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6

Janna

The little bitsof leftover laughter died in my throat when he came toward me with his fists clenched.

He hated that I wasn’t taking him seriously, and I was about to see him turn on the viciousness he had shown in the alley.

“Wait.” I held up my hands, palms out, and he froze in place.

It was the first time I had seen him show any sort of nerves, and it surprised me. Was that all it took?

I looked at my palms, then at him. “What? What’s the problem?” There was nothing wrong with my hands that I could see.

“It’s just that…” He chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “You honestly don’t know. I keep forgetting.”

“Forgetting what? Oh, right. That I have witch’s blood in me.” I pointed them at him again. “Are you afraid I’ll cast a spell on you?”

“No, because you don’t have power. But you do have witch blood. And don’t roll your eyes, because it’s true.”

“I didn’t roll my eyes.”

“You did.” He frowned. “Didn’t you know it?”

“No.”

“You probably do it so frequently, it’s become second nature.”

I rolled my eyes. “See? That’s an eye roll.”

“It’s exactly what you did before.”

“Oh, my God.” I shook my head, eyes closed. “It’s like an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

“The what?”

I blinked. “The TV show. Yeah, it’s old, but I thought everybody’d heard of it.”

“I never have.”

“Where have you been your entire life? In a cave?”

He chuckled again, only this time it was genuine. The chuckle became a laugh. “You’ve come closer than you know.”

I didn’t bother asking what that meant. Every question only led me deeper down the rabbit hole.

“Fine, whatever. Let’s take a few steps back, because I would genuinely like to know what you’re talking about when you say my mother’s a witch. I mean, yeah, there are times when I’ve imagined her sitting on a broomstick, zooming through the sky.”

I pantomimed the motion with my hand, moving it up at an angle as I made a whooshing sound.

He frowned.

What a surprise.

“Why would a witch do that?”

“Because… that’s what witches are supposed to do. I mean, on TV, in books, cartoons.”

The man is more lost than ever. I’m pretty sure he came from another planet. It’s the only explanation I can put together on the fly.