mother told me a thousand times, and, until I broke, I believed her.

Witches have magic, humans have money, and all the things money buys. Wars have been fought over that exact divide.

The peace we now live under is tenuous; separate, but equal is the best we can hope for. Still, no matter how many humans pack the coffee shop, there is a magic to Canaries.

I found this place months ago after yet another Saturday spent in my cubicle at KingsGuard working to avoid my empty apartment. The cafe’s punch yellow awnings and whimsical logo of three birds on a branch charmed me.

The first time I walked through the door, I stood there on the threshold and breathed deep. Welcome. That’s what it feels like to walk into Canaries. The sensation of being invited burned my cheeks that first day. It still catches me off guard. Welcome.

This morning the sidewalk sign had read:

Where have you bean all my life?

This morning, when I pushed the door open, I felt a magic different than the kind my locket negates. It was the charm of the ordinary, the mundane, the human. It’s the magic I’ve hedged all my bets upon.

Leaving the city isn’t an option; I don’t have the money to pay a witch to completely untangle my magic from my coven. Even if I did, I doubt I could find one powerful enough to do so among the B*tch Coven.

My magic flairs. This time my laptop mysteriously rattles toward the edge of the table. A glance around me confirms no one paid me and my table of seemingly possessed objects attention.

‘That isn’t their name.’

‘It’s how they advertise.’ I counter to my magic.

‘Because they have to. Because they made the same choice you did.’

The B*tch Coven isn’t a true coven like the rest of the witch hamlets throughout the city. Rather, it’s the name brandished on any witch who chooses the humans over her own kind.

Once she makes that choice, the witch is cut off from the power of her coven. She and her magic have to find a way to live among humans.

Alone, her magic is like a downed electric wire: hot, sputtering, and dangerous. A B*tch witch sells low-level spells among the poorer humans who can’t afford the coven prices.

My magic is right. I made the same choice as those witches. The difference is that my coven hasn’t cut me off because they want my magic. What I can do is…unique.

But they will never have access to it again. I will never allow myself to feel as helpless as I did last Yuletide. Leaving the city while still anchored to my coven, to this place, would be like peeling my skin away. It’d kill me.

The coffeeshop door opens, and I note the thrill of a canary bird in lieu of a bell.

My magic thrums, and then my cell phone takes off the table seemingly on its own. Fine. Let my magic be a child. I will be the adult. One of us has to be.

I scoot my chair back to look for my phone, but it’s a Saturday and Canaries is packed. I bump into a woman at the table behind me. She’s having tea with her daughter. I stammer an apology, and the woman scoots her chair so I can stand up.

The entire time the daughter stares at me with wide eyes, and I push away the anxiety curling up my spine. Had she seen my magic misbehaving? I keep up the open, bubbly demeanor. It’s the same reason why I got blond highlights and painted my nails pink. It’s details like this that expose a witch long before she does an ounce of magic. Witches don’t do small talk, and we don’t wear pink.

I can feel the girl watching me as I turn away from the mother, but I don’t look back. I’ve had dozens of close calls like this one, and staying as ordinary as possible is the best strategy.

“I think this belongs to you.”

My head snaps up at the sound of a male voice. It’s deep with the lilt of a smirk there at the end. My steps falter and I knock into yet another chair. The teenager sitting in it doesn’t even bother to look up from his screen. My leg hits a table, rocking a third person’s coffee and I start to stutter out an apology when the man with the upturned voice steps up alongside me.

“Easy,” he soothes. Though to whom I’m not exactly sure.

His hand skims my elbow. The contact is brief. But my magic pulses and flares. Then, without touching me, he guides us back to my table.

“Your phone,” he holds out the wayward device. He scratches an ear, “It seemed to have a mind of its own. Leaped off the table and skittered all the way over to me.”

He nods over his shoulder toward an empty table where a laptop and tablet sit unattended. It isn’t far, but it isn’t close. My magic chuckles mischievously in my chest, but it sounds like my stomach rumbling.

“I’m hungry,” I say too quickly as if I need to explain myself to this man.

“Hungry, it’s nice to meet you,” he grins, “I’m Bash.”

“What kind of name is Bash?”

‘Yep, totally what a polite, normal human woman would say,’ my magic pipes up.

‘Shut up.’ I hiss in my mind’s eye. My magic laughs again in my chest and it comes out as more rumbling stomach noises.

The man–Bash–scratches his eyebrow, “The kind my little sister made up when my full name was too much. It stuck and I learned not to question it.”

Okay, now I feel like a heel.

“What kind of name is Hungry?” He mimics my tone perfectly, but tacks on the inflection of a smirk

For a moment, my brain drags, and then—oh yeah —I’d said I was hungry. He’s making a joke.

My magic sighs, ‘Goddess, we don’t stand a chance.’

I wrap my arms around my middle as if to stifle its snark.

It’s also the first true moment I’ve had to look at him. He’s handsome in a normcore way: nondescript, but neat clothing, floppy brown hair that falls across his forehead, blue eyes, straight nose, and–okay this isn’t ordinary–a dimple in his chin that appears when he smiles.

Which is what he’s doing right now. At me.

“Actually, it’s Beatrice,” I say.

“That’s too bad,” Bash slips his hands into the pockets of his chinos, and holy goddess there is nothing ordinary about the flex in his forearms.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, if you were hungry I was going to ask if I could buy you a baked good. Maybe a coffee. An excuse to keep talking. That is if you really were hungry.”

I gape. His dimple is adorable, but that smirk paired with the way his head tilts toward me unspools something low in my belly that isn’t my magic but feels like magic at the same time.

It’s a silent challenge.

I dare you, he says without saying a word, and something in me flares alive.

‘There you are.’ My magic whispers, and for once I’m in agreement.

Here I am. Rather than hiding in a crowd, I want to stand out. Even if it’s just to this adorable man with the name of a video game character. Even if it’s for the length of a single cup of coffee. Even if it changes nothing in the rest of my life.

I know the date is just flirtation. I know the stakes aren’t actually stakes. But there’s that smirk at the end and how his hair falls across his forehead…the combination feels like a sentence I need to finish.

“Excuse me,” a man shouts.

The din of the room quiets and heads swivel to a group of three young men clustered near the marble counter along the back of the store.

Behind the counter, I spot the woman who took my drink order and the one who delivered it. The third, the one who asked about my locket, emerges from the back.

“Excuse me,” the man repeats. One of his buddies drags a chair over and the man climbs up onto it. “I don’t want to take up your time on this lovely Saturday, but I have an important public safety announcement.”

He pauses to let the anticipation grow. As people murmur, the gleam in his eye grows. He smirks down at his two buddies flanking him. “We have a witch in our midst.”